Cold War Liberalism: Power in a Time of Emergency (Military, War, and Society in Modern American History)

In the mid-twentieth century, Cold War liberalism exerted a profound influence on the US state, US foreign policy, and liberal thought across the North Atlantic world. The essays in this volume examine the history of this important ideology from a variety of perspectives. Whereas most prior works that analyze Cold War liberalism have focused on small groupings of canonical intellectuals, this book explores how the ideology transformed politics, society, and culture writ large. From impacting US foreign policy in the Middle East, to influencing the ideological contours of industrial society, to shaping the urban landscape of Los Angeles, Cold War liberalism left an indelible mark on modern history. This collection also illuminates the degree to which Cold War liberalism continues to shape how intellectuals and policymakers understand and approach the world.

Daniel Bessner is the Anne H. H. and Kenneth B. Pyle Associate Professor in American Foreign Policy in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington. He is the author of Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual; the co-editor, with Michael Brenes, of Rethinking US World Power: Domestic Histories of US Foreign Relations; and the co-editor, with Nicolas Guilhot, of The Decisionist Imagination: Sovereignty, Social Science, and Democracy in the 20th Century.

Michael Brenes is the co-director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy and Lecturer in History at Yale University. He has authored and edited several books, including For Might and Right: Cold War Defense Spending and the Remaking of American Democracy and, with Daniel Bessner, Rethinking US World Power: Domestic Histories of US Foreign Relations.