Cold War Culture: Intellectuals, the Media and the Practice of History (International Library of Twentieth Century History)

Britain in the 1950s had a distinctive political and intellectual climate. It was the age of Keynesian, of welfare state consensus, of insipient consumerism, and, to its detractors, of complacency. While Harold Macmillan famously remarked that ‘most of our people have never had it so good’, the playwright John Osborne lamented that ‘there aren't any good, brave causes left.’ Philosophers, political scientists, economists and historians embraced the supposed ‘end of ideology’ and fetishized ‘value-free’ technique and analysis. This turn is best understood in the context of the cultural Cold War in which ‘ideology’ served as shorthand for Marxist, but it also drew on the rich resources and traditions of English empiricism and a Burkean skepticism about abstract theory in general. James Smyth here shows that, despite being allergic to McCarthy-style vulgarity, British intellectuals in the 1950s operated within powerful Cold War paradigms all the same.