In the arts, the idea of freedom was equally powerful. “Art is, always, the sphere of freedom,” Susan Sontag wrote in a 1964 review of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, an experimental film starring drag performers that climaxes with a combination rape-earthquake-orgy sequence. “In those difficult works of art, works which we now call avant-garde, the artist consciously exercises his freedom.” A series of precedent-setting obscenity trials pertaining to controversial works of art—Allen Ginsberg’s Howl in 1957, D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer in 1964, and Louis Malle’s film Les Amants the same year—redefined the boundaries of artistic liberty. By the end of the ’60s, Menand observes, bestselling American novels by John Updike and Philip Roth “used words and described acts for which their publishers just ten years earlier would have faced jail.” Other artists exercised their freedom in more peculiar ways: John Cage by composing silent music, Robert Rauschenberg by wrapping an automobile tire around the midsection of a stuffed goat, Ornette Coleman by abandoning chord changes and regular meters, Carolee Schneemann by covering her naked body in snakes and raw meat. All of these gestures, however outré or anti-social, could be claimed as part of a common project: the desire to see how free the free world could get.
Menand’s book has been a long time in the making. It is a sequel of sorts to The Metaphysical Club, his 2001 Pulitzer Prize–winning history of American pragmatism; some of the material in it dates from as far back as the Clinton administration. He’s been writing it, in other words, over the course of the same period that the types of intellectuals Menand is most interested in—artists, writers, and philosophers of a liberal or left-leaning persuasion—lost interest, and faith, in “freedom.” In his preface, he describes the book as a reckoning with a concept he’s not sure he believes in anymore. “If you asked me when I was growing up what the most important good in life was, I would have said ‘freedom,’” he writes. “As I got older, I started to wonder just what freedom is, or what it can realistically mean.” The unvoiced answer that haunts the book is that it might not mean anything at all.
What made mid-century Americans’ loose talk of freedom coherent and convincing was the fear of a type of society supposedly defined top to bottom by unfreedom. This was totalitarianism, a term applied in real time to the Stalinist Soviet regime but also retroactively to Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The collapsing of communism and fascism into a single sinister category had a lot to do with making an anti-totalitarian politics, in Menand’s words, “close to universal” in Cold War America. Anti-totalitarianism animated the liberal and socialist left as well as the right, the center, and those who preferred to think of themselves as off the ideological chessboard entirely.