Cold War Liberalism or Socialist Revisionism?

This chapter explores the nature of Cold War liberalism by comparing how French and American sociologists who collectively elaborated a theory of “industrial society” reacted differently to the politics of the Cold War between the late 1940s and the eruption of the student protest movements in the late 1960s. It argues that these differences were not rooted in sociological theory, but in whether or not particular sociologists embraced an anti-totalitarian politics of emergency that saw democratic societies as vulnerable to dangerous degrees of political mobilization. While theorists of industrial society in both France and the United States were all in some sense social democrats, those who embraced what is now identifiable as Cold War liberalism had a more pessimistic disposition, and fear of the demos at home drove them to embrace conservative arguments against programs for political change.