At a time when American political and cultural leaders asserted that the nation stood at "the center of world awareness," thinkers and artists sought to understand and secure principles that lay at the center of things. From the onset of the Cold War in 1948 through 1963, they asked: What defined the essential character of "American culture"? Could permanent moral standards guide human conduct amid the flux and horrors of history? In what ways did a stable self emerge through the life cycle? Could scientific method rescue truth from error, illusion, and myth? Are there key elements to democracy, to the integrity of a society, to order in the world? Answers to such questions promised intellectual and moral stability in an age haunted by the memory of world war and the possibility of future devastation on an even greater scale. Yet other key figures rejected the search for a center, asserting that freedom lay in the dispersion of cultural energies and the plurality of American experiences. In probing the centering impulse of the era, At the Center offers a unique perspective on the United States at the pinnacle of its power.
Industry Reviews
A strikingly original and nuanced account of Americans' responses to the traumatic events of midcentury and to the country's new place in the world. -- Dorothy Ross, from the foreword At the Center is an impressive synthesis of American Thought and Culture for a critical period. The range and depth of knowledge makes this book indispensable for scholars and students. Familiar figures receive their due along with others less well known but deserving. The book is at once authoritative and accessible. -- George Cotkin, author of Existential America and Feast of Excess This revisionist account of the long 1950s in American intellectual life is both exciting and timely. Showing how across different domains artists and thinkers sought coherence after depression and war without renouncing their insights into flux and historicity, Borus, Blake and Brick make clear that the boundary to the experimentation and upheaval of the 1960s was much more porous than usually thought. Without apologizing for its limitations, they have saved a pregnant era from the condescension of posterity. -- Samuel Moyn, Yale University While surveying and acutely commenting on an impressive range of thinkers and ideas, this book makes itself indispensable when it pauses to pay intricately nuanced attention to innovative works of music, painting, sculpture, literature, and architecture. At the Center is a fresh, absorbing, and compelling look at U.S. culture from 1948 to 1963. -- Ross Posnock, Columbia University Surveying the American landscape from the aftermath of World War II through the sharpening conflicts of the early 1960s, At the Center weaves together diverse strands of midcentury thought in revelatory fashion. It finds neither conformity nor complacency nor consensus but instead a profound concern for the stable center of things-a concern that would infuse debates over everything from the individual self to the global order, ultimately shaping ideas about hegemony, history, and humanity itself. Alert to currents and cross-currents, prominent figures and lesser known ones, scientific as well as popular culture, this is an impressive achievement: the most precise and persuasive account yet of the distinctive moods of U.S. cultural, political, and intellectual life at midcentury. -- Sarah Igo, author of The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens and the Making of a Mass Public and The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America
