A Brief History of Cold War Liberalism

Abstract

In recent years, a flurry of books that explore the history and theory of liberalism have appeared. Nevertheless, there has been surprisingly little scholarship examining the history of ‘Cold War liberalism’ — one of the most important instantiations of twentieth-century liberalism — as a phenomenon in and of itself, and the work that has been done has mostly focused on a small coterie of American and Western European intellectuals. This essay is a first step attempt to articulate a broader history of Cold War liberalism, tracing the ideology’s origins and influence from the 1910s until the 1980s. We focus on three distinct elements of the history of Cold War liberalism: its embrace of anti-democratic politics and how this informed the creation of the national security state; its linking of reform to the imperatives of national security; and its decline and transformation in the 1970s and 1980s.