Angst in America

George Cotkin. Existential America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. x + 359 pp. Illustrations, notes, essay on sources, and index. $39.95 (cloth); $26.95 (paper).

On the TV show Jack & Bobby, the mother of the title characters (who are early-twenty-first-century, middle American kids, one of whom will grow up to become president of the United States) is a radical, women's studies professor at a fictional university in Missouri. Like most of Hollywood's fictional humanities professors, Grace McCallister (Christine Lahti) is largely shown spouting banalities, quoting famous thinkers, speaking in grand abstractions. Almost inevitably, as a radical humanist, she discusses existentialism.¹

While as recently as the 1970s existentialism played a vibrant role in American intellectual life and popular culture, today it is often seen as effete, and even foreign, a fitting part of the high-minded-but-out-of-touch vocabulary that TV writers like to imagine "radical" professors spout. Little wonder that George W. Bush's speechwriters had the President quote Albert Camus—badly out of context—during his recent visit to Brussels. Surely, they must have thought, Camus would appeal to Europeans.

Existentialism in America is a very worthy subject for a scholarly monograph. Exploring American existentialism can provide us with a better understanding of American thought and culture during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the decades of existentialism's greatest influence. And the rise of existentialism to cultural and intellectual importance is a fascinating example of the international flow of ideas, a subject about which there lately has been much scholarly interest. It is surprising, then, that George Cotkin's Existential America is the first book to address its subject.² Cotkin's intelligent, interesting, and broadly conceived study effectively charts the rise of existentialism in the United States and provides a valuable foundation for further work on its subject.

Cotkin starts his book with a brief pre-history of existentialism in the United States, by surveying American thinkers and artists whose works have in one way or another dwelled on the darker side of the human experience (pp. 13–32). After discussing Jonathan Edwards, Herman Melville, Joseph Wood Krutch, and Walter Lippmann, Cotkin ends this chapter with a survey of 1930s hardboiled detective literature and 1940s film noir.

Such a short survey of over two centuries of American intellectual and cultural history inevitably feels somewhat cursory. However, this opening chapter provides an important foundation for Cotkin's study by correcting a common misapprehension about American culture. Jean-Paul Sartre was not alone in mistakenly believing that "there is no pessimism in America regarding human nature and social organization" (p. 2). Although Americans would come to view the formal philosophical system of existentialism as essentially a European import, it found fertile soil in the mid-twentieth-century United States.

Cotkin's discussion of the cultural tendency he calls—following Ishmael's description of his own state at the start of Moby Dick—"the "drizzly November' of the American soul" also introduces some important tensions that remain largely unresolved over the course of his study: is existentialism a transhistorical mood or a timebound school of philosophy? Is it first and foremost a reflection of the human condition or is it much more specifically the product of particular times and places? Some of this tension flows from the fact that Cotkin clearly writes not only as an intellectual historian, but also as an admirer of philosophical existentialism as a valid description of the human condition.

While this commitment makes him open to the existence of a native American existentialism going back to the colonial period, it ultimately leads him to focus on those very European thinkers whose prominence has led Americans to think of existentialism as a distinctly European phenomenon. Cotkin announces at the start of the book that this will be a "cultural and intellectual history, rather than a history of philosophy" (p. 8). Nonetheless, Cotkin rarely strays very far from existentialist philosophers. Although his actors include...