The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature by Jamie Cohen-Cole (review)

It seems safe to say that in contemporary America, “open-mindedness” is a fairly ecumenical concept. We are told to keep an open mind to the cultural practices of others, to new technological innovations, to difference in all forms. However, open-mindedness cuts both ways: we can also hear frankly racist denunciations of “mainstream” unwillingness to consider the “scientific” evidence for the hereditary bases of intelligence as a form of “close-mindedness.” Indeed, the very obviousness of the metaphor and its seeming lack of ideological specificity lend the concept a certain air of timelessness. The open mind, however—at least in its specifically American form — is a surprisingly recent invention. Jamie Cohen-Cole’s meticulously researched monograph does an excellent job of excavating the political and intellectual context in which the idiom emerged, demonstrating convincingly the powerful role that it played in shaping the intellectual landscape of post-war America. Indeed, its contemporary idiomatic ubiquity—however attenuated its positive content may appear—only serves to demonstrate how successfully it has infiltrated American ways of thinking about thinking. The Open Mind lucidly charts the history of the concept, showing how it sutured creativity, rationality, autonomy, and willingness to embrace alternative viewpoints to a politically centrist, technocratic understanding of science and governance. Open-mindedness was used as both an evaluative standard for and scientific description of human activity in a surprisingly wide range of venues.

Cohen-Cole argues that this open mind emerged as a quilting point for a whole host of projects and strategies within the ideology of a newly ascendant class of problem-oriented, interdisciplinary, Cold War intellectuals. These intellectuals found in the open mind the perfect expression of, and justification for, their particular experiences and understandings. Their participation in war-time working groups and policy planning, designed to rapidly mobilize America’s intellectual capital to solve concrete problems, had forced them to learn to work together with experts from radically different disciplinary traditions and social locations. As they transitioned back to civilian life, they were faced with the dual challenges of transforming the networks of patronage and collegiality forged during World War II into durable institutions for the conduct of Cold War science, and—with millions of returning soldiers entering universities and the work force—of designing an educational system adequate for training a productive and cohesive citizenry. In Chapters 1 and 2 (“Democratic Minds for a Complex Society” and “The Creative American,” respectively), Cohen-Cole convincingly demonstrates how open-mindedness came to serve as perhaps the chief ethical virtue guiding each of these ventures, as the creativity, receptivity to alternative viewpoints, and problem-solving orientation required for success in intellectuals’ earlier undertakings came to be held as a model for both academic and civic life more generally. As World War II turned into the Cold War, these elites used their particular war-time experiences to develop a new ethics and a new way of understanding their own practices as intellectuals. These self-understandings became the basis for a series of practical interventions into the way that all Americans learned, worked, and understood themselves both as citizens and human beings.

Of course, the problems of coordination in complex organizations and societies were hardly novel. Indeed, Cohen-Cole also traces how the open mind presented a solution to longstanding fears in the educational establishment and early social sciences about the corrosive effects of the division of labor and stratification of society on national unity. In the Cold War context, however, these fears took on new urgency when dovetailed with the political concerns of a centrist, technocratic elite—fears of both an insidious international communism, as well as the home-grown specters of racism and reactionary paranoia. The golden mean, Cohen-Cole argues, was not to be found simply in the lack of ideological extremism. The conformist, bureaucratic “organization man” was not a particularly appealing alternative either, at least for an intellectual elite that felt...