A Failure of American Progressivism: Debating the Role of the State in the Early Cold War

Jonathan Bell. The Liberal State on Trial: The Cold War and American Politics in the Truman Years. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. xix + 408 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $37.50.

Americans are notoriously hostile to big government. In 1964, Barry Goldwater told an audience, "A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all the way." President Bill Clinton, touching on this theme, proclaimed in his 1996 State of the Union Address, "The era of big government is over." The debate is far from dead. Political debates in the United States are still waged about how best to curb the state and its functions, arguing that it has become cumbersome at best, unduly interventionist at worst. Libertarians, suspicious about social democracy and the "ill-fare" state, have lamented how little attention is being given to the rise of bloated bureaucracies and stifling regulations. "If the Americans cannot block the march of Leviathan," writes a pessimistic Robert Higgs, "others are even less likely to so."¹ The sentiment is an odd one, given how the discourse on social democracy on the European continent and Britain has actually moved toward a consensus that the state is an unduly onerous beast. Indeed, one would think that the current malaise in Europe over the failed blueprint of the European Constitution would add weight to the proposition.

The early Cold War years saw some commentators warn how the growth of the state, notably on the path of social democracy, would threaten basic liberties. The classic warning, which duly spawned the intellectual arsenal of neo-liberal theory that would guide the pundits of Thatcherite and Reaganite economics in the 1980s, came from Friedrich Hayek who argued that formal liberties were incompatible with the welfare state. While Hayek proved the most famous critic of the social democratic model, other figures of the same libertarian cloth, such as his contemporary Ludwig von Mises, kept him company with works about the vicissitudes of "irrational" bureaucracy. Some time later, Robert Nozick would propound a theory of freedom that would strip the state to a skeletal system of military defense and security.²

Given the international context of such debates, Bell's work touches a rich vein of historical analysis on the state, adding further to the fruitful forays of Daniel T. Rodgers into the transatlantic "crossing" of ideas between Europe and the United States, which has revealed the complex nature of social reform in the shaping of American society between 1880 and World War II.³ Indeed, with Rodgers's pioneering Atlantic Crossings, an entire field of cultural, intellectual and political exchange has been unearthed, demonstrating the workings of appropriation, critique and failure of numerous ideas that worked their ways through various policy channels across the Atlantic. The value of such a comparative approach to understanding core notions of how America has viewed itself at various trajectories of its history has been shown by some scholars who have taken such work further.⁴ With this framework in mind, Bell continues the story of how U.S. progressivism was shaped in the formative years of the Cold War, taking as his vantage point the state and how political debates framed its role.

The interconnectedness between early Cold War politics at home and U.S. foreign policy is formidably set in a text that adds much to our understanding of domestic politics and its connection with Cold War ideologies. But how it significantly proves useful is in assessing the intellectual tensions on the Left, highlighting the compelling need in an era of Cold War animosities to identify alternative ideologies that did not forfeit the principles of progressivism, whilst eschewing "totalitarian" tendencies. While attempts were being made on the European continent to distinguish progressive movements and socialism from dogmatic Stalinism in the efforts of...