A Peculiar Sovereignty: Antifascist US Literature and the Liberal Warfare State

This essay considers the changing role that US writers played in framing American involvement in the antifascist struggles of the mid-twentieth century, from the Spanish Civil War through World War II and its fallout. In phases that mark a shifting orientation toward political “futurity”—a general drift from left-wing to centrist to right-wing versions of the liberal freedom narrative—it traces literary culture’s investment in the evolution of the liberal warfare state and the rise of the national security paradigm. While the nightmare of fascism would seem to justify virtually any ideological leverage to oppose it, this study considers how the geopolitical realism that survives the conflict, as a supplement to the liberal imaginary of the “open society,” persistently eviscerates progressive desires for the “as yet,” “unfinished” world, the dream of social equality that, however flawed, initially spurred Popular Front resistance.