Abstract
Weeks after President Roosevelt delivered his widely reprinted 1941 State of the Union address, known in shorthand as the ‘Four Freedoms’ speech, America’s publishing magnate Henry Luce penned his own call to arms, an editorial that came to define not only his own unparalleled career and reputation but that of postwar U.S. hegemony, entitled simply ‘The American Century’. Promoting an ‘internationalist’ stance many months prior to the Japanese attack against Pearl Harbor and a formal declaration of war, Luce admitted that the question facing the American public and elected officials was ‘not primarily one of necessity and survival. It is a question of choice and calculation’ (Luce, 1941: 62). Did America want to be in the war, and, if so, on what or whose terms? Reading Jamie Cohen-Cole’s The Open Mind recalls not just this question, but a finer argument about the role of ideological rhetoric and material interests in the pressing conflagration (and future Cold War) that Luce made explicit in his editorial but the President would or could not in his State of the Union address.
‘Are we going to fight for dear old Danzig or dear old Dong Dang? Are we going to decide the boundaries of Uritania?’ Luce asked somewhat facetiously. ‘Or, if we cannot state war aims in terms of vastly distant geography, shall we use some big words like Democracy and Freedom and Justice?’ Luce allowed that the U.S. could make a plausible case for intervention with big words. The President had himself demonstrated as much. Still, the publisher found neither Olympian rhetoric nor unidentifiable territories terribly persuasive. ‘[I]s there nothing between the absurd sound of distant cities and the brassy trumpeting of majestic words? And if so, whose Dong Dang and whose Democracy?’ he asked. ‘Is there not something a little more practically satisfying that we can get our teeth into? Is there no sort of understandable program?’ (Luce, 1941: 63). As the title and subtitle of his study indicate, Cohen-Cole is aiming at both big words and vast intellectual geography. His thesis is that psychology dominated midcentury social analysis and that this resulted to a marked extent from the ammunition it contributed to the Cold War’s arsenal of policy makers, scholars, and intellectuals. The Cold War, the author maintains, was a conflict not only over weaponry and realpolitiks and ideas, not only over hearts and minds—but over open versus closed minds. If the advancing authoritarian regimes trafficked in doctrinaire closed-mindedness, then the West absolutely must and would parlay open-mindedness as a ‘model and ideal of national and intellectual character’ that, as the ‘cognitive virtues to free thought’, ‘could unify the political and intellectual desiderata of the time’ (1–2). Cohen-Cole uses this model and ideal not only to explain the intellectual Cold War through ‘big ideas’. He seeks to use it as a lens through which to survey the rather vast and disparate geography of the mid-twentieth-century human sciences.
First, though, the big words. In Cohen-Cole’s study, democracy and open-mindedness are political and cognitive siblings if not indeed twins. He bases this equivalence on the Frankfurt School’s The Authoritarian Personality (1951). This cultural critique of totalitarianism advanced the German-Jewish émigré Erich Fromm’s unforgiving psychohistorical analysis of German fascism, Escape from Freedom, published a decade prior. Fromm, a revisionist Freudian sociologist and early School member, argued in Escape from Freedom that the rise of Nazism in Germany was fueled by a neurotic ‘authoritarian personality’ that drove the Führer's sadism and suckled the masochistic acquiescence of the German masses. Fromm’s peers adopted this wartime interpretation in The Authoritarian Personality and adapted it to the Cold War’s East-West bipolarity. If, on the one side, the ‘authoritarian personality’ of totalitarianism was irrational, doctrinaire, ‘rigid, narrow, conformist, intolerant, ideological and prejudiced’ (4), then the West’s ‘democratic personality’ simply must remain open minded—that is, creative, autonomous, tolerant, flexible, pluralist, and animated by reason. As Cohen-Cole does well to highlight, the democratic mind looked conspicuously akin to the liberal, learned mind that scholars in the human sciences imagined they themselves quintessentially possessed, or needed to possess. Cohen-Cole makes much of the cognitive scientist George Miller’s assertion at the end of a Voice of America radio broadcast on psycholinguistics that ‘the scientist is Everyman, looking just as you and I. We go and look for the things we want, and when we find them we find part of ourselves’ (142). Miller’s bald assertion, as Cohen-Cole points out, was both descriptive and prescriptive. It was fueled by the presumption that Miller and his colleagues in the nascent cognitive sciences were the right kind of human scientists, that they were creative, flexible, interdisciplinary, and thus demonstrably open-minded. The assertion was simultaneously prescriptive by beckoning the Cold War Everyman to the cognitive sciences: what was good for the cognitive sciences and its cultivation of the democratic personality was equally good for the rational, democratic Everyman. As Cohen-Cole astutely notes, this elision equated, or rather confused, the ‘Academic Mind’ with the ‘American Mind’ with the more-universal ‘Human Mind’, ‘normalizing’ scientific subjectivity across all three domains of mind as though they were interchangeable. Seeking other advantages, Miller, Jerome Bruner and other psychologists in the fledgling cognitive sciences also deployed open-minded Democracy against their ‘close-minded’, territorial and thus anti-interdisciplinary peers—the behavioralists B.F. Skinner, Clark Hull, and Kenneth Spence.
Translating the big words of World War II and Cold War ideology into the research and rhetoric of the interdisciplinary human sciences served a number of interests and purposes in the emergent military-industrial-educational (and philanthropic) complex, as Cohen-Cole limns. But does Open-Mindedness explain ‘Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature’ as much as Cohen-Cole would have us believe? This reviewer remains unconvinced. My reservations are in part structural, for a good deal of this book was published elsewhere and for other purposes. The open-mind thesis gets injected into this previously published material, yet the effect is inelegant. A stronger introduction would have certainly helped. My concerns and reservations, however, run deeper. After quoting Miller’s narcissistic Everyman-a-scientist assertion, Cohen-Cole notes that Miller and his fellow cognitive scientists ‘looked for human nature by holding an image of what they were looking for in their minds. The image they held was none other than their own self-image’ (164). This is not too far removed, it seems, from Cohen-Cole’s own approach to the Cold War human sciences, only the image is not so much the author’s own, at least not explicitly, but that of the eclectic educational psychologist Jerome Bruner, who, with Miller, co-founded Harvard’s short-lived Center for Cognitive Studies. ‘Saint Jerome’—not Cohen-Cole’s appellation, but a designation he includes by quotation—may well have embodied open-mindedness at its best. But his vision of psychology in its ideal form—interdisciplinary, open-minded, creative, humane—inadequately captures the breadth of midcentury psychology and the complexity of the Cold War-era human sciences. It also foists on the reader a partisan perspective. The author, for instance, would have us believe that the creation of Harvard’s Department of Social Relations was driven by high-minded interdisciplinarity. (The assertion here is that interdisciplinarity exemplified open-mindedness at an institutional level.) This big word certainly played a role in the Department’s formation. Yet in the recollection of M. Brewster Smith, purportedly the Department’s first Ph.D., ‘The new venture was as much responsive to chronic political tensions in the old Psychology Department as it was to clearly articulated goals of interdisciplinary integration.…Even then I did not regard the particular combination of disciplines in Social Relations as dictated by anything other than pragmatic and political reasons’ (Brewster Smith, 2003: 17). Smith’s recollection raises a question that recurred often in my reading. To what extent was open-mindedness, as a Cold War ‘model and ideal of national and intellectual character’ (1) driving these institutional and disciplinary developments? Were either the Department of Social Relations or the CCS established for the express purposes of promulgating the democratic personality in the battle against the authoritarian personality? I do not imagine Cohen-Cole would say yes. If he would agree, does his thesis best account for and explain local institutional politics and the history he has amassed, especially as he clearly sides with Saint Jerome and others in the cognitive scientists’ camp? The Open Mind recurs to the old maxim that history is written by and for the victors.
Practical concerns and politics are not entirely lost on the author, to be sure. Yet too often they are marginalized, coloring not only the recounting of Cambridge politics and the history of psychology, but the very sources Cohen-Cole marshals in defense of open-mindedness. One of the hallmarks of the democratic personality he highlights is autonomy. Nevertheless, in a chapter devoted to ‘Interdisciplinarity as a Virtue’ he argues that the invitation to interdisciplinary Cold War conferences, salons, and cocktail parties utterly depended on a person possessing the right sort of personality: they had to be a team player, had to get along, had to be flexible and tolerant. Teamwork, fitting in, belonging—these were precisely the attributes of ‘conformity’ that exercised critics of postwar American social and culture. Cohen-Cole himself writes that ‘interdisciplinary was not an issue of knowledge of several fields’ but rather ‘the ability, cognitive skills, and personality to get along with people of other disciplines’, ‘having the patience necessary for getting along with different types of people…and possessing facility in translating one’s own perspective and disciplinary ways of thinking into terms accessible to those steeped in other traditions’ (99). Proponents of ‘social adjustment’ (conformity) did not believe everyone should think alike. What they insisted is that ‘getting along’ was a cardinal virtue, for this is what made democracy work—in the same way that getting along made interdisciplinarity work. That social adjustment and interdisciplinarity held so much in common seems lost on Cohen-Cole, seemingly because it might detract readers from the villains in the author’s narrative, Bruner’s and Miller’s positivist colleagues—the ‘authoritarian’, ‘close-minded’ faculty controlling Harvard’s old Psychology department: the stimulus-and-response behaviorists.
Now for the vastly distant geography of dear old Danzig and dear old Dong Dang. Cohen-Cole is at his best in describing how Cambridge’s cognitive scientists broke free of the old-guard behaviorists. The chapters he devotes to the founding of the Center for Cognitive Studies and to an elementary-level social studies curriculum organized by Bruner with NSF and Ford Foundation money, ‘Man: A Course of Study’ (MACOS), are well researched, closely argued, and make an important contribution to the history of the human sciences. But Cohen-Cole’s ambitions are to survey geography well afield from the cloistered confines of Cambridge—guided, to a great degree, by Saint Jerome’s eclectic career. This leads the author to brush over, and in places inexplicably to fail to acknowledge, wide swaths of the human sciences. His analysis of the democratic versus authoritarian personality binary is rooted in The Authoritarian Personality, as already noted. Yet he is oddly dismissive of the social psychology upon which the study was based, namely, revisionist Freudianism. He claims, for example, that the book’s (‘neo-Freudian’) psychodynamic explanations for authoritarianism were a special source of criticism and thus were ‘largely dropped by social scientists’ (41). Perhaps in some circles and with particular scholars this was true, yet Cohen-Cole misjudges the significance of Freudian psychocultural analysis in the postwar human sciences. After the Frankfurt School’s relocation from Germany to Morningside Heights in 1941, Erich Fromm proved an indispensible liaison at Columbia with his bona fide credentialing in sociology, having studied under Karl Jaspers, Heinrich Rickert, and Max Weber’s brother, Alfred. His Escape from Freedom was read widely not only by the public but inspired countless scholars across the humanities and human sciences. Noam Chomsky, about whom Cohen-Cole writes quite positively, read it while a child and was, and remained for years, deeply impressed with its imaginative analysis. Encountering the book as a doctoral student in the Department of Social Relations, Brewster Smith found Fromm’s ‘account of the psychohistorical roots of Nazism and the perils of modern democracy’ a ‘brilliant integration of Marxist and neo-Freudian ideas’ (Brewster Smith, 2003: 13). No convert to Marxism, David Riesman borrowed freely from Fromm’s psychodynamic model; Fromm was also his personal analyst. Margaret Mead, John Dollard, William Ogburn, Harry Stack Sullivan, and a host of other interlocutors who participated in the salons and conferences that figure prominently in The Open Mind were conversant with and influenced by Freudian-informed social psychology, too. Why Harold Lasswell, another student of psychoanalysis, makes not a single appearance in Cohen-Cole’s study strikes me as a particularly odd absence, given his interdisciplinary stature and influential writings on, of all topics, the ‘democratic character’. None of this is intended as a defense of neo-Freudian psychocultural analysis, per se. Rather it is to point to a lacuna in Cohen-Cole’s study: namely, social psychology, which, by its very nature, traversed the behavioral and social sciences. Cohen-Cole’s contention that Mead and company simply used their own open (liberal) minds to fashion a psychology of democratic personhood implies that they were guided by ego and ideology alone. Granted, they would have imagined their minds to be far superior to the authoritarian mind. Nevertheless, they were far more conversant with various theories and articulations of personhood and identity, more so certainly than Cohen-Cole’s focus on the internecine conflicts in Cambridge permits. The author’s desire to write Cambridge’s story across vastly distant geography spits out generalizations that simply gloss over the welter of open-minded—but nevertheless discipline-informed—research taking place in more collegial settings. He, for example, off-handedly asserts, ‘Many social scientists (including psychologists) did not place much stake in disciplinary studies’ (255). This undermines the rudimentary premise of interdisciplinarity's necessity, that academia suffered from an overabundance of ‘specialization'—i.e., disciplinary studies. More discordantly, it deprecates the great body of midcentury scholarship dedicated to understanding the human mind and social relations and the sinuous threads that weave the self and society through culture.
The Open Mind would have been better served had its author focused on a more practically satisfying history of Bruner, Miller, and the emergence of the cognitive sciences, for this is where the book shines its brightest and, one imagines, will have its most enduring impact.