‘The Bright Future of All Humanity’: Liberal Criticism and the Soviet Union in the Twentieth Century

Marsh, Stephen Taylor

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Year:: 2023
Contributor:: Marsh, Stephen Taylor (creator); Anderson, Amanda (Advisor); Rooney, Ellen (Reader); Gould, Philip (Reader); Brown University. Department of English (sponsor)
Genre:: theses
Subject:: American literature; Phenomenology; Aleksievich, Svetlana, 1948-; Twentieth century; Soviet Union; Criticism; Communism; Marx, Karl, 1818-1883; Existentialism; Eastern Europe; Liberalism; Post-communism; Marxist criticism; Liberty; Philosophy of history; Trilling, Lionel, 1905-1975; Baldwin, James, 1924-1987; Ellison, Ralph; Sontag, Susan, 1933-2004; Invisible man (Ellison, Ralph); The Middle of the Journey (Trilling, Lionel); Another country (Baldwin, James); Havel, Václav; Patočka, Jan, 1907-1977; Miłosz, Czesław; Kołakowski, Leszek; Stalin, Joseph, 1878-1953; Lenin, Vladimir Ilʹich, 1870-1924; Zalkind, A. B. (Aron Borisovich), 1888-1936; Kollontaĭ, A. (Aleksandra), 1872-1952
Extent:: 12, 232 p.

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Abstract:: This dissertation argues that much of the critical imagination of mid-twentieth century liberal thinkers in the United States is best understood as a worldview shaped in response to the novel philosophical problems introduced by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), particularly during the dictatorship of Joseph V. Stalin. I draw on two concepts from the intellectual historian Peter E. Gordon, the “ramification” of ideas in history and the “normative image of humanity,” to distinguish two such images, one associated with the Soviet imagination, the other with a liberal imagination. The Soviet imagination, I argue, is defined by the drive to normalize and rationalize human experience, making the world predictable both in principle and in fact to achieve the equality of all and, consequently, a Communist world-historical telos. Conversely, the liberal “normative image of humanity,” I argue, is defined by its primal focus on how humans “become” free (as opposed to how they “are” free). The mid-twentieth century liberals I examine—including Lionel Trilling, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Susan Sontag—each contribute to this image of human beings becoming free: the precondition of human Being itself, the capacity to be conscious in the world, to intend towards the world as oneself, as one really is, and the ability to change, develop, and grow in relation to it. In this, their thinking parallels that of a variety of dissident writers and intellectuals from Central and Eastern Europe, in particular Poland and the former Czechoslovakia. This dissertation contributes a novel interpretation of midcentury liberalism’s understanding of freedom in addition to a fresh rendering of this idea of freedom itself, defined in terms of its relationship to sacrifice. In so doing, it draws comparative connections to Central and Eastern European philosophy and finds a new place for midcentury liberalism within American literary studies.
Notes:: Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2023

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Marsh, Stephen Taylor, "‘The Bright Future of All Humanity’: Liberal Criticism and the Soviet Union in the Twentieth Century" (2023). English Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:rer6befk/

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English Theses and Dissertations

Theses and Dissertations for the English department.
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