Radio Free Europe used balloons to drop leaflets in an attempt to supplement radio with printed words in the 1950s—a historical moment when closing borders, censoring the press, jamming foreign radios, tapping telephone lines, and tracking letters from abroad created an almost hermetically sealed space without many means for exchanging information across the Iron Curtain. This article traces how distorted and limited information shaped Cold War propaganda and practices of information-gathering. The article further examines unpredictable environmental factors that were (...) transformed into persuasive political rhetoric. A comparative analysis of communist media shows similarities of imagination in a visual propaganda campaign across five communist countries. Fantasies evolved into an object of public interest when propaganda strategies embraced a language of facts. (shrink)

In September 1950, the Genetics Society of America (GSA) dedicated its annual meeting to a "Golden Jubilee of Genetics" that celebrated the 50th anniversary of the rediscovery of Mendel's work. This program, originally intended as a small ceremony attached to the coattails of the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) meeting, turned into a publicity juggernaut that generated coverage on Mendel and the accomplishments of Western genetics in countless newspapers and radio broadcasts. The Golden Jubilee merits historical attention as both (...) an intriguing instance of scientific commemoration and as an early example of Cold War political theatre. Instead of condemning either Lysenko or Soviet genetics, the Golden Jubilee would celebrate Mendel – and, not coincidentally, the practical achievements in plant and animal breeding his work had made possible. The American geneticists' focus on the achievements of Western genetics as both practical and theoretical, international, and, above all, non-ideological and non-controversial, was fully intended to demonstrate the success of the Western model of science to both the American public and scientists abroad at a key transition point in the Cold War. An implicit part of this article's argument, therefore, is the pervasive impact of the Cold War in unanticipated corners of postwar scientific culture. (shrink)

In Cold War Freud Dagmar Herzog uncovers the astonishing array of concepts of human selfhood which circulated across the globe in the aftermath of World War II. Against the backdrop of Nazism and the Holocaust, the sexual revolution, feminism, gay rights, and anticolonial and antiwar activism, she charts the heated battles which raged over Freud's legacy. From the postwar US to Europe and Latin America, she reveals how competing theories of desire, anxiety, aggression, guilt, trauma and pleasure emerged and (...) were then transformed to serve both conservative and subversive ends in a fundamental rethinking of the very nature of the human self and its motivations. Her findings shed new light on psychoanalysis' enduring contribution to the enigma of the relationship between nature and culture, and the ways in which social contexts enter into and shape the innermost recesses of individual psyches. (shrink)

This intriguing and ground-breaking book is the first in-depth study of the development of philosophy of science in the United States during the Cold War. It documents the political vitality of logical empiricism and Otto Neurath's Unity of Science Movement when these projects emigrated to the US in the 1930s and follows their de-politicization by a convergence of intellectual, cultural and political forces in the 1950s. Students of logical empiricism and the Vienna Circle treat these as strictly intellectual non-political (...) projects. In fact, the refugee philosophers of science were highly active politically and debated questions about values inside and outside science, as a result of which their philosophy of science was scrutinized politically both from within and without the profession, by such institutions as J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. It will prove absorbing reading to philosophers and historians of science, intellectual historians, and scholars of Cold War studies. (shrink)

This book discusses how rational choice theory grew out of RAND's work for the US Air Force. It concentrates on the work of William J. Riker, Kenneth J. Arrow, James M. Buchanan, Russel Hardin, and John Rawls. It argues that within the context of the US Cold War with its intensive anti-communist and anti-collectivist sentiment, the foundations of capitalist democracy were grounded in the hyper individualist theory of non-cooperative games.

Cold-War Twins: Mikhail Alpatov's a Universal History of Arts and Ernst Gombrich's the Story of Art This article deals with the "afterlife" of a methodological disagreement in the Vienna School of Art History between the positions of Alois Riegl and Julius von Schlosser in Mikhail Alpatov's and Ernst Gombrich's art history survey texts published during the Cold War on different sides of the Iron Curtain. Though these surveys are methodological antipodes, the difference itself, I argue, is possible only (...) within the framework of the larger art historical discourse they share. In addition, I will draw on the radical ideological critique of Alpatov's survey inside the Soviet Union and the case of the Stalinist survey meant to replace it, in order to address the ideological commonality between Alpatov's and Gombrich's surveys. (shrink)

Homosexual aversion therapy enjoyed two brief but intense periods of clinical experimentation: between 1950 and 1962 in Czechoslovakia, and between 1962 and 1975 in the British Commonwealth. The specific context of its emergence was the geopolitical polarization of the Cold War and a parallel polarization within psychological medicine between Pavlovian and Freudian paradigms. In 1949, the Pavlovian paradigm became the guiding doctrine in the Communist bloc, characterized by a psychophysiological or materialist understanding of mental illness. It was taken up (...) by therapists in Western countries who were critical of psychoanalysis and sought more ‘scientific’ diagnostic and therapeutic methods that focused on empirical evidence and treating actual symptoms. However, their attitude towards homosexuality often played a decisive role in how they used aversion therapy. Whereas Czechoslovakian researchers cautioned readers about low success rates and agitated for homosexual law reform in 1961, most of their anglophone counterparts selectively ignored or misrepresented the results of ‘the Prague experiment’, instead celebrating single-case ‘success’ stories in their effort to correct ‘abnormal’ sexual orientation. In histories of queer sexuality and its pathologization, the behaviourist paradigm remains almost entirely unmapped. This article provides the most detailed study to date of aversion therapy literature from both sides of the East/West border. In doing so, it contributes to the project not only of ‘decentring Western sexualities’, but of decentring Western sexological knowledge. Given its Pavlovian origins, the history of homosexual aversion therapy can be fully understood only in the context of Cold War transnational sexological knowledge exchange. (shrink)

With this introduction we aim to illuminate Western Europe's place on the map of Cold War science and, specifically, to draw attention to the differences in and the diversity of Western European Cold War science in comparison to the United States. By discussing narratives of Cold War science in small states and asking how they fit into the European condition, we suggest that the fact of being a small state affects the conditions for and the scope of (...) Cold War science. As a whole, this special issue also emphasizes the importance of the spatial dimension; that is, the significant dependence of Cold War science on geographical relations and geopolitical interests. (shrink)

By the end of the Second World War the advancing allied forces discovered a new nerve gas in Germany. It was called Tabun. Codenamed GA, it was found to be extremely toxic. British experts were immediately dispatched to examine the agent. On arrival, they discovered that German scientists had also developed even more toxic nerve agents, including Sarin, known as GB. The first organized testing of Sarin on humans began in October 1951 at Porton Down in Wiltshire, Britain's biochemical warfare (...) establishment since the First World War. In February 1953, volunteer number 562 experienced the first recorded serious adverse reaction. Testing continued. Two months later, on April 27, six subjects were given 300 milligrams of Sarin. One of the volunteers, a man named Kelly, suffered serious ill effects, fell into a coma, but then recovered. Although asked by their superiors to reduce the amount tested to the “lowest range of dosage”—which would have been somewhere in the region of 10–15 milligrams—Porton's scientists continued their tests with a “lower” dosage, reducing it from 300 to 200 milligrams. (shrink)

This study examines the mobilization of the Far Right in Korea and Japan in the 2000s and probes how and why the actors and political claims of East Asian extremists differ from their counterparts in Europe and North America. The Far Right forces in Korea and Japan are politically regressive in glorifying the authoritarian or colonial past and cling to unchanging ideological claims from the postwar decades in their current targeting of old-time, internal “others.” This divergence is explained by the (...) United States–led Cold War geopolitics in Asia, under which Far Right elites were fortified in postwar Japan and Korea. The Cold War that has not ended in Asia as opposed to Europe or North America further allows the institutional sustainability of the radical Right and the political resonance of its old ideology of anticommunism and colonial racism. As such, democratic politics in East Asia is predicated on Cold War undercurrents. (shrink)

Richard Löwenthal’s response to the challenges of ‘1968’ was more complex than that of most of his liberal colleagues. He did not simply remain beholden to the interpretative patterns of a German ‘special path’ (Sonderweg). He also, and increasingly so, drew on the conceptual framework of ‘Western civilization’ to make sense of and cope with the socio-cultural transformations of his times. What many like-minded intellectuals perceived solely as a ‘deviation from the West’, he also viewed as a ‘crisis of the (...) West’. This article argues that this transnationally ‘Western’ stance was part and parcel of Löwenthal’s intellectual profile as ‘cold war liberal’. This was a relatively rare species in Cold War Germany, and Löwenthal was rather exceptional in his sustained engagement with the topic of ‘Western civilization’. Compared with luminaries such as Carl Joachim Friedrich, Ernst Fraenkel or Karl Loewenstein, Richard Löwenthal may be lesser known in English-speaking scholarship, but he makes for a particularly instructive case when discussing ‘cold war liberalism’ in West Germany. With its focus on the spatialization of political thought, and ‘the West’ as a spatial imaginary, this article also seeks to contribute to the growing discussion of how to ‘spatialize’ intellectual history. (shrink)

Kant had a notion of our determined and freely-choosing behavior which illuminates basic assumptions of contemporary ideologies. A myopic embracement of only one or the other behavior has been superseded by a new entanglement which renders moot ordinary political classifications. Fascism had typically affirmed the radical freedom of an Uebermensch as well as a superior race and racism; Marxist communism a radical determinism as well as inevitable class warfare. But during the Cold War, especially since the 1960s, there arose (...) in open societies a virulent assimilation of the two ideologies. Understood as a species of the"New Left", the ideology has effectively combined name-calling ad hominem attacks of "racism" with"elite white classes" to politicize dialogue and to suppress objective pursuits of truth as well as to foster ethnic identity and provide an unprecedented apologetics for global conflict. (shrink)

By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era--among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Judith Shklar, and Lionel (...) Trilling--transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time. In his iconoclastic style, Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals redefined the ideals of their movement and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous philosophy: preserving individual liberty at all costs. In denouncing this stance, as well as the recent nostalgia for Cold War liberalism as a means to counter illiberal values, Moyn presents a timely call for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy--a path to undoing the damage of the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism."--Dust jacket. (shrink)

During the Cold War, political thinkers in the West debated the balance between the requirements of liberal democracy and national security. This debate is relevant to East Asia and especially to Korea, where an ideological-military standoff between a democracy and a totalitarian system persists. The thinkers often identified as "Cold War liberals"--Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Raymond Aron, Friedrich Hayek, and Michael Oakeshott--are worth revisiting in this context. Of these, Oakeshott is the least well understood in East Asia and (...) therefore particularly deserving of attention. His ideas about the limits of rationalism in politics, the irrelevance of conventional views of liberalism and conservatism, how constitutional democracy should be defined, and how it can be defended against various forms of anti-liberal politics are especially valuable. In this book, leading Oakeshott scholars from around the world explore these ideas and their implications for East Asia in ten illuminating and readable essays. (shrink)

The Danish marine biologist Anton Frederik Bruun (1901–1961) is chiefly remembered as an explorer of the deep-sea fauna and a key figure in international scientific organizations during the 1950s. As the Cold War increasingly permeated the marine sciences and it became too expensive for small states to operate deep-sea research vessels, he became an asset to the USA's oceanographic establishment as it sought to first assess Soviet strength (in terms of research, technology and logistical capacity) and then to build (...) up American oceanography in response. Bruun's contacts with the USSR – including a visit in 1957 – strengthened his contacts to the American military as well as American oceanographers. His enthusiasm for raising interest in the marine sciences in developing countries could also be matched to American geopolitical goals. Bruun's participation in the Scripps Institution of Oceanography's Naga expedition to the South China Sea and Gulf of Thailand captured the mutually beneficial nature of his American connections. Bruun was able to use the USA to reach distant oceans, while the USA in turn gained from Bruun's prestige as it forged connections with friendly states through science, an increasingly important arena for Cold War competition. (shrink)

Abstract:Hannah Arendt wasn't a liberal, she repeatedly declared. Yet in a series of ways she was a fellow traveler of Cold War liberals. And caught up as she also was in neo-imperial and racist entanglements that go entirely unmentioned in promotional accounts of Cold War liberalism and have barely begun to be challenged even today, she helps cast their thought in relief. Yet there is a proviso. From another, exceptional, and unique perspective—that of their Middle Eastern politics—Cold (...) War liberals did challenge liberal Eurocentrism, following Arendt who did so more briefly. (shrink)

At the height of the Cold War, in the 1950s, the process of parallel invention of masers and lasers took place on the opposing sides of the Iron Curtain. While the American part of the story has been investigated by historians in much penetrating detail, comparable Soviet developments were described more superficially. This study aims at, to some extent, repairing this discrepancy by analyzing the Soviet path towards the maser from a comparative angle. It identifies, on the one hand, (...) significant differences between the two projects regarding their heuristics, the relationship between theory and experiment, grounding in different academic cultures, and the resulting conceptualization of the maser principle. At the same time, the case also illustrates more fundamental transformations in the practices of postwar research that can be characterized as a convergence between the Soviet and the American science of the period. (shrink)

Donnelly's essay reconstructs the scholarly discourse on human rights that began with the initial mid-1970s "innovative and controversial" approach of linking human rights to foreign policy.

The Cold War has affected the communities around the world. Malaysia was no exception in being affected by the turmoil the international world, particularly after the World War 2, due to ideological conflicts. Based on the domino theory, the ups and downs of particular country in terms of its, strong ideology, brings about network impacts to each country in the world. Thus, a freedom of Malaya and the establishment of Malaysia came from the history of Cold War which (...) influenced the international scene. The establishment of Malaysia is seen as a mechanism to stop the influence of communism. The involvement leaders from Malaya, Singapore, Sabah and Sarawak as well as Brunei Darussalam in the agenda to ‘build’ Malaysia with the approval from democratic countries showed a very strong cooperation that communism was a threat. This contributed to the creation of a new and bigger country. The wise Malaysian leaders in negotiating and being united in facing the global threats at that time, has shown that Malaysia’s ‘project’ in stopping the communist theory which is also known domino theory, was successfully carried out and maintained till today. Therefore, Malaysia as a case study, on how a country was ‘built’ on the basis of stopping the spread of communism in saving the Southeast Asia from falling into the hands of communists, is unique and its effectiveness should be studied. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, EarlyView.

This article has a dual purpose. First, it looks at the transfer of the methodology of systems analysis from the RAND Corporation to the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in the wake of an East–West bridge-building effort during the Cold War. Second, it draws out a more general argument about how the institutional structures of these research organizations condition their methodological orientations. Acknowledging the complexity of factors influencing methodological choices at RAND and IIASA, the article concentrates on the (...) centrality of institutional purpose, institutional environments and internal organizational structure, and demonstrates how, when taken together, these factors led to a methodological diversification at IIASA that is best summarized as the internationalization of systems analysis. (shrink)

This article identifies a distinct strand of 20th-century liberal thought that was exemplified by Isaiah Berlin, Raymond Aron and, to a lesser extent, Karl Popper. I offer a stylized account of their common ideas and shared political sensibility, and argue that their primarily negative liberalism was a variety of what Judith Shklar called the `liberalism of fear' — which put the imperative to avoid cruelty and atrocity first. All three founded their liberalism on a `politics of knowledge' that was directed (...) primarily against Marxist philosophies of history and less against the idea of bureaucratic planning, as, in contrast, was the case with Friedrich von Hayek's thought. Moreover, all three subscribed to more or less explicit versions of value pluralism, and claimed that, in the circumstances of modernity, Weber's `clash of values' was exacerbated and required a particularly prudential approach to politics; this prudential management of value conflicts in turn was best entrusted to cultivated bureaucratic elites. All shared an image of a tolerant and humane society — essentially an idealized version of Britain — but said perhaps too little on the question how societies without the appropriate traditions of moderation and compromise were to be liberalized. (shrink)

This is a short essay written for the forthcoming *Handbook of American Pragmatism* (Cheryl Misak, ed., Oxford University Press). The author argues that the standard narrative, according to which pragmatism went into eclipse in the years of the Cold War is nonviable.

: President Clinton's charge to the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments included the identification of ethical and legal standards for evaluating government-sponsored radiation experiments conducted during the Cold War. In this paper, we review the traditional account of the history of American research ethics, and then highlight and explain the significance of a number of the Committee's historical findings as they relate to this account. These findings include both the national defense establishment's struggles with legal and insurance issues (...) concerning human experiments, and the medical profession's perspective on human experimentation in the years following the Nuremberg Medical Trials. We conclude that the Committee's work both enriches the traditional view of the history of research ethics and opens important new areas for study. (shrink)

This fascinating study reveals the extensive influence of Cold War politics on academia, philosophical inquiry, and the course of intellectual history. From the rise of popular novels that championed the heroism of the individual to the proliferation of abstract art as a counter to socialist realism, the years of the Cold War had a profound impact on American intellectual life. As John McCumber shows in this fascinating account, philosophy, too, was hit hard by the Red Scare. Detailing the (...) immense political pressures that reshaped philosophy departments in midcentury America, he shows how the path of American philosophy was altered to follow a political agenda. McCumber begins with the story of Max Otto, whose appointment to the UCLA Philosophy Department in 1947 was met with widespread protest charging him as an atheist. Drawing on Otto’s case, McCumber details the conservative efforts that, by 1960, had all but banished existentialism and pragmatism—not to mention Marxism—from philosophy departments across the country. These paradigms were replaced with what McCumber calls Cold War philosophy, ideas that valorized scientific objectivity and free markets and which downplayed the anti-theistic implications of modern thought. As McCumber shows, the effects of this trend can still be seen at American universities today. (shrink)

Sixteen works are analyzed to shed light on historical practice in regard to praising, blaming, and ascribing responsibility. Agents are held responsible for the Cold War only if they had an opportunity to prevent it specified goals or norms required that they utilize that opportunity, but, instead their actions, under the circumstances, brought about the Cold War. Historians' diverse ascriptions of responsibility reflect different views as to opportunities, applicable goals or norms, appropriate standards for determining culpability as distinguished (...) from answerability, and bases for comparative judgments. Analysis also discloses that Dray's thesis regarding the interdependence of moral and selective causal judgments is simplistic. (shrink)