Liberalism and Mass Psychology
The American Experience
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6356056 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Eli Zaretsky (New School, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 54 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 59-83 |
| Publication date | 2022-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Polity (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0032-3497 • E-ISSN: 1744-1684 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/717254 |
| OpenAlex | W3212576121 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 9 |
European liberals have viewed themselves as the avatars of the rational individual as opposed to the mob or tyrant. Faced with the populist, democratic, and egalitarian character of US society, American liberals could not take this point of view for granted. For that reason, they turned to Freud, although with mixed success. I explore this turn in three consecutive moments: the New Deal, when liberals first understood America to be not only a class society, but a mass society; Richard Hofstadter’s theory of paranoia, which he applied to the right-wing born with McCarthyism; and the New Left and feminist attempts to remake liberalism into a more democratic and multicultural creed. In all three cases, I argue that the liberal commitment to capitalist property relations and the market limited its ability to advance a more robust and democratic politics
Creed · Democracy · Liberalism · Mass society · Paranoia · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Politics of the United States · Sociology · Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology · Law · Psychology
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,25 |
| Citation span | 2022 - 2022 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |