The SSL ‘Book of the Month’ feature highlights a book in our collection that has been chosen by one of our Subject Consultants. This may be a recent addition to our stock or an existing item that we would like to share with you.
November’s Book of the Month was selected by Jo Gardner, Subject Consultant for Bodleian Social Science Librarian and Subject Consultant for Politics and International Relations.
Liberalism against itself: Cold War intellectuals and the making of our times
Samuel Moyn
Yale University Press
It was chosen because the author provides a set of intertwined profiles of six scholars of the Cold War, and in doing so he offers some insight into the evolution of liberalism and the cause of the Red Scare.
Book Overview
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. In this book 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.
Reviews
“A fascinating and combative intellectual history of what Moyn calls ‘cold war liberalism”
Gideon Rachman, Financial Times
“Moyn has written a masterful interconnected intellectual biography of Cold War liberals.”
Atreyee Majumder, LSE Review of Books
“A striking, poignant account of how liberalism lost its way. Through a set of fascinating intellectual portraits, Samuel Moyn prompts us to confront liberalism’s Cold War capitulation to a reactionary pessimism, and invites us to imagine a liberalism oriented toward emancipation.”
Amia Srinivasan, author of The Right to Sex
How can I access it?
We have one lending copy of this book, which is located on our New Books Display Area (around the corner from our Issue Desk). Its shelfmark is JC574.MOY 2023. It is also available as an eBook which can be accessed from a Bodleian Library computer or use it remotely, by logging on to SOLO with your SSO.
What would your SSL Book of the Month be? Do you have a favourite book in our collection? If so, we would love to know what it is. Add a comment below or email us.