The Maturity of American Thought, 1945-1968:
An Unfinished History

New York: Archae Editions. Copyright © 1972, 1977, 1978, 2006 by Richard Kostelanetz. All rights reserved.

Dedicated to the memory of
William G. McLoughlin,
The best intellectual historian
I’ve ever known.

The Maturity of American Thought was begun in the late 1960s, with the help of a Guggenheim Fellowship. It was meant to be a comprehensive intellectual history of post-WWII America (1945-68), and its thesis was that only in the post-War period did American thinking in many fields achieve first-rank importance and major international influence. My strategy in writing this book was less to prove this thesis, which I took to be virtually self-evident to those who knew (and cared) than to identify and summarize what this major thinking was. I completed several chapters before putting the project aside to complete something else; it was never resumed. The chapters I finished beyond the introduction covered “Historiography,” “Sociology,” “Social Philosophy,” “Government,” “Anthropology,” “Esthetics,” “Architecture,” “Literary Criticism,” and “Poetry.” Some of them appeared in such U.S. cultural periodicals as Bennington Review, Chelsea, Sun & Moon, Western Humanities Review, and Boston University Journal; two were even reprinted in books. Since most of these essays are not conveniently available, while readers of one often ask about the others, these chapters now appear as a single volume sub-titled “An Unfinished History.” One advantage of publishing it as a computer file is that proper names and particular words need not be indexed.

I am grateful again to the Guggenheim Foundation for the grant that initially inspired this project. Way behind the book stands William G. McLoughlin, my favorite history professor at Brown University. He introduced intellectual history to me (or vice versa) and remains, in many respects, the greatest historian and historian-teacher I have ever known. My major regret, as I write now, is not publishing this “unfinished” history sooner—before he passed in 1992.

—Richard Kostelanetz, New York, NY, 2006

ON THE AUTHOR

At the time that he was writing The Maturity of American Thought, Richard Kostelanetz was an independent writer living on the East Village of New York City. In addition to contributing prose and poetry to magazines both slick and literary, he had already published two books entirely of his own, The Theatre of Mixed Means (1968) and Master Minds (1969) and edited such anthologies as On Contemporary Literature (1964; rev. ed., 1969), The Young American Writers (1967), and Beyond Left & Right (1968) and contributed to magazines both large and small. The recipient of many fellowships, he was anticipating a career as a fulltime writer that he has since pursued.

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Ours is a period of transition: a transition from the mechanistic age to the electronic age; a transition from the tangible, logical laws to intangible, irrational phenomena of the invisible world, from the normal bodies to the particles of the atoms, which cannot be seen by our eyes, but only the effect evaluated.

—Sigfried Giedion, “Symbolic Expression in Prehistory and in the First High Civilizations” (1966)

For the historian, there are no banal things. Like the scientist, the historian does not take anything for granted.

History writing is ever tied to the fragment. In the [historian’s] mind, the fragments of meaning here displayed should become alive in new and manifold relations.

—Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (1948)

History does not foretell the future, but study of the past may provide some keys to understanding. Above all, knowledge of history should liberate us from the past and enable us to be vividly contemporary.

—Lynn White, Jr., “Science, Scientists, and Politics” (1964)

In essence, there is a kind of intellectual polarization taking place around the mid-twentieth century which separates the intellectual establishment into two—one, those who are still preoccupied with the world as conditioned by its pre-1900 parameters, and those who are attempting to recast and reorient their world view to one which is in many ways quite unprecedented in human experience.

—John McHale, “Toward the Future” (1968)