As the sales of amateur microscopes, science kits, and telescopes escalated, American scientists achieved a corresponding elevation in their social standing. Mass-circulation magazines and television programs introduced the “wizards of the coming wonders,” and several scientists, including J. Robert Oppenheimer with his ubiquitous porkpie hat, became national celebrities.12 Many scientists were also swept into politics. When the Atomic Energy Commission was established in 1946, a civilian advisory committee was formed to serve as a scientific liaison to commission members. Even more directly, President Truman established the Science Advisory Committee within the Office of Defense Mobilization in 1951 to advise on national security policy, a committee whose original members were some of the most prominent American scientists including J. Robert Oppenheimer, James Conant, and James Killian. Despite their continuing rancor toward military officials over security regulations, postwar scientists received an inordinate amount of respect. Indeed, because they represented “the leaders of mankind’s greatest inquiry into the mysteries of matter, of the earth, the universe, and of life itself,” Time magazine named “fifteen scientists” including I. I. Rabi and Edward Teller the “men of the year” for 1960.13 At the moment when science was “at the apogee of its power for good or evil,” everyone in the United States including “statesmen and savants, builders and even priests” had become, according to the editors at Time, the “servants” of the modern scientist.
Of course American society as a whole had difficulty swallowing such a notion.14 Warning that “the monuments of Big Science—the huge rockets, the high-energy accelerators, the high-flux research reactors” had become “the symbols of our time just as surely as Notre Dame is a symbol of a past age,” Alvin Weinberg was just one of many commentators wondering if federal support of large-scale scientific research was a “marvel or menace.”15 By the time scientist and writer C. P. Snow delivered his famous 1959 lecture at Cambridge University in which he marked the mutual distrust between the “two cultures” of science and literature, intellectuals in America had already taken umbrage against scientists such as Snow for making disparaging remarks about the supposed failure of men of letters to offer anything more than “imbecile expressions of anti-social feelings.”16 For instance, in his response to the public debate that emerged after Snow’s lecture, literary critic Lionel Trilling challenged Snow’s promotion of “scientific philosopher-kings” to a position of power, noting that modern science, unlike literature, was incapable of “making a declaration about the qualities that life should have, about the qualities life does not have but should have.”17 As threats of impending nuclear disaster lingered in the air, many men of letters issued a similar defense of the humanities in the face of the militarization of American life.
The Challenge of High Modernism
Although modern science had become, as J. Robert Oppenheimer explained, part of “the common understanding,” many postwar intellectuals such as Lionel Trilling worried about the implications, both political and psychological, of this intellectual shift, arguing that the scientific method was not the only framework for understanding the surrounding world.18 Indeed, a conglomeration of artists, writers, and literary critics, both separately and in tandem, rethought the nature of aesthetics within this Cold War landscape, giving rise to the movement known as high modernism. Arguing that bourgeois society had failed in its emancipatory promises, that bureaucratic rationality had usurped the public sphere, and that the scientific method had morphed into a form of domination, high modernists went to great lengths to carve out aesthetics as the last vestige of prior utopian promises vanquished by recent atrocities. The constellation of intellectual traditions that composed the high modernist position in the 1940s and 1950s included the literary practices of the New Criticism, formulated in part by John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Cleanth Brooks; the cultural criticism of the New York intellectuals, including Dwight Macdonald, Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, and Philip Rahv; the critical theory of the relocated Frankfurt school, centered on the work of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm; and the aesthetic writings of the art critic Clement Greenberg. At its core, high modernism was a defense of the humanities in the face of this rising enthusiasm for science and an argument for a disinterested and polite observance of the natural world in contrast to the aggressive hand of technology.
To many high modernists, the development of modern science went hand-in-hand with the rational administration of social life; for others, it marked the widespread acceptance of unimpeded capitalist growth as a social imperative. Members of the transplanted Institute for Social Research acknowledged both. Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964), for instance, opened with an oft-repeated claim: “A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress.”19 Packed with topical references to the military-industrial complex of the early Cold War, One-Dimensional Man was a vociferous critique of the intermingling of science, technology, and capitalist production, an indictment not only of the sacrifices demanded by American politicians but also of the historical trend of mechanization that characterized modern life. The footnotes in his book pointed to an earlier German text by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno that had first outlined the Frankfurt school critique of modern industrial society. Written primarily while the two German scholars were living in southern California during the war, Dialectic of Enlightenment reflected the despondency of two Jewish émigrés coming to terms with the devastation in their homeland and with an American landscape that seemed, in Adorno’s words, to “[display] capitalism in a state of almost complete purity.”20 Borrowing language from Nietzsche, Weber, and Marx, the two writers brushed aside the naïve belief that the technological advances ushered in by the Enlightenment were harbingers of a better tomorrow. Eighteenth-century proponents of the Enlightenment had promised that a commitment to the scientific method would bring emancipation from prerational forms of thought. In fact, the opposite was the case; the Enlightenment had produced unimaginable suffering. “Enlightenment,” argued Horkheimer and Adorno, “dissolves the injustice of the old inequality—unmediated lordship and mastery—but at the same time perpetuates it in universal mediation, in the relation of any one existent to any other.”21 Reason, the guiding force of the Enlightenment, was seen as responsible for the domination of nature. Once envisioned as a benign tool for understanding the material world, reason had morphed into an insidious form, into an instrumental rationality that indiscriminately carved up and objectified a living reality. For Horkheimer and Adorno, instrumental rationality was reason stripped of any consideration for the qualitative differences between the objects to which it was applied and reason utilized without any acknowledgment of the ends to which it aimed. Everything in turn was reduced to an abstract equivalent. Even worse, instrumental rationality had reduced man, just as it had reduced nature, to an objective other, making him just as exchangeable as goods, services, and materials. The Enlightenment, in this sense, demanded sacrifice—both on the part of the natural world, which was stripped bare, and on the part of the masses, which produced and consumed the stale goods offered. For Horkheimer and Adorno, mastery over nature had led to mastery over man.
The lessons of Dialectic of Enlightenment were translated into an accessible language in Max Horkheimer’s 1947 Eclipse of Reason, originally a series of lectures given at Columbia University. Continuing his melancholic view of