The Cold War as comparative political thought

Abstract

The aim of this article is to provide a programmatic statement for a research agenda in the comparative political thought of the Cold War. As an innovative methodology for the study of political ideas, the author contends that comparative political theory connects up very well with the ways in which Cold War historians have come to frame their questions: systematically applying its principles therefore offers an interesting opportunity to take the recent scholarship forward. The first section reviews the treatment of ideas across phases of the Cold War historiography, and proposes that an approach styled on comparative political theory potentially brings out two general qualities of Cold War ideas, which are often missed: what the author calls their granularity and embeddedness. At the same time some prospects are raised for reconciling the political and cultural histories of the Cold War. The second section focuses on the aspect of comparison, and situates the research programme in the context of the recent trend towards the study of international history. The third section is the most constructive. An indicative series of projects is offered which such a programme might pursue. The concept of the Cold War ‘thought-practice’ is proposed as the most promising unit of analysis by which the figure of the political theorist might contribute to the interpretation of Cold War history.

Keywords:

• Cold War
• comparative political theory
• thought-practices

Notes

¹ See esp. Dan Stone, ‘Cold War Ideas,’ Contemporary European History 22, no. 4 (2013): 675–86; and Joel Isaac and Duncan Bell, ‘Introduction,’ in Uncertain Empire: American History and the Idea of the Cold War, ed. Joel Isaac and Duncan Bell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 4.

² There is no intention in this article to apply the normative aspects of political theory.

³ See inter alia Roxanne Euben, Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Fred Dallmayr, Dialogue Among Civilizations: Some Exemplary Voices (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Andrew March, ‘What is Comparative Political Theory?,’ The Review of Politics 71, no. 4 (2009): 531–65; Fred Dallmayr, ed., Comparative Political Theory: An Introduction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Farah Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Michael Freeden and Andrew Vincent, eds., Comparative Political Thought (London: Routledge, 2012).

⁴ A cultural studies variant of comparative political theory might caution against taking ‘East’ and ‘West’ as reference points. However, I suggest that ‘East’ and ‘West’ are not troubling labels when the purpose is to provide original historical interpretation, which logically must entail working with historical self-identifications, rather than (say) challenging the legacies of empire. This is not to discount the utility of seeking to comprehend Cold War East and West from ‘post-colonialist’ analytical perspective: see esp. William Pietz, ‘The ‘Post-Colonialism’ of Cold War Discourse,’ Social Text 19/20 (1988): 55–75. The political thought, of West and East, may have involved, respectively, an ‘Orientalist’ and ‘Occidentalist’ conception of the Other. Two useful sources are Martin Malia, Russia under Western Eyes: From the Bronze Horseman to the Lenin Mausoleum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies (New York: Penguin, 2004).

⁵ For discussion of embedded ideas, see Daniel Béland and Robert Henry Cox, eds., Ideas and Politics in Social Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

⁶ A standout study is David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

⁷ Reinhard Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).

⁸ Odd Arne Westad, ‘Introduction: Reviewing the Cold War,’ in Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretation, Theory, ed. O.A. Westad (London: Frank Cass, 2000), 5.

⁹ Freeden and Vincent, ‘Introduction,’ in Comparative Political Thought, ed. Freeden and Vincent, 1–23.

¹⁰ Patrick Mayor and Rana Mitter, ‘East is East and West is West? Towards a Comparative Socio-Cultural History of the Cold War,’ in Across the Blocs: Cold War Cultural and Social History, ed. Mayor and Mitter (London: Frank Cass, 2004), 1–21.

¹¹ Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). See inter alia Thomas A. Bailey, America Faces Russia: Russian-American Relations from Early Times to Our Day (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1952); William H. McNeill, America, Britain and Russia: Their Cooperation and Conflict, 1941–1946 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953); Herbert Feis, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin: The War they Waged and the Peace they Sought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957); Feis, From Trust to Terror: The Onset of the Cold War, 1945–50 (New York: Norton, 1970); Arthur M Schlesinger Jr., ‘Origins of the Cold War,’ Foreign Affairs 46 (1967): 22–52.

¹² The orthodox view of the Soviet outlook after 1945 was that it was fundamentally aggressive, even if considerably dampened in revolutionary ardour since 1917. George Kennan’s famous despatch from Moscow noted that ‘expansionist tendencies’ inhered in Stalin’s aims despite the fact that they were one part revolutionary logic, one part circumstance, hence a response of ‘firm and vigilant containment’ was required. See George F. Kennan, ‘The Long Telegram,’ in Containment: Documents on American Policy and Strategy, 1945–1950, ed. Thomas H. Etzold and John Lewis Gaddis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 62–3; and also Kennan, ‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct,’ in ibid., 84–90. In particular, Kennan emphasised Stalin’s continuity with the Tsars.

¹³ See Jan-Werner Müller, ‘The Triumph of What (If Anything)? Rethinking Political Ideologies and Political Institutions in Twentieth-Century Europe,’ Journal of Political Ideologies 14, no. 2 (2009): 211–26.

¹⁴ Howard Brick, ‘The End of Ideology Thesis,’ in The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, ed. Michael Freeden, Lyman Tower Sargent, and Marc Stears (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 34–56. At policy level, ideas-as-ideology connected a firm stand against communism to the prior mobilisation against fascism. See Les K. Adler and Thomas G. Paterson, ‘Red Fascism: The Merger of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the American Image of Totalitarianism, 1930s-1950s,’ American Historical Review 75, no. 4 (1970): 1046–64.

¹⁵ E.g. Merle Fainsod, How Russia is Ruled (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953). For a Soviet specialist’s more recent (re)statement of the case for the priority of ideology, see esp. Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000), 34–56.

¹⁶ David C. Engerman, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Sovietology was central to the US intellectual mobilisation against the enemy. However, Sovietologists could both over- and under-estimate Soviet strength; they could assert that the Soviet Union was either stable or else on the brink of collapse (5).

¹⁷ Cf. Douglas MacDonald, ‘Formal Ideologies in the Cold War: Toward a Framework for Empirical Analysis,’ in Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretation, Theory, ed. Odd Arne Westad (London: Frank Cass, 2000), 180–204.

¹⁸ Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006).

¹⁹ Orwell, Nineteen-Eighty Four (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958), 14.

²⁰ Revisionism can be understood as a generational perspective that came of age in the 1960s. This was the era which ended in American disaster at Vietnam. See inter alia Lloyd C. Gardner, Architects of Illusion: Men and Ideas in American Foreign Policy, 1941–1949 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970); David Horowitz, The Free World Colossus: A Critique of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War (New York: Hill and Wang, 1965); Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and the United States Foreign Policy, 1943–1945 (New York: Vintage Books, 1968); Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967); William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: Delta Books, 1962).

²¹ Orwell, Nineteen-Eighty Four, 160. For Orwell, the theory exposed the (Cold War) deception that ‘war is peace’: the active maintenance of permanent war sustained – in the domestic sphere – ‘the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs’. For revisionists, this was in part the thesis of the ‘military industrial complex’; in part the view that in the United States, election campaigning played to the exaggeration of threat. A more recent statement appears in Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall, America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2005).

²² See Neil Robinson, ‘Marx and Kremlin: Writing on Soviet Politics and Marxism-Leninism after the Fall of Communism,’ Journal of Political Ideologies 5, no. 3 (2000): 377–90.

²³ An additional lesson is that Cold War historiography itself comprises a first-hand source of Cold War ideas, i.e. given the political commitments of many revisionist commentators. The late Tony Judt rightly observed that we need to appreciate far better the ways in which writing the contemporary history of the Cold War was actually intrinsic to what the Cold War was. Judt, ‘Why the Cold War Worked,’ New York Review of Books, 9 October 1997, 42. See esp. Robert Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969); and Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography: 1888–1938 (New York: Knopf, 1974).

²⁴ John Lewis Gaddis, ‘The Emerging Post-Revisionist Synthesis on the Origins of the Cold War,’ Diplomatic History 7, no. 3 (1983): 171–90.

²⁵ For foundations of realism, see Hans Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Knopf, 1960); and Kenneth Waltz, A Theory of International Politics (London: McGraw-Hill, 1979). For realism, balance of power is engendered by mutual pursuit of the strategic arms race. In the least, realism thought ideas could not be given priority because what went on inside the human head was difficult to measure. Douglas J. MacDonald, ‘Communist Bloc Expansion in the Early Cold War: Challenging Realism, Refuting Revisionism,’ International Security 20 (1995/6): 152–88.

²⁶ Viewed in the terms of Orwell’s positions, realism/post-revisionism amounts not so much to the power of ideas, but to the idea of power; and as such it approximates what the character of O’Brien notes of the super-state in Nineteen Eighty-Four: that power serves as an end in itself, independent of ideological goals (274). That, perhaps, calls attention to a different kind of idea: certainly, in the form of strategists who advised on policy in Washington, the world view of realists can be said to have entered the substance of Cold War political life, as well as having provided it with external comment. On realism’s influence, see Sean Molley, The Hidden History of Realism: A Genealogy of Power Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

²⁷ Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American Security Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), ix.

²⁸ Mark Kramer, ‘Ideology and the Cold War,’ Review of International Studies 25, no. 4 (1999): 539–76. Similarly, some recent accounts of Soviet foreign policy restate the priority of (Marxist-Leninist) ideas, e.g. Vladislav Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

²⁹ Charles W. Kegley, Jr., ‘The Neoidealist Movement in International Studies? Realist Myths and the New International Realities,’ International Studies Quarterly 37, no. 2 (1993): 131–46.

³⁰ Lebow, ‘Social Science, History, and the Cold War: Pushing the Conceptual Envelope,’ in Reviewing the Cold War, ed. Westad, 103–25.

³¹ Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 281–95. In broad terms, the New Cold War history spotlights (a) culture and (b) internationalism. For an effort to systematise this agenda, see Westad, ed., Reviewing the Cold War.

³² The concept of the social imaginary originates from two fields: first, from continental post-Marxism, where it is used to describe the relative autonomy of thought from material life; second, from Anglo-American philosophy, where it is used to attenuate any aspiration that intellectuals might have to found the social order with the more modest position that they may structure its concepts. See Samuel Moyn, ‘Imaginary Intellectual History,’ in Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History, ed. Darrin M. McMahon and Samuel Moyn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 116–18, 120.

³³ Pierre Rosanvallon, ‘Towards a Philosophical History of the Political,’ in The History of Political Thought in National Context, ed. Dario Castiglione and Iain Hampsher-Monk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

³⁴ Jan-Werner Müller, ‘The Cold War and the Intellectual History of the Late Twentieth Century,’ in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 3, Endings, ed. Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 3: 1–22.

³⁵ Rosanvallon, ‘Towards a Philosophical History of the Political,’ 192, 200; italics added.

³⁶ David Milne, Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), esp. 3–20.

³⁷ Rosanvallon, ‘Towards a Philosophical History of the Political,’ 200. This is the relevant passage: ‘[I]t is precisely the essence of the political to consider that social representations cannot simply be assimilated to the [Marxist] order of ideology; nor can they be reduced to categories of prejudices reflecting a given state of relationships. The philosophical history of the political maintains that beyond ideologies and prejudices there are positive representations organising the intellectual field within which lie a certain range of possibilities in a given historical moment. These representations need to be taken seriously: they constitute real and powerful infrastructures in the life of societies. In contrast to an idealist vision, which disregards the economic and social determinants structuring the field of human action, this approach sets out to enrich and render more complex the notion of determination. Alongside passive representations, it is consequently necessary to take into account all those active representations by reference to what is thinkable, and determine the questions of the moment.’

³⁸ Engerman, Know Your Enemy, 5.

³⁹ On political significance as a criterion, see Müller, Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011).

⁴⁰ See, respectively, Anders Stephanson, ‘Cold War Degree Zero’ and Odd Arne Westad, ‘Exploring the Histories of the Cold War: A Pluralist Approach,’ in Uncertain Empire, ed. Joel Isaac and Duncan Bell, 19–50, 51–60.

⁴¹ Nils Gilman calls this the ‘adjectivalization of the Cold War’, whereby the conflict becomes the adjective that explains any sort of extra-geopolitical activity, from ‘Cold War tourism’ to ‘Cold War science’ (‘The Cold War as Intellectual Force Field,’ Modern Intellectual History 13, no. 2 [2016]: 507). I argue that a comparative project will make its optimal contribution when the entire Cold War is treated as cultural history (on this, see Stone, ‘Cold War Ideas’), but the kiss of death of the more conventional cultural approaches is to portray the Cold War as ‘the smoking gun’ behind all cultural activity in the epoch (David Caute, ‘Foreword,’ in The Cultural Cold War in Western Europe, 1945 to 1960, ed. Giles Scott-Smith and Hans Krabbendom [London: Frank Cass, 2003]).

⁴² Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

⁴³ Stephanson, ‘Cold War Degree Zero,’ 35.

⁴⁴ Stephanson, ‘Cold War Degree Zero,’ 35. This is unpersuasive at one level because it ignores the original meanings for non-US actors. For instance, it may appear salient that political actors in Moscow and Washington pursued foreign policies constructed around ‘peace’ and around ‘security’ respectively. See Ole Waever, ‘Securitization and Desecuritization,’ in On Security, ed. Ronnie Lipschutz (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 60–1.

⁴⁵ Prominently, Joel Isaac and Duncan Bell argue that in order to foreground ideas, a premium should be placed on accessing what ‘the Cold War’ meant to the original historical actors themselves (Isaac and Bell, ‘Introduction,’ in Uncertain Empire, ed. Isaac and Bell, 6). Insofar as the very concept of the Cold War has a ‘metaphorical foundation’, the suggestion seems appropriate, but I think the experience of Enlightenment history may offer a cautionary tale. Over recent decades historians of the Enlightenment have followed the same kind of cultural turn, taking them to what ‘the Enlightenment’ meant – when used in written word or speech – in different time and place: the consequence is ‘multiple’ Enlightenments. But this is rather to obscure the issue of significance: what is influential and not? What counts as innovative and not? So, with too much eye to detail, there is perhaps a danger of a similar fate befalling Cold War history. See the excellent discussion in Dan Edelstein, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), esp. Ch. 1.

⁴⁶ Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History. Conceptual history casts ideas as ‘embedded’ with nuance: concepts are neither elevated to autonomy from material life (i.e. do not create the ‘decisive’ aspects of experience that Rosanvallon centres), nor reduced to the status of the merely epiphenomenal (i.e. do not simply register experience).

⁴⁷ Jan-Werner Müller, ‘On Conceptual History,’ in Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History, ed. Darrin M. McMahon and Samuel Moyn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 83–44.

⁴⁸ Roughly, there are three approaches to comparative political theory: from ethics; cultural studies; and political science. Ethical approaches generally seek to ensure that the visions political philosophers construct are not unduly ‘Eurocentric’ (e.g. March, ‘What is Comparative Political Theory?’) Approaches from cultural studies typically contest ‘colonial’ legacies (e.g. Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought). The version of comparative political theory I seek to engage is the one aligned to political science (e.g. Freeden and Vincent [eds.], Comparative Political Thought). This takes its cue from the comparative study of political institutions and extends the same rationale, rather belatedly, to the study of ideas.

⁴⁹ Cf. Dallmayr, Dialogue Among Civilizations. This is not easy because conceptual history rejects that the investigator should fixate on the presence of particular words (i.e. to indicate particular concepts): even within a single language, a concept may be designated by more than a single word. This is one further reason why the actors’ category argument is problematic. Melvin Richter, The History of Social and Political Concepts: A Critical Introduction (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 9.

⁵⁰ Holger Nehring, ‘What Was the Cold War?,’ English Historical Review 127, no. 527 (2012): 923.

⁵¹ See Freeden and Vincent, ‘Introduction,’ in Comparative Political Thought, ed. Freeden and Vincent.

⁵² Westad, The Global Cold War.

⁵³ E.g. Fred Halliday, The Making of the Second Cold War (London: Verso, 1983).

⁵⁴ Westad, ‘The New International History of the Cold War: Three (Possible) Paradigms,’ Diplomatic History 24 (2000): 23–54.

⁵⁵ Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (London: Penguin, 2005). For the criticism, see Tony Judt, ‘A Story Still to be Told,’ New York Review of Books, 23 March 2006.

⁵⁶ Westad, The Global Cold War, 8–38, 39–72. In other words, Westad’s thesis may be a better pointer to granular ideas than to spatial units: what would be worthwhile is to unpack these two visions of modernisation vying for Third World ‘hegemony’.

⁵⁷ Stephanson, ‘Cold War Degree Zero.’

⁵⁸ Anders Stephanson, ‘Fourteen Notes on the Very Concept of the Cold War,’ in Rethinking Geopolitics, ed. Simon Dalby and Gearòid Ò. Tuatail (London: Routledge, 1998), 62–85. The most salient consequence is that it becomes implausible to picture a multipolar Cold War (more than two ‘poles’ can show systematic opposition, but neither symmetry nor continuous action). China especially is an important omission in my conceptualisation: it is difficult to assimilate China into a (single) Communist bloc, since logically the record of Sino-Soviet rivalry will have prevented China and the Soviet sphere from having spoken in a single voice. On China’s place here in general, see esp. Mark Philip Bradley, ‘Decolonisation, the global South, and the Cold War,’ in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, ed. Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, vol. I, Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 474.

⁵⁹ Major and Mitter refer to two ‘mirroring mechanisms’: ‘mirror imaging’ versus adopting the ‘mirror opposite’ (‘East is East and West is West?,’ 7).

⁶⁰ The narrow conception of the Cold War as superpower rivalry is often still expressed. E.g. see Melvyn P. Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union and the Cold War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007).

⁶¹ Craig and Logevall, America’s Cold War, 5–6, 10.

⁶² Experience in East and Central Europe was very different from Western Europe’s ‘empire by invitation’, cf. Geir Lundestad, ‘Empire by Invitation? The United States and Western Europe, 1945–1952,’ Journal of Peace Research 23, no. 3 (1986): 263–77.

⁶³ Timothy Garton Ash, ‘Does Central Europe Exist?,’ in History of the Present (London: Penguin, 1999). See also Catherine Lee and Robert Bideleux, ‘East, West, and the Return of “Central” Europe: Borders Drawn and Redrawn,’ in The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History, ed. Stone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 85; and György Peteri, ed., Imagining the West in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010).

⁶⁴ Cf. Westad, ‘The Cold War and the International History of the Twentieth Century,’ in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. I, Origins, ed. Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

⁶⁵ Craig and Logevall, America’s Cold War, 5–6.

⁶⁶ Major and Mitter, ‘East is East and West is West?,’ 6–7.

⁶⁷ Westad, The Global Cold War; Westad, ‘Exploring the Histories of the Cold War: A Pluralist Approach,’ in Uncertain Empire, ed. Isaac and Bell, 51; Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind, 7.

⁶⁸ Gilman, ‘The Cold War as Intellectual Force Field,’ 8.

⁶⁹ Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. I, Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

⁷⁰ Freeden and Vincent present this as the ‘foundational ontology of political thinking’ (‘Introduction,’ 7). See also Freeden, The Political Theory of Political Thinking: The Anatomy of a Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), esp. 314–16.

⁷¹ For a good discussion of the ‘performative turn’ in historical studies, see Peter Burke, ‘Performing History: The Importance of Occasions,’ Rethinking History 9, no. 1 (2005): 35–52.

⁷² See esp. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1956).

⁷³ Judith Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,’ Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988).

⁷⁴ This is to reject the alternative definition often implied by realists: simply, that the Cold War corresponds to competition maintained all the way through a discrete historical period. From another angle, this is a further rejoinder to the temptation to take ‘culture’ too far: the Cold War was performed in culture, but not in all culture, and certainly not all the while.

⁷⁵ J.L. Austin, How to do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 5.

⁷⁶ Roughly, on this account, the Cold War begins in ‘dividing’ and ‘crusading’; purging, spying, and arms-racing are to the fore in the middle era; dissenting and rebelling are foremost when the Cold War starts to unravel. Though this ordering really is only intended to be loose (for instance, dissent was present at the start; dividing was still manifest at the end).

⁷⁷ It is important to stress that nothing is excluded on the principle that a practice is not well-enough expressed ‘in ideas’. Rather, the task is to pinpoint where and how a practice receives that expression.

⁷⁸ Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Also, some practices can be subsumed within alternatives. ‘Thawing’ has a claim for inclusion, but is covered in the Cold War practice of dissenting. So too does ‘brinkmanship’ – or escalating conflict to a dangerous point – but that might be brought under arms-racing.

⁷⁹ ‘Dividing the World’ is the title of the opening chapter in Gaddis’ Cold War account, We Now Know.

⁸⁰ See for instance Peter Schneider, The Wall Jumper (London: Penguin, 2005).

⁸¹ For a stimulating and recent account of the politics of anti-fascism, see Dan Stone, Goodbye to All That? The Story of Europe since 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

⁸² Cf. Willibald Steinmetz, ed., Political Languages in the Age of Extremes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). See in particular Steinmatz’s assertion that in the literature, there is a discrepancy between the abundance of comparative studies on the ideologies of dictatorial regimes and the dearth of those between regimes that are, in turn, dictatorial and democratic (Steinmatz, ‘New Perspectives on the Study of Language,’ in ibid., 7).

⁸³ Cf. Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

⁸⁴ Freeden, ‘Is Nationalism a Distinct Ideology?’ in Liberal Languages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 204–24.

⁸⁵ For ‘oppositional’ political languages, see Richard Shorten, ‘The Failure of Political Argument: The Languages of Anti-Fascism and Anti-Totalitarianism in Post-September 11th Discourse,’ British Journal of Politics and International Relations 11, no. 3 (2009): 479–503.

⁸⁶ Separations of levels of intellectual articulation appear, for instance, in Steve Buckler, ‘Theory, Ideology, Rhetoric: Ideas in Politics and the Case of “Community,”’ British Journal of Politics and International Relations 9, no. 1 (2007): 36–54, and Iain Hampsher-Monk, ‘Politics, Political Theory, and its History,’ in Political Philosophy versus History? Contextualism and Real Politics in Contemporary Political Thought, ed. Jonathan Floyd and Marc Stears (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 105–27.

⁸⁷ Nicolas Lewkowicz, The German Question and the International Order, 1943–48 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

⁸⁸ Cf. Maxim Leo, Red Love: The Story of an East German Family, trans. by Shaun Whiteside (London: Pushkin Press, 2013).

⁸⁹ See for instance Thomas Mergel, ‘The Unknown and the Familiar Enemy: The Semantics of Anti-Communism in the USA and Germany, 1945–1975,’ in Political Languages in the Age of Extremes, ed. Wilibald Steinmetz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 245–74.

⁹⁰ The received questions should sometimes be taken with a pinch of salt: the historiography of the Cold War contains numerous examples of the questions of the day deriving from very particular agendas and assumptions. Characteristically, (a) the first post-war generation debated ‘guilt’ (Soviet or otherwise); (b) the generation of the 1970s and 1980s debated ‘the long peace’, such that the absence of war became the anomaly to be explained; and (c) for the most recent generation, in the wake of the Soviet demise, the debate really became about whether the West’s early stand is (now) vindicated. Lebow, ‘Social Science, History, and the Cold War: Pushing the Conceptual Envelope,’ 105–8.

⁹¹ David C. Engerman, ‘Ideology and the Origins of the Cold War, 1917–1962,’ in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, ed. Leffler and Westad, 1: 20–43.

⁹² See recently, for instance, Gellately, Stalin’s Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

⁹³ See Gaddis, ed., Containment.

⁹⁴ Stalin, ‘Economic Problems of the USSR,’ in Bruce Franklin, ed., The Essential Stalin: Major Theoretical Writings, 1905–1962 (New York: Doubleday, 1972); Andrei Zhdanov, ‘The Two-Camp Policy,’ in From Stalinism to Pluralism: A Documentary History of the Eastern Europe since 1945, ed. Gale Stokes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 38–43.

⁹⁵ Cf. Scott Lucas, Freedom’s War: The American Crusade Against the Soviet Union, 1945–1956 (New York: New York University Press, 1999).

⁹⁶ Simon Clarke, Paul Hogget and Simon Thompson, eds., Emotions, Politics and Society (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

⁹⁷ For an account of normativity in this sociological (rather than philosophical) sense, see Charles Tilly, Why?: What Happens When People Give Reasons … and Why? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).

⁹⁸ Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind, 9.

⁹⁹ CNN Cold War, Episode 3, ‘Marshall Plan, 1947–52;’ Episode 4, ‘Berlin, 1948–49.’

¹⁰⁰ A brief but effective overview of relevant cultural institutions appears in Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht, ‘Culture and the Cold War in Europe,’ in Leffler and Westad eds., Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 1, 398–419.

¹⁰¹ See esp. Frances Stoner Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 2000).

¹⁰² See, for instance, Fredrick C. Barghoorn, The Soviet Cultural Offensive: The Role of Cultural Diplomacy in Soviet Foreign Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960). See also Stephen Koch, Stalin, Willi Münzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals (London: HarperCollins, 1995).

¹⁰³ Jan-Werner Müller, ‘Fear and Freedom: On “Cold War Liberalism,”’ European Journal of Political Theory 7, no. 1 (2008): 45–64; David Caute, The Fellow Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988).

¹⁰⁴ David Caute, Isaac and Isaiah: The Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).

¹⁰⁵ Tony Judt, The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

¹⁰⁶ Alan Montefiore and Peter Winch, eds., The Political Responsibility of Intellectuals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Jeremy Jennings and Anthony Kemp-Welch (eds.), Intellectuals in Politics: From the Dreyfus Affair to Salmon Rushdie.

¹⁰⁷ Richard Crossman, ed., The God that Failed (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Vital Centre: The Politics of Freedom (London: Transaction, 2014); Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals (London: Transaction, 2001).

¹⁰⁸ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).

¹⁰⁹ For assessment from contrasting angles, see Richard Gid Powers, Not Without Honour: The History of American Anti-communism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998) and Ellen Schrecker, Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1998).

¹¹⁰ Karl Schlögel, Moscow, 1937 (New York: Polity, 2014).

¹¹¹ Robert Gellately, ‘Denunciation as a Subject of Historical Research,’ Historical Social Research 26, no. 2 (2001): 16–29. See also Sheila Fitzpatrick and Robert Gellately, eds., Accusatory Practices: Denunciation in Modern European History, 1789–1989 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

¹¹² The classic treatment is Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Vintage, 2008).

¹¹³ See Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, 2nd edn (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996).

¹¹⁴ Judt, ‘A Story Still to be Told,’ 13.

¹¹⁵ Freeden and Vincent, ‘Introduction,’ 17.

¹¹⁶ See George H. Hodos, Show Trials: Stalinist Purges in Eastern Europe, 1948–1954 (New York: Praeger, 1987). Likewise, the trials in East and Central Europe are often focus of the period’s cultural representation, e.g. Milan Kundera, The Joke (London: Faber and Faber, 1992).

¹¹⁷ E.g. Heda Margolius Kovàly, Under a Cruel Star, 1941–1968 (London: Granta, 2002).

¹¹⁸ Cf. ‘The Trial of Laszlo Rajk’ and ‘The Slánsky Trial,’ in From Stalinism to Pluralism, ed. Stokes, 67–70, 71–7; Major Speeches and Debates of Senator Joe McCarthy: Delivered in the United States Senate, 1950–1091 (New York: Gordon Press, 1975).

¹¹⁹ Alan Finlayson, ‘Rhetoric and the Theory of Ideologies,’ Political Studies 60, no. 4 (2012).

¹²⁰ Robert Cockcroft and Susan Cockcroft, Persuading People: An Introduction to Rhetoric (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

¹²¹ Sam Leith, You Talkin’ to Me? Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama (London: Profile, 2011), 208–34. The classic account is Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, trans. H.C. Lawson-Tancred (London: Penguin, 2004).

¹²² Jeffrey T. Richelson, A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 1997).

¹²³ E.g. Ben MacIntrye, A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).

¹²⁴ Nicholas J. Cull, ‘Reading, Viewing, and Tuning in to the Cold War,’ in Cambridge History of the Cold War, ed. Leffler and Westad, 2: 448.

¹²⁵ Markus Wolf, The Man Without a Face: The Autobiography of Communism’s Greatest Spymaster (New York: Public Affairs, 1997); Kim Philby, My Silent War: The Autobiography of a Spy (London: Panther, 1969).

¹²⁶ CNN Cold War, Episode 21, ‘Spies 1945–89.’

¹²⁷ A recent philosophical account is Anita L. Allen, ‘The Virtuous Spy: Privacy as an Ethical Limit,’ The Monist, 91/3 (2008): 3–22.

¹²⁸ David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996).

¹²⁹ Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 145–77.

¹³⁰ E.g. Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961) and Thinking about the Unthinkable (New York: Horizon Press, 1962); Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963) and Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966). For the Soviet side, see John A. Battilega, ‘Soviet Views of Nuclear Warfare: The Post-Cold War Interviews,’ in Getting MAD: Nuclear Mutual Assured Destruction, Its Origin and Practice, ed. Henry D. Sokolski (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 2004), 151–74.

¹³¹ In general see Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

¹³² Cf. Ference Feher and Agnes Heller, Eastern Left, Western Left: Totalitarianism, Freedom and Democracy (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1987).

¹³³ Respectively, these dates mark revolt in East Berlin, the Hungarian Uprising in Budapest, the Prague Spring, the imposition of martial law in Poland, and the various incidences in 1989.

¹³⁴ F.L. Cross and E.A. Livingstone, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 490. The concept of ‘dissent’ is still quite neglected by contemporary political theorists. A good historical study which throws up the right sort of questions is Jonathan Bolton, Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, The Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

¹³⁵ On the Budapest School see, for example, Simon Tormey and Jules Townshend, eds., Key Thinkers from Critical Theory to Post-Marxism (London: Sage, 2006), 141–64; Khrushchev, ‘The Secret Speech,’ in Khrushchev Remembers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 1: 580–643.

¹³⁶ Anthony Kemp-Welch, ‘Eastern Europe: Stalinism to Solidarity,’ in Cambridge History of the Cold War, ed. Leffler and Westad, 2: 232. For an original perspective, see Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Harvard, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012).

¹³⁷ Adam Michnik, ‘The New Evolutionism,’ in Letters from Prison and Other Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).

¹³⁸ Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).

¹³⁹ Robert James Maddox, The New Left and the Origins of Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 7.

¹⁴⁰ For an account of rhetoric connected to the idea of ‘situated judgment’, see Bryan Garsten, Saving Persuasion: A Defence of Rhetoric and Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

¹⁴¹ Ben Lewis, Hammer and Tickle: A History of Communism Told Through Communist Jokes (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2008), 145. Lewis gives the following example: ‘Why is it not possible to control the birth rate in Soviet bloc countries? Because the means of production remain in private hands.’

¹⁴² Vaclav Havel, ‘The Power of the Powerless,’ in Open Letters: Selected Prose, 1965–1990, ed. Paul Wilson (London: Faber and Faber, 1991).

¹⁴³ The ‘retreat to ethics’ is the interpretive frame imposed in Stokes, From Stalinism to Pluralism. See esp. Tony Judt, ‘The Dilemmas of Dissidence: The Politics of Opposition in East-Central Europe,’ East European Politics and Societies 2, no. 2 (1988): 185–240.

¹⁴⁴ Daniela Baratieri, Mark Edele, and Guiseppe Finaldi, ‘Beyond the Delusion: New Histories of Totalitarianism,’ in Totalitarian Dictatorships: New Histories, ed. Daniela Baratieri, Mark Edele, and Guiseppe Finaldi (London: Routledge, 2013), 2.

¹⁴⁵ Leszek Kolakowski, ‘Totalitarianism and the Virtue of the Lie,’ in 1984 Revisited: Totalitarianism in our Century, ed. Irving Howe (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), 122–35.

¹⁴⁶ Jeane Kirkpatrick, Dictatorships and Double Standards (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982).

¹⁴⁷ Nina Tannenwald and William C. Wohlforth, ‘Introduction: The Role of Ideas and the End of the Cold War,’ Journal of Cold War Studies 7, no. 2 (2005): 3–12.

¹⁴⁸ Ellen Schrecker, ed., Cold War Triumphalism: The Misuse of History after the Fall of Communism (New York: The New Press, 2006).

¹⁴⁹ Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World (London: HarperCollins, 1987); Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin, 1992).