"That Exaltation of the Autonomous Self—Whether in the Bedroom or the Shopping Mall—Had Deep Roots in the Nation’s Emersonian and Radical Protestant Traditions"

"Marsden is clear-eyed in describing the forces, especially the economic ones, which did so much to weaken community ties and authority in the 1950s and ’60s. Those pressures have hardly lessened. If anything, community is more ad hoc and transient than ever. The historian Mark Lilla addressed such developments in a 1998 essay in the New York Review of Books, 'A Tale of Two Reactions.' Analyzing much of the same cultural and political history as Marsden, Lilla asked why the social revolutions of the ’60s and the subsequent Reagan revolution of the ’80s have embedded themselves so deeply in American society. Those seemingly incompatible movements, he concluded, were in fact 'complementary, not contradictory,' each finding its spiritual source and justification in the radical democratic individualism of America’s Protestant heritage. Reaganism, Lilla argued, was 'an extension of the same utopian vision' as the antinomianism of the ’60s—one viewing economic freedom as an inalienable right, the other individual personal and sexual expression. How, Lilla lamented, 'have our notions of equality and individualism been transformed to support a morally lax yet economically successful capitalist society'? Marsden wonders, along similar lines, how Americans can continue to find in individual self-determination and self-fulfillment 'a complete standard for a public philosophy that would adjudicate the hard questions that arise when individual interests conflict.'"


Paul Baumann in The Washington Monthly reviews George M. Marsden's The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief.