The Free World

A landmark history of the Western World we wanted and of the one we made

‘This is a book about what people thought and said and did because of the fact that, for more than forty years, the United States was at war with the Soviet Union. The book is a narrative, not an argument, but it has a premise, which is that the Cold War is the key to understanding the social and cultural history of the West between 1945 and 1989, and it has a point, which is that the great consequence of that history, the consequence everyone in the world is living with today, was the globalization of American culture.

The book is a narrative about individual thinkers and writers, books and their readers, events and their consequences. It tells the story of Western art and thought between 1945 and 1989 in the setting of the events that made them possible and that circumscribed their fates. It looks at western culture from the underside, so to speak, from The Cat in the Hat to The White Album via Bonnie and Clyde.’