To set about describing an epoch is to enter a booby-trapped maze. Calendar time proves little use as a guide. The cultural theorist Fredric Jameson once argued that the 1960s underwent a “break” in “the general area around 1967,” before ending more decisively in “the immediate neighborhood of 1973.” Then there are questions of causality. Do culture, politics and philosophy reflect their times? Or perhaps it’s the other way round. Which came first: the spirit or the age?
Louis Menand, the author of an enormous new historical survey, The Free World, is acutely aware of these dangers—so aware that it may seem surprising that he embarked on the project at all. The book’s first footnote (of 2,587) identifies 10 other writers who have been “drawn to this period for reasons like mine.” But in those cases the intentions were more baldly stated: to trace the “origins of a cultural style,” for instance, or show how “everything changed” in 1959. Menand’s own subtitle, “Art and Thought in the Cold War,” seems non-committal, and he is murky on the matter of how the process exactly works. In a brisk preface—a thousand words of throat-clearing for a 720-page aria—he writes, “As conditions changed, so did art and ideas.” Then a page later: “the environment changed dramatically. So did art and thought.”