The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War

In The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, Louis Menand tests the proposition that the West's victory in the Cold War might have been a bigger win on the cultural level than it was on the political and military ones. Nuclear dread does not pervade his narrative, and he handles strategic affairs interstitially. During the Cold War, he suggests, the United States and the Soviet Union exploited the human foibles illuminated by modern literature on a grand scale. Visual art, for its part, elevated and framed American capitalism as a cultural as well as an economic monolith. The US government, including the CIA, sought to weaponise Western culture, but Menand concludes that its unaided power was far greater than any government instrument's. Art may now be less useful or powerful as a tool of cultural warfare than it was in the latter part of the twentieth century.