| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Liberal State on Trial: The Cold War and American Politics in the Truman Years. By Jonathan Bell. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. xx, 383 pp. $37.50, ISBN 0-231-13356-1.)
The title of this book suggests an exercise in state-centered political history, investigating the nexus of public policy, political processes, and state institutions. Actually, we get a traditional critique of post–World War II American liberalism. Jonathan Bell, a British scholar educated at the University of Cambridge and teaching at the University of Reading, writes from an explicit socialist perspective. Rejecting the concept of rights-based liberalism, he asserts that rights inhere in groups, not in individuals, and that socialist statism (comprehensive social welfarism, egalitarian income redistribution, and nationalization of industry) would have been the achievable goal of liberal politics in the Truman era had the Cold War not split "the American left."	1
In seven chapters, based on extensive manuscript research, Bell alternates overviews of the American political landscape with capsule histories of key state political campaigns. He surely succeeds in showing what historians of the period have long known—that conservatives indiscriminately identified socialism with Soviet Communism, successfully exploited the fall of China and the Korean War, and used the Communist issue effectively against some high-profile liberals.	. . .

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