| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism. By David Ciepley. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. xii, 379 pp. $49.95, ISBN 978-0-674-02296-6.)
David Ciepley argues that totalitarianism had an immense impact on American thinking and policy, particularly regarding economic programs, politics, and the courts. His thesis makes absolute sense to those of us who have done work on any aspect of this multifaceted topic, although he is not the first to make this claim. Perhaps it is unfair to assess Ciepley, a philosopher, according to historians' standards, but this is a historical journal, and I am a historian. From that perspective, the book will likely disappoint.	1
The words "liberalism," "totalitarianism," and "intellectuals" (identified by Ciepley as his primary subjects) immediately conjure a set of expectations for those of us who study liberalism, totalitarianism, and intellectuals. Yet this work bypasses the largest single debate between liberal intellectuals concerning totalitarianism, the one that asked whether or not the Soviet Union was a totalitarian state, the one that divided the American intellectual community into pro- and anti–Popular Front camps. Ciepley's intellectuals are actually policy makers more than public intellectuals, employed by the New Deal and the courts. This book looks narrowly at philosophical transformations made by bureaucrats, and it looks at them in a relative vacuum.	. . .

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