Anti-Imperialism and the Critique of Managerialism in Post- War American Thought, 1939–1995

This thesis is a collective intellectual biography that reconsiders the relationship between anti- statism and social thought in post-war America. I look at a cluster of intellectuals who were critics of the Cold War, empire, and the managerial state, charting debates around these controversial topics from the late-1930s to the mid-1990s. Managerialism created a triad of new political dilemmas in post-war America. These can be condensed into three leading questions: a) are economic or non-economic factors behind elite formation? (b) has the rule of the expert created a new form of government? (c) was the world creeping faceless bureaucratic superstate? These questions concern agency, governance and international order respectively. The dissertation examines three groups of thinkers from 1939 onwards who were animated by the dilemmas posed by the managerial state through three respective preoccupations. For Post- Trotskyites Max Shachtman (1904–1972), C. L. R. James (1901–1989) and Murray Bookchin (1921–2006) the rise of statism led them to question whether it would be enough to abolish capitalism to achieve socialism. The Old Right, whom I examine through journalists Garret Garrett (1878–1954) and Felix Morley (1894–1982), interrogated whether the ‘old republic’ – which they reconstructed as sceptical of empire, the masses, and a champion of the market – could survive the coming of the New Deal. Finally, two of the main the protagonists of the thesis I look at, Murray Bookchin and Murray Rothbard, were the inheritors of these milieus. I follow Bookchin and Rothbard to the ‘end of history’ as they shape the emerging ecology and libertarian movements towards what I call a politics of limits. The conventional story of anti-statism in post-war America views it as undermining notions of community leading to an era of depoliticization, neoliberalism and fracture. I offer an alternative analysis that emphasises a politics of limits which looked to overcome managerialism by reducing the scale of politics: rejecting globalisation, delegation, and public debt. This rejection of modernity offers a road back to community and collective categories that have shaped ‘populism’, an ideal type embraced by Rothbard and Bookchin.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Pallis, Sam

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Bourke, Richard

• American History
• History of Political Thought

Licence

• https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/71691e9f-0026-43d5-94e8-3e51b856abe2/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.120193

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/387389