Naturalizing Liberalism in the 1950s

This paper will examine how post-World War II American scholars navigated competing pressures toward universalism and cultural relativism by drawing, either explicitly or implicitly, on conceptions of human nature that enabled them to project the core values of postwar liberalism onto various aspects of natural and social reality. Two of the most common “naturalization strategies” of this sort invoked human nature directly. Some scholars, such as the biologist Edmund Sinnott and the anthropologist Ashley Montagu, rooted key values directly in human biology. Others, including Theodore Adorno and his collaborators on The Authoritarian Personality (1950), located human nature in the realm of psychology instead. A second family of naturalization strategies drew more implicitly on such concepts of human nature, identifying various social institutions and cultural frameworks as what the sociologist Talcott Parsons called “evolutionary universals”: inventions so congenial to the expression of human nature and the coordination of human behavior that otherwise diverse societies would all hit on and adopt them. Placing familiar episodes such as consensus history, the elite theory of democracy structural-functionalism, modernization theory, and even the “Western Civ” course in a new frame, this paper emphasizes the prevalence of naturalization strategies in postwar America and traces their widespread use to the competing political pressures generated by the need to recognize cultural differences while positioning the nation as a beacon of democracy for the developing world.