Sigmund Freud and American Democratic Realism, 1915-1963

Description

American political theorists constructed a defensive liberalism, often referred to as the vital center, from a shared reading of the ideas of Sigmund Freud. Beginning in the 1920s and reaching a high-point during the 1940s and 1950s, American intellectuals used Freud’s ideas to question both the ethical premises of democratic political action and the capabilities of the average citizen to bear his or her democratic responsibilities. What emerged was a desire to find new grounds for political legitimation and political obligation other than the optimistic and usable fiction of classical democratic theory which assumed that the average citizen was more than capable of carrying out his or her democratic responsibilities and that such participation ought to be broadly encouraged. Controlled by unconscious yearnings, infantile wishes, or incomplete resolutions of key developmental stages, the masses were seen as politically dangerous. Ultimately this Freudian-inspired critique took on a pessimism about modernity which routinely impugned the advent of popular rule, and took the gap between the promise and performance of liberal-democracy as a call to render the status quo the ideal.