The Freeing of the American Mind
About this episode
Louis Menand discusses his sweeping cultural history The Free World, which traces postwar America's artistic explosion — Pollock, Cage, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Dylan — through the era's contested idea of freedom. They explore how the left's and right's rival definitions of freedom shaped culture and Cold War policy, the Free Speech Movement and campus upheavals, the professionalization of criticism, and how consumer markets were sold as freedom itself. Menand describes America's cultural diplomacy as a Cold War weapon and asks what that generation's hard-won freedoms left us: a culture of self-expression shadowed by markets, inequality, and the narrowing of artistic life into institutions.