Soc (2009) 46:437–444
DOI 10.1007/s12115-009-9243-4
PROFILE
Remembering the Congress of Cultural Freedom
Edward Shils & Peter Coleman
Published online: 7 July 2009
# Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2009
Introduction
The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), established in
1950, was the principal American attempt to win over the
world’s intellectuals to the liberal–democratic cause during
the Cold War. Its leading figures included Raymond Aron,
Ignazio Silone, Arthur Koestler, Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell,
Irving Kristol, Nicola Chiaromonte, Leopold Labedz, and
many others from many countries. It conducted interna-
tional conferences on a range of themes from economic
planning and Sovietology to “the end of ideology”, the
Third World, and US visa policy. It published literary-
political magazines (Encounter, Preuves, Tempo Presente,
Der Monat, Quadrant among others). It established a
world-wide network of national committees from New
York to Bombay. It offered help to intellectuals in the Third
World and behind the Iron Curtain (including books and
magazines on request, cultural exchanges, and travel
grants).
In 1990—23 years after its collapse amid revelations of
its covert funding by the C.I.A—Edward Shils wrote a
lengthy and critical essay reflecting on the history of the
Congress, its intellectuals and administrators, its achieve-
ments and failures. He called it “Remembering the
Congress for Cultural Freedom”. Shils had played an active
role in the Congress’s international conferences from its
earliest years. He was the founding editor of the Congress
quarterly magazine Minerva devoted to academic freedom.
He had also developed a program to shift the CCF from its
concentration on the Cold War to the creation or consoli-
E. Shils : P. Coleman (*)
c/o Quadrant,
Post Office Box 82, Balmain, NSW, Australia 2041
e-mail: coleman@optusnet.com.au
dation of a world-wide community of liberal intellectuals, a
New Enlightenment. His essay was the most revealing and
comprehensive statement on the CCF yet made by one of
its leading figures.
The essay was to be published in two parts in Encounter,
the monthly magazine which many considered the best of
its kind in the world. Founded in 1953 by Irving Kristol of
Manhattan and Stephen Spender of Bloomsbury, its editor
in 1990 was Melvin J. Lasky, the New Yorker who had
founded Der Monat in post-war Berlin. The first part duly
appeared in Encounter of September 1990. It begins by
discussing what Shils had elsewhere called “the burden of
1917”:—the appeal of communism and problems of the
liberal–democratic response to it. It then reconsiders the
role of the CIA. Shils is scornful of those CCF intellectuals
who pleaded ignorance of rumors or who, to prove their
innocence after the revelations, took up such causes as the
Black Panthers or the student revolutionaries.
In a personal statement on the CIA’s funding role Shils
writes: “I dislike deception, but I do not think it is the only
thing to be taken into account. It is inconsistent to argue for
the value of truthfulness while being untruthful. But an
untruthful account of the means of livelihood of a person
does not in itself impugn the truthfulness of the assertions
made by that person about other objects. If I was deceived,
it was only regarding the fact that the source of the money
was hidden. My disapproval was restricted to that particular
fact. I would have been more troubled if I had ever taken
instructions from anyone about the activities in which I
participated and which I would not have done without those
instructions. That was never the case.”
The second part of the essay, due to be published in the
October 1990 issue of Encounter, has a Shilsian character
sketch of Michael Josselson, the organizing genius of the
CCF and “one of my closest friends”. He was also the
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CIA’s man in the Congress. Shils sums up the work of
Josselson and of the CCF: “Although the Congress’s
victories were not spectacular, I think they were valuable
parts of the movement to save liberal–democratic societies
from the worst consequences of the great deception
practiced by a large and very active part of their intellectual
strata. Alongside that service Josselson’s deception of his
friends was a small price to pay for an honorable
achievement.”
But before this second part of Shils’s essay could be
published, the magazine folded, a victim of its own
financial crisis. I had a particular reason for regret in that
the essay was in part a commentary on my recently
published book on the Congress, The Liberal Conspiracy.
The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for
the Mind of Postwar Europe. Lasky gave me a set of the
page proofs of the unpublished part of the essay—and that
was that. But personal considerations apart, it was a shame
that Shils’s final assessment of the Congress for Cultural
Freedom did not reach the public. In the light of contemporary
assaults on liberal–democratic societies, it is in the public
interest, not only in the United States, that Society is now
completing what Encounter began but could not finish.
Peter Coleman, Sydney, Australia
Just how and in what way the Central Intelligence
Agency and the Congress for Cultural Freedom came to be
connected with each other is not described by Peter
Coleman in his book, The Liberal Conspiracy. It is not
likely ever to be known unless Mr. Cord Meyer writes his
recollections about it in more detail than in his already
published book of memoirs, Facing Reality: From World
Federalism to the CIA (1982). Obviously, Mr. Thomas
Braden, the former official of the Central Intelligence
Agency, who wrote what purported to be a circumstantial
account (but which is in fact rather vague and not always
plausible about the relationship) is not likely to be able to tell
the truth about the matter. His original article in the Saturday
Evening Post was only evidence of a frivolous character.
For reasons I have already given, this matter has not
been of great moment to me in my assessment of the
Congress. Even if the Central Intelligence Agency initiated
the idea of some congress for intellectual freedom, or if it
did not do that but took the initiative in offering financial
support to such a congress which had come into existence
without it, I did not think that this would affect the real
issues. One of these issues was whether the Congress ever
undertook actions which it was instructed to take by the
Central Intelligence Agency. Only the latter would have
been manipulation, and it would have placed the Congress
in a poor light morally. In my own experience this never
happened, and I have no reason to think that any other
Soc (2009) 46:437–444
actions of the Congress were taken on such initiatives.
However, I cannot be certain.
I was interested in having a truthful historical record of
what had happened from the very beginning of the
relationship between the Central Intelligence Agency and
the Congress. Michael Josselson had, on a number of
occasions, spoken of his desire for “a history of the
Congress” to be written. I, too, was eager to have it done,
not only because the events in which the Congress
participated were important and worthy of the recollection
of a later generation but also because I wanted clarification
of the role of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Not long after the high point of the crisis, John Hunt,
Konstantin Jelenski and I had lunch 1 day in a small dingy
restaurant in a district of Paris hitherto unknown to me. I
wondered why they chose that obscure restaurant, not
especially good and in an out-of-the-way part of Paris. It is
possible that they did not wish to be seen. My plan—in
which Josselson had concurred—was that Konstantin
Jelenski should be asked to conduct intensive interviews
with all the persons who had played parts of some
importance in the Congress—Ignazio Silone, Michael
Polanyi, Raymond Aron, Sidney Hook, Manès Sperber,
Carlo Schmid, Richard Loewenthal, Nicola Chiaramonte,
Minoo Masani, Denis de Rougemont, Francois Bondy,
Willy Brandt, and many others on a long list. This was the
first thing to be done; the longer the delay, the fewer the
survivors to be interviewed. John Hunt was wholly
unsympathetic with the plan to write a history of the
Congress or even to assemble the materials for such a
history; I had a clear impression that he thought it best to
move the Congress towards oblivion.
On a number of occasions, when I visited Josselson in
Geneva, I urged him to write out in the greatest possible
detail his recollections of the Central Intelligence Agency,
particularly as they bore on the Congress. I told him that it
would not be seen by anyone until the year 2025, or 2050,
and he seemed to be persuaded; but the last time I spoke
with him about it he said that he could not do it. He
proposed instead that he would come to England to stay
with me in Cambridge for several weeks, and that I could
interview him there. The interviews were to be recorded
and transcribed, and then hidden away in a bank vault, or in
a library which respects the confidentiality of documents
deposited with it. (I did not at that time think about the
problems of finding a trustworthy person to transcribe the
recorded interviews.)
It was arranged that he would come to Cambridge. I
would have him put up as my guest in a guest suite right
below my own rooms in the William Stone Building at
Peterhouse. He would be comfortable there and his meals
would be supplied, so that when he was not inclined to
go into the old part of the college—he was walking with
Soc (2009) 46:437–444
difficulty by this time—he could have his lunch and
dinner in his rooms. This was firmly agreed between us,
and sometime early in the spring was fixed. About a
fortnight before his scheduled arrival, he telephoned me
to tell me that he had to undergo medical tests and
treatment, and that he could not come to Cambridge.
This must have been in the spring of 1977. He died in
January 1978. I do not foresee that the information
Michael Josselson might have provided will ever be
forthcoming.
Michael Josselson: A Memoir
Now let me say a little more about Michael Josselson
himself. Although Mr. Coleman has the advantage of
having read Josselson’s correspondence, of having inter-
viewed many persons who knew him and of having seen
his achievement as a whole, he did not know him
personally. Perhaps I can add a few details to his account
of this exceptional man.
He was about five feet eight inches in height, plump but
compact. He had a pink, oval face, slightly fleshy but
entirely unwrinkled, his hair was parted at the side and was
neatly combed back away from a high, bald forehead. His
hair must have been dark when he had it; towards the end it
had become grey around the ears. He had small hands,
pink, well manicured, and with a firm grasp. He was always
perfectly groomed, his hair pomaded slightly. He never
looked grimy or dusty, even at the end of a long day. He
had large, dark, slightly popping eyes; a small mouth, with
lips which drew slightly inward when he smiled or when he
listened intently. He always gave an impression of
compactness and orderliness.
His garments were always well cut and of perfect fit. He
spoke with a soft voice. His English was perfectly spoken
with a slight trace of an East European accent. He was, of
course, completely fluent in all his languages; I always
spoke English with him but when he switched from one
language to another in the course of conversation in a small
group, his German and French also had that slight Baltic
accent. His written English, although not that of a stylist,
was clear and orderly. It never became entangled in long
sentences; it was as direct as his speech and manner. In
view of the fact that he lived in the United States for only a
few years at the most (including the period of his military
service), his written and his spoken English were remark-
able for being grammatically flawless.
He frequently jotted down notes when he engaged in a
conversation. If he told me about a newspaper report or an
article in a magazine which I had not seen, a few days later
I was likely to receive a photostat of it. (This was before the
universality of xerox-copying machines.) If he mentioned a
439
recent book which I did not know, a complete bibliograph-
ical note—or often the book itself—arrived in the post not
long afterwards. Similarly, he took bibliographical notes for
himself in the course of our talks.
His conversation was practically never gossip; it was
never scandalous. It was mostly about the intellectual work
of intellectuals, past and present. He had an excellent
knowledge of Russian and French literature of the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; he continued to
read French, German, English and Russian literary works,
certainly up to our very last meeting. He was, of course,
very familiar with the published works of all the intellec-
tuals who played any significant part in the activities of the
Congress. Unlike most foundation officials I have known—
he described himself in his American passport as “a
foundation official”—he read the books of the persons he
dealt with. He never displayed the evasive simulation of
familiarity which is common among many of that breed of
disposers over fortunes and dispensers of favors. He had a
soft, quiet voice, very gentle and very courteous; when he
became angry, which was very seldom in my company, it
tended to become somewhat more guttural.
Everything about him was neat and elegant. His furniture
at home was that way. His desk was always very tidy. It
was remarkable to me that he could almost always find
what he was looking for; he never forgot to do what he said
he would do; and, in an understanding way, he often
reminded me of what I had promised him I would do.
Josselson was a reticent person. It might have been the
embarrassment of his relations with the Central Intelligence
Agency which made him chary of intimacy. He seldom
spoke about his past and he seldom sought intimacy with
others. Yet he was an affectionate person, who was brought
up in the atmosphere of Russian bourgeois society in
Tallina in Estonia, and among the Russian émigrés in
Berlin. He greeted and took leave of his friends by
embracing them and kissing them on both cheeks. He had
a fine judgment for the quality of individuals, moral,
intellectual and personal, with the qualification, as far as the
activities of the Congress were concerned, that he was
impressed by “names”. He wished to gain the support of
well-known persons for the Congress. That is why he had
those six useless honorary presidents”: Bertrand Russell,
Benedetto Croce, Karl Jaspers, Salvador de Madariaga,
John Dewey, and Jacques Maritain. They were all men of
merit, perhaps ever greatness; but I could not see that their
decorative function was of much value. Still, he was
attached to their presence. His desire to retain the mercurial
and, in his old age, impressionable Bertrand Russell only
did damage to the Congress by causing the dissolution of
its ties with the American Committee for Cultural Freedom
and affronting Sidney Hook who was one of the founders
of the Congress.
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Josselson was usually a man of very discriminating taste
in human beings and in the assessment of works of art and
literature. Indeed, in any field he almost always showed
fine discrimination of judgment. He had a sense for the
qualities of human beings. He disliked pretentious persons,
vulgar persons, uncouth persons, although he was much
attached to Shepard Stone. And those whom he appreciated
also saw his fine qualities: his intelligence, tact, courtesy
and capacity for affection. Even Stephen Spender, who felt
himself to have been put upon by the disclosure and who
disliked Irving Kristol and Melvin Lasky, acknowledged the
exceptionally fine personal qualities of Michael Josselson,
and in the years after the troubles continued to visit him in
Geneva.
His faiblesse for “names” showed itself in his treatment
of Irving Kristol. Stephen Spender and Irving Kristol did
not work harmoniously with each other. There probably
was a bit of snobbery in Spender’s dislike of Kristol:
Oxford versus City College of New York; Cyril Connolly
versus Elliot Cohen; Horizon versus Commentary.
There was probably also a difference in intelligence, in
sharpness of wit, and in industriousness; and I suppose that
Irving Kristol’s sardonic attitude did not make things easier.
As Peter Coleman’s few quotations from the correspon-
dence of Kristol and Josselson show, Josselson was not
always pleased by Kristol’s conception of how to proceed
with Encounter; and Kristol, although always polite,
properly insisted on the free hand which any editor must
have. In this situation, Josselson took what must have been
Spender’s view of the situation and decided that Kristol
should go. Much went on that I do not know about, but it is
known that Josselson was ready to replace Kristol, who had
a great editorial gift, with the witty nit, Dwight Macdonald.
Josselson saw that he was wrong as soon as he met
Macdonald, but the whole episode shows Josselson’s
eagerness for “names”. Kristol was less of a “name” than
Spender or even than Macdonald, and therefore he was
thought to be more dispensable.
I do not think that it was just a desire to enhance the
prestige of the Congress that made him bow before
“names”. But he did think that the Congress was a better
organization by virtue of having persons like Robert
Oppenheimer, John Kenneth Galbraith, and George Kennan
associated with it. In that respect he was still an outsider; he
thought that the great world judges rightly. But, in fact, he
did not over-esteem them.
Nevertheless, the existence of the Congress for Cultural
Freedom with its extraordinary assembly of persons—
Raymond Aron and Ignazio Silone at the forefront, but
not far behind them Richard Loewental, Minoo Masani,
Manès Sperber, Leopold Labedz, Melvin Lasky, Irving
Kristol, Francois Bondy, Sidney Hook, Pierre Emmanuel,
Konstantin Jelenski, Jacques Freymond, Jeanne Hersch,
Soc (2009) 46:437–444
Denis de Rougemont, Bertrand de Jouvenel and others—is
evidence of Michael Josselson’s capacity to assess the
intellectual quality and moral bearing of men and women.
There is no doubt that he nodded from time to time—I have
given a few examples—but he was right in most cases. It
would be a great university which could count on its
teaching staff so many individuals of such outstanding
achievements.
The sadness of his later years in Geneva was a product
of genuine regret that he had deceived friends and
associates for whom he had affection and regard. I do not
think that his sadness was a product of isolation from the
intellectual liveliness of Paris, nor was it the tangible
deterioration of the Congress when it sailed forth as the
International Association for Cultural Freedom under
Shepard Stone, although that certainly did distress him. It
was, I think, a consequence of his sense of his infidelity to
friends and other persons who had trusted him.
It is true that sometimes Josselson was intemperate and
imperious; but he was never that way with me. Daniel Bell
once told me about a skit which he wrote for a Christmas or
some other party of staff members, secretaries, etc. of the
Congress. In one scene, the person impersonating Josselson
stomps around his office at about 4 A.M. on a Sunday
growling, “Where is everyone? Doesn’t anyone ever work
around here?” There was undoubtedly something in that
portrayal.
Josselson had been a businessman before the War; he
was the chief European representative in Paris of one or
several American department stores. He must have had a
considerable knack for business. He made a very immediate
impression on his employer (or rather on the person in
charge of purchasing in Europe for one of these department
stores) when he succeeded in persuading a Czech manu-
facturer of women’s handbags to sell a large number of
them for a price significantly lower than the one his chief
had unsuccessfully tried to reach over several hours of hard
bargaining. That achievement, on his first journey with his
senior, assured his permanent appointment. At the time he
was working for this man as a temporary student assistant,
while he was a student at the University of Berlin. Werner
Sombart was one of his teachers.
After his long experience in trade and commerce, he
regarded his intellectual associates as children when it came
to business. Under the pressure of his apprehension of the
disclosure of the Central Intelligence Agency connection,
he tried, over several tense years before the disclosure, to
make the Congress financially independent. He had all sorts
of schemes to make the magazines of the Congress self-
supporting, and he sometimes introduced into the financial
management of the magazines persons whose alleged
experience would enable the magazines to dispense with
subsidies altogether. Some odd characters turned up as a
Soc (2009) 46:437–444
result of these efforts. One of them must have spent nearly
as much money on “business lunches” as could have been
saved by the efficient management which he failed in any
case to provide. These “managers” were misjudgments,
made out of his urgent desire—not stated at the time—to
break away from financial dependence on the Central
Intelligence Agency. But these misjudgments were very
rare. Ordinarily, he was a very good judge of personal
qualities.
Melvin Lasky was inseparable from Josselson, and
Josselson could not have got along without him. Their
common experiences in Berlin after the War, their shared
universal intellectual curiosity, and their common political
outlook bound them to each other, as did their deep mutual
affection. Lasky was younger than Josselson by about
10 years or a little more: he was more intellectually
effervescent, and Josselson enjoyed that greatly. Josselson
was sometimes vexed by Lasky’s willful deafness: he was
sometimes exasperated by Lasky’s failure to imagine the
consequences of his words and actions, but at the same time
he looked on him with indulgent admiration, even
wonderment. Lasky for his part looked upon Josselson as
an affectionate, sometimes (but only briefly) stern uncle.
Leopold Labedz was another member of Josselson’s
gallery. Labedz was sometimes trying to Josselson’s
patience, not because of wilfulness as was the case with
Lasky, but because his judgments were always so detailed
and differentiated and Josselson sometimes became
annoyed when Leopold persisted in adding one brush-
stroke after another to an already finished portrait.
Josselson liked such artistry but he also liked to come to
the point, and this was different from Leopold’s extraordi-
narily knowledgeable circumambulations. Josselson valued
punctuality highly and that was never one of Leopold
Labed’s more striking personal or editorial features.
Nevertheless, Leopold held a place in Josselson’s affections
by his own affectionate disposition and his selfless pursuit
of knowledge of Eastern Europe and his encyclopedic
attainments. Labedz, like Lasky, was prized by Josselson.
He also felt very appreciative of François Bondy’s
intellectual curiosity about all of Europe and his almost
boundless knowledge of world literature. I do not know
whether there was anyone else in the Congress who held
his tender affection as did these three.
Towards the others, he was extremely considerate and
generous, courteous and always interesting. He knew a
great deal about many things but he had no need to
display his knowledge. For an active administrator who
led a convivial life of spirited lunches and dinners, he also
read a great deal and was always ready and eager to take
up any author in English, French, German and Russian
literature whose works he had neglected to look into
earlier.
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Without Josselson’s energy, convictions, affections,
discrimination and intelligence, the Congress would never
have flourished for a decade and a half between 1950 and
1965. It probably could not have gone on and would have
frittered away like so many associations of literary men and
women. Even when he moved to Geneva to reduce the
strain on his weakened heart, he still was the source of
vitality of the Congress. John Hunt nominally ran the
Congress at that time, but without the presence—even at a
distance—of Josselson the Congress would have gone into
the doldrums before the crisis of 1966–1967 finished it off.
The Congress was a necessity in the 1950s and the
1960s. However, without Josselson it never could have
functioned. It is still a necessity—but there is, alas, no
Josselson to make our contemporaries aware of how large a
place there is for an organization attempting to do things
like those done by the Congress.
Those of us who were active participants in the confer-
ences and seminars of the Congress, or who edited and
contributed to the periodicals which were published under
its auspices, have from time to time asked ourselves: What
did it all amount to? How much did it really achieve? Was
it merely an opportunity to travel to other countries, to eat
good (or even excellent) meals in Geneva or Zurich or Paris
or Tokyo? Did it have any public benefit beyond the circle
of those who organized the conferences and seminars or
wrote papers for them? Did it reach beyond them, to those
who were not already intellectually convinced? Did it have
the influence which it sought to exercise?
Denis de Rougemont once asked me, after a meeting of
our executive committee well before the storm, whether
what we were doing was worth the effort, whether we did
anything good through our activities? De Rougemont was a
Christian, and I tried to put my answer to him in terms with
which he was familiar. I said that on a much smaller scale,
our efforts were like the efforts of Christians, clergy and
laymen, who do not improve human beings—they just keep
them from becoming worse than they otherwise would be.
The same, I thought, was true of the Congress. Things
would have been worse if we had not done what we did
(and for a while, after its demise, they were indeed worse.)
The aim of the Congress was multiple. It wished to
affirm the value of intellectual integrity and of “cultural
freedom” in Western liberal–democratic countries, strength-
ening the convictions of those already attached to them but
rather unthinkingly. It sought to arouse intellectuals to a
keener awareness of the destruction of intellectual freedom
in the Communist societies which so many of them admired
in a general way and which they thought showed the
grandiose outlines of the progressive path which their own
liberal–democratic societies should follow. If the Soviet
Union occupied such a large place on the horizon of the
Congress, it was because the false image of the Soviet
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Union, knowingly diffused throughout the world, was the
source of inspiration of so many intellectuals in the West
whose aim was to push their societies and governments
(and their foreign policies) in the direction of the Soviet
Union. In so doing, the Communists and their fellow-
travelers, to the extent that they were successful, were
corroding intellectual integrity and impeding the growth of
civility, making intellectuals pernicious to their societies
and deteriorating the working of intellectual institutions.
It was not that the Soviet Union as such was the enemy
of liberal democracy: although it was that. It was rather
that the believers in the superior merits of Communism
were, through their influence on the culture and politics of
liberal–democratic societies, doing damage to those socie-
ties, and fostering the ascendancy of the Communist way of
doing things.
The present situation is very unlike that in which the
Congress was born and was most active. Communism in
Central and Eastern Europe, in Cuba and Nicaragua, and in
China has now lost most of its persuasive power—not
necessarily its military power—in the world. One by one,
beginning with Poland, the Communists, out of their own
mouths, have corroborated point by point the analyses
made of the Communist societies by the Congress.
Gorbachev would have been the right person to write the
introduction to Mr. Coleman’s book. Many of his acknowl-
edgements of what has happened in the Soviet Union
confirm the analysis made by scholars associated with the
Congress.
What influence did the Congress have on this abdication
of Communism, of this self-declared bankruptcy of the
Communist ideology in the Soviet Union? Directly, the
Congress had little influence. Solzhenitzyn’s writings and,
in France, the unyielding, unbroken clarity of Raymond
Aron’s analyses in books, periodical articles, and newspa-
per columns had a more direct influence. The bravery of
Andrei Sakharov and other courageous men and women in
the Soviet Union; of the Polish students, professors and
workers in 1956; of Kuron, Michnik, Walesa and of
Solidarity in the 1970s and 1980s; of Havel and Charta
77 in Czechoslovakia and their Hungarian counterparts—
this bravery was a more direct force. They broke the self-
confidence of the Communist rulers of East European
societies, and enfeebled their sense of their own legitimacy.
The crisis of the Communist countries is in large part a
result of the abject failure of the allegedly “planned”
Communist economies. It was also the result of the
incapacity of Marxist ideology to continue to blind those
rulers of the Communist countries to the finally undeniable
facts of their own incapacity to do effectively what they
always claimed was the great virtue of “the dictatorship of
the proletariat” and the vanguard Party, as the regent of the
proletariat.
Soc (2009) 46:437–444
In so far as the demoralization and enfeeblement of the
rulers of Communist society is a matter of the loss of their
conviction about their legitimacy as the consummating
agents of the dialectical process of historical change, the
Congress contributed to the diminution of that sense of
legitimacy. It contributed to this by its emphasis in telling
Western intellectuals, over and over again, what the Soviet
Union really was as a society and what it was doing to its
peoples. It placed the Communists and their fellow-travelers
in the liberal democracies in situations in which they could
no longer bully and falsify with the self-confidence that
they had in the years just after the Second World War, and
which they continued to have until recently, although with
increasing uncertainty.
Encounter, Survey, Preuves, Tempo presente, and Der
Monat made them aware that they were not having their
own way. These journals were as important for the
unceasing discomfiture which they caused to fellow-
travelers and Communists as they were for those whose
liberal–democratic beliefs they sustained.
Through the organs of the Congress, the leaders of the
Soviet Union and “people’s democracies” were made more
aware that they were no longer having their own way in the
domination of opinion outside their countries. The rulers of
the Communist countries lost their nerve when they knew
that they were no longer getting away with it; and they lost
their nerve in part because they were beginning to lose
supporters in the liberal–democratic countries.
It is not that President Gorbachev, General Jaruzelski,
and Secretaries Honecker and Husak became more liberal.
They were rather made aware that they were no longer able
to do, with a good conscience and with the same self-
confidence, what they and their predecessors had been
doing for a long time. For 5 years after the Second World
War, the dogmatic and brutal methods of the Communist
rulers were spared the kind of unmasking to which the
organs of the Congress subjected them in the decade and a
half that ensued.
The process by which the rules of the Communist
countries came to lose their belief in their own legitimacy
is a complicated one, and I will not attempt to analyze it
further here. The important point is that the Congress was—
during the high tide of Soviet tyranny and the efforts of the
Communists and fellow-travelers to give a false, contrary
impression of this tyranny and to make it seem beneficial—
the chief resistance to this grand deception. Had the
Congress not existed, the tyrants and their agents and the
bien pensants of “the social ownership of the instruments of
production” might not have been checked.
The “crisis of Communism” is not a phenomenon of the
past two decades; it began at the very beginning of the
Soviet regime, as soon as there were intellectuals who
refused to accept the false account which the Bolshevik
Soc (2009) 46:437–444
regime was attempting to give of itself outside the Soviet
Union itself. The first rulers of the Soviet regime knew that
their power depended on the success of the deception
which they could work on Western societies through a
moral and intellectual corruption of the educated class.
They did not create this corruption; they developed,
exploited, and nurtured it. Those intellectuals who resisted
the deception began perhaps with Bertrand Russell in The
Theory and Practice of Bolshevism; Waldemar Gurian in
Bolschewismus followed not very long after; much later
came Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror. Some of the
earliest signs of the crisis of Communism were the works of
former Communists such as Anton Ciliga, Boris Souvarine,
Victor Serge, and Franz Borkenau. Later came journalists
who had been enthusiasts for Communism like Edgar
Lyons, W.H. Chamberlin, Louis Fischer and, above all,
Whittaker Chambers; as well as former members of the
OGPU, the NKVD and the KGB, like Walter Krivitsky or
numerous others. These works were a trickle which turned
into a stream, and they were the honorable forerunners of
the Congress.
It took courage to stand out against the stampede of the
Gadarene intellectuals. It takes no courage now for the
contributors to The New York Review of Books and the New
Statesman to criticize the Soviet Union. Indeed, it has
become fashionable, a way of creating a false impression of
intellectual integrity. That is not the way it was when the
Congress for Cultural Freedom began its work in the 1950s.
Tasks that Remain
Although the events of the past year might be a turning-
point in history, making 1989 into a year as significant in
history as 1917, they have not yet annulled October 1917.
1989 is by no means a complete reversal of October 1917.
“The burden of 1917” did not originate in 1917. It carried
forward a very old tradition of antinomianism and utopian
romanticism, and of a yearning for an utterly new order of
social justice. 1989 does not mean its end. It means that the
most monstrous and best organized form of tyrannical effort
to destroy human civilization has been discredited. For the
moment, it is easy for thoughtless liberals to believe in the
nonsense of “the end of history”. But the traditions of
antinomianism, of the hatred for civil society, and of the
superficial progressivism which sustained these tendencies
(out of a naïve belief in their kinship with Communism) are
not yet finished. Nor will they ever be.
These more fundamental attitudes which formed the
matrix of sympathy with Communist regimes have not been
expunged from the human mind. They are in many respects
as strong as they have ever been over the past six decades.
It is no longer fashionable to praise the Soviet Union of the
443
“people’s democracies”—or to be enthusiastic about the
“Third World”, which was the first refuge after the Second
World War of those beginning to be disillusioned with
totalitarian regimes. The alienation of intellectuals from
their own societies is no longer as blatant as it was from the
1930s onwards, but it is still very tangibly present.
It was my desire 30 years ago that the Congress should
go beyond the criticism of the moral and intellectual
deficiencies of fellow-travelling and collectivistic liberal
intellectuals and the traditions of romanticism and emanci-
pationism and would begin to deal with the obligations of
intellectuals in liberal–democratic societies, but I was never
successful.
As long as Josselson was alive there was a chance that
the Congress could deepen its understanding of its task.
Josselson had an eager mind; he always wanted to extend
his understanding. When Shepard Stone, supported by
Konstantin Jelenski, took the tiller in his hands, he
studiously stayed away from large considerations. Stone
would never do or say anything which was unpopular and
disapproved of by his well-connected intellectual betters—
the kind of persons whom Georges Sorel called “the bullies
of university socialism”. He had lived too long in the
atmosphere of the New York Times and the Ford Founda-
tion; he was affable, accommodating, and eager to please.
There was nothing inconsistent between his earlier roles
and his presidency of the International Association for
Cultural Freedom.
The case of Konstantin Jelenski was different. After
Josselson, he had been the best member of the secretariat of
the Congress. By his close relations with Kultura, he was
one of the fathers of the Polish October. His broad culture,
his elegant, soldierly bearing, and his air of moral
earnestness complemented Josselson’s common sense. He
was an affectionate, charming and cultivated person who
served the Congress exceptionally well when Josselson was
at its head. When Stone, a person with weaker convictions,
was president of the Congress, Jelenski had a freer hand.
By this time, he wished to stay away from the new tasks
because he regarded it as right that writers and thinkers
should be alienated from and hostile to their own societies.
Furthermore, he was much affected by the student
agitations and “the young people’s thing”. In the end, he
was resolute to prevent any discussion of the incivility of
Western intellectuals.
Despite the partial similarity of the name and the
persistence of some of the earlier participants, what had
been the Congress became a very different kind of body. It
became the International Association for Cultural Freedom,
which came to an ignominious end under the uninterested
and timorous leadership of Shepard Stone and Adam
Watson, both supported, after initial sulking, by Pierre
Emmanuel and Jelenski.
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But even in Josselson’s time, the Congress never
addressed these questions of the long perspective. It
neglected the deeper issues because it was more concen-
trated in the narrower task of criticizing the mendacity of
Communists and fellow-travelers and their support for the
intellectual bondage imposed by the Communist régimes.
Although the Congress’s victories were not spectacular, I
think that they were valuable parts of the movement to save
liberal–democratic societies from the worst consequences
of the great deception practiced by a large and very active
part of their intellectual strata. Alongside that service,
Josselson’s deception of his friends was a small price to pay
for an honorable achievement. Most of the courageous men
of the best years of the Congress are now dead: Josselson,
Silone, Aron, Sperber, de Rougemont, Chiaramonte, Hook,
Soc (2009) 46:437–444
Koeltler, Crosland, Torberg, and Jaesrich are all dead.
Lasky, Labedz, and Bondy remain. Together, they formed a
unique assemblage. They were brave men who did not fear
to speak the truth when it was unpopular to do so. Quite
apart from the success or failure of their intentions, they did
the right thing by speaking the truth. It was a privilege to be
associated with them.
Edward Shils (1910–1995) was Distinguished Service Professor in
the Committee on Social Thought and in Sociology at the University
of Chicago and one of the world’s most influential sociologists.
Peter Coleman was for 20 years editor of the Australian literary-
political monthly Quadrant. He is the author of numerous books and
is currently a regular contributor to the Australian edition of the U.K.
magazine The Spectator. He is a former Member of Parliament.