SOURCE: "Lionel Trilling, 'The Liberal Imagination,' and the Emergence of the Cultural Discourse of Anti-Stalinism," in Boundary 2, Vol. 20, No. 1, Spring, 1993, pp. 94-124.

In the following essay, Reising investigates the later impact on American cultural studies of the "discourse of anti-Stalinism" that emerged in the 1950s alongside the study of Soviet communism in the American academy, exemplified by Lionel Trilling's The Liberal Imagination.

In the concluding remarks to her excellent study of McCarthyism and the universities, Ellen W. Schrecker reiterates one of her central points—that university professors were not only not "isolated from the political repression that touched their institutions" but that, "in fact, many of the nation's leading intellectuals were directly involved with one or another aspect of McCarthyism."¹ Lionel Trilling is one of the few of these intellectuals to whom Schrecker calls our attention for his having "chaired a Columbia committee that developed guidelines for...