Lionel Trilling

Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) was a highly influential American literary critic and Professor of English at Columbia University in New York. His most influential book was The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (1950).

A Communist when young, Trilling turned anti-communist in the 1930s. Trilling was an architect of liberal anti-communism and political pluralism who sought a reasoned moderation as the antithesis to Soviet communism. Rejecting his Jewish heritage he became an advocate of secularism.

Trilling's novel The Middle of the Journey (1947) contains the ideological dilemmas out of which the neoconservative movement would grow in the 1970s. One main character is based on his college friend Whittaker Chambers. The origins of this movement lie in the novel's subject, the break with Communism. Trilling was Jewish, as were many neoconservative intellectuals, but his novel is conspicuous for its lack of Jewish characters. The novel's ideological content helps to explain this. Trilling made a stark separation between religious conservatism and the secular liberalism to which he personally adhered. He foresaw the ways in which anticommunism would legitimate both liberalism and conservatism, yet his novel offered no room for its characters to synthesize ethnicity or religion with involvement in the modern world. The absence of Jewish characters allowed Trilling to explore a liberalism uncomplicated by religion or ethnicity. Jewish neoconservatives perpetuated the anti-Communist world of Trilling in 1947, but they discovered within it the possibility of being Jewish, conservative, and modern; hence the complexity of Trilling's relationship to them.

Further reading

• Kimmage, Michael. The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (2009)
• online books and articles from Questia