The Open Mind

Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature

Jamie Cohen-Cole

The Open Mind
Bookmark and Share

Jamie Cohen-Cole

368 pages | 10 halftones, 3 line drawings | 6 x 9 | © 2014
Cloth $45.00 ISBN: 9780226092164 Will Publish January 2014
The Open Mind chronicles the development and promulgation of a scientific vision of the rational, creative, and autonomous self, demonstrating how this self became a defining feature of Cold War culture. Jamie Cohen-Cole illustrates how from 1945 to 1965 policy makers and social critics used the idea of an open-minded human nature to advance centrist politics. They reshaped intellectual culture and instigated nationwide educational reform that promoted more open, and indeed more human, minds. The new field of cognitive science was central to this project, as it used popular support for open-mindedness to overthrow the then-dominant behaviorist view that the mind either could not be studied scientifically or did not exist. Cognitive science also underwrote the political implications of the open mind by treating it as the essential feature of human nature.     
           
While the open mind unified America in the first two decades after World War II, between 1965 and 1975 battles over the open mind fractured American culture as the ties between political centrism and the scientific account of human nature began to unravel. During the late 1960s, feminists and the New Left repurposed Cold War era psychological tools to redefine open-mindedness as a characteristic of left-wing politics. As a result, once liberal intellectuals became neoconservative, and in the early 1970s, struggles against open-mindedness gave energy and purpose to the right wing.
Howard Gardner, author of The Mind’s New Science
“In this fascinating book, Cohen-Cole illustrates the surprisingly strong relations among conceptions of the human mind, models of the academy, and images of the ideal American citizen, as well as the ultimate fragility of these relations in the face of disruptive political forces.”

Contents
Introduction
The American Mind
Chapter 1. Democratic Minds for a Complex Society
Chapter 2. The Creative American
The Academic Mind
Chapter 3. Interdisciplinarity as a Virtue           
Chapter 4. The Academy as Model of America
The Human Mind
Chapter 5. Scientists as the Model of Human Nature
Chapter 6. Instituting Cognitive Science
Chapter 7. Cognitive Theory and the Making of Liberal Americans
The Divided Mind
Chapter 8. A Fractured Politics of Human Nature
Conclusion. The History of the Open Mind
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index

For more information, or to order this book, please visit http://www.press.uchicago.edu
Google preview here

Chicago Manual of Style |

Chicago Blog: Psychology

Events in Psychology

Keep Informed

JOURNALs