Abetting Neoliberalism: Cold War History and the Post-Revisionist Synthesis

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Method III: Neoliberal/Cultural Turn in Histories of Socialism

Abstract

Since the term came into circulation in 1947, the Cold War as a category of analysis has undergone several transformations, each building on previous reconstructions even as they were critiqued and discarded in turn. Throughout, one element has remained constant. While each revision has justified itself through some notion of empirical accumulation, revisions have in fact tracked general social trends visible in cultural productions of all kinds. Much of this has been about reproducing forms of ideological hegemonies that have marked the rise of our neoliberal world order. This paper explores the transformations in the way historians have thought of the Soviet Union/Russia over the course of almost eight decades of Cold War historiography, contextualizes the debates over what the Cold War was within the cultural transformations in which they happened, and discusses the field’s current impasse and possible departures.

Author

• Oscar Sanchez-Sibony, U of Hong Kong (China)