Communist, Conservative, Liberal: Freda Utley and Twentieth-Century International Thought
Thursday 28 November 16:00 until 18:00
AV视频 Campus : A108
Speaker: Katharina Rietzler, AV视频
Part of the series: History Work in Progress
Admired by Dark MAGA figures such as Curtis Yarvin, Freda Utley (1898-1978) was one of the most politically flexible international thinkers of twentieth-century Anglo-America. A committed communist in the 1930s, she became a speechwriter to Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s and a fixture of the 1960s conservative social scene in Washington D.C. Author of no less than three memoirs, she entitled the final account of her life ‘Odyssey of a Liberal’. Previous treatments have sentimentalised Utley’s rejection of communism after her Russian husband disappeared in a Soviet gulag in 1936 and she had to flee Moscow with their toddler son. But this does not do justice to Utley as a perceptive if ideosyncratic analyst of global power relations. This paper will focus on Utley’s international thought in the crucial decade of the 1940s, and her analysis of imperialism, intervention, militarism and gender.
Posted on behalf of: Faculty of Media, Arts and Humanities
Last updated: Tuesday, 12 November 2024