Richard Crockatt is concerned with cultural and ideological aspects of the Cold War, and with the light they throw on early post-war US foreign relations. Whereas Lucas concentrates on covert behaviour and agency, however, Crockatt's attention is directed towards public – indeed highly publicized – discourse and its meanings. Similarly, whereas Lucas is interested in the execution of state-sponsored American designs, primarily on Europe, Crockatt investigates the historical writings of one individual, the British writer Arnold Toynbee, and in particular the meaning of their popularity and influence in the United States. For Crockatt, the seemingly-incongruous trans-Atlantic reception accorded Toynbee's post-war publications, in particular the abridged edition of his A Study of History (1947), offers a distinctive insight into not only American ideological and cultural values but also the ways in which they informed foreign policy formulation or reception. Crockatt's chapter has something in common with earlier, full-length investigations of the multiple relationships between American culture, ideology and diplomacy, notably Michael Hunt's Ideology and US Foreign Policy (1982) and Anders Stephanson's Manifest Destiny (1995). By focusing on one writer, however, Crockatt addresses the less-thoroughly studied intellectual dimensions of the Cold War. Need college essay editing help? Our college essay editors are professional! Order college essay editing services at our site! Plagiarism-free editing! In narrowing his chronological horizon, meanwhile, he provides a concrete example of how, why and to what extent current events and circumstances may prompt the conscription of long-standing ideological formulae and archetypal discursive tropes on behalf of immediate cultural needs and political interests.Crockatt argues, the process is best understood at two distinct but related levels. The immediate attention paid to, and the popularity of, the abridged A Study of History he relates on the one hand to the timing of its publication: a moment of crisis and transition symbolized by the promulgation of the Truman Doctrine. Tapping into public anxieties concerning the future of western, or at least American, civilization, Toynbee's reading of the rise and fall of civilizations in terms of a challenge-and-response formula appealed to the public and its leaders as an interpretive framework capable of explaining the nature of the crisis. It also facilitated their justification of the nation's response, soon to be formulated for policy-makers around George Kennan's concept of containment. Sufficiently grand to accommodate Truman's own hyperbolic rendering of the problems of Greece and Turkey, Crockatt suggests, Toynbee's Study had both the range to be promoted as an ideological alternative to Karl Marx's version of historical change and the hermeneutics to serve as a political weapon in the hands of such a celebrated ex-Communist as Time magazine editor Whittaker Chambers. Toynbee, in this sense, found himself nominated for the role senior Kennedy and Johnson advisor Walt Rostow a decade and more later would hope to play.
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