God, Capitalism, and the State

Abstract During the 1980s, a neoconservative cultural counterrevolution organized in response to the previous two decades of political turmoil and intellectual ferment, which had resulted in the emergence of a strong academic left in American universities. The cultural counterrevolution began with several acts of academic repression designed to purge some of the most prominent leftists from academia, although this repression mostly took other forms during the 1980s. The intellectual leaders of this counterrevolution included figures such as Ronald Reagan, William J. Bennett, Allan Bloom, John Silber, and Roger Kimball. However, the neoconservative critique advanced by these individuals was quickly embraced as policy by national-state institutions, such as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Department of Education. The counterrevolution was also aggressively implemented through nonprofit organizations such as Accuracy in Academia and the National Association of Scholars.