ABSTRACT
Any sense of reform liberal triumph dissipated very quickly after World War II. The fact is that there was every good reason for liberals to oppose Stalinism and Maoism, even if the dangers from those sources, particularly the dangers of internal subversion, were grotesquely exaggerated and led to the hysterical anti-Communist excesses of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his acolytes. Schlesingers contribution, in effect a manifesto for the new liberal ginger group, Americans for Democratic Action, was an attempt to define the political space to be occupied by liberals as of 1949—The Vital Center. Although Riesman did not hope for the return of inner-direction, he could not applaud the ascendancy of the other-directed either. What Riesman sought was neither inner- or other-direction, but rather to build on the present social base to achieve the goal posited by all classical social thought and some forms of liberalism: the fullest development of the individual personality.
