Session 1: Cold War Liberals: The Indispensable Intellectual, Arthur Koestler

This short course introduces (or reintroduces) alumni to an important chapter in contemporary intellectual history by looking at several writers and scholars whose work in the early Cold War was decisive for casting the conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States as a struggle between democracy (and pluralism) and totalitarianism. These writers were politically committed to the cause of the West. In Session 1, Mark Gilbert – a professor of history at SAIS Europe – provides an introduction to Arthur Koestler, a front man for the Congress on Cultural Freedom and writer of DARKNESS AT NOON. Koestler is sometimes depicted as an anti-communist zealot; he would have replied that zealotry against Stalinism was no crime. Visit www.jhu.edu/hopkinsathome for more lectures and mini-courses.