Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins on Judith Shklar’s 1976 Debate with Charles Taylor over at his Substack, The History of Now:
One of the collections that proved key to the research for my book on Raymond Aron is the International Association for Cultural Freedom Records at the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library. The collection holds the archival record of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). What amazed me about it was not simply the endless correspondence between thousands of intellectuals, politicians and artists that it contains. It was also the detailed care the organizers took to transcribe the hundreds of seminars and talks the Congress held between its founding in 1950 and 1967, when revelations that the CIA had funded the organization led to its reorganization. There are books on the history of the CCF, but I believe the definitive work has yet to be written. In particular, the CCF’s global story has yet to be told in a single book, since the Congress made significant inroads into Africa, Asia and South America.
Yet it is often forgotten that the CCF did not truly die in 1967. That year it was renamed the International Association for Cultural Freedom (IACF), which lasted until the end of the 1970s. The IACF continued the Congress’s practice of organizing seminars, and almost all of the papers are in the IACF Records. Strangely, almost no scholarship has been devoted to them, even though some of the leading academics of the day took part. Of particular note is the IACF’s three-part seminar series called “Re-Examinations” that took place in the mid-1970s.
More here.
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