Congress for Cultural Freedom

The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF, 1950-67) was a transnational Cold War cultural organization founded in West Berlin in June 1950 to promote free thought and democratic values as the patrimony of Western culture. Born from the relationships and shared preoccupations of cultural figures largely associated with the non-communist transatlantic left, the CCF developed an alternative to Soviet cultural programming that was initially focused on countering the moral and intellectual authority of communism in Western Europe, where the legacy of the 1930s Popular Fronts and Soviet support for antifascism was robust. 

The founding of the organization institutionalized collaborations between leading US and European intellectuals that intersected public and private interests by presenting cultural freedom as a rallying point for likeminded artists and intellectuals on the democratic left and taking direct aim at communist ideological dogmatism and totalitarian repression. Indeed, the CCF’s roots were pre-existing networks of US and European artists and intellectuals, some of which had mobilized to protest a series of 1948-49 USSR-sponsored public conferences—most notably the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace in New York (famously heckled by Sidney Hook and a group of New York intellectuals) and the World Congress of Peace Partisans in Paris. The protests challenged the rhetoric of Soviet overtures towards the European and American intellectual communities and drew the attention and clandestine support of the American Central Intelligence Agency thanks to covert contacts (especially Melvin J. Lasky and Michael Josselson) between the US government and the US intelligentsia—though only select figures in the organization’s upper echelons were aware of these covert ties. After the protests also inspired a competing conference on intellectual liberty in West Berlin in 1950, the CCF was founded to coordinate similar future activities.

The CCF thus institutionalized a transatlantic alliance of likeminded thinkers that helped create a liberal democratic community later expanded to include Latin American, African, and Asian nations. The organizational structure was composed of a transnational International Secretariat whose Paris-based Executive Committee included the American Irving Brown (alternate: Haakon Lie), Hungarian-born Arthur Koestler (alternate: Raymond Aron), German Eugen Kogon (alternate: Carlo Schmid), Frenchman David Rousset (alternate: Georges Altman), Italian Ignazio Silone (alternate: Nicola Chiaromonte), Englishman Stephen Spender (alternate: Tosco Fyvel), and Swiss president Denis de Rougemont. The CCF was also present in 35 countries in the form of national committees. While the Executive Committee sponsored high-profile art exhibitions and international conferences and grants and prizes for artists, the national committees organized domestically focused initiatives and coordinated local branches. Other major figures associated with the organization over the course of its lifetime include Sidney Hook, Nicolas Nabokov, Irving Kristol, James Burnham, Andrè Malraux, James T. Farrell, François Bondy, Julián Gorkin, Friederich Torberg, Arthur Schlesinger, Richard Löwenthal, Edward Shils, Daniel Bell, Michael Polanyi, Karl Jaspers, John Dewey, Jacques Maritain, Bertrand Russell, A. J. Ayer, Gaetano Salvemini, Czeslaw Milosz, and Benedetto Croce, among many others.

One of the CCF’s most well-regarded enterprises was its publication of over 20 international magazines, including the journals Encounter, Preuves, Der Monat, Tempo Presente, and Cuadernos. Such periodicals constituted a transatlantic publishing circuit and forum for cultural transfer and idea exchange: articles appearing in one magazine, for instance, could be easily reprinted in others, and journal editors were often in dialogue not only with the CFF Executive Committee but also with each other. The organization’s conferences—which were attended by well-known intellectuals from around the world and focused on themes related to its advancement of cosmopolitanism, freedom of thought, and modernism in the arts and sciences—also became sites for circulating and consolidating attitudes, approaches, and priorities. Such initiatives helped promote a vision of the mid-twentieth century as a post-ideological era and framed Western democratic culture as a unified set of shared Euro-American moral, socio-cultural, and aesthetic values. As Giles Scott-Smith has demonstrated, that the organization’s activities and ethos seemed to operate outside political channels or idioms helped cultivate a Cold War Euro-American consensus and sense of common cultural heritage that promoted Atlanticist political interests. Yet it performed this cultural diplomacy in indirect and non-unilateral ways, meaning that its activities and organizational structure were largely scenes of cultural mediation and negotiation—not only between journal contributors and editors or conference participants and coordinators but also among such figures, the national committees, and the International Secretariat. 

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