The Vital Center

The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom is a 1949 book by Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Schlesinger's argument runs as follows: modern man has been detached from his moorings by capitalism and technology.

Searching for a new solidarity, he finds this in communism, but it has been really a totalitarian military dictatorship run by the Communist Party since Lenin "exposed Marxist socialism to the play of ... influences which divested it of its libertarian elements.

[2] Schlesinger writes: The deeper issue is the freedom of the teacher to teach his subject according to his most responsible understanding of it, and not according to the ukase of a board of trustees, a legislature, a political party, or a foreign country.

He cites Harvard University president James Bryant Conant: "A free society must dedicate itself to the protection of the unpopular view.