With an academic post at Harvard and a National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama, New Yorker critic Louis Menand is like a modern version of the elite cultural and political figures he writes about in his new book, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War. Twenty years after he won a Pulitzer Prize for The Metaphysical Club, his book on the Civil War’s influence on American pragmatist philosophy, The Free World, in a way its sequel, assesses the lives and works of leading American and Western European pragmatist and liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era, like realist diplomat George Kennan, liberal academic Lionel Trilling, and anti-Marxist diplomat and academic Isaiah Berlin.

The book also includes biographical portraits and critical summaries of leading works by liberalizing artists, writers, musicians, and entertainers — artists like Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol; philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir; writer and activist James Baldwin; and musicians like John Cage and The Beatles. Even New Yorker cartoons are conscripted in the Cold War struggle between “The Free World” and “totalitarianism.”

The book reads more like a collection of essays, some of which have been expanded from New Yorker pieces, than a tightly argued whole. But it does have a thesis, which is essentially this: those were the days.