4/19/2021 ‘If We Don’t Adapt, We Will Wither Away’: Louis Menand on the University Historians in the News Louis Menand’s The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, out tomorrow from FSG, begins and finishes with global geopolitics: at one end, the carving up of Europe into Soviet and American zones of influence after the Second World War; at the other, America’s catastrophic invasion of Vietnam. But the bulk of the book is concerned with the history and the global circulation of ideas: Lionel Trilling at Columbia University; Jean-Paul Sartre in Paris; Claude Lévi-Strauss in Paris and New York; Aimé Césaire in Paris and Martinique; Hannah Arendt in New York; Isaiah Berlin in London and Leningrad; James Baldwin in Harlem, Greenwich Village, and the South of France. This is a very partial list of the book’s cast.