Religions 2012, 3, 681–698; doi:10.3390/rel3030681 OPEN ACCESS religions ISSN 2077-1444 www.mdpi.com/journal/religions Article The City of Man, European Émigrés, and the Genesis of Postwar Conservative Thought Adi Gordon 1,* and Udi Greenberg 2 1 Department of Judaic Studies, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 45221-0169, USA 2 Department of History, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, USA; E-Mail:
[email protected] * Author to whom correspondence should be addressed; E-Mail:
[email protected]. Received: 5 June 2012; in revised form: 14 July 2012 / Accepted: 16 July 2012 / Published: 6 August 2012 Abstract: This article explores the forgotten manifesto The City of Man: A Declaration on World Democracy, which was composed in 1940 by a group of prominent American and European anti-isolationist intellectuals, including Thomas Mann, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hermann Broch. Written in response to the victories of Nazi Germany, the manifesto declared that the United States had a new global responsibility not only to lead the war against fascism and Marxism, but also to establish a global order of peace and democracy under U.S. hegemony. Moreover, the authors of the manifesto claimed that such an order would have to be based on the rejuvenation of conservative values; in their view, the collapse of Western democracies under the weight of totalitarian aggression was the consequence of inner moral and intellectual degeneration. The City of Man therefore called on the United States to lead the spiritual transformation of democracy into a modern political religion, which would bring about the intellectual and political unity of humanity under one state and one creed.