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Lionel Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity (1972) was an intellectual challenge from the rebellious 1960s to the Cold War-obsessed, conservative 1950s. His response indulged to a certain extent in emotional escapism, justified by existential philosophies in Europe which slowly but surely influenced intellectuals in the United States too. Whether true authenticity can be expressed through subjectively sincere communications of one's feelings and beliefs, and how this reputed authenticity is to be judged by reigning standards of rationality and morality, is the major theme of his book, and hardly an irrelevant one for our rocky times. Trilling was emphatically averse to blaming individual unhappiness only on imposed social roles - the square peg in the round hole syndrome - as if individuals had no responsibilities to reach a compromise with themselves, each other and with society overall.
According to Trilling, existentialists, at least as he understood them, located the source of authenticity in personal feelings which were rooted in psychological angst, or else in alienation, if one takes a radical sociological tack. How to assess such feelings, is the rub. Feelings can and do also lead one astray, a conspicuous point pondered ever since Plato, and no doubt earlier. As to whether authenticity rooted in earnest self-exploration is the cure-all for societal decadence, or merely a poor substitute for true empathy, sympathy, and trust, is the key issue for Trilling.
In Western civilization, Platonic and Aristotelian concerns for morality, while rooted in communal custom and religious understandings of “natural law”, aimed as a project to become all-embracing and integrated into a cultural whole through proper use of language, rational analysis and formal logic. That there was always a danger of backsliding was highly evident both in the eventual failure of democracy in Athens to prevent militarism, and later in Rome where eventually all pretenses of republican virtue w