Arthur Miller's McCarthyism: A Foucauldian Study

Before Winston Churchill finished writing the history of WW II, another history was being written in the United States under the auspices of the state power, a history that would later be compared to Hitlerism for its extravagance of scope and intensity of terror. Popularly known as McCarthyism or Red-Hunt, this history would occupy a central space in the dramaturgy of Arthur Miller in the decades to come, appearing significantly in at least four of his major plays: The Crucible (1953), A View from the Bridge (1956), After the Fall (1964), and The Archbishop’s Ceiling (1977). A direct subject of this history, Arthur Miller observed in McCarthyism a lasting framework of control and intimidation, a signature of Foucault’s disciplinary power that dragged the American nation to the brink of hysteria.