Anyone interested in the history of U.S. foreign relations, Cold War history, and twentieth century intellectual history will find this impressive biography of Hans Speier, one of the most influential figures in American defense circles of the twentieth century, a must-read.
In Democracy in Exile, Daniel Bessner shows how the experience of the Weimar Republic’s collapse and the rise of Nazism informed Hans Speier’s work as an American policymaker and institution builder. Bessner delves into Speier’s intellectual development, illuminating the ideological origins of the expert-centered approach to foreign policymaking and revealing the European roots of Cold War liberalism.
Democracy in Exile places Speier at the center of the influential and fascinating transatlantic network of policymakers, many of them German émigrés, who struggled with the tension between elite expertise and democratic politics. Speier was one of the most prominent intellectuals among this cohort, and Bessner traces his career, in which he advanced from university intellectual to state expert, holding a key position at the RAND Corporation and serving as a powerful consultant to the State Department and Ford Foundation, across the mid-twentieth century. Bessner depicts the critical role Speier played in the shift in American intellectual history in which hundreds of social scientists left their universities and contributed to the creation of an expert-based approach to U.S. foreign relations, in the process establishing close connections between governmental and nongovernmental organizations. As Bessner writes: to understand the rise of the defense intellectual, we must understand Hans Speier.
Daniel Bessner is the Anne H. H. and Kenneth B. Pyle Assistant Professor in American Foreign Policy in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington.
Table of Contents
PrefaceAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Masses and Marxism in Weimar Germany2. The Social Role of the Intellectual Exile3. Public Opinion, Propaganda, and Democracy in Crisis4. Psychological Warfare in Theory and Practice5. The Making of a Defense Intellectual6. The Adviser7. The Institution Builder8. Social Science and Its DiscontentsConclusionAbbreviationsArchival and Source AbbreviationsNotesArchives CitedIndex
What People are Saying About This
Gene Zubovich
Democracy in Exile is more than a biography of Hans Speier. It stands out in a growing field of burgeoning scholarship that straddles the confluence of intellectual history and the history of U.S. and the World.
Bruce Kuklick
This biography of Hans Speier is of unusual interest. Daniel Bessner illuminates the problems and projects of an entire generation of ‘defense intellectuals’ from World War II to the post-Vietnam era. Bessner argues incisively for the role of ideas in foreign affairs and resists the conclusion that Speier was a creature of American Cold War politics. Highly recommended.
Mary L. Dudziak
Democracy in Exile is a fascinating and deeply researched account of Hans Speier's rise as leading researcher at the RAND Corporation and his deepening belief that democracy could only survive through, in essence, undemocratic means. Daniel Bessner offers us an important and sobering assessment of the role of intellectuals in building the military-industrial complex."
Samuel Moyn
Daniel Bessner is one of our most exciting emerging commentators on American foreign policy past and present. His Democracy in Exile is a pioneering study of Hans Speier and his milieu, and casts new light on the Weimar German sources of the American Century. In examining Speier's life, Bessner poses critical and enduring questions about the relationship of expert knowledge and democratic politics.
Jeremi Suri
Democracy in Exile offers a powerful deconstruction of the democratic pessimism at the core of elite foreign policy thinking during the Cold War and merits deeper exploration by Bessner and other talented historians.
