Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual
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Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual
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Overview
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781501712036 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Cornell University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/15/2018 |
| Series: | The United States in the World |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 312 |
| Sales rank: | 975,403 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
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.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Masses and Marxism in Weimar Germany
For Hans Speier, crisis defined the Weimar Republic (1918–1933). Though the entirety of interwar Europe suffered profound shocks after the trauma of World War I, Germany's were deeper and longer than most. Between 1918 and 1933, Germans experienced the devastating loss of the war, a punitive Versailles Treaty, popular uprisings, coup attempts against the newly democratic state, foreign occupation of their industrial heartland, hyperinflation and depression, the emergence of extremist political parties of the left and right, presidential dictatorship, and, finally, the rise of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers' (Nazi) Party. As he matured, Speier recognized that he was living through an unstable and liminal period in which the assumptions of the past would no longer be relevant in the future. He did not, however, despair at this situation, preferring instead to believe that Weimar's precarity provided a unique opportunity for social democratic intellectuals like himself to reshape society. Hope, rather than anxiety, characterized Speier's early career.
In Weimar's first years, socialist intellectuals had reason to be hopeful. From the ashes of World War I and the Kaiserreich arose a constitution that, for the first time in Germany's history, vested sovereignty in the German people. The newly enfranchised "masses" — the term intellectuals and other elites used to describe ordinary Germans — soon thereafter granted the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) pluralities in the federal elections of 1919 and 1920 and victory in the presidential election of 1919. Between 1919 and 1923, the SPD was a critical component of several governing coalitions, which allowed the party to enact policies for which it had long advocated, including welfare reform and the strengthening of labor's rights. The SPD's success persuaded manifold socialist intellectuals that after years of struggle, the revolution Karl Marx had prophesied was at hand.
Political developments, however, quickly dashed socialist dreams. In November 1923, SPD officials withdrew from the parliamentary coalition of which they were a part after their conservative partners enabled the overthrow of Saxony and Thuringia's left-wing governments. As the SPD retreated into political opposition, a crisis of Marxism began to permeate socialist intellectual circles as it became increasingly clear that social democratic governance had not engendered revolutionary socioeconomic transformation and that many economically impoverished Germans had chosen to ally themselves with either the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) or the nationalist right wing, both of which impugned the SPD's parliamentary reformism.
It was during this moment of social democratic uncertainty that Speier matured intellectually. Despite the evident challenges facing the socialist movement, the young Speier was certain he, and others of his generation, could reinvigorate Marxist theory and practice. In particular, Speier insisted that theoretical development and popular education were the keys to social democracy's salvation. If social democratic intellectuals reformed Marxist theory in light of historical experience and dedicated themselves to enlightening Germans in socialism's tenets, Speier argued, both the SPD's and the broader socialist movement's futures would be guaranteed. The young Speier was convinced that the difficulties social democracy faced in the mid-1920s were temporary obstacles that would not prevent socialism's historically preordained realization.
History proved Speier wrong. The mounting electoral successes of the Nazi Party in the late 1920s and early 1930s, which culminated in Adolf Hitler's appointment to the Reich chancellorship in January 1933, eradicated his expectations. For Speier, as for many socialists, the Nazi victory was a profoundly traumatic experience that altered the course of his life. Intellectually, Hitler's triumph had proven false everything in which he had placed his faith. A republic Speier was positive would engender expansive social democratic transformation had instead ended with the victory of radical nationalism and racism. Personally, the new regime forced Speier, who was a socialist married to a Jewish pediatrician, into exile in the United States.
Speier's understanding of the Nazi triumph led him to embrace four ideas that became central to the logic of governance he helped institutionalize in the Cold War United States. First, Weimar's collapse convinced Speier that democracy was a weak political form that could fall prey to radical threats. He became forever wary that extremist political movements of the right and left, no matter how apparently feeble, retained the potential to overthrow democratic governments. Second, Speier attributed Weimar's failure to his own, and by implication other socialist intellectuals', naive conviction that the masses had the capacity to be educated to make wise political decisions. In his exile he held that the Nazi victory demonstrated that mass education was a project doomed to disappoint. Third, the failures of social democratic theory and practice encouraged Speier to reject Marxism as irrelevant, while the KPD's repeated attacks on the SPD and the republic compelled him to diagnose communism as malevolent. Anyone who identified as a Marxist was at best unsophisticated and at worst malicious. Finally, Hitler's rise prompted Speier to redefine his understanding of democracy. Whereas before 1933, democracy had meant for Speier economic, cultural, and political equality, afterward it referred only to an undertheorized notion of procedural equality. Democracy in essence became the vague, negative image of authoritarianism, a concept largely shorn of substantive content.
Despite these shifts in Speier's thought, one theme remained constant in his thinking before and after 1933: in both periods, Speier argued that intellectuals had an essential role to play in modern politics. In his exile, Speier maintained that socialist intellectuals' primary mistake in Weimar had been to focus on educating an uneducable mass constituency. He declared that instead of attempting to enlighten the public, pro-democratic intellectuals must use their knowledge in the service of the American state. In short, the Nazi victory led Speier to conclude that ordinary people were irrational, dogmatic, and manipulable, and that only elites, whether intellectuals or decision makers, could be trusted. This was the first step on a path that ended, across decades and the Atlantic, at the RAND Corporation.
Hans-Heinrich Adolf Ludwig Speier was born in Berlin on February 3, 1905, the only child of Adolf and Anna, a white-collar worker and housewife. As an adult, Speier remembered his father as a free thinker who was nonetheless "Prussian" when it came to discipline, and recalled that his mother was a gentle woman. Throughout his youth, his parents were ill; Anna had multiple sclerosis while Adolf suffered from Parkinson's disease. Despite the comfortable existence Adolf's position as director of the Berlin office of the New York Insurance Company provided the Speiers, Anna's and Adolf's infirmities made Hans's childhood a difficult one. From a young age, Speier felt responsible for his parents' well-being, which provided him with a profound sense of self-reliance.
Adolf and Anna were conservative Lutherans who endorsed the nationalistic politics shared by many middle-class Protestants. As an adolescent, Speier rejected his parents' political and religious values, a decision likely informed by his position as caretaker. He asserted his agnosticism and, at the age of fifteen, refused to receive the Lutheran confirmation blessing. Speier's most rebellious act, however, was his declaration of allegiance to the Weimar Republic and its socialist movement. During the Wilhelmine era (1890–1918), the majority of German Protestants were dedicated imperialists and nationalists. After the republic's creation, conservative Lutherans like Adolf and Anna critiqued democracy as a liberal betrayal of the German Volk and considered its supporters, especially the anti-imperialist and anticlerical socialists, to be national and religious traitors. For them, the republic, which was initially governed by a reviled coalition of socialists, liberals, and Catholics, was a foreign imposition intended to tear apart the natural connection between Protestantism and German nationalism. Indeed, late in life Speier recalled that as a child, he was "afraid" of workers and Catholics because he had learned that they were "against the [Protestant] middle classes." Speier's teenage decision to identify with socialism reflected a fierce independence that would serve him well throughout his career.
In the aftermath of World War I, the SPD emerged as the firmest defender of a republic that suffered aggressive physical and rhetorical attacks throughout its brief existence. As a result of internal reconfigurations that led to the expulsion of its more radical members during the war, the Weimar-era SPD was a decidedly reformist institution. Unlike the revolutionary KPD, socialist leaders rejected violent radicalism and extraparliamentary agitation. The SPD's self-presentation as the party of stability, codified in its Görlitz Program of 1921, no doubt appealed to the young Speier, who had been personally affected by political chaos when his parents sent him, along with other "undernourished children," to East Prussia toward the end of the war. When a thirteen-year-old Speier finally returned to Berlin after the November 1918 armistice, he arrived to a city wracked by food shortages and riots. Speier's embrace of the SPD revealed not only his youthful progressivism and rebelliousness but a concomitant desire for order. 6
The young Speier's career choices reflected his eagerness to make a life independent of his family. After graduating from Realgymnasium in 1923, he made clear to his parents his interest in pursuing a university degree. Adolf, concerned that his son would not find academic employment, attempted to prevent him from taking the Abitur, the final examinations German students interested in university took during their last year of secondary education. In defiance of his father, Speier sat for the Abitur and did well. Nonetheless, at Adolf's insistence he delayed enrolling at a university full time and worked as a telephone boy at the joint-stock company of Sachs, Warschauer & Company. During his off hours, however, Speier attended lectures at the University of Berlin. In the summer of 1924, Germany's monetary contraction led to Speier's dismissal from Sachs, though he quickly found work as a mathematics tutor. Throughout late 1924 and 1925, Speier worked as a tutor while continuing to take classes at Berlin, which convinced Adolf that his son was dedicated to academia. Finally, in early 1926, Adolf allowed Speier to attend the University of Heidelberg to pursue a PhD in political economy, which he deemed a suitably practical discipline with potential professional payoff. Although late in life Speier claimed he attended Heidelberg for no particular reason, merely wanting to leave Berlin, this is probably not entirely accurate. Heidelberg was recognized nationally as a liberal institution, which likely influenced Speier's decision to matriculate there.
Adolf refused to pay for his son's education, which was a fortuitous decision, as Speier's lack of funds encouraged him to seek an assistantship with the Jewish socialist economist Emil Lederer. Speier's relationship with Lederer was enormously important for him intellectually, professionally, and personally. Lederer, who served on Speier's dissertation committee, was the first party-affiliated socialist with whom he developed a close relationship, and it was Lederer who facilitated Speier's entrance into socialist intellectual circles and, later, his exile. Professionally, Lederer dedicated himself to crossing the divide between scholarship and public policy and was, as Speier remembered, a "passionate participa[nt] in the political and social events that he witnessed." Lederer, "an activist by temperament," according to his friend the sociologist Paul Kecskemeti, had close ties to the SPD-led Prussian government and regularly advised the party and its affiliated unions on economic policy. He also served as the co-director, along with Alfred Weber, of Heidelberg's Institute for Social and State Sciences, which sought to bring social science to bear on public policy and foreshadowed the types of research organizations Speier helped build in the Cold War United States. In his academic scholarship and work as an SPD consultant, Lederer demonstrated to Speier that although an intellectual must be interested in the world of ideas, it was important to involve oneself in politics as well.
But it was the Jewish liberal sociologist Karl Mannheim, a Hungarian émigré and former associate of the radical communist theorist Georg Lukács, who emerged as Speier's most important disciplinary interlocutor. In 1926, Speier attended Mannheim's inaugural lecture, "The Contemporary State of Sociology in Germany," and was entranced by the professor and his subject. Mannheim's talk was Speier's first encounter with the sociology of knowledge, a sociological methodology that traced political perspectives to individuals' and groups' position in the social structure. Speier's admiration for the lecture, he recalled, "converted [him] to sociology" and eventually resulted in his declaring a double major in sociology and political economy. However, as a private lecturer (a German position that roughly corresponded to an untenured assistant professor in the American academy), Mannheim was unable to officially oversee Speier's field in sociology. Instead, at Mannheim's request, Samuel Paul Altmann, an economist, directed Speier's committee and his field in sociology, though Mannheim was the one who actually read and passed Speier's dissertation. In addition to Altmann, the conservative historian Willy Andreas, the liberal philosopher Karl Jaspers, and Lederer oversaw Speier's other fields — a politically ecumenical collection of scholars that reflected Speier's innate ability to get along with people who shared different political opinions. Although Mannheim could not direct Speier's dissertation, Speier nevertheless became a founding member of the Mannheim Circle, a group of young left-wing intellectuals that congregated around the scholar and included several individuals who would become well known in the future, such as Norbert Elias, Werner Falk, Hans Gerth, Ruth Neuberg, and Svend Riemer. As Speier remembered, between 1926 and 1928 he "attended all [of Mannheim's] seminars and lecture courses and saw him at his house quite often." Until the end of his life, Speier proudly referred to himself as Mannheim's first doctoral student.
Speier's decision to become a sociologist, however, likely was motivated by more than his admiration for Mannheim. Throughout the Weimar era, the discipline of sociology, and especially the subfield of the sociology of knowledge, was identified with liberal governance and practical, pro-democratic political action. Sociology's progressive reputation, for instance, led figures like Konrad Haenisch, Prussia's socialist minister of culture, and Carl Becker, his liberal successor, to make sociology a central discipline in their educational reform efforts. Mannheim in particular maintained that sociological education was by definition a political act, and his work galvanized pro-democratic intellectuals throughout Germany. As we will see below, Mannheim's sociology of knowledge endowed intellectuals with the crucial duty of guiding Weimar's pluralistic politics, which probably appealed to a young intellectual like Speier who sought to make his mark on the world. Moreover, as Speier recalled, in Weimar "sociology was not necessarily regarded as a specialized discipline, but as a science concerned with the structural and historical problems of society as a whole," which surely stoked the wide-ranging and ambitious Speier's interests.
When Speier enrolled at Heidelberg in 1926, German academia was undergoing a period of social and economic instability. The high inflation of the early 1920s had caused intellectuals' savings to disappear and decreased their real purchasing power. Academics had already experienced a loss of social prestige caused by educational democratization and the rise of a business elite whose status was premised on wealth as opposed to knowledge. The political emergence of the newly sovereign masses also posed a significant challenge to academics' traditional authority. Whereas in the late nineteenth century intellectuals were one of Germany's most respected social groups, to which ordinary people and elites alike looked for spiritual and political guidance, by the 1920s this was no longer the case.
These socioeconomic and status transitions engendered a crisis of Bildung, the dominant educational ideal of German academia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bildung , a term that does not translate well into English, referred to a process of cultivating oneself through, first, extensive reading in classical texts and, second, conducting original research in a Wissenschaft (science). Before 1918, not only scholars but also state officials and other elites appealed to Bildung to justify their authority. As the conditions of German academia and society changed after the war, however, the discursive coalition that had defended Bildung throughout the Wilhelmine era disintegrated. Socialist and liberal academics, who had critiqued traditional Bildung as elitist and out of step with modern times, quickly recognized that the collapse of the pro-Bildung coalition provided them with an opportunity to redefine Bildung in more progressive directions.
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Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Masses and Marxism in Weimar Germany
2. The Social Role of the Intellectual Exile
3. Public Opinion, Propaganda, and Democracy in Crisis
4. Psychological Warfare in Theory and Practice
5. The Making of a Defense Intellectual
6. The Adviser
7. The Institution Builder
8. Social Science and Its Discontents
Conclusion
Abbreviations
Archival and Source Abbreviations
Notes
Archives Cited
Index
What People are Saying About This
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.