Cult of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security

How professionalization and scholarly “rigor” made social scientists increasingly irrelevant to US national security policy

To mobilize America’s intellectual resources to meet the security challenges of the post–9/11 world, US Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates observed that “we must again embrace eggheads and ideas.” But the gap between national security policymakers and international relations scholars has become a chasm.

In Cult of the Irrelevant, Michael Desch traces the history of the...