Democracy in Exile

Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual

Bibliographic Data

ID7101326
AuthorsDaniel Bessner (0000-0001-5528-7166, corresponding author)
Year2018
Pages312
Publication date2018-04-15
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueDemocracy in Exile (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherCornell University Press (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.7591/9781501709395
OpenAlexW2793138825
Open LibraryOL33611713M
ISBN9781501709395
LanguageEN
Citations received24

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

Democracy · Political science · Politics · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · German Social Sciences and History · Law · 1945-1989 · biography · Diplomatic relations · Exiles · foreign relations · Germany · History · Intellectual life · National security · Sociologists · united states

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