Daniel Bessner. Democracy in Exile

The influx of approximately two thousand German intellectuals fleeing the Third Reich for the United States in the 1930s provided immeasurable benefits to American cultural and academic institutions. Many of these intellectuals were eager to serve the war effort, offering their talents to the burgeoning war bureaucracy created to dismantle the regime that forced their exile. In 1945, another wave of Germans filtered into the country under the auspices of covert intelligence operations like Operation Paperclip, in which scientists, technicians, and engineers associated with Hitler’s so-called “wonder weapons” played a key role in building the military-industrial complex. Daniel Bessner’s biography of German sociologist Hans Speier, Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual, provides fascinating insight into the creation of a unique “military-intellectual complex” meant to serve the national security state forged during World War II and the early Cold War period. While Speier’s personal story is interesting and worthy of a historical biography, Bessner uses Speier to trace the “pivotal shift in American intellectual history in which hundreds of social scientists, both native and foreign born, left the university and contributed to the creation of an expert-based approach to U.S. foreign relations” (x). This new species of defense intellectuals ferried between government agencies and private think tanks throughout the Cold War, confident social science applied to contemporary security dilemmas would avoid blundering into crises and disasters in a nuclear world.

Biography · Bureaucracy · Covert · Democracy · German · National security · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science) · World War II · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies