Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual by Daniel Bessner (review)

Daniel Bessner's outstanding biography of the eminent and influential social scientist Hans Speier charts his intellectual and political efforts to promote democracy in the Weimar republic, his refashioning of his strategy once Hitler came to power, his move to the United States, and his uncritical commitment to serving as a defense intellectual advising the highest levels of government after dedicating himself to analyzing Nazi propaganda during World War II. Its richness lies in Bessner's careful analysis of the changing positions adopted by Speier on the vulnerability of democracy to mass politics, a concern rooted in Mannheim's sociology of knowledge, and of his gradual conviction that social scientific advice should be left to experts who were not accountable to the body politic. To save democracy from tyranny one had—temporarily—to suspend some of its core values. Speier's determination to hold extremism, both fascism and communism, at bay, was central to his politics, from WWII through the Cold War. Ironically, Speier was a democrat in exile in the United States but in his role as a defense intellectual at RAND, and then as consultant to the Ford Foundation and the State Department, he argued for "exiling" democracy: he thought democracy was threatened by the gullible, selfinterested, and manipulable masses that he came to despise after the trauma of Hitler's rise to power. Gradually detaching himself from Marxism and relinquishing his direct engagement with educating working men and women during the Weimar years, Speier saw an unbridgeable epistemological gulf between the educated intellectual elite and the working class.

RAND emerged as a perfect venue for Speier to promote his agenda. He joined it in 1948 as the founding chief of its Social Science Division, when its future was still uncertain, and remained there until 1969 when he was appointed professor of sociology and government at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. It was at RAND that he and his colleagues "learned secrecy" (p. 147), producing a culture of classified reports and journals, restricted conferences, and off-the-record discussions and security clearances (up to nuclear developments for Speier himself) that shaped policy decisions in a universe that existed parallel to the open society. He used his growing influence to persuade the Ford Foundation to fund "basic research" at the Center for the Advanced Study of Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) and a Research Program in International Communications at MIT's Center for International Studies (CIS), engaging a new academic elite in social science research that could be "applied" to policymaking in the Cold War. His influence at RAND waned as quantitative and formal methods of analysis, including game theory, systems analysis, and computer simulations, pushed qualitative social scientific research to the margins. Speier remained committed to considering politics, culture, psychology, and emotions in making sense of human behavior, and he developed his own Cold War political game that simulated real-life behavior in international politics. It was used by the Kennedy Administration to simulate the Second Berlin Crisis.

Bessner writes about his subject with sympathy and insight. It is only in his conclusion that he questions Speier's political choices. He does quote Noam Chomsky bemoaning scholars who worked uncritically for the military-intellectual complex as being unable to fulfill their intellectual duty to speak truth to power—a left-wing critique that had run out of the steam by the late 1970s. Preferring rather to address those currently engaged as defense intellectuals, Bessner emphasizes the need for expert accountability. Taking a position orthogonal to that of his subject, he insists that public accountability is the only way to ensure that expert governance functions effectively: Speier believed it would have had just the opposite effect. Democracy is still in exile today, writes Bessner, and it can only be revitalized if "Americans were to develop means by which experts were morally and professionally sanctioned for poor advice" (p. 231). Bessner challenges us thus...