Democracy in Exile

Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual (The United States in the World)

By: Daniel Bessner

Narrated by: Eric Burgher

Length: 11 hrs and 21 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

The book is published by Cornell University Press. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks.

"Highly recommended." (Bruce Kuklick, University of Pennsylvania)

"A pioneering study of Hans Speier and his milieu." (Samuel Moyn, Yale University)

"A fascinating and deeply researched account of Hans Speier’s rise as leading researcher at the RAND Corporation...." (Mary L. Dudziak, author of War-Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences)

©2018 Cornell University (P)2022 Redwood Audiobooks

Excellent historical work on the defense intellectual and history of social science

Bessner presented an empirically rich, theoretically well-rounded account of the rise of the “defense intellectual complex” through his “intellectual biography” of Hans Spier. Using Spier as a wedge, Bessner takes very interesting forays into the history of German intellectual exiles in the United States, the history of social science, and the history of diplomacy and propaganda. Bessner supported his claims with rich archival detail from foundation records to personal correspondence. The chapters on Spier’s time at RAND and his consultation with the Ford Foundation were placed in thoughtful context by the background on his education and intellectual lineage in Germany.

I thought the prose was excellent (if somewhat repetitive in the way academic press chapters sometimes are written, since they are sometimes read stand-alone) and the reading was also very good.