Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual

The United States in the World

by Daniel Bessner

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 �migr�s, 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.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, Biography, American History, The United States Of America, War

312 pages, Hardcover

Published April 15, 2018

Reviews

[Prasan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Daniel Bessner’s biography of the life of Hans Speier is clearly an academic text, but offers valuable insight into the nature of the way foreign policy is conducted today. Expert-directed foreign policy is a relatively modern phenomenon, yet it has come to so dominate Washington thinking that we never imagine that there was once an alternate (more democratic) approach to the field.

Speier comes of age in Weimar Germany, in a period characterized by democratic fragility. He starts out as a rebellious democratic socialist, a member of the SPD, one of the first Marxist parties in the world. In 1929, he receives his doctorate in sociology, and becomes a professor at Deutsche Hochschule für Politik. He also participates in the task of worker education for the SPD, still being under the belief that the work of an intellectual is to train the working class in order to help build a successful and inclusive democratic socialism.

However, as the Nazi party starts gaining popularity in Germany, Speier begins to lose his faith in the ability of the ordinary people to sustain democracy. In 1933, after his wife is dismissed from her nursing position for being Jewish, Speier emigrates to the United States with his family, and soon finds employment at the New School with a cadre of German emigres.

When the United States enters World War 2, Speier is hired by the government to interpret and combat Nazi propaganda. He is extremely skilled at this new role, and begins to gain prominence among the intellectual class that advises government. It is here that Speier finally takes the stance that democratic values can and must be put on hold, at least temporarily, when democracy is itself threatened. Speier also begins to identify the United States as critical to the cause of democracy worldwide, and starts to believe that the defense of America is always justified, regardless of the means used.

After the war is over, Speier attempts to return to academia, but having had a taste of real power, finds the experience less than satisfying. Before long, he is roped back into the defense-intellectual complex, becoming the Director of Social Science at the RAND corporation — in a position where he can directly advise people in power, thus directly being in a position to influence policy. By this time, Speier has largely abandoned the educationist position, and no longer believes that ordinary people are capable of making wise decisions about which policies to pursue.

After the Soviets get the bomb in 1949, Speier, along with other defense intellectuals, once again sees an existential threat for democracy. However, this time, the threat is clearly seen as long-term, as no direct conflict is possible between two nuclear powers. Yet, the suppression of democratic procedures, and the increased reliance on experts operating under secrecy is championed by Speier and his cohort of intellectuals — thus, Speier’s transformation from a democratic socialist to a full blown Cold Warrior is complete. Many others in this cohort are also prominent exiles, most notably Zbigniew Brzezinski & Henry Kissinger — having seen totalitarianism firsthand, many of the exiles have an amplified perception of the totalitarian threat, and a corresponding blindspot for the violence perpetuated by US empire.

The remainder of the book focuses on Speier’s later career, including his role as anticommunist propagandist in East Germany, and internal disputes between social scientists on the relative importance of quantitative studies.

While the book is rather slow reading at times, the insights gleaned from reading it are rather important. Firstly, a large number of the people we now think of as irredeemably evil neoconservatives were at one point in time among the more optimistic utopian thinkers in their societies — humans are shaped to a large degree by the experiences they have had, and it is important not to base the entirety of our policy based on the very worst experiences of a subset of people. Secondly, the way threats are framed is very important — recklessly overestimating the threat coming from societies that are different from us tends to lead us to both overreact, and to be blind to the violence that we commit ourselves as a matter of routine. In a time when even progressive Democrats in the United States frame the potential conflicts in the world as a simple matter of “the good guys” versus the international authoritarian axis of evil, reading Bessner’s book is a valuable reminder of why that approach is ultimately likely to be very destructive.

In summary, this is likely to be a useful read if you are interested in the way foreign policy is shaped today, and the reasons for why it is so. Otherwise, it is a little overly detailed and academic for the casual history buff.

[Nils · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most momentous intellectual episodes of the 20th century was the mass immigration of intellectuals fleeing fascism in central Europe to the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. On the one hand, Germany, which had been the epicenter of North Atlantic Wissenschaft (in fields from philosophy to physics) and possessed the greatest research universities in the world, imploded intellectually in ways that 85 years later it has yet to fully recover from. On the other hand, the recipient of the large majority of these fleeing intellectuals was United States, was equally remade from a provincial and largely intellectual outpost in North Atlantic intellectual life, into the intellectual superpower it remains today.

This intellectual migration has been a major subject of intellectual histories since the 1970s, when the field was really formed around Martin Jay’s Dialectical Imagination (1973), which focused on the Frankfurt School, and Jay’s dissertation advisor H. Stuart Hughes’s more expansive but today largely forgotten Sea Change: The Migration of Social Thought 1930-1965 (1975). Following the lead of Jay and Hughes, much of the initial historiography on this migration focused on mostly Jewish and mostly leftist intellectuals, from physicists like Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe and Emilio Segrè to philosophers like Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt and Erich Fromm.

Over the last decade or so, however, a broader picture of the migration has emerged, focusing on other categories of intellectuals with distinctly different ideologies, from Friedrich von Hayek and Peter Drucker to Ayn Rand and Mircea Eliade. The emerging awareness of this more center-right or even nakedly rightwing dimension of the intellectual migration has also been accompanied by a growing appreciation that in many cases the impacts of these “other” intellectual migrants was in arenas other than academic life, above all in practical areas such as business or policymaking. For every Einstein, Marcuse, or Arendt, there was a Werner von Braun, a Ludwig von Mises, and a Henry Kissinger. Intellectual tastes aside, with what confidence can we claim that the influence of the former has ultimately been greater than that of the latter?

Into this enriched historiographic landscape arrives Daniel Bessner’s excellent new book, Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual. Before I read Bessner’s book in manuscript, I was only dimly aware of Hans Speier, knowing him mainly as one of the intellectual stalwarts at the RAND Corporation during its heyday during the Cold War. I knew next to nothing of his background, and was unaware of his influence within RAND, where his reputation has been overshadowed by the likes of strategists like Albert Wohlstetter and Herman Kahn, on the one hand, and economists like Kenneth Arrow, Robert Aumann, Edmund Phelps, and Herbert Simon (Nobel Prize winners all), on the other.

Bessner’s choice of Speier, however, turns out to be inspired not only because he has been un unfairly neglected figure in terms of the institutional development of RAND, one of the most protean and generative sites in postwar American intellectual life, but also because his intellectual biography is perfectly designed to both illustrate and explode the binaries that have come to structure the field of transatlantic intellectual migration studies.

The basic question Bessner asks is how an idea which until recently had long been taken for granted – that social scientists should have a voice in foreign policymaking – came to be institutionalized. Put another way, where did an expert-based foreign policy come from?

The rise of the Nazis was the key event in Speier’s life. It turned him away from a social democratic, republic faith in the people, toward the view that the people “could neither trusted nor educated to make correct political decisions.” Speier and his cohort had no doubt that their intellectual methods gave them a unique purchase on both truth and judgment. “His experiences witnessing ordinary people vote and fight for Hitler persuaded him that political extremism could be oversome only if democracy became rule for the people, whose interests were determined by expert-influenced elites.”

Speier occupied a position of intense institutional influence: the head of the Social Sciences division at the country’s most prominent (or, from the point of view of the emergent New Left, notorious) think tank, the RAND Corporation. This institutional perch afforded him with access to the highly levels of access to national security secrets and to very high-level policy makers, at least during his initial decade at the Corporation. While he went back to the academia (the New School) after WWII, he found himself less excited analyzing and writing about foreign policy than by the prospect of actually shaping policy.

Think tanks became RAND became a place where an intellectual could imagine himself as a “free-floating intellectual” in Mannheim’s sense, while at the same time having an unapologetically political purpose. There is now a significant scholarly literature on the history of think tanks in general, policy intellectuals specifically, and the RAND Corporation in particular.


“By shaping RAND’s Social Sciences Division, Speier helped institutionalize a system that empowered non-elected experts to influence policy without popular oversight.” “Fears regarding democracy’s weaknesses in the face of perceived existential threats drove a generation of transatlantic generation of scholars to leave the groves of academe to create institutions that provided them with access to the corridors of power.” “Speier recognize that policies made without reference to public opinion suffer a democratic deficit. On the other hand, he understood that, as Walter Lippmann argued in the 1920s, most people have neither the time, nor knowledge, nor inclination to consider policy decisions fully.”

The key shift took place with the burgeoning of the Cold War, particularly once the Soviets acquired the bomb and the stakes of any future war seemed to be not just national security but indeed the existential survival of the species. The sense of permanent crisis justified a permanent state of emergency, which in turn became the grounds for a permanent tutelary relationship between the experts who deemed themselves uniquely capable of managing the emergency, and their charges, the population at large. At the same time, the institutionalization of the secret national security state itself reinforced the sense of permanent crisis, making paranoia the governing logic of governance. “Speier never considered the possibility that the logic of crisis could itself become a conceptual resource that decision makers could misemploy or exaggerate, either consciously or unconsciously.”

Speier and many liberal intellectuals in his generation generalized from the experience of Weimar that any democracy faced with an extremist threat faced potential collapse. Just as 1938 has become the neocon’s eternal rallying cry, so was 1933 was the eternally significant political event for Speier and his compadres. Unlike the modernization theorists, almost all of whom were American-born, the central European emigres were simply too pessimistic (or cynical) to be confident in the capacity of development aid to produced stable democracy.

In Weimar, Speier had retained the faith that the working classes was capable of Enlightement, and that the role of intellectuals was to provide the working classes with an enlightening education; in America he came to the view that intellectuals should primarily be government advisors if not direct decision-makers. “Speier’s trajectory explains how a person who genuinely considered himself a democrat came to endorse a pessimistic theory of politics that supported a culture of classification and secrecy that promoted the institutionalization of expert governance largely impervious to public oversight.” Bessner describes this as “ahistorical cynicism,” though after 2016, it’s hard for residents of Anglophone North Atlantic democracies not have some grudging sympathies with this view.

Military-industrial complex intellectuals like Speier were the betes noires of a certain species of post-New Left scholarship, which excoriated such men as the abettors of American empire and anti-radical oppression. Bessner suggests that his book belongs “to a new historiographical movement that takes a more nuanced and sympathetic, if still critical, of these figures’ motivations and contributions.”

Speier was clearly mugged by the reality of the Nazi takeover, and according the Bessner, took away four key general lessons: first, that democracy was an inherently weak institutional form that could fall prey to radical threats; second, that he and other socialist intellectuals had been naïve to believe that the masses could be educated to political wisdom; third, that Marxism was theoretically irrelevant, and that anyone who still believed in it was either naïve, or downright pernicious if they were actually communists; and finally, that democracy needed to be redefined not in terms of substantive economic, cultural, and political equality, but rather as a “vague, negative image of authoritarianism.”

Speier was a founding member of the Mannheimkreis that gathered around Karl Mannheim. Reinterpreting the traditionally conservative German idea of Bildung, Mannheim had argued that intellectuals necessarily made better political choices than members of any other social group, and that they were uniquely capable of speaking for the totality of society, which made their decision making actually compatible with democracy.

Bessner’s work fits with other recent monographs tracking a set of ideas moving from central Europe to the United States amid the crucible of the European Götterdämmerung. In contrast to much of the first generation of literature on the European intellectual migration, which focused on the impact of intellectuals working in natural sciences (especially physics) or on “left” ideas (such as the Frankfurt School), much of the more recent literature has focused on more conservative thinkers, and has demonstrated that their impact was not just intellectual but very practical. Speier would become an important figure in importing Mannheim to the United States as an intellectual figure whose thinking could be posed as grand theoretical alternative to the Marxist tradition.

When Speier arrived in New York in the late 1930s, he connected with a cohort of liberals interested in rethinking how democracy was supposed to work in an era of totalitarian ideologies, demagogic politics, mass media-driven propaganda, and putatively credulous masses. He was initially part of the circle of the Frankfurt School exiles and other center-to-left German speaking intellectuals in and around the New School for Social Research, but soon explicitly repudiated them as political defeatists in favor of a group of Americans that included political scientists Gabriel Almond, communications theorist Harold Lasswell, and sociologist Edward Shils – all of whom would go on to towering academic careers in during the postwar period as foundational modernization theorists.

Unlike many of the hitherto better-known intellectual emigrees, Speier found the transition into U.S. intellectual circles relatively easy, which Bessner speculates may have had do with the fact that he was a Protestant and not a Jew, in a time when genteel anti-semitism was still pervasive. Another factor was Speier’s personal connection to Karl Mannheim: although by the late 1930s Speier had turned against Mannheim for what he considered the latter’s relativism, “[Louis] Wirth, Lasswell, Almond, Shils, and [Robert] Merton wanted to be associated with Speier not because of his own scholarship but because he provided them with a link to Mannheim specifically, German sociology generally, and, at the broadest level, a progressive German intellectual tradition they profoundly respected.” As a general matter, one of the great accomplishments of this book is its archival reconstruction of an important transatlantic network of intellectuals who all were educated and connected to one another during in the interwar years, and who went on to form the heart of the intellectual-policymaking revolution in the postwar period.

The book is also studded with wonderful nuggets, such as this stunningly contemporary passage from a review Speier wrote in 1938 of Grete di Francesco’s Die Macht des Charlatans: "The boldness of the exploiter has its counterpart in the insecurity of the exploited, and the disappointment of the victims, which is eventually inevitable, causes the constant insecurity of the charlatan himself…. It is this insecurity which, to my mind, not only increases the boldness of the charlatan but also constitutes the ultimate affinity between him and his prey. As long as his followers are not yet disillusioned they create the atmosphere in which trickeries prosper, and by producing legends which increase the charlatan’s fame they become effective agents of his propaganda. Thus, it may perhaps be said that the public of the charlatan consists of passive charlatans."

Speier’s understanding of the political role of intellectuals followed a particular interpretation of Weber, namely, as Bessner puts it, to “present several courses of action and their potential outcomes to a policymaker, who, having accepted responsibility (Verantwortung) for his or her decision, could heed or ignore the intellectual’s counsel.” Unlike many left intellectuals during this same Cold War period, Speier throughout his career “displayed little reticence about using his knowledge in the service of the American state. His trust in the state reflected the lingering influence of German Staatswissenschaft on his thought.”

“In the debate between Dewey and Lippmann about the ability of public opinion to serve as a bellwether for decision makers in democracy, Speier ultimately sided with Lippmann, who argued that public opinion could not be used as a policy guide…. To defend democracy in an epoch of war, Speier and many of his colleagues affirmed, the United States needed to become more authoritarian.” (72) He agreed with Lippmann that “ordinary people were too ignorant and disinterested [sic] to make astute political choices and therefore elites had the right and duty to manipulate them, at least during moments of crisis.” “By World War II’s eruption, Speier promoted a new type of democratic consciousness premised on the idea that during moments of crisis, elites must limit democracy in order to save it.” This created “an intellectual space within which he and other elites could legitimately employ antidemocratic means whenever they diagnosed a crisis.” During the 1930s, Speier had assumed that the confrontation with fascism was a unique moment, and indeed immediately after the war, in 1946-47, Speier did not promote the manipulation of either the German or the American people via propaganda.

With the arrival of a nuclear-armed Soviet adversary during the Cold War, however, the crisis in effect became permanent, and thus Speier’s intellectual framework provided the basis for legitimating permanent and ongoing elite manipulation of the democratic process. “The Cold War necessitated permanent mobilization and vigilance, in which responsible elites, headquartered at organizations like RAND, ignored democratic norms in order to guarantee that the United States survived a long-term battle with an unscrupulous enemy. With this argument, Speier transformed his earlier, time-limited moment of crisis into an indefinite era of crisis, in which previously extraordinary measures became permanently normalized.” As such, Speier, who in 1932 had written a “cautiously admiring” review of Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political (for the Frankfurt School’s house organ, no less), was now tacitly endorsing the Schmittian idea of the “state of exception,” though without ever acknowledging it as such.

Specifically, this manipulation of the democratic process would take the form of propaganda. That Speier had served as one of the leading U.S. analysts of Nazi propaganda would provide him with the tools for reverse-engineering how propaganda techniques might (paradoxically) be deployed to defend democracy. [Of course, as Fred Turner has shown, however, the propaganda techniques that the US government ultimately deployed were not simply mirror images of fascism’s mass rallies and blaring movies, but in fact took the form of new kinds of collective events that were intended to promote a powerful experience of American democracy in action. A more thorough account of American Cold War propaganda techniques would assess the relative influences of these different ideas of how to manipulate the masses in the name of democracy.]

“RAND represented the culmination of a decades-old project to insulate experts from public opinion and to furnish a home for intellectuals dedicated to using knowledge for the state’s service.” Speier “assumed that U.S. global leadership was the only means by which to ensure that Enlightenment ideals he cherished would survive in a hostile world.” RAND was also much more diverse than the elite universities of the day, with researchers including people with working class, immigrant, and Jewish backgrounds – though with very few African-Americans or women. His goal at RAND was to ensure that that this echt meritocratic elite would be the “primary drivers” of U.S. foreign policies, insulated from democratic accountability. To put it in contemporary parlance, Speier’s mission was to build what today’s American populist right refers to as “the Deep State,” that is, a meritocratic community of experts determining policies above the heads of the misinformed and disinformed hoi polloi.

Like many a mugged former socialist, Speier had by this time evolved into a realist of a somewhat tragic sensibility: war was a fact of human existence, and the question was how to prevent war. For him, the position at RAND afforded him an opportunity to influence questions of war to ensure that it would be rarer, more rational, and more humane. It’s worth noting that taking the job at RAND was a bit of a career gamble for Speier, since it was at the time a relatively unknown entity, and the idea of a policy think tank based on the West Coast (at a time when transcontinental jets were still not available) seemed well more than a bit peculiar.


Of course, as Bessner acknowledges, Speier was head of the Social Sciences Division, a group that would exercise far less influence than the more renowned Economics division. While the Economics division would eventually play host to more than a dozen future Nobel Laureates, and serve as the hothouse for the development of enormously influential game theory and rational choice models of decision-making, the Social Sciences division never achieved anything close to the same impact. Indeed, the only real policy outcome that Bessner claims Speier significantly influenced was Eisenhower’s decision in 1953 to eschew the right’s preferred policy of “rollback” against communism, in favor of the more cautious decision to continue Truman’s containment policy. Part of what ultimately limited Speier’s influence, as Bessner explains, was his commitment to mixed quantitative and qualitative methods, in any environment in which a perfervid commitment to mathematical modeling was increasingly the dominant ethos. A rivalry emerged in particularly with the legendary nuclear theorist Hermann Kahn, who typified the “view held by many RAND analysts: the social sciences were not really sciences but rather were inchoate and unproved opinions as facts.