Daniel Bessner’s new book is a biography of Hans Speier (1905–1990), an émigré scholar who established himself as a prominent “defense intellectual” and played an important role in creating the “military-intellectual complex.” Speier enrolled at the University of Heidelberg in 1926 and became the first graduate student of Karl Mannheim, a founder of the sociology of knowledge. Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia (1929) “profoundly influenced Speier’s opinion, which he held throughout his life, that intellectuals were superior to other social groups” (p. 23). For Mannheim and Speier, because intellectuals were “free-floating”—that is, because they shared an acquired scientific ethos rather than a common socioeconomic background—they had a unique capacity for and duty of achieving a unifying “total perspective” that transcended the parochial perspectives of political parties.

Guided by this vision, Speier, a social democrat, committed himself in the waning years of the Weimer Republic to mass education in the interest of saving German democracy from partisan extremism and political fragmentation. In 1931 he joined the faculty of the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik, whose mission included workers’ education. To Speier’s dismay, he discovered that German workers were more responsive to the divisive propaganda of the communists and Nazis than to the rational, universalizing knowledge purveyed by social democratic intellectuals. This experience dimmed his esteem for the demos and reoriented his thought toward an elitist, procedural understanding of democracy. He continued to believe in the intellectuals’ responsibility to serve the public good, but he concluded that this responsibility was better discharged through advising policymakers than through educating the public.

The Hochschule’s strong ties to U.S. foundations helped many of its members find refuge in the United States and eased their assimilation into the American academy. Shortly after the Nazis fired him in the spring of 1933, Speier arrived in New York City as a founding member of the New School for Social Research’s “University in Exile.” Curiously, he did not reach out to the city’s famous intellectuals. His integration into American intellectual life was facilitated primarily by members of the University of Chicago’s social science division, who were attracted to the sociology of knowledge and valued Speier’s connection to Mannheim. Although he was not invited to teach there, in the mid-1930s Speier began tapping into and consolidating a network of University of Chicago–trained scholars. Offspring of the “Chicago School” of political science figured prominently in this network, including Harold Lasswell, Gabriel Almond, Alexander George, Nathan Leites, Leo Rosten, Bernard Brodie, and Ithiel de Sola Pool.

Aside from a shared interest in German sociology, the intellectual cement of this group consisted of distrust of ordinary citizens, “fear of ‘totalitarianism,’” and a strong commitment to “scholarly engagement with the state” (p. 47). The outbreak of World War II gave Speier and his Chicago allies the opportunity to put this commitment into practice. In 1942 he was appointed head of a Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service group that analyzed German propaganda, and in 1944–45 he directed the Office of War Information’s propaganda campaign against Nazi Germany. In 1946–47 he worked for the State Department in occupied Germany, and from 1948 to 1960 he was the founding head of the RAND Corporation’s social science division. Speier’s clout as a national security expert peaked in the early 1950s, when his division actively participated in psychological warfare operations in Korea, and he played a key role in the clandestine campaign to destabilize the communist regime in East Germany. In addition to RAND, Speier was instrumental in creating other key institutions of the military-intellectual complex, including MIT’s Center for International Studies and the Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

In all of these endeavors, either Speier’s Chicago friends worked directly for him or their careers intersected with his. By midcentury, “Speier and the Chicago social scientists became respected members of the first generation of defense intellectuals, . . . provid[ing] each other . . . with ideological support, employment, publication opportunities and access to government decision makers” (p. 47). More broadly, this story “captures a 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. To understand the rise of the defense intellectual, we must understand Hans Speier” (p. x).

Democracy in Exile is a good read. It is well written and meticulously researched. Bessner wisely sticks to the intellectual and political aspects of Speier’s career, avoiding speculative probes of his personality or excessive details of his personal life. The book usefully redresses two omissions in the literature on U.S. intellectual and Cold War history. First, it corrects a common perception that “the members of the Frankfurt School, along with Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss, are the paradigmatic representatives of the émigré generation” (p. 60). Bessner reminds us that a sizable number of European-born intellectuals, including, among others, Speier, Leites, Henry Kissinger, Paul Kecskemeti, Olaf Helmer, Oskar Morgenstern, and John von Neumann, aligned themselves closely with the existing order rather than critiquing it. Second, by shining a light on the social science division of the RAND Corporation, the book corrects an imbalance in the large literature on this massive think tank; this literature focuses almost entirely on the contributions of RAND’s natural scientists, mathematicians, and economists.

Although he produced a fine record of scholarly publications, Speier was a gifted institution builder and administrator more than an original thinker. Recommendations written by his Chicago friends praised his deep learning but “said little that was specific to Speier’s work” (p. 58). Why, then, should political scientists read this biography? Because it speaks to an issue that engenders heightened anxiety in the discipline today, especially in the international relations field: the policy (ir)relevance of academic scholarship. Surveys of IR scholars reveal widespread dissatisfaction with the limited influence of IR research on foreign policy outcomes. This dissatisfaction finds expression in repeated calls to bridge the widening “gap” between IR scholarship and policy practice. These calls implicitly compare the present to earlier eras when social scientists regularly revolved in and out of government and social scientific research presumably shaped policy decisions.

Speier’s biography usefully reminds us that this view of the past is exaggerated and that it glosses over significant pitfalls. First, Bessner’s account raises doubts about the degree of policy influence exercised by past scholars. While the book’s introductory chapter states that “in many instances” defense intellectuals “affected” or “impacted” U.S. foreign policy (p. 10), a careful reading of the substantive chapters reveals a more modest assessment. Even when his access to decision makers was at its peak, Speier’s advice often “echoed [policymakers] own opinions.” He only “exerted his influence in an ad-hoc manner that ultimately relied on decision makers’ largesse.” When the interest of government officials in psychological warfare “waned after the failure of the East German uprising of June 1953, so did Speier’s influence” (pp. 157–58). This modest appraisal of the influence of experts is congruent with the conclusions of other recent studies of defense intellectuals, notably Bruce Kuklick’s Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger (2006).

Second, Democracy in Exile reminds us that expert policy advice must not be automatically equated with wisdom or even success: “Since 1945 the history of the United States in the world has repeatedly revealed that experts often support disastrous policies, such as those implemented during the Vietnam War and Iraq War” (p. 13). The architects of the “disastrous” Iraq War prominently included Paul Wolfowitz, “who received a PhD in political science from the University of Chicago, where he was advised by Speier’s RAND colleague Albert Wohlstetter” (p. 231).

Finally, Speier’s career demonstrates that closeness to power is not costless. Much of the research produced by Speier and his colleagues was conducted in secrecy; it was subjected to neither external peer review nor congressional oversight. He was remarkably unreflective about how such practices putatively compromised the core academic and civic values of freedom, transparency, and public accountability. Current advocates of “bridging the gap” should consider the putative costs of the theory–practice bridge as much as its benefits.