Sacrificing Our Cherished Values: Hans Speier, the Public, and Foreign Policymaking from Weimar to Washington
Daniel Bessner, Kenan Gradate Fellow, will be speaking April 1st as part of the Monday Seminar Series from 12:00 – 1:30 in room 101, West Duke Building.
Bessner will examine the rise of the defense intellectual, analyzing the process by which liberal German and American academics re-envisioned their social role in the wake of the Weimar Republic’s collapse. This phenomenon will be traced through Hans Speier, Karl Mannheim’s first doctoral student, a founder of the New School for Social Research’s University in Exile, and, during the Cold War, the first chief of the RAND Corporation’s Social Science Division and a consultant for the State Department and executive branch. Speier’s career reveals that, in the course of re-imagining their social function, intellectuals jettisoned the public from democratic theory and practice. This dismissal encouraged the proliferation of certain types of organizations, including think tanks and academic research centers, that sought to insulate defense intellectuals from political pressures while removing the public from the policymaking process.
Bessner is a historian of the twentieth-century United States in global perspective, with a focus on Central Europe. His dissertation is entitled,The Night Watchman: Hans Speier and the Making of the American National Security State, which is a cultural history of foreign policy and a social history of political thought. Daniel has published on a variety of topics related to the history of the Cold War and German exiles in America.
Bradley Simpson, Assistant Professor of History and International Studies at Princeton University, will be giving two talks cosponsored by Duke History, the Asian/Pacific Studies Institute, the Center for International Studies, International and Comparative Studies, Borderwork(s) at the Franklin Humanities Institute, and the Duke Center for Human Rights at KIE.