Mandarins, Guns and Money: Academics and the Cold War

Mark Mazower

"For something happened in the cold war, something that ultimately benefited neither scholarship nor government. Huge sums of money were suddenly poured into the universities. Those with knowledge to offer were not necessarily those to whom policy-makers listened. The social scientists who got the grants offered technical advice that simplified the world and made it governable, using behavioral science or mathematical economics as their models. They turned human affairs into data sets, cultural patterns into forms of behavioral response, and they replaced the messy multiplicity of words and tongues with the universal and quantifiable language of science. This was not so much a military-industrial complex as a governmental-academic one. With the collapse of modernization theory, international relations offered itself as a new way of understanding the world. But world affairs continued to be seen as a problem to be managed, and the view adopted was almost always that from Washington. The rise of the think tanks made a bad problem worse, because as they adopted ever more partisan identities--and as American politics became more polarized--so academics reified the idea of value-neutral science and banished any explicit consideration of politics from their treatment of the world. Alternative approaches--dependency theory, underdevelopment, Marxism--found their niche in the American academy but rarely in mainstream politics departments.

Can social scientists these days do anything like the harm Walt Rostow inflicted? The short answer is yes. What of the Stanford political scientist turned policy-maker who has tried applying the lessons she mistakenly derived from the Soviet collapse to the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein? Condoleezza Rice is only the most obvious case, and the country's continuing love affair with technical expertise guarantees a receptive audience for applied social science. Last year the National Research Council recommended that the Pentagon double the research funding for the behavioral and social sciences; scholars are already helping to build computer-simulated models to predict insurgencies in Iraq and identify "the root causes of terrorism." Professor Pool's heirs march on"