Numerous contemporary commentators have observed that there is a gap that might accurately be described as an estrangement between academic social scientists and policy-makersâespecially those charged with national security policy. Indeed, some scholars have asserted that the gap between the two worlds is growing wider.1 Consequently, there are frequent calls for social scientists to become more involved with policy communities by conducting research of greater practical application. Robert Putnamâs 2002 presidential address to the American Political Science Association that urged political scientists to have a greater public presence is but one example of such calls.2 This issue concerning the academic/policy divide is, of course, a subset of the larger questions concerning the nature of the relationship between knowledge and power, theory and practice, and ideas and action. While there is compelling logic for encouraging efforts to bridge this gap, we need to recognize the problematic nature of doing so. We might best accomplish this by examining the emergence of the symbiotic relationship that grew up between policy-makers and social scientists in the early days of the Cold War and tracing the impact of this relationship. Indeed, even as that symbiotic relationship was forged, it generated controversy leading to congressional hearings like those convened in the aftermath of diplomatic fallout associated with âProject Camelot.â3 Yet, for a variety of reasons, including the changes in the strategic environment after World War II, the influence of social scientists on national security policy grew, and the early Cold War has been characterized as the heyday for such an influence.
The problematic nature of the close relationship between social science and policy-makers is well demonstrated through an examination of two social science frameworks that came to be reflected in national security policy in that era. The two conceptual frameworks that will be discussed in detail in subsequent chapters are deterrence/coercion theory and modernization theory.4 The incorporation of these two frameworks in policy offers a cautionary tale concerning potential hazards of drawing directly on social science for national security policy. Indeed, David Easton once likened political science to medieval medical practices and raised the question of whether its use in policy might do more harm than good.5 Both frameworks, as we shall see, can be implicated in the strategy that the United States used in its prosecution of the war in Vietnam. At the same time that the story of the incorporation of deterrence and modernization theory into policy provides a warning to policy-makers, it should stand as a sobering reminder to scholars of the limits to their theory and the potential hazards to the discipline of abandoning older approaches and terminology in the interest of scholarly innovation.
But before we can describe the aspect of each framework and their respective association to policy, we need to provide some background concerning the evolution of ties between social scientists and policy-makers to show how both groups would, for their own reasons, become attracted to a scientific approach for a US grand strategy. While this book includes a variety of disciplines under the general category of âsocial science,â we do recognize a difference among the disciplines in terms of their receptivity to the generalizing potential of âscience.â We can therefore distinguish between anthropology and history with their greater tendency to contextualize their analysis in specific circumstances and the more universalizing discipline of economics. Perhaps political science and sociology might be viewed appropriately as splitting the difference and containing research strands reflecting each tendency, and therefore were more prone to reflect what I have labeled a conflicted identity.6
To begin with, the development of any ties between social scientists and policy-makers needed to overcome the fact that each group inhabited different professional environments requiring different organizational cultures to perform their respective tasks. Academic social scientists tend to pursue knowledge for its own sake to enhance their disciplines. Such analytical work means abstraction is a virtue that may require long time horizons to complete. Moreover, because collaboration is not required, research can easily be conducted within a horizontal organizational structure. In addition, the task of furthering disciplinary knowledge demands specialization that often results in jargon-laden analysis that can, at times, remain unintelligible to outsiders. Indeed, so acute is the communication problem that one scholar writing in the 1960s, those halcyon days of collaboration between social scientists and policy-makers, observed that the social sciences âhave come to make almost a fetish of non-communication.â7
For their part, the tasks of policy-makers provide a stark contrast to that of the social scientists. Concrete practical problems are frequently time-sensitive requiring action that must reconcile competing interests, thereby sacrificing the âbestâ solution for one that is feasible. In such cases, as Carol Weiss expressed the point, âPolitical rationality may eclipse scientific rationality.â8 What is more, the work of policy-makers must take place within a hierarchical organization with clear lines of authority and responsibility. Given this cultural disparity between social scientists and policy-makers, it is not surprising that when Franklin Roosevelt sought to incorporate social scientists in his âbrain trust,â they were caricatured in cartoons of the day as cross-eyed professors with their academic robes askew.9
That the specialized nature of academic social science would necessarily provide knowledge that was remote from the needs of policy-makers was even recognized by men who straddled the policy and academic divide in the 1960s when social science enjoyed its greatest influence on policy. For example, McGeorge Bundy expressed criticism of scholarship that was not useful for statesmanship or diplomacy and suggested that there was âperhaps too much, analysis aimed at scholarly rigor and scientific validity.â10 Paul Nitze echoed similar criticism when he noted that most of what had been written under the heading of political science since World War II âhas been contrary to experience and common sense. It has also been of limited value, if not counterproductive as a guide to the actual conduct of policy.â11 Indeed, even such an established discipline as economics, which had proven its value in addressing the problems of the Great Depression so that it became institutionalized in the Council of Economic Advisors, suffers from a concern that its specialized knowledge may be of decreasing relevance to policy. In one survey conducted by the American Economic Association, nearly two-thirds of graduate-level economic professors considered their profession too unrelated to the real world.12 A stronger note of caution concerning social science as a basis for policy was expressed by Paul Johnson, who asserted that both Hitler and Stalin had relied on the âinexact sciencesâ of economics, sociology and psychology to construct âthe juggernaut of social engineering which had crushed beneath it so much wealth and so many lives.â13
Yet, despite such reservations concerning the value of social sciences for policy, they did come to play an important conceptual, shaping role during the early stages of the Cold War. Before describing the processes and factors that enabled the social sciences to play such a role, we must delve into some earlier history of the disciplines that helped set the conditions for their rise to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s. The starting point of this history recognizes that, relative to the natural sciences, the social sciences are fairly young disciplines, for their emergence required a detachment that became possible only when the ecclesiastical authority and the traditional belief that supported it had weakened.14 One convenient way to mark their emergence is through the founding of their professional associations. Economics and psychology formed their professional associations at the end of the nineteenth century (American Economic Association, 1885; American Psychological Association, 1892), while anthropology, political science and sociology founded theirs in the early twentieth century (American Anthropological Association, 1902; American Political Science Association, 1903; and the American Sociological Society, 1905).15 Moreover, in the nineteenth century, the various disciplines did not even conceive of themselves as related. For instance, psychology and anthropology felt a closer connection to biology, and political science saw itself as more closely allied to history and law.16
Given this relatively recent origin, it is not surprising that systematic efforts by policy-makers to use knowledge derived from the social sciences would only emerge in the twentieth century. For example, the establishment of the Bureau of the Census in 1902 created a place for social scientists to serve in the government. As such, the solidification of the social sciences corresponds roughly with the Progressive Era (1900â1918) that was characterized by various reform efforts that aimed to eliminate government corruption, regulate business practices and improve the health and working conditions for the common man. As we shall see, this Progressive Era heritage helped to lay the foundation for what may be termed a conflicted identity in the social sciences and created some tension between the normative concerns for reform and a grounding in objective and normatively neutral science.
Under the influence of Progressive Era notions, the US government took its first tentative steps toward incorporating specialized knowledge into government policy. These initial efforts focused on using the natural sciences with the creation of the National Research Council in 1915 by President Wilson to coordinate the scientific work of academia, industry and government. Although the coordination focused more on the natural sciences, under the exigencies of World War I, the Council also provided assistance to the military in...