Rigor Over Relevance: The Professionalization of Political Science and the Marginalization of Security Studies1 Michael Desch Professor and Chair, Department of Political Science University of Notre Dame [Second Draft – September 2013]

I. Introduction.

Columbia political scientist Robert Jervis observes that at one time “there were significant links between theory and U.S. policy.” 2 One of the most influential civilian academic strategic theorists,

Harvard Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling, agrees that “there was a wholly unprecedented ‘demand’ for the results of theoretical work: scholars had an audience and scholars had access to classified information. Unlike any other country … the United States had a government permeable not only to academic ideas but by academic people, especially under Democratic Party administrations.”3 But today, there is a broad consensus that the gap between scholars and policymakers has widened in recent years, particularly in the realm of national security affairs.4 The bridge between the Ivory Tower and the Beltway has become a one-way street, and an increasingly rickety one at that!

1 I am grateful for comments on this project to participants in seminars at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, the Buffet Center for International Studies at Northwestern University, the Security Studies Program at MIT, the Lone Star National Security Forum (Texas A&M, University of Texas Austin, and Southern Methodist), the University of Virginia’s International Security Colloquium, and The Program on International Security Policy (PISP) at the University of Chicago; for the generous financial support of the Earhart and Lounsbery Foundations and the Carnegie Corporation of New York; and especially for extensive discussions on the topic with John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, and especially Stephen Van Evera. 2 Jervis, “Security Studies: Ideas, Policy, and Politics,”101. Also see, Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983), 336. 3 Thomas Schelling, “Academics, Decision Makers, and Security Policy During the Cold War: A Comment on Jervis” in Edward D. Mansfield and Richard Sisson, eds. The Evolution of Political Knowledge (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2004), 137, 4 Alexander L. George, Bridging the Gap: Theory and Practice in Foreign Policy (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace, 1993); Phillip Zelikow, “Foreign Policy Engineering: From Theory to Practice and Back Again,” International Security, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Spring 1984): 143-71; Joseph Kruzel, “Review: More of a Chasm Than a Gap, But Do Scholars Want to Bridge It?” Mershon International Studies Review, Vol. 38, No. 1 (1994): 179-81; Joseph Lepgold, “Is Anyone Listening? International Relations theory and the Problem of Policy Relevance,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 113, No. 1 (1998): 43-62; Peter D. Feaver, “The Theory-Policy Gap in Political Science and Nuclear Proliferation,” National Security Studies Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Summer 1999): 69-82; Joseph Lepgold and Miroslav Nincic, Beyond the Ivory Tower: International Relations Theory and the Issue of Policy Relevance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Bruce Jentleson, “The Need for Praxis: Bringing Policy Relevance Back In,”

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This development is puzzling in many respects: It flies, for example, in the face of a wide-spread and long-standing optimism about the compatibility of social science and policy relevance that traces its origin back to the Progressive Era and the dawn of modern American social science.5 As historian Barry

Karl remarks apropos of Charles Merriam, one of the founders of the modern discipline of political science, he “was an American activist of his generation before he was a political scientist; it was his reason for becoming a political scientist. He saw no conflict between activism and science. Indeed, he saw science as the essential precondition of useful activism.”6 Unfortunately, Merriam’s students did not share his dual commitment to balance the requirements of science with the exigencies of reform.

Moreover, while not all scholars and policymakers agree that the two sides of this yawning Beltway-

Ivory Tower chasm have had, or could have, much useful to say to each other in the realm of national security affairs, 7 the vast majority do. Former Ambassador David Newsom, for example, thinks that of all the various groups in American society that could shape U.S. foreign policy, “the free realm of academia – the 3,638 institutions of higher education and the persons associated with them – should have the most knowledge and insight to offer policymakers.”8 MIT Professor and long-term U.S.

Government consultant Ithiel de Sola Pool argues that training in the social sciences constitutes a useful

International Security, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Spring 2002): 169-83; Walt, “The Relationship Between Theory and Policy in International Relations,” 23-48; Kenneth Lieberthal, “Initiatives to Bridge the Gap,” Asia Policy, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2006): 7-15; Nye, “International Relations: The Relevance of Theory to Practice,” The Oxford Handbook of International Relations. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 648- 60; and Bruce W. Jentleson and Ely Ratner, “Bridging the Beltway-Ivory Tower Gap,” International Studies Review, Vol. 13, No. 1 (March 2011): 6-11. 5 See, for example, Gene M. Lyons and Louis Morton, Schools for Strategy: Education and Research in National Security Affairs (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1965), 4 and 69; and Ellen Herman, “The Career of Cold War Psychology,” Radical History Review Vol. 63, (Fall 1995): 62. 6 Barry D. Karl, Charles E. Merriam and the Study of Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1974), x. 7 Skeptics include Paul Nitze, “The Role of the Learned Man in Government,” Review of Politics, Vol. 20, No. 3 (July 1958): 275-88; Ezra F. Vogel, “Some reflections on Policy and Academics,” Asia Policy, Vol. 1 (2006): 31-34; Allen S. Whiting, “The Scholar and the Policymaker,” World Politics, vol. 24, (Spring 1972): 229-47; Marc Trachtenberg, “Social Scientists and National Security Policymaking,” (Unpublished paper for Notre Dame International security Program Conference, April 23, 2010); Stephen Krasner, “Garbage Cans and Policy Streams: How Academic Research Might Affect Foreign Policy,” Power, the State, and Sovereignty: Essays on International Relations, 254- 74; and Ernest J. Wilson, III “Is There Really a Scholar-Practitioner Gap? An Institutional Analysis,” PS: Political Science and Politics, 40, (January 2007) 147-51. 8 David D. Newsome, “Foreign Policy and Academia,” Foreign Policy, No. 10 (Winter, 1995-96): 52.

2 tool for policymakers. 9 Nuclear strategist Bernard Brodie famously advocates making strategy into a

“science,” and commends academic social science as the means to do it.10

But despite this general optimism, and the best of intentions among both scholars and policy- makers, “the relationship between the federal government and the social sciences generally and historically, while substantial in scope, has not been altogether harmonious.” 11 According to the most recent Teaching and Research in International Politics (TRIP) survey, a regular poll of international relations scholars, very few of them believe they should not contribute to policy-making in some way.

And yet, the majority of them also recognize that the state-of-the-art methodologies of academic social science constitute precisely those approaches that policymakers find least helpful.12 A recent related poll of senior national security decision-makers confirms that for the most part academic social science is not giving them what they need.13

In this essay, I want to explain this disconnect between our discipline’s self-image as balancing rigor with relevance and the reality of how we actually conduct our scholarship most of the time, which is to privilege the former, by answering the question of what explains variation in social scientists’ willingness to engage in policy-relevant scholarship over time? An answer to this question requires me to provide a more general theory explaining when and why academic social scientists have tried to influenced U.S. national security policy.

9 Ithiel de Sola Pool, “The Necessity for Social Scientists Doing Research for Governments,” Background, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Aug., 1966),” in Irving Louis Horowitz ed., The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 1967), 267. 10 Bernard Brodie, “Strategy As a Science,” World Politics, Vol. 1, No. 4 (July 1949): 467-88. 11 Advisory Committee on the Management of Behavioral Science Research in the Department of Defense, Behavioral and Social Research in the Department of Defense: A Framework for Management (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1971), 2. 12 Paul C. Avey, Michael C. Desch, Daniel Maliniak, James D. Long, Susan Peterson, and Michael J. Tierney, “The Beltway vs. the Ivory Tower: Why academics and policymakers don't get along.” Foreign Policy (JAN/FEB 2012) at http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/01/03/the_beltway_vs_the_ivory_tower. 13 Paul C. Avey and Michael C. Desch, “What Do Policymakers Want From Us? Results of a Survey of Current and Former Senior National Security Decision-makers,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 4 (December 2014): [forthcoming].

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My theory, in a nutshell, is that social science, at least as it has been practiced in the United

States since the early 20th Century, contains two contradictory impulses: To be a rigorous science and a relevant social enterprise. There are obvious tensions between these two objectives, however: First, as we shall see, historically the most useful policy-relevant social science work in the area of national security affairs has often proven to be interdisciplinary in nature, and this cuts against vested disciplinary interests in the academy. Second, there are also widely recognized tensions between

“basic” and “applied” research more generally, which not surprisingly manifest themselves in the social sciences as well.14 During wartime, the tensions between these two impulses have been generally muted; in peacetime, they reemerge and there are a variety of powerful institutional incentives within academe to resolve them in favor of rigor rather than relevance.

For short-hand, I will refer to the tendency among many American social scientists to frame and orient their work around internal, disciplinary criteria and agendas, and ignore the relevance of their scholarship for addressing broader societal concerns, government policy needs, or the concerns of people in the “real world” more generally as the “Cult of the Irrelevant.” MIT’s Stephen Van Evera first coined the phrase, but other scholars such as New York University’s Lawrence Mead characterize the same phenomena as the “the New Scholasticism,” Yale’s Ian Shapiro refers to it as “the flight from reality, and Chicago’s John Mearsheimer laments that the academy has become a “self-enclosed world.”15

14 Lyons and Morton, Schools for Strategy, 7 and 298-99. Also see the discussion of the tensions between basic and applied national security research in the natural sciences in Chalmers W. Sherwin and Raymond Isenson, “Project Hindsight,” Science [New Series] Vol. 156, No. 3782 (June 23, 1967): 1571-77. 15 Stephen Van Evera, “Director’s Statement: Trends in Political Science and the Future of Security Studies,” MIT Security Studies Program Annual Report, 2009-2010 (Cambridge: MIT, 2010), 4-9 and Lawrence M. Mead, “Scholasticism in Political Science,” Perspectives on Politics Vol. 8, No. 2 (June 2010): 453-64. On this trend, see also Ian Shapiro, The Flight From Reality in the Human Sciences (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 178 and 212; and John Mearsheimer, “A Self-Enclosed World?” in Ian Shapiro, Rogers M. Smith, and Tarek E. Masoud, eds., Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press), 388-394.

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Their common concern is that the development of a social science exclusively guided by internal research agendas and assessed by self-generated metrics of excellence is not likely to encourage members of the guild to speak to external audiences nor gauge success by broader relevance criteria.16

This general pattern, I show, is evident in the changing relationship between the academic social sciences and the policy world. But tracing and explaining the changing influence of social science upon policymakers is too large an undertaking for one book. So I propose to look at the changing nature of one social science discipline -- political science – and its subfield security studies as a window into this larger problem. My objective is to show how these trends in political science are marginalizing the sub- field of security studies, which has historically sought to maintain a balance between scholarly rigor and real-world relevance.

Political science and national security affairs are excellent cases for a variety of reasons. First, while national security studies has been an inter- and multi-disciplinary enterprise for much of this period, “political scientists have been the most receptive to national security studies,” in Gene Lyons’ and Louis Morton’s estimation, “both because international relations has developed as a major field within the discipline and because of the political scientist’s concern with the impact of national security measures on democratic institutions.”17 While, the place of security studies in political science over the years has been uncertain, it has been even more “tenuous” and “precarious” in other disciplines such as history, sociology, or economics.18 Lyons and Morton explain that “it is more difficult to develop a program of national security studies … where the institutional character is dominated by the traditional social sciences” and so it is not surprising that this would be particularly the case in economics given its

“generally theoretical and empirical orientation.”19 They worry about the possibility that “a pattern of

16 For discussion of this generic problem, see Aaron Wildavsky, “The Self-Evaluating Organization,” The Public Administration Review Vol. 32, No. 5 (Sep.-Oct. 1972): 509-20. 17 Lyons and Morton, Schools for Strategy, 51 and 302. 18 Lyons and Morton, Schools for Strategy, 8, 52, and 55. 19 Lyons and Morton, Schools for Strategy, 68 and 128.

5 professional development similar to that in economics and sociology will develop in the study of politics, as the behavioral aspects of the discipline strengthen” with similarly deleterious results for national security studies.20 That is precisely what we have seen in recent years.

Second, national security affairs was not only one of the earliest and most sustained efforts to bring social science to bear upon policy matters, it was also a leader in the development and early application of some of the most sophisticated social science tools and techniques such as operations research, systems analysis, econometrics, and game theory. 21 Some political scientists today argue that if security studies would only more vigorously embrace cutting edge methodologies it will be better integrated into the discipline of political science.22 In my view, this argument gets things exactly backwards: Security studies embraced cutting-edge social science methods early on, significantly contributed to their development, but soon discovered their limitations, well-before the rest of the discipline. It is precisely the effort of some political scientists to push an exclusively method-driven, rather than a problem-oriented, approach to security studies that is at the root of the theory/policy gap today, in my view.

Finally, there are methodological reasons for choosing these cases: They offer variation over this period of time in terms of both the causes (threat environment and professionalization) and also the consequences (the engagement or disengagement of scholars with national security affairs).23

An answer to this question of when and under what conditions academic social science is willing to engage policy issues matters for four reasons: First, there is some debate about whether and if academic social science has really affected U.S. national security policy. Highlighting the difference

20 Lyons and Morton, Schools for Strategy, 72-73. 21 Stephen M. Walt, “The Renaissance of Security Studies,” International Studies Quarterly Vol. 35, No. 2 (June 1991): 212. 22 Lisa L. Martin, “The Contributions of Rational Choice: A Defense of Pluralism,” International Security, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Fall 1999): 76. 23 Robert Jervis, “Security Studies: Ideas, Policy, and Politics” in Edward D. Mansfield and Richard Sisson, eds. The Evolution of Political Knowledge (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2004), 121.

6 between U.S. nuclear declaratory policy (in which civilian defense intellectuals apparently had influence) and actual operational doctrine and war plans (where they did not), historian Bruce Kuklick presents the most sustained critique of the conventional wisdom that it did. According to his account, “the men who actually made decisions were least concerned with scientific ideas of any sort” and he concludes that the ideas of strategists had “little causal impact,” save as ex post facto rationalizations for policymakers’ decisions. In his view, “none of the critical aspects of decision making had much to do with the prevalent model of American social science – ‘whispering in the ear of princes’ – the middle-range generalizations supposedly necessary to benign policy and learned in a Ph.D. course.”24

This debate about the extent of the influence of academic social scientists calls for further historical investigation to ascertain, in the words of a National Research Council study, whether there is any “relationship between basic [social science] research … and programmatically useful results.25 Or to quote Aaron Wildavsky, “the real question … is whether disciplined intuition (meaning theorizing) has something to offer the untutored kind.”26 Answering this question definitively will be challenging, in part, due to the secrecy surrounding national security decision-making secrecy but also as a result of the more general challenges of tracing the influence of ideas – the currency of academics -- on policy outcomes.27 My sense is that academic social scientists did have some influence upon national security

24 Bruce Kuklick, Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 6, 15-16, 143-44, 150, 223-30. Also see, Francis J. Gavin, Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America’s Atomic Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 4 and Christina Boswell, The Political Uses of Expert Knowledge: Immigration Policy and Social Research (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 12. 25 Advisory Committee on the Management of Behavioral Science Research in the Department of Defense, Division of Behavioral Sciences, National Research Council, Behavioral and Social Research in the Department of Defense: A Framework for Management (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1971), xii. 26 Aaron Wildavsky, “Practical Consequences of the Theoretical Study of Defense Policy,” Public Administration Review Vol. 25, No. 1 (March 1965): 93. Also see Robert Packenham, “Social Science and Public Policy” in Sidney Verba, and Lucian W. Pye, eds., The Citizen and Politics: A Comparative Perspective. (Stamford, CT: Greylock Publishers, 1978), 237-57. 27 Peter A. Hall, “Introduction” in Hall, ed., The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism Across Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 3-4. Also see Jeffrey W. Legro, “The Transformation of Policy Ideas,” American Journal of Political Science Vol. 44, No. 3 (July 2000): 419-32; Emanuel Adler and Peter M. Hass, “Conclusion: Epistemic Communities, World Order, and the Creation of a Reflective Research Program,”

7 policy but that the so-called “Golden Age” of strategy (1945 to 1961 according to Schelling) of their influence was both earlier and shorter than we have generally recognized. 28 My hunch is that the changing security environment and disciplinary dynamics explain this.

Second, despite doubts about when and how academic social science influences national security policy, there is nevertheless a lot of time and money devoted to trying to connect these two realms, both inside and outside the Beltway. Given that, it would be worthwhile to figure out how to ensure that these resources are well-spent.29 I am also inspired in this effort by C.P. Snow’s incisive limning of the “two cultures” of science and literature and his related concern that a new cultural divide between academic social science and policy is emerging, with similarly deleterious consequences for both.30

Third, there are good reasons for thinking that more policy-relevant social science would contribute to better policy: The advantages scholars bring to these discussions include the protections of tenure, the generally positive benefits of peer review, a lack of bureaucratic vested interest in particularly programs or weapons systems, a longer-term perspective they have compared with most elected officials in our democratic political system, and the deeper level of expertise in many issues they develop. There are historical examples that bolster these claims: The most insightful work on the impact of nuclear weapons on international relations was done by academics like Yale’s Bernard Brodie.

The most telling critique of U.S. intervention in Vietnam came from the University of Chicago’s Hans

Morgenthau.

International Organization Vol. 46, No. 1 (Winter 1992): 367-90; and especially John W. Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies [Second ed.] (New York: Longman, 2003), 2-3. 28 Thomas Schelling, “Bernard Brodie (1910-1978),” International Security Vol. 3, No. 3 (Winter 1978-1979): 2. 29 Boswell, The Political Uses of Expert Knowledge, 7.; “Report Says Social Sciences Can Help Avoid Policy Goofs,” Science, Vol. 165, No. 3893 (August 8, 1969): 574; and Cornelia Dean, “Groups Call for Scientists to Engage the Body Politic,” The New York Times August 8, 2011 at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/09/since/09emily.html. 30 C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures: and a Second Look (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 11.

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Finally, there is growing evidence that the relationship between practical problems and basic science is reciprocal. Rather than the findings of the former trickling down to the latter, a growing number of historians of science have shown that the solution of practical problems at least as often contributes to theoretical advances.31 Given that, policy engagement ought to be viewed not so much as an avocation for social scientists but rather as a core component of the social scientific enterprise.

In the next section, I lay out my theory of the Cult of the Irrelevant, the variation in the willingness of social sciences such as political science to engage in policy relevant scholarship. Briefly, I argue that wartime fosters integration between academia and government mirroring its more general effects on society. Initially, there is optimism among social scientists about the compatibility of scientific rigor and concrete relevance. But there are also tensions between those two objectives which peacetime allows to re-emerge. One important source of these tensions is the internal dynamics within the social sciences themselves, which foster an inward and self-referential focus in how we do “science.”

In the following section, I trace this general pattern across American history in the Twentieth

Century, showing that war and peace correlate with the general pattern I anticipate and then showing how the disciplinary dynamics within the social sciences contribute to the process my theory proposes, leading to the slighting of relevance in favor of rigor.

I conclude with some recommendations for how to reestablish a better balance between rigor and relevance in our discipline.

II. A Theory of the Cult of the Irrelevant in Social Science

This section lays out my theory of the rise of the “Cult of the Irrelevant” in the social sciences. It first presents the logic undergirding my claim that mobilization for war has, as one of its effects, the bringing together of academics and policymakers on a whole host of issues relevant to national security.

31 Donald E. Stokes, Pasteur’s Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation (Washington, DC: Brookings, 1997). Also see Robert N. Proctor, Value-Free Science: Purity and Power in Modern Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 224.

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I then outline the logics of three organizational explanations for the peacetime retreat from policy relevance among social scientists: The dynamics of “normal science,” a traditional organizational interest argument, and an argument based upon institutional identity. I then provide evidence that the

Cult is having the outcome I anticipate: A retreat from relevance among social scientists. Next, I show that it is having this effect through a number of specific causal mechanisms associated with these three explanations. I then illustrate this process with an account of how political science became dominated by the methods (statistics) and approaches (modeling) of Economics. I argue that this process explains the marginalization of policy-relevant work in that discipline in recent years.

War Builds the Bridges Between the Ivory Tower and the Beltway …

My argument about the waxing and waning of policy relevance among the social sciences has two elements to it: An organizational/institutional set of dynamics within the disciplines themselves and a structural dynamic between the disciplines and the policy realm. On the former, there is, in Sociologist

Thomas Gieryn’s view, “in science, an unyielding tension between basic and applied research, and between the empirical and theoretical aspects of inquiry.”32 As we shall see, this tension is reflected in the social sciences as well. When it became manifest, it was increasingly resolved in favor of scientific rigor over practical relevance. In terms of the latter, I argue that war or the threat of intense and prolonged security competition helps to dampen the tensions within academic social science between pursuing exclusively disciplinary agendas and remaining relevant to broader societal concerns. 33 In the absence of these conditions, I anticipate that a series of organizational and institutional factors within the disciplines will lead them to eschew broader relevance and embrace a largely inward, self-defined intellectual focus.

32 Thomas F. Gieryn, “Boundary Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists,” The American Sociological Review Vol. 48, No. ? (December 1983): 787. 33 The logic of the dynamics of the two sets of factors interacting is similar to the argument Barry R. Posen makes about the role of threats and bureaucratic politics in shaping military doctrine. See his The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany Between the War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 37 and 80.

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The structural part of my argument begins with the substantial literature on the effect of war on the state and domestic politics.34 One common effect of war is to unify the state and most elements of society.35 Gene Lyons explains that “war is a moment which compresses time and illuminates needs that less dramatic environments obscure or never force to the surface. War involves the entire society and gives central government new powers, for the exercise of which it needs new sources of information and expertise.”36 There are two specific mechanisms that operate in such an environment:

First, the need for wartime expertise leads the Government to look toward academia for both natural and social science expertise. Second, a common sense of threat fosters a rally around the flag effect and increased patriotic sentiment which affects even the academy, making scholars more amenable to balance disciplinary rigor with broader relevance. In the rest of this section, I show how the peacetime dynamics within academic social science frequently lead to a disengagement with policy, what I refer to for short-hand as the Cult of the Irrelevant.

… And Peace Weakens Them As Disciplinary Dynamics Come to the Fore

What explains the peacetime rise of the Cult of the Irrelevant in the social sciences? While a variety of different factors play some role in it, 37 I focus on the process of “normal science” and the

34 The classic statement of the dependence of political order on war and military mobilization is Otto Hintze, “Military Organization and the Organization of the State” in Felix Gilbert, ed. The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 178-215. My own view is laid out in “War and Strong States, Peace and Weak States?” International Organization, Vol. 50, No. 2 (Spring 1996): 237-68. See also, inter alia, Bruce D. Porter, War and the Rise of the State: The Military Foundations of Modern Politics (New York: The Free Press, 1994); Geoffrey Perret, A Country Made by War: From the Revolution to Vietnam – the Story of America’s Rise to Power New York: Vintage, 1989); and Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). 35 Carol Gruber, Mars and Minerva: World War I and the Uses of Higher Learning in America (Baton Rogue, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1975), 5. 36 Gene M. Lyons, The Uneasy Partnership: Social Science and the Federal Government in the Twentieth Century (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1969), 27. 37 Edward Shils, “Social Science and Social Policy,” Philosophy of Science Vol. XVI (1949): 219-221, attributes the decreasing interest of social science in policy to four factors: 1) Liberalism’s desire to “depoliticize” large segments of human life; 2) the increasing dominance of Economics, which focuses on the role of an “autonomous market;” 3) the growing disciplinary specialization of universities; and 4) an emerging consensus on the definition of science that drew a sharp distinction from policy, in much the same way that natural scientists distinguished themselves from engineers.

11 impact of institutional dynamics – both vested interests and institutional self-image -- within the academy as one of the major causes of the decreasing policy relevance of many of the social sciences, especially political science. Organizational interest explains why the social sciences tend to isolate themselves from the rest of society and the culture of “science” accounts for the particular way in which they do so.38

The first logic for the decreasing relevance of political science flows from the dynamics of the scholarly enterprise itself. Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn observes that growing specialization is the engine of progress in normal science: “By focusing attention upon a small range of relatively esoteric problems, the paradigm forces the scientist to investigate some part of nature in a detail and depth that would otherwise be unimaginable.”39 Burton Clark confirms that “intense specialization characterizes the modern campus; academic man has moved from general to specific knowledge.”40 The reason that this approach to the development of science is inevitable is that, given the limits of individual human cognition, it is only through an intellectual division of labor that science can progress.41 The French sociologist Emile Durkheim famously argued that the division of labor was a fundamental fact of modern life, including in science, because it was an efficient way to divide up tasks.42

However, scientific progress, in Kuhn’s view, also comes at the cost of narrower and narrower specialization and the increasing isolation of the various specialties from each other and from society as

38 The Humanities have also experienced a similar trend as well. The source of this impulse is the largely the same: Institutional vested interest. The particular direction it has taken, however, is different, reflecting different ideas about the appropriate scholarly approach in those disciplines. For discussion of intellectual trends within the Humanities, see David Lehman, Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (New York: Poseidon, 1991). 39 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [2nd ed.] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 21 and 24. 40 Clark, “Organizational Adaptations of Professionals” 285. 41 Gordon Tullock, “Economic Imperialism” in James M. Buchanan, ed., Theory of Public Choice: Political Applications of Economics (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 319. Also see G.H. Theodor Eimer, “Specialization in Science,” Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 32, No. ? (November 1887): 1 at http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Popular_Science_Monthly/Volume_32/November_1887/Specialization_in_Science 42 Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, Lewis Coser, intro., (New York: Free Press, 1984), 2, 23, 79, 293- 94 and 306.

12 a whole. As Friedrich Nietzsche colorfully puts it, “a specialist in science gets to resemble nothing so much as a factory workman who spends his whole life in turning one particular screw or handle on a certain instrument or machine, at which occupation he acquires the most consummate skill.”43

This process of the development of modern science makes it less directly applicable to concrete problems.44 As political theorist Rogers Smith observes, the result in the social sciences is that “often the only question that could be answered at what was taken to be the highest level of scholarly rigor were relatively narrow, technical aspects of the big questions with which I thought we ought to be concerned – so the discipline ended up saying very little of substance about those big questions.”45

Striking a decidedly Weberian note, Thomas Bender maintains that “the academic disciplines in America have been astonishingly successful in producing new knowledge,” but then goes on to lament that “their almost complete hegemony in our intellectual life has left Americans with an impoverished public culture and little means for critical discussion of general ideas, as opposed to scientific or scholarly expertise.”46 In process similar to that through which Weber thought that the ethos of modern rationalism would usher in the “iron cage” of modern bureaucracy, I argue that the process of normal science has fostered an intellectual “Cult of the Irrelevant.”47

Second, traditional theories of organizational behavior would attribute the decreasing relevance of academic social science to the fact that universities, like most other complex organizations, seek

43Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Future of Our Education Institutions” at https://webspace.utexas.edu/hcleaver/www/330T/350kPEENietzscheFutureTableAll.pdf, 11. 44 Robert Multhauf, “The Scientist and the ‘Improver’ of Technology,” Technology and Culture Vol. 1 No. 1 (winter 1959): 43. 45 Rogers Smith, “Public Sphere Forum” at http://publicsphere.ssrc.org/smith-political-science-and-the-public sphere/ 46 Thomas Bender, Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 46. 47 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 181-83. For discussion of Weber’s attribution of this dynamic to universities see Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics: 1890-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 444.

13 autonomy, the reduction of uncertainty, and more resources.48 When these goals conflict, organizations almost always prefer the first. Indeed, a sense of distinctiveness increases as the organization becomes more professionalized. One of the hallmarks of professionalism, as Samuel Huntington points out, is

“corporateness,” which he defines as “a sense of organic unity and consciousness of themselves as a group apart from laymen.”49 The professional incentives professors increasingly face lead them write for each other and pursue disciplinary agendas, rather than write more accessibly and address issues of broader import.50 Disciplinary organizational interest encourages scholars to use language and other modes of discourse which are inaccessible to the laity.51 Doing so makes it possible to maximize autonomy by making the university more distinct from, and hence independent of, the rest of society.52

Sophisticated social science methods (modeling and statistics) can be an ideal barrier to entry for the non-professional because they take considerable investment in time and effort to understand.

Disciplines like political science, which deal with issues that are not otherwise inherently difficult to engage for educated laypersons, are even more susceptible to the Cult of the Irrelevant because they

48 For evidence that universities behave in typical bureaucratic fashion, see Burton R. Clark, “Organizational Adaptations of Professionals” in Howard M. Vollmer, ed. Professionalization (Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1966), 283-91. 49 Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1957), 8 and 10. 50 Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Academic Culture in the Age of academe (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1987), 6. 51Clark, “Organizational Adaptations of Professionals” 285-86. For a similar sentiment, see Noam Chomsky, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” in Theodore Roszak, ed. The Dissenting Academy (New York: Pantheon, 1968), 271. 52 For compelling arguments about how the process of academic disciplinary professionalization was spurred by concerns about ensuring the autonomy of the university faculty see Talcott Parsons, “The Academic System: A Sociologist’s View,” The Public Interest No. 13 (Fall 19688): 173-97 and Bender, Intellect and Public Life, 60.-61. The classic discussion of “organizational processes” is Anthony Downs, Inside Bureaucracy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), which was originally commissioned by the RAND Corporation. Also see Graham T. Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 67-100. For a discussion of “particularism” in complex organizations, see Charles Perrow, Complex Organizations: A Critical Essay [2nd ed.] (New York: Random House, 1979), 13. Applying these arguments in security affairs are Morton Halperin, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy (Washington, DC: Brookings, 1974); Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine, 41-57; Jack Snyder, The Ideology of the Offensive: Military Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 24-34; and Stephen Van Evera, “The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins of the First World War,” International Security, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Summer 1984): 58-107.

14 need to construct higher barriers to entry. One does not have to be as cynical as George Bernard Shaw, who famously quipped that “’All professions are conspiracies against the laity,’” to believe that the growing Cult of the Irrelevant in the social sciences is fostered, in part, by disciplinary vested interests.53

A reinforcing set of arguments involve “sunk costs” and the resulting “law of the instrument” mentality which lead many scholars who invest a considerable amount of intellectual capital in learning these sophisticated techniques to feel the need to amortize this investment by either choosing only questions amenable to them or forcing questions which are not into that template. 54 The deleterious consequences of this are not only felt within the disciplines but also affect their relationship with the rest of society.

While the professionalization of a discipline, and its increasing irrelevance to concrete policy issues is neither logically nor historically inevitable, there nonetheless seems to be an elective affinity between these two trends. Indeed, for much of the Twentieth Century, the effort to make the social sciences – including political science – both more scientific and more applicable to policy seemed to go hand-in-hand. But despite the discipline’s desire to have its cake (be relevant) and eat it too (be highly rigorous), John Gunnell’s history of the American Political Science Association concludes that “a considerable body of scholarship and opinion suggests that the practical and often reformist motives that animated early American social science foundered as a consequence of conservative tendencies in professionalization.”55 My explanation for this is that professional incentives overwhelmingly encourage attention to scholarly rigor over practical relevance.56

53 Quoted in Michael A. Bernstein, A Perilous Progress: Economists and Public Purpose in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 7. A compelling logical argument for this sort of group behavior is presented in Mancur Olson The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 41-47. 54 Stokes, Pasteur’s Quadrant, 171, fn. 31. 55 John G. Gunnell, “The Founding of the American Political science Association: Discipline, Profession, Political Theory, and Politics,” The American Political Science Review Vol. 100, No. 4 (November 2006): 479. Also see Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (New York: Norton, 2010), 15 on the inherently organizationally conservative nature of universities. 56 Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas, 103.

15

Finally, a somewhat different, but complementary, organizational interest explanation for the growing Cult of the Irrelevant in academic social science focuses upon how disciplines define

“excellence” and the incentives the individual members of the discipline have to adopt similar approaches to each other. As Gieryn points out, “it is no mere academic matter to decide who is doing science and who is not.”57

If one wants to be a “good” social scientist, one emulates the approaches and practices of the leading scholars, institutions, and disciplines. Such homogenization is a rational response to competition with other organizations for status and legitimacy.58 As Harold Wilensky further explains,

“in modern societies, where science enjoys extraordinary prestige, occupations which shine with its light are in a good position to achieve professional authority.”59 Of course, one of the hall-marks of science is its ability to measure causes and effects precisely, especially in mathematical terms.60

Another component of our modern image of science is the distinction between civic and disciplinary professionalism. Modern science’s image of itself was formed in the Victorian era, during which it battled with two competing views of how to understand the world: religion and mechanics. The battle with religion (the revelatory approach to knowledge) was won handily but mechanics (the practical, inductive approach to knowledge) proved less easy to supplant. In order to distinguish itself from mechanics, proponents of science embraced the following assumptions: That basic science is the foundation for practical knowledge. That science, unlike mechanics, relies upon systematic method

57 Gieryn, “Boundary Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science,” 781. 58 Paul DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organization Fields,” American sociological Review, Vol. 48, No. 2 (April 1983): 147-60. For a related argument, see John W. Meyer and Brian Rowan, “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony,” The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 83, No. 2 (September 1977): 340-63 59 Harold L. Wilensky, “The Professionalization of Everyone?” The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 70, No. 2 (September 1964): 138. Also see, Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, Louis Menand, intro., (New York: New York Review of Books, 1990), 182. 60 Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, 339.

16 rather than trial and error. That science is theoretical. And that scientific knowledge can be an end in and of itself. 61

The core of this distinction between science and mechanics manifested itself subsequently in the distinction between “basic” and “applied” research: Basic research refers to knowledge for its own sake while applied research involves finding solutions to specific problems. Ideally, the pursuit of basic research eventually produces applied knowledge via a “trickle down” process.62 Such an assumption about the relationship between basic and primary research reinforces the inclination of most scientists to do basic research without worrying too much about whether it was also practically relevant. 63 The general trend since the establishment of the graduate research university and the professionalization of the social science disciplines in the late XIXth and early XXth Century has been, with the marked exception of wartime, a marked disengagement with practical affairs.64 As the late Donald Stokes puts it, “in academic research circles … the ideal of pure inquiry still burns brightly.”65

The problem, however, is that, as Stokes also shows, the “annuals of research so often record scientific advances simultaneously driven by the quest for understanding and considerations of use that one is increasingly led to ask how it came to be so widely believed that these goals are inevitably in tension and that the categories of basic and applied research are so radically separate.”66 In other words, it is not clear that the preferred scientific paradigm in which there is a harmonious division of labor between basic science and useful application operates in practice.

Consequences

61 Gieryn, “Boundary Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science,” 786-87. 62 Warner R. Schilling, “Scientists, Foreign Policy, and Politics,” The American Political Science Review Vol. 56, No. 2 (June 1962) : 295. 63 Schilling, “Scientists, Foreign Policy, and Politics,” 294. 64 Bender, Intellect and Public Life, 5-6 and 131. 65 Stokes, Pasteur’s Quadrant, 135 66 Stokes, Pasteur’s Quadrant, 24.

17

Most contemporary political scientists would probably agree with Jon Bond’s optimistic conclusion that “normal science is not a bad thing.”67 This sanguine view, however, ignores some serious problems with it. For example, slavish imitation of the hard sciences assumes that their methods and approaches are optimal for addressing the questions or problems in the social sciences, which often is not the case.68 Moreover, scientific technique becomes less a means to pursue research based on its intrinsic importance more a way to simply demonstrate scientific commitment or defend academic turf.

Indeed, in many of the modern social sciences, “method” has become the defining feature of their claim to being a “science.”69 As Kuhn explains, “normal research, which is cumulative, owes its success to the ability of scientists regularly to select problems that can be solved with conceptual and instrumental techniques close to those already in existence.”70 Unfortunately, “the study of politics is now dominated by the belief that the main objective – acquiring scientific knowledge about politics – depends upon the adoption and refinement of specific techniques and that to be qualified or certified as a political scientists is tantamount to possessing prescribed techniques, ” Sheldon Wolin complains. 71

The result, as social theorist Jürgen Habermas concludes, is that modern social scientists “achieved the rigor of their theory at the cost of access to praxis.”72

Moreover, as the social sciences increasingly emphasized their “scientific” character, they became more isolated from the rest of society. “Science is a technique and the more it develops,”

67 Jon R. Bond, “The Scientification of the Study of Politics: Some Observations on the Behavioral Evolution in Political Science,” The Journal of Politics Vol. 69, No. 4 (November 2007):905. 68 For a critique of this trend from a surprising quarter, see Kevin A. Clarke and David M. Primo, “Overcoming ‘Physics Envy,’” The New York Times, March 30, 2012 at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/opinion/sunday/the-social-sciences-physics-envy.html?_r=0. 69 Bond, “The Scientification of the Study of Politics,” 897. 70 Joseph Lepgold and Miroslav Nincic, Beyond the Ivory Tower: International Relations Theory and the Issue of Policy Relevance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 14-15. 71 Sheldon Wolin, “Political Theory as a Vocation,” The American Political Science Review Vol. 63, No. 4 (December 1969): 1063. Also see Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 9 and Bond, “The Scientification of the Study of Politics,” 897-907. 72 Jürgen Habermas, Theory and Practice (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1973), 79. Also see, 254 and 280.

18 economist Joseph Schumpeter concedes, “the more completely does it pass out of the range of comprehension not only of the public but, minus his own chosen specialty, of the research worker himself.”73 That as a discipline professionalizes, it would become less accessible to those outside of it is no surprise.74 That it would be driven not only by the logic of scientific inquiry but also reinforced by organizational interest and intellectual culture certainly is. The net result is not only to foster a disconnect between the public and government, but many scientists are increasingly concerned that the fragmentation of knowledge now makes it difficult for even scholars in different disciplines to understand each other.75

Miguel Centeno posits that that an “ideology of method” has taken hold among the social sciences flowing from the belief that technique is the key to knowledge.76 But as political scientists

David Collier, Henry Brady and Jason Seawright warn, this “technification” of social science “can impose substantial costs. It can lead to replacing a simple and appropriate tool with an unnecessarily complex one. It can sometimes distance analysts from detailed knowledge of cases and contexts that is an invaluable underpinning for any inference, whether derived through complex research procedures or simpler tools. Technification can also devolve into a form of intellectual obscurantism in which research ceases to be driven by important substantive questions and interesting intellectual agendas.”77

73 Joseph A. Schumpeter, “Science and Ideology,” American Economic Review Vol. 39, No. 2 (March 1949): 346. 74 Eimer, “Specialization in Science,” 3. 75 See, for example, Laurent Lafforgue, “Does Basic Research Have Meaning: A Few Remarks by a Catholic Mathematician,” (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2011), 15, who laments that “the fragmentation of knowledge is nothing short of a tragedy for the University and for the research individually.” Also see, Jürgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971), 76. 76 Miguel Angel Centeno, “The New Leviathan: The Dynamics and Limits of Technocracy,” Theory and Society Vol. 22, No. 3 (June 1993): 312. 77 David Collier, Henry Brady and Jason Seawright, “Source of Leverage in Causal Inference: Toward An Alternative View of Methodology” in Henry E. Brady and David Collier, eds., Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 266.

19

The 1950s and 1960s witnessed the increasing “technification” or “scientification” of political science.78 In his 1969 American Political Science Association presidential address, David Easton describes “The New Revolution in Political Science” that he saw looming on the horizon which manifested a “deep dissatisfaction with political research and teaching, especially of the kind that is striving to convert the study of politics into a more rigorously scientific discipline modeled on the methodology of the natural sciences.” The crux of the revolutionaries’ rejection of “behavioral” political science was their conviction that it had grown increasingly irrelevant to the major political issues of the day.79 As Oran Young put it in a pointed critique of the rising behavioralism in international relations, “it is time for us to stop being fascinated with numbers for their own sake and to get on with the job of explaining important political phenomena.”80

Economic historian Michael Bernstein suggests that the process of academic peer review can contribute to “the homogenization of opinion” throughout the social sciences.81 An important mechanism for privileging of method and technique over substance in political science was the institution of peer review in the The American Political Science Review in the early 1960s.82 The result of this change in the APSR was, according to former editor Lee Sigelman, that “the emerging organizational model makes it more likely that a given paper will be selected for publication because it passes muster among a narrow range of specialists rather than because it is considered to be of potentially great

78 Jon R. Bond, “The Scientification of the Study of Politics: Some Observations on the Behavioral Evolution in Political Science,” The Journal of Politics, Vol. 69, No. 4 (November 2007): 897-907. 79 David Easton, “The New Revolution in Political Science,” The American Political Science Review Vol. 63, No. 4 (December 1969): 1051 and 1053. 80 Young, “Professor Russett: Industrious Tailor to a Naked Emperor,” 493. 81 Bernstein, A Perilous Progress, 122. 82 Samuel C. Patterson, Brian D. Ripley, and Barbara Trish, “The American Political Science Review: A Retrospective of the Last Year and the Last Eight Decades,” PS: Political Science and Politics, Vol. 21, No. 4 (Autumn 1988): 920; and Lee Sigelman, “The Coevolution of American Political Science and the American Political Science Review,” The American Political Science Review, Vol. 100, No. 4 (November 2006): 463, note 3.

20 interest and importance to a broad range of readers. Thus, the end product may be a wide array of narrower articles – greater diversity at the price of even greater fragmentation.”83

Simply by gaining control of professional activities such as peer review, a small group of scholars committed to a narrow definition of science has had a disproportionate influence on the development of the discipline.84 “If we look around us,” political theorist Leo Strauss elaborates, “we may observe that the political science profession contains a strong minority of the right, consisting of the strict adherents of the new political science or the ‘behavioralists,’ a small minority of the left, consisting of those who reject the new political science root and branch, and a center consisting of old-fashioned political scientists, men who are concerned with understanding political things without being much concerned with ‘methodological’ questions but many of whom seem to have given custody of their

‘methodological’ conscience to the strict adherents of the new political science and thus continue their old-fashioned practice with somewhat uneasy conscience.”85

The central problem with such methodologically driven research agendas in the social sciences is that they are growing increasingly narrow in focus, privilege technique over substance, and increasingly select for their audiences only other scholars. The result of this process of “normal science” therefore is a political science increasingly characterized by a narrow focus of research, a fetish of methodology, and an indifference to the real world in favor of an inward focus upon the concerns of the discipline. In other words, we are in the thrall of the Cult of the Irrelevant.86

83 Sigelman, “The Coevolution of American Political Science and the American Political Science Review,” 475 84 Theda Skocpol, “Doubly Engaged Social Science: The Promise of Comparative Historical Analysis” in Mahoney and Rueschemeyer, eds., Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 410. 85 Leo Strauss, “Epilogue” in Herbert J. Storing, ed., Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1962), 308. 86 For evidence that the discipline of Political Science is finally acknowledging that it has a problem, see Bruce E. Cain and Lynn Vavreck, “Keeping It Contemporary: Report to the American Political Science Association of the Ad Hoc Committee on Public Understanding of Political Science” (Washington, DC, APSA, circa 2012). The gestalt of this institutional response is very much on the order of contemporary political science has much to contribute to public debates but political scientists have failed to effectively communicate this. Other analysts argue that the problem is more fundamental to how the discipline sees itself. See, for example, Steven F. Hayward, “The

21

Evidence

What’s the evidence that the dynamics of the Cult of the Irrelevant explain the retreat from relevance among many political scientists?

Lawrence Mead complains that political science’s striving for rigor “has come at the expense of relevance to political problems and issues as nonacademics perceive them.”87 The evidence linking this to the professionalization of the discipline is that as more “scientific” (defined in terms of using quantitative or formal model approaches) articles were accepted by Political Science’s flagship journal, the policy relevance of published articles declined precipitously, as Figure 1 makes clear.88 Former APSR

Editor Sigelman admits that “by the early 1960s, prescription had almost entirely vanished from the

Review. If ‘speaking truth to power’ and contributing directly to public dialogue about the merits and demerits of various courses of action were still numbered among the functions of the profession, one would not have known it from leafing through its leading journal.”89 Figure 2 gets at this trend in a slightly different way, showing that the public visibility of presidents of the American Political Science

Association (APSA) has decreased over time, at least as measured by the number of times he or she appeared in the elite press.

Figure 1: Policy Relevant Articles in APSR (1906-2006)90

Irrelevance of Modern Political Science,” The American September 14, 2010 at http://www.american.com/archive/2010/september/the-irrelevance-of-modern-political-science. 87 Mead, “Scholasticism in Political Science,” 453-55. Also see, Shapiro, The Flight From Reality in the Human Sciences, 2, where he argues that this is a broader problem in the social sciences and the humanities. 88 Andrew Bennett and G. John Ikenberry, “The Review’s Evolving Relevance for U.S. Foreign Policy 1906–2006” The American Political Science Review Vol. 100, No. 4 (November 2006): 652, Table 2 which shows a drop from a high of about 25% of articles aspiring to near-term relevance in the early 1950s to less than 5% in the mid-1960s. 89 Sigelman, “The Coevolution of American Political Science and the American Political Science Review,” 467. 90 Sigelman, “The Coevolution of American Political Science and the American Political Science Review,” 466, Table 2, Column 2+3.

22

30 Pol_rel_APSR 25

20 20

15

Pol_rel_APSR 10

Policy_relevant_articles 10

5 0

0 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 1 2 3 4 5 6 Decade_beginning7 8 9 10

Figure 2: New York Times Index Citations to Current APSA Presidents

Mechanisms

If the Cult of the Irrelevant arises due to the increasing division of labor, as the “normal science” approach predicts, we ought to see evidence that political science is becoming narrower and more divided. One logic undergirding this mechanism is that as more scholars are now joining the ranks of academic political science (see Figure 3), the number of big questions that can be answered has

23 shrunk.91 Younger scholars are left with only smaller and narrower problems. One way the process of normal science contributes to the Cult of the Irrelevant is because this process of “drilling down” has a strong tendency to disconnect the research enterprise from theory, which is the means by which we connect particular phenomena to more general processes.92 But without an integrative theory to show when and how they fit together, small findings are of little use to policymakers.

Figure 3: The Explosion in the Number of Academic Political Scientists

The Growth in the Number of Academic Political Scientists 10000 8000 6000 ac_pols 4000 2000

1940 1960 1980 2000 2020 year Source: APSA Membership Directories

91 Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Academic Culture in the Age of academe (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1987), 14 reports that during the years in which the population of the United States increased by 50%, the number of professors increased by 1000%. 92 For discussion of the importance of combining empirical analysis with theory, see Bear F. Braumoller and Anne E. Sartori, “Empirical-Quantitative Approaches to the study of International Relations,” in Detlef Sprinz and Yael Wilinsky, eds., Models, Numbers, and Cases: Methods for Studying International Relations (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 129-51 which highlights the “fundamental Problem” of the widespread use of statistics with inadequate attention to the goal of testing theories of international behavior.” The classic critique in quantitative international relations remains Oran R. Young, “Professor Russett: Industrious Tailor to a Naked Emperor,” World Politics Vol. 21, No. 3 (April 1969): 486-511. For an updated critique, see John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, “Leaving Theory Behind: Why Hypothesis Testing Has Become Bad for IR,” European Journal of International Relations (forthcoming).

24

Moreover, as Figure 4 makes clear, the discipline has in fact become more divided and specialized as is evident from the explosion in the number of different sections and conference divisions within the American Political Science Association, the discipline’s most prestigious professional organization.

Figure 4: The Fragmentation of Political Science

Increasing Fragmentation of APSA Increases in Sections and Divisions

50

40

30

20

10

0 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 Year APSA sections Conf divisions Source: Mead (2010)

Another manifestation of the Cult of the Irrelevant in political science we should expect to see is the discipline’s growing professionalization. By that, I mean, it should be increasingly dominated by academics, as opposed to practitioners or individuals in other career tracks. As Figure 5 shows, the field, as measured by the demographic profile of the members of APSA, has indeed become overwhelmingly a tweed guild since 1948, largely at the expense of practitioners in government.

25

Figure 5: The “Academicization” of Political Science Since 194893

The Changing Membership Profile of APSA Academic and Government Member Trends by Percentage 1 .8 .6 .4 .2 0

1940 1960 1980 2000 2020 Year

acapc govtpc

Finally, if the organizational cultural theory of the Cult is correct, we ought to see political science emulating Economics, the most “scientific” of the social sciences. In fact, that is precisely the direction the discipline has moved. As Albert O. Hirshman points out, economists “have succeeded in occupying large portions of the neighboring disciplines while political scientists – whose inferiority complex vis-à-vis the tool rich economist is equaled only by that of the economist vis-à-vis the physicist

– have shown themselves quite eager to be colonized and have actively joined the invaders.”94 Many political scientists regard Economics as the epitome of social “science.” This view, however, rests on a narrow definition of science that assumes that it can only be expressed mathematically.95 It also is premised on the notion that the hall-mark of science is method (how you know something), rather than

93 Source: American Political Science Association membership directories for 1948, 1961, 1968, 1973, 2000, and 2011. 94 Albert O. Hirshman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 19. Also see, Tullock, “Economic Imperialism,” 325. 95 Making this argument is Martin, “The Contributions of Rational Choice,” 78.

26 the substance of what is learned. Finally, it is reinforced by another bureaucratic rationale: Failure while pursuing normal science is punished far less often than failure operating outside the reigning paradigm.

There have been two particular manifestations of the emulation of economics in political science in recent years. The first was the rise of expected utility and game theoretic approaches in the discipline. Like Economics, its wellspring, rational choice theory (RCT) is an approach to political behavior based upon the assumption of homogeneous utility maximizing individuals, who have consistent and transitive preferences about expected outcomes. Based upon those assumptions, RCT employs methods of formal analysis, most often game theory, to analyze these actors’ political behavior.96 Rational choice is also an intellectually imperialistic approach, seeking to displace other methods under the banner of “scientific progress.”97 For a time, it nearly succeeded when formal theory articles constituted almost 40% of those published in the APSR in the early 1990s.98

Political Scientists Donald Green’s and Ian Shapiro’s landmark book Pathologies of Rational

Choice highlights the irony of RCT’s ascendency given that its actual performance in explaining real- world behavior was modest at best.99 Asian Studies scholar Chalmers Johnson offers a particularly telling example of the lengths to which RCT proponents sometimes had to go to make reality correspond with their models, pointing to one influential application of RCT in Asia studies that maintained that

Chinese coolies voluntarily hired people to whip them so their colleagues would not shirk in pulling barges on the Yangtze.100 Despite less dubious efforts to address RCT’s empirical shortcomings, either by more systemically combining it with statistical testing (a movement referred to as the Empirical

96 Donald P. Green and Ian Shapiro, Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory: A Critique of applications in Political Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 14-17. 97 Jack Hirschleifer, “The Expanding Domain of Economics,” The American Economic Review, vol. 75, No. 6 (December 1985): 53-68; Tullock, “Economic Imperialism,” 317-29; and Kenneth E. Boulding, “Economics As A Moral Science,” The American Economic Review, Vol. 59, No. 1 (1969): 8, which holds up Anthony Downs “economic theory of democracy” as the poster child for economics imperialism in political science. 98 Green and Shapiro, Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory, 3. 99 Green and Shapiro, Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory, 180. 100 Chalmers Johnson and E.B. Keehn, “A Disaster in the Making: Rational Choice and Asian Studies,” The National Interest, No. 36 (Summer 1994): 14-22. In a similar vein, see Larry Diamond, “What Political Science Owes the World,” PS: Political Science and Politics, (2002): on-line special forum.

27

Implications of Theoretical Models)101 or through deeper historical and case study analysis (through the writing of Analytic Narratives),102 even formal theorists like Peter Ordeshook admit that, “Green and

Shapiro’s critique, although sometimes incomplete and inaccurate, nevertheless seems to me largely correct: the substantive relevance of much of formal rational choice analysis is tenuous and its empirical content lacks coherence.”103

While the influence of rational choice in political science appears to have crested, that of quantitative and statistical work (what economists refer to as econometrics) continues to dominate the discipline, at least as measured by the percentage of articles in the flagship APSR. David Pion-Berlin and

Dan Cleary mark the beginning of the hegemony of quantitative approaches in political science in the early 1960s (circa Vol. 54 of the APSR) when the process of academic peer review was established. By

2000, nearly 60% of the articles published in that journal employed such approaches.104 The result of the increasing hegemony of formal and quantitative approaches, as Sigelman shows, was the decline in qualitative or “narrative,” approaches to political science, which is even more pronounced given that most of the non-quantitative and non-formal articles in The Review are in the area of Political Theory.105

Substantive research in comparative politics and international relations was thus squeezed out as those were subfields of political science often employing more qualitative research methodologies.106 A recent review of publications in leading international relations journals shows a similar trend. Despite

101 For discussion of the issue and various approaches to dealing with it, see http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/ses/polisci/reports/eitmreport.jsp 102 Margaret Levi, “Modeling Complex Historical Process With Analytic Narratives,” http://www.yale.edu/probmeth/Levi.pdf. 103 Peter C. Ordeshook, “Engineering or Science: What is the Study of Politics?” Critical Review, Vol. 9 No. 1-2 (1995) in Jeffrey Friedman, ed. The Rational Choice Controversy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 175- 76. 104 David Pion-Berlin and Dan Cleary, “Methodological Bias in the APSR” in Kristen Renwick Monroe, ed., Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 307, Table 24.1. Also see, 316. 105 Compare Figures 1 and 2 in Sigelman, “The Coevolution of American Political Science and the American Political Science Review,” 468. 106 Sigelman, “The Coevolution of American Political Science and the American Political Science Review,” 467 and 470. Also see Pion-Berlin and Cleary, “Methodological Bias in the APSR,” 304-22.

28 the fact that the majority of IR scholars use qualitative methods, the majority of published articles in the subfield’s leading scholarly journals increasingly employ quantitative methods.107

Figure 6: The Dominance of “Scientific” Approaches to the Study of Politics108

The increasing dominance of the discipline by these approaches coincided with its decreasing relevance to policy issues, as Figure 2 makes clear. 109 This should not be surprising given that, as

Andrew Bennett and John Ikenberry point out, “the increasing technical specialization of the profession has made it more difficult for policymakers and citizens to understand and make direct use of political

107 Daniel Maliniak, Amy Oakes, Susan Peterson, and Michael J. Tierney, “International Relations in the Academy,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 55, No? (2011): 439 and 450-54 108 Sigelman, “The Coevolution of American Political Science and the American Political Science Review,” 469, Figure 4. 109 Recognizing this “peculiarly academic temptation” to do clever but faddish work that does not really contribute to understanding important problems” is Robert O. Keohane, “’Beware the Bad Fairy’: Cautionary Notes for Academics in the Policy Realm,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs Vol. 22, No. 1 (March 2009): 127.

29 science research.”110 Some would go further and argue that as the discipline has become even more enamored of these approaches, it has ceased to even try to be relevant to current policy concerns. 111

III. The Marginalization of Security Studies in Political Science

In this section, I look at changing place of the sub-field of national security studies in political science as an illustration of how war played a key role in connecting the academy with government, in this case in the area of national security affairs, and how of the process professionalization of the discipline led it to eschew policy relevance once the war was over or the threat receded and a choice had to be made between rigor and relevance.

Specifically, I provide two types of evidence to support my theory: First, I offer some macro- historical, correlational evidence from the last century that shows that this pattern is evident during periods of war or increased international conflict: Academic social science, particularly political science, has been more receptive to balancing methodological rigor with practical relevance than was the case in peacetime. Second, I also provide some process evidence that shows that disciplinary dynamics exacerbated tensions between these two objectives, with the result that political scientists increasingly tend to favor the former once the war is over.

The Macro-historical Pattern

If I am correct, we should see a pattern in which war-time initially fosters greater attention among scholars to policy-relevant work but tensions between rigor and relevance should become acute in peacetime. This, in fact, has been the pattern, with war affecting both the U.S. government national security community and the academy. On the former, RAND consultant Warren Weaver observes that

“cooperation [between the two] has resulted only from the pressure and necessity of war.”112 In other

110 Bennett and Ikenberry, “The Reviews’ Evolving Relevance for U.S. Foreign Policy,” 653. 111 John Balz, “The Absent Professor: Why Politicians Don’t Listen to Political Scientists,” The Washington Monthly (January/February/March 2008): 12. 112 F.R. Collbohm and Warren Weaver, “Opening Plenary” in Conference of Social Scientists, September 14 to 19, 1947 [R-106] (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, June 9, 1948), 5-6.

30 words, war leads the U.S. government and the military to look outside the bureaucracy for expertise essential to the war effort from both the natural and the social sciences. Academia is one natural place to look for it.

To be sure, this particular approach to the mobilization of societal resources dovetails with

America’s Liberal political culture which prefers “contractual mobilization” of non-state resources over more statist alternatives.113 As Wesley Posvar succinctly puts it, our system “is a pragmatic American solution which is compatible with our political institutions and our pluralistic society. It indulges our sympathy for private enterprise and our distrust of big government and militarism. It reflects our dual beliefs in decentralization and in large-scale effort as being instrumental to success in turning out the best ‘product.’ It is effective in part because it is not completely hampered by the bad features of bureaucratic organization; in fact, it is so constituted as to be partly immune from organizational constraints.”114 Government drawing upon the private sector and academic expertise, rather than doing all of these things all in-house, dovetails with this facet of the “American Way of War.”115

On the latter, in times of war the willingness of American academics to contribute directly and indirectly to the war effort increases markedly. As Carol Gruber puts it, “academicians in large numbers became ‘men of action’ during the United States involvement in the First World War.” 116 Indeed, they were among the wars greatest boosters and so many professors were eager to serve. One important source of this willingness was their embrace of the Progressive Era “service ideal.” But self-interest was another important rationale. As Richard Hofstadter notes, “the war itself, ironically, raised many

[intellectuals] to heights of influence as no domestic issue could. Historians and writers were recruited

113 Aaron L. Freidberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). For an historical discussion of different patterns of military mobilization and democracy, see Brian Downing The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). 114 Wesley W. Posvar, “The Impact of Strategy Expertise on the National Security Policy of the United States,” Public Policy Vol. 13, (1964): 37. Also see 43. 115 On this topic more generally, see Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military strategy and Policy (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1973). 116 Gruber, Mars and Minerva, 44. Also see 46, 82, and 172.

31 as advisers. Military Intelligence, the War Industries board swarmed with academics, and Washington’s

Cosmos Club was reported to be ‘little better than a faculty meeting of all the universities.’”117 This was also true during the Second World War and early in the Cold War. One might also include the late 1970s and early 1980s “renaissance” of security studies during the second phase of the Cold War and the post-

9/11 Minerva Initiative of 2008, at the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as additional manifestations of this pattern. In other words, war or intense international security competition opens door to greater academic willingness to cooperate with government.118

The flip-side of my argument, if it is correct, is that we ought to see a decline in such cooperation in peacetime or when the international security competition seems to abate. The changing status of national security studies suggests that this seems to be the case. As Columbia political scientist

Richard Betts notes, “intellectual support for strategic studies parallels the cycles of international conflict and calm. When the danger of war obtrudes in the real world, the study of war prospers, because the academy considers it unavoidable. When danger slackens, academic interest or tolerance falter.” Betts blames both a widespread moralizing impulse among the American public to abolish war combined with an intellectual impulse to make its study a “science” for this peacetime waning of support for policy-relevant security studies.119 His piece was a response to a post-Cold War calls by other academics to “abolish the subfield of security studies,” which is precisely what the logic of my theory leads us to expect.120

The Causal Process

117 Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage), 211. 118 The key sources for this pattern are Gruber, Mars and Minerva; Robin W. Winks, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961 [2nd ed.] (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); Barry M. Katz, Foreign Intelligence: Research and Analysis in the Office of Strategic Services, 1942-1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); and Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon. 119 Richard K. Betts, “Should Strategic Studies Survive?” World Politics Vol. 50, No. 1 (October 1997): 10-11. 120 David Baldwin, “Review: Security studies and the End of the Cold War,” World Politics Vol. 48, No. 1 (October 1995): 135.

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If I am correct, we should see that this peacetime waning of academic interest in security studies is caused by resurgent tensions between rigor and relevance within political science which are increasingly settled in favor of the former.

The rise and fall of Yale’s Institute for International Studies (IIS) illustrates both the promise and the peril of policy relevant work in an academic setting. In the period between its establishment in 1935 and its collapse in the early 1950s and subsequent relocation to Princeton, IIS for the first time in

American history assembled an impressive group of scholars of international affairs who produced some of the most influential national security policy-relevant scholarship of its era. The process of getting IIS off the ground was slow prior to the Second World War, however. During the war, IIS blossomed as the nation’s leading center of policy-relevant national security affairs. But soon after the end of the war, the

Yale effort collapsed.

To be sure, there was some interest in policy-relevant social science – particularly in the area of security studies – prior to the Second World War.121 Reflecting that interest, professional programs in international affairs were established at the University of Chicago (1928), Johns Hopkins (1930), and

Tufts (1933) and Yale set up IIS at about the same time (1935).122 In addition, Princeton’s Institute for

Advanced Study under the leadership of historian Edward Meade Earle stimulated some early work in the sub-field and Princeton would, for a brief time early in the Cold War, be an important bastion of security studies. 123 But as will become clear, both of these programs were exceptions whose ultimate fate ultimately proves the rule of about the tenuous standing of national security affairs in academe, especially in peacetime.

121 For a discussion of these efforts and how they segued into the subsequent wartime mobilization of the social sciences, see David Ekbladh, “Present at the Creation: Edward Meade Earle and the Depression Era Origins of Security Studies,” International Security Vol. 36, No. 3 (Winter 2011/12): 107-41. 122 For discussion of IIS and World Politics see William T.R. Fox, “Frederick Sherwood Dunn and the American Study of International Relations,” World Politics Vol. 15, No. 1 (October 1962): 12-19. 123 Lyons and Morton, Schools for Strategy, 36-37. Also see, Thomas Schelling, “Academics, Decision Makers, and Security Policy During the Cold War: A Comment on Jervis” in Edward D. Mansfield and Richard Sisson, eds. The Evolution of Political Knowledge (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2004), 137.

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Among the leading scholars who were affiliated with IIS at one time or another were Nicholas

Spykman, Arnold Wolfers, Frederick Dunn, William T.R. Fox, Bernard Brodie, Percy Corbett, Klaus Knorr,

Gabriel Almond, Harold Lasswell, and William Kaufmann, among others. Influential books and monographs the Institute produced included Spykman’s America’s Strategy in World Politics, Samuel

Flagg Bemis’ Latin American Policy of the United States, and Bernard Brodie’s edited volume The

Absolute Weapon. Finally, the Institute founded the journal World Politics, which for a time was the leading journal in the field.124

The story of IIS’s short-career is comprehensively told in the archives of the Rockefeller

Foundation, which was the Institute’s major benefactor during its roughly 15 year existence. Yale’s initial effort to secure Rockefeller Foundation support for a program in international law and international relations in 1931 did not pan out.125 Law School Dean Charles E. Clark seemed concerned that the program was tainted with an “isolationist” and “realist” caste which would make it unattractive to Rockefeller.126 While Rockefeller Foundation program officer Edmund Day sought to reassure him that these would not be factors in the ultimate decision, Rockefeller nevertheless declined to fund the

Yale proposal.127 Another factor that seemed to play a role in the Foundation’s lack of enthusiasm for the original Yale program was the perception that it, in the words of a later IIS document, “was generally non-scientific and was concerned more with the description of unique events than with revealing the common elements in classes of events.”128 In short, rigor trumped relevance.

124 A good history of the Institute is provided by Frederick S. Dunn, “The Growth of the Yale Institute of International Relations,” November 7, 1950 at http://rockefeller100.org/archive/files/ccfe7e7718d3606ab50c8cdd2d88c37b.pdf. 125 The proposed program is described in “Research in International Law and International Relations at Yale University,” May 1931 at http://rockefeller100.org/archive/files/17f0a3c078180850ebeac401b077ac1a.pdf. 126 Charles E. Clark to Edmund E. Day, December 11, 1931 at http://rockefeller100.org/archive/files/6151e5d31c6fdf5f10464f79e1822d32.pdf. 127 Edmund E. Day to Charles E. Clark, December 15, 1931 at http://rockefeller100.org/archive/files/2a3cbde1085914ceac083c52a52cb899.pdf and Edmund E. Day to Charles E. Clark, January 25, 1932 at http://rockefeller100.org/archive/files/828f28823012e764a1e43f4e200c5111.pdf. 128 Frederick S. Dunn, “The Growth of the Yale Institute of International studies,” November 7, 1950 at http://rockefeller100.org/archive/files/ccfe7e7718d3606ab50c8cdd2d88c37b.pdf.

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A subsequent Yale proposal that sought to balance a more systematic social scientific approach with direct policy relevance met with success. In May 1934, Spykman, then Chairman of Yale’s

International Relations Program, proposed a program in international relations under the auspices of a

Yale Institute for International Studies to “conduct studies of national polices aiming at the preservation of peace.”129 In May of 1935, the Rockefeller foundation approved a five year, $100,000 grant for the IIS which was led by Spykman and included other Yale international relations faculty such as Arnold Wolfers and Frederick Dunn.

Despite an ambitious research agenda, the Institute was not as productive as Spykman hoped.

Part of the problem was his precarious health; but part of it was attributable to other issues, not the least of which was an overly ambitious set of research goals.130 Despite IIS’s falling short of its initial aspirations, Rockefeller program officers seemed satisfied with what progress had been made. In a hand written note, program officer Sydnor Walker pointed out that “Yale seems to be our greatest hope for an integrated research program in international relations at an Amer. Univ.”131

During the war itself, Yale contributed disproportionately to the war effort, primarily through the service of its faculty in the O.S.S. Indeed, Yale’s President Charles Seymour had served in the Inquiry

– a major focus of academic/government cooperation during the First World War -- constituting a direct link between these two major efforts to bring scholars into government during war-time.132 In May of

1941, on the eve of the U.S.’s formal entry into the Second World War, Rockefeller approved an

129 Rockefeller Foundation, “Minutes of the Rockefeller Foundation regarding the study of international relations at Yale University,” 5/17/35 at http://rockefeller100.org/archive/files/5c74fc963e5eeaede4f5e2f47d9fbb25.pdf. 130 Nicholas J. Spykman to Sydnor Walker, April 14, 1938 at http://rockefeller100.org/archive/files/703012d8a38f369f81f212162832ebbc.pdf and Sydnor H. Walker, “Yale University – Research in International Relations,” no date (circa 1941) at http://rockefeller100.org/archive/files/86f299cd577136d26e904a6fdac90a16.pdf. 131 Sydnor H Walker., “Memorandum regarding Yale's work on international relations,” April 6, 1940 at http://rockefeller100.org/archive/files/23769c5332fb6a004fbcb31345850e50.pdf. 132 Winks, Cloak and Gown, 29. On the Inquiry, see Lawrence E. Gelfand, The Inquiry: American Preparations for Peace, 1917-1919 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963).

35 additional three year grant of $51,500 for the Institute.133 By now, the work of Institute members was beginning to bear fruit. IIS’s highest impact publication was Spykman’s book The United States and the

Balance of Power which came out after Pearl Harbor in early 1942 to much critical acclaim.134

The Institute also took stock of its role, and that of other university-based research centers, in doing policy relevant scholarship. Dunn, who had taken over from Spykman as director of the Institute, wrote a 10 page memorandum on the topic in 1943 which made this case in detail.135 But by January of

1944, Dunn had become more pessimistic about the prospects, pointing out that within universities “the conditions sometimes found inhibit rather than encourage creative activity” in this area.136 Rockefeller

Foundation staff realized at about the same time that the problems were not only intellectual; but also financial. Whereas the Foundation regarded its support to IIS as seed-corn to start a program that the

University would eventually fully fund, the University was unwilling or unable to assume full financial responsibility for it.137

The institutional status of the Institute became precarious again after the war even though its research out-put was steadily increasing in terms of both quantity and influence. Indicative of the latter is the rapporteur’s report from an Institute conference on “Security Policy for a Postwar America.” To be sure, the group which included Dunn, Wolfers, Fox, and David Rowe from Yale, along with Earle and

Harold Sprout from Princeton and Grayson Kirk from Columbia, did not get everything right about the emerging post-war world. But their general conclusions and recommendations seem remarkably prescient almost 70 years later. Steering a middle course between the extremes of a return to

133 Rockefeller Foundation, “Minutes of the Rockefeller Foundation regarding the study of international relations at Yale University,” 5/16/41 at http://rockefeller100.org/archive/files/65eb13cb2b7aca8eafcf8e4e8e78ca05.pdf 134 Rockefeller Foundation, “The United States and the balance of power,” http://rockefeller100.org/archive/files/9d86b9c00f134afe11bcb334c3ed6338.pdf. 135 Frederick S. Dunn, “The Place of University Research Agencies in International Relations,” December 23, 1943 at http://rockefeller100.org/archive/files/1a99e311afbff54136f56bcfddc27fe3.pdf. 136 Frederick S. Dunn, “The Position of a Creative Research Organization within a University,” January 8, 1944 athttp://rockefeller100.org/archive/files/59f12a209994268f335bb5a2460cb568.pdf. 137 Joseph H. Willits, “Memorandum regarding Yale's Institute of International Studies,” January 18, 1944 at http://rockefeller100.org/archive/files/515fec76204ef7a616d022dd4373cb73.pdf.

36 isolationism and the “utopianism” of world federalism, the IIS group outlined a realist vision in which the

United States would have to contend with Russia, but should not assume that its former war-time ally would necessarily become an adversary either. Pointing to the common interest between the two superpowers in avoiding World War III and preventing a recurrence of “the German problem,” the group anticipated an enduring superpower rivalry, but one that did not inevitably have to lead to war if managed adroitly.138

Not surprisingly given Yale’s role during the war, the post-war locus of thinking about the implications of the “nuclear revolution” was also at IIS. It was there that political scientist Bernard

Brodie first argued that the development of these armaments would fundamentally change the nature of statecraft.139 For much of history, in Brodie’s view, military force had been a viable instrument of statecraft. But with the advent of nuclear weapons, only the threat of the use of force remained available to statesmen because the actual use of nuclear weapons would be mutually catastrophic.140 It was Brodie’s mentor University of Chicago economist Jacob Viner who drew the logical implication of his student’s argument that nuclear weapons were only useful for deterrence.141 All these ideas crystalized in a volume of essays Brodie edited for IIS entitled The Absolute Weapon which established he and his colleagues as the country’s leading experts on nuclear strategy, their services much in demand in government and the military.142

138 Joseph H. Willits, “A security policy for postwar America,” http://rockefeller100.org/archive/files/9218290cc292b6d5bc72aa71f1bb3144.pdf. 139 Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, 10. 140 See the discussion of Brodie’s influence in Gregg Herken, Counsels of War: The Revealing Story of the Experts and Advisers – Scientist, Academics, Think Tank Strategists – who have influenced and Helped Determine American Nuclear Arms Policy since Hiroshima (New York: Knopf, 1985), xi-xii. 141 The essay was Jacob Viner, “The Implications of the Atomic Bomb for International Relations” in International Economics (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1946), 300- 9. Also see Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, 27; and Albert Wohlstetter, Letter to Michael Howard, “On the Genesis of Nuclear Strategy,” 1968, in [Trachtenburg docs?], 227. 142 Marc Trachtenberg, History and Strategy, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 11.

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Why did the Institute never establish a firm beach-head at Yale? Part of the reason was undoubtedly attributable to personalities: A. Whitney Griswold, an early IIS member, grew disenchanted with the Institute’s trajectory largely because of the defense policy research IIS was doing.

When he became president of Yale in 1951 one of his first acts was to close it down.143 But it would be a mistake to attribute IIS’s demise solely to personalities.

Griswold’s lukewarm support for the Institute also reflected academic institutional biases as well.144 Recall that the core philosophy of the Institute’s work was, in Dunn’s words, “the development of a more disciplined type of policy analysis.”145 The IIS philosophy cut against the grain of both the traditional scholarly approach to research (the Institute sponsored a lot of team projects as opposed to supporting the work of individual scholars) and it paid scant attention to traditional academic disciplinary boundaries. Indeed, it was not just Griswold who had reservations about IIS; Yale’s political science department also launched a campaign to de-emphasize international relations in favor of

“’domestic’ political science” on campus.146

By 1954, Yale had lost six of the core IIS members and its main activities – policy research and

World Politics -- to other institutions. Wolfers remained at Yale and tried to make the best of the situation. But even in his optimistic gloss on these developments to Rockefeller he had to concede that policy-relevant research had been severely curtailed at Yale as a result.147 With the support of a friendly foundation, many of the IIS principals decamped to Princeton and set up shop again, bringing World

Politics with them. For a brief time, Princeton became the key link between the new RAND Corporation

143 Joseph H Willits, “Interview with Arnold Wolfers regarding the growth of the Yale Institute of International Studies,” March 15, 1951 at http://rockefeller100.org/archive/files/464514a0e9fb3d64ddf7ae10c9b59789.pdf. 144 Joseph H.Willits, “Interview with A. Whitney Griswold regarding research at Yale University,” March 12, 1951 at http://rockefeller100.org/archive/files/0bb26064370a6261d891c6810dd9e052.pdf. 145 Dunn, “The Growth of the Yale Institute of International Studies,” 8. 146 Roger F. Evans, “Interview with David N. Rowe regarding international relations vs. political science,” October 2, 1951 at http://rockefeller100.org/archive/files/8679dfe2866bb4a1c589b1de63291b67.pdf. 147 Arnold Wolfers , “Letter from Arnold Wolfers to Joseph H. Willits,” April 2, 1954, 2 at http://rockefeller100.org/archive/files/367c6e651593916e1c1e334914b10f06.pdf.

38 and those academics still interested in doing policy relevant research.148 But as Morton and Lyons observe, the Princeton Center for International Studies was hardly a model of successful integration of national security studies into the disciplinary departments.149

In short, the fate of these early academic national security studies programs illustrates the larger problem of relying upon universities and disciplines to pay consistent attention to these issues.

Disciplinary dynamics and other academic trends made the peacetime place of national security studies in the academy tenuous, even during the supposed Golden Age of such cooperation.

IV. Conclusions and Recommendations

I am not arguing that scholarship that is formal or quantitative is by definition irrelevant.

Indeed, one can point to examples of both that are. When applied to economic issues, the discipline of economics has managed to be both highly “scientific” and, at times, quite relevant, though for both good and ill.150 Likewise, there are examples of highly quantitative political science that policymakers have found useful.151 Finally, there is much non-quantitative scholarship, particularly but not exclusively in the humanities that in jargon-laden and otherwise inaccessible to a wider audience.152

Rather, what I am saying is that these approaches have a tendency, left to their own devices, toward irrelevance.153 This inclination is in part the result of the normal workings of science, but is also reinforced by organizational dynamics. The net result is that many political scientists today are pursuing

148 Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, 49-50; and Kuklick, Blind Oracles, 87. 149 Lyons and Morton, Schools for Strategy, 130-34. 150 For a cautionary note on the limits of contemporary academic economics, see Paul Krugman, “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?” The New York Times Magazine, September 6, 2009, 37. 151 A good example is Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder, Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), a précis of which was published as Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder, “Democratization and War,” Foreign Affairs Vol. 74, No. 3 (May/June 1995): 79-97. Their argument was picked up by the National Intelligence Council, Global Trends: 2030 (Washington, DC: NIC, 2012). For more detailed discussion of this, along with survey evidence backing its conclusions, see Avey and Desch, “What Do Policymakers Want From Us?” 152 For an embarrassing example of how post-modern flights of rhetorical fancy took in even other scholars, see Alan D. Sokal, "Transgressing the Boundaries - Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," Social Text Vol. 46/47 (1996): 217-252. 153 The hard science version of the Sokal hoax is reported in Kimmo Ericksson, “The Nonsense Math effect,” Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 7, No. 6 (November 2012): 746-49.

39 formal and quantitative methods to the exclusion of all else less because they believe that they will illuminate real-world policy matters and more because they serve our vested interest in disciplinary autonomy and dovetail with our image (mathematized and model-based) of what a “science” of politics should look like. This tendency toward irrelevance can only be checked through constant attention to the costs it imposes on the discipline and the rest of society, especially when it excludes a more balanced approach to rigor and relevance of the sort that characterized security studies in the past. In my view, these trends in political science have had deleterious consequences for policy, science, and threaten the ethical obligation that scholars have to contribute to the commonweal.

The easiest argument to make is that the Ivory Tower/Beltway gap is detrimental for policymakers and society as a whole. As former diplomat George Kennan rightly observes, policymakers need academic expertise because they have to make decisions about issues and areas of the world

“about which they cannot be expert and learned.”154 Policymakers depend upon the academy for the raw data – whether quantitative or historical – that they use in decision-making. They also depend upon the social sciences for the theories they use to analyze and make sense of this data.

Former State Department official Roger Hilsman points out that everyone, including policy- makers, use theory. Paraphrasing Keynes, he concludes that “It seems obvious that all thinking involves notions of how and why things happen. Even the ‘practical’ man who despises theory has a number of assumptions and expectations which lead him to believe that when certain things are done, certain results follow…. It is this ‘theory’ that helps a problem solver select from the mass of facts surrounding him those which he hopes are relevant.”155 Since policymakers implicitly use theory in analyzing

154 George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900-1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 38. 155 Roger Hilsman, Jr., “Intelligence and Policy-Making in Foreign Affairs,” World Politics, Vol. 5, No. 1 (October 1952): 13; and Klaus Knorr, “Failures in National Intelligence Estimates: The Case of the Cuban Missiles,” World Politics, Vol. Vol. 16, No. 3 (April 1964): 465-66. Also see Joseph Nye, “International Relations: The Relevance of Theory to Practice,” The Oxford Handbook of International Relations,” in Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal, eds., (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 648.

40 situations and assessing the various alternatives they have, it makes sense for such theories to be stated explicitly and analyzed systematically, which is the comparative advantage of the Academy.

To be clear, my argument is not that scholars would make superior decisions to those of bureaucrats and elected officials. Rather, I believe that our system depends upon the successful functioning of the “marketplace of ideas” and the systems of checks and balances in which individuals and groups with various strengths and weaknesses, and off-setting biases, contribute to the larger policy debate, thereby compensating for each other.156 Academics have their own limitations and biases, particularly in the realm of foreign and national security policy debates. Most importantly, they lack inside knowledge, have little real power, and tend to be politically out of step with the rest of American society.157

But academics also have some important advantages as well. For example, scholars have the time to develop greater depth of knowledge in issues and regions than most policymakers can.

Ambassador David Newsome nicely summarizes the differences between the two estates: “For officials, the objective of action is to resolve or manage a problem. Their motives are operational, not intellectual. Often under intense pressures, they are engaged in reconciling domestic and foreign politics, resources, and realities abroad, and hammering these factors into a workable policy. The scholar, less pressed by time, is basically an observer, endeavoring to discover in an event or a series of events verities that may apply to other situations.”158 The institution of tenure also gives academics the freedom to explore controversial issues and take unpopular stands, at least in theory. And university- based scholars have less of a vested interest in certain policies and programs than do policymakers,

156 Though he does not use the phrase “marketplace of ideas,” John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs- Merrill, 1956), 19-66 provides the rationale for it. The system of checks and balances in which “ambition must be made to counteract ambition” is famously outlined in “Federalist #51” in Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers (New York: Mentor, 1961), 322. 157 On this last, see Robert Jervis, ed., ISSF Roundtable on “Politics and Scholarship” Published by H-Diplo/ISSF on 1 June 2010 at http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/ISSF/PDF/ISSF-Roundtable-1-2.pdf. 158 David D. Newsome, “Foreign Policy and Academia,” Foreign Policy, No. 10 (Winter, 1995-96): 55.

41 though we do have our own particular institutional interests. 159 While peer review can homogenize and narrow scholarship, it also plays an indisputable positive role in advancing it. None of this is to claim that scholars should have the last word in policy debates, but rather to simply urge that their perspectives be part of the conversation. One can, however, point to instances – the war in Vietnam and the recent Iraq War – in which had the majority consensus of scholars in academia influenced policy, the country’s strategic interest would have been better served.160

Less widely recognized, and perhaps more controversial given the prevailing sentiments in the

Academy in favor of a sharp distinction between “science” and “policy,” is my contention that the gap is ultimately bad for the generation of new knowledge. But as John Kenneth Galbraith warned his

Economics colleagues nearly forty years ago, “No arrangement for the perpetuation of thought is secure if that thought does not make contact with the problems that it is presumed to solve.”161 Expanding upon this argument, Ordeshook explains that “the practical application of theory and experiences feeds back on our awareness of theoretical inadequacies and on our identification of phenomena that warrant generalization and theoretical understanding.”162 Historian Robin Winks echoes this perspective:

“Unless a disciplinarian gets out into ‘the real world’ (which is actually not more real, merely different, though in purely democratic terms perhaps more ‘real’ in that it is accepted as so by a larger number of people) from time to time, the disciplinarian or methodologist begins to forget that most people do not see reality as he sees it, and they therefore act on different realities.”163

Even the most sophisticated social science will be judged in the final analysis by what it tells us about things that affect the lives of large numbers of people and which policymakers therefore seek to

159 Robert K. Merton, “Role of the Intellectual in Public Bureaucracy,” Social Forces, vol. 23, No. 4 (May 1945): 412. 160 On the former, “5,000 Scholars Ask a Neutral Vietnam,” New York Times, July 11, 1964, 1 and 2. On the latter, Robert Art, et al., “WAR WITH IRAQ IS NOT IN AMERICA'S NATIONAL INTEREST,” paid advertisement on the Op/Ed page of New York Times September 26, 2002 and Security Scholars for a Sensible Foreign Policy, “An Open Letter to the American People,” October 2004 at http://www.sensibleforeignpolicy.net/letter.html. 161 Galbraith, “Power and the Useful Economist,” 2. 162 Ordeshook, “Engineering or Science?” 181. 163 Winks, Cloak and Gown, 425.

42 influence and control. 164 Given that, a deeper and more regular engagement between the Ivory Tower and the Beltway will be mutually beneficial for both sides of the theory/policy gap. Former Harvard

Dean and Kennedy National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy’s judgment seems eminently sensible: “I think it is wrong to suppose that the university is usefully disconnected from this reality. I think rather that there is a gain for both the political world and the academy from an intensified process of engagement and of choosing sides and engaging in battle.”165 The recurrent debates about political science funding from by the National Science Foundation highlight the costs to the discipline of not being able to justify itself in terms of broader impact on the rest of society.166

Finally, we in the academy spend a lot of time thinking about our ethical obligations to the norms of our discipline and also our relations with students and colleagues. But what little discussion there is of the ethical issues at stake in this debate about the proper relationship between science and policy tends to overwhelmingly favor the distancing of scholars and the Academy from policymaking.

The most frequently heard arguments against close scholarly engagement with policymaking are that it presents an insuperable threat to the integrity of the scientific process and also makes the academy complicit in the immoral policies that governments sometimes undertake.167

Political theorist Anne Norton, for example, cites the authority of one of the fathers of modern social science, Max Weber, on behalf of maintaining distance between scholars and policymakers.168

Weber was, to be sure, an opponent of preaching from “the academic chair” and maintained that “the professor should not demand the right as a professor to carry the marshal’s baton of the statesman or

164 N. Gregory Mankiw, “A Quick Refresher Course in Macroeconomics,” The Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. 28, No. ? (December 1990): 1659. 165 McGeorge Bundy, “The Battlefields of Power and the Searchlights of the Academy,” in The Dimensions of Diplomacy, ed. E. A. J. Johnson (Baltimore, 1964), 15. 166 See, most recently, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s call for “reprioritizing federal research spending … politics … to helping find cures for diseases” in his Make Life Work” speech, Washington Post, February 5, 2013 at http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/02/05/full-text-eric-cantors-make-life-work-speech/. 167 Shils, “Social Science and Social Policy,” 230. 168 Anne Norton, “Political Science as a Vocation” in Ian Shapiro, Rogers M. Smith, and Tarek E. Masoud, eds., Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press), 67-8.

43 the reformer in his knapsack.”169 But Norton misreads Weber as completely eschewing policy relevance in my view. After all, he was deeply engaged with policy issues from the very first study he did on the

East Elbian land question through his work on German constitutionalism for the Weimar Republic right up until his death in 1920. Weber’s argument was simply a salutary warning that the methods of science cannot adjudicate among competing ethical claims.170

Tellingly, the ethical obligation of political science to society has been a recurrent theme in

Presidential Addresses at the American Political Science Association, indicating that from the perspective of eminent senior scholars, the discipline needed to be reminded of it. In 1998 Harvard’s

Samuel Huntington proposed that “works in the social sciences should be judged not only on their intellectual merit but also by the contributions they make to achieving moral purpose.”171 Five years later his colleague Robert Putnam concurred: “I believe that attending to the concerns of our fellow citizens is not just an optional add-on for the profession of political science, but an obligation as fundamental as our pursuit of scientific truth.”172 Van Evera ties this ethical obligation back to the health of the discipline, arguing that a broader ethical self-reflection is essential for the health of the discipline because “social science operates largely beyond accountability to others. Institutions and professions that face weak accountability need inner ethical rudders that define their obligations in order to stay on course. Otherwise they risk straying into parasitic disutility. Social science is no exception.”173

169 Max Weber, “The Meaning of ‘Ethical Neutrality’ in Sociology and Economics” in Edward shills and Henry A. Finch, eds. and trans., The Methodology of the Social Sciences (New York: The Free Press, 1949), 5. 170 Weber, “The Meaning of ‘Ethical Neutrality,’” 6-7. Also see Max Weber, “Science As a Vocation” in H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 129-58. For a fuller development of this argument, see my “Politics and Science as a Vocation: The Ethical Imperative for Some Scholars to Be Public Intellectuals (and For the Rest to Let Them Do So),” (Unpublished Ms., University of Notre Dame, 2013). 171 Samuel P. Huntington, “One Soul at a Time: Political Science and Political Reform,” The American Political Science Review, Vol. 82, No. 1 (March 1998): 4. 172 Robert D. Putnam, “APSA Presidential Address: The Public Role of Political Science,” Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 1, No. 2 (June 2003): 250. 173 Stephen Van Evera, Guide to Methods for Students of Political Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1997), 5.

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Clearly, political science needs to rethink how it balances scholarly rigor with practical relevance.

“American political science started out from practical concerns with hardly any regard for theoretical ones,” political scientist Hans Morgenthau observes, “It then moved into a period of theorizing for its own sake without any practical concerns. It future lies in the combination of the two approaches: practical concerns based upon a firm theoretical foundation.”174 Political theorist Rogers Smith strikes what is in my view the right balance between rigor and relevance: “the main endeavor of political science should be to make roughly probable empirical and logical cases for and against claims about political questions that many people can be persuaded to regard as substantively important.”175

There is, in other words, a middle ground between policy analysis and journalism on one side and the Cult of the Irrelevant on the other. The best approach to balancing scholarly rigor with continuing policy relevance is methodological pluralism, which includes a significant role for qualitative social science, and a commitment to problem-, rather than method-, driven research agendas.176 That is how the discipline of political science can contribute to better policymaking, produce better scholarship, and fulfill its ethical obligation to the rest of society. Indeed, it is only within such an approach to political science that policy-relevant security studies can not only survive, but thrive.

174 Hans Morgenthau, “The Purpose of Political Science” in James C. Charlesworth, ed., A Design for Political Science; Scope, Objectives, and Methods (Philadelphia, PA: American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1966), 79. 175 Rogers M. Smith, “Should We Make Political Science More of a Science or More About Politics,” PS: Political Science and Politics, Vol. 35, No. 2 (June 2002): 201. 176 It is no coincidence that the call for policy relevance comes from scholars doing qualitative, mixed method, or “problem-driven” research. For example, see, Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 263-86.

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