Daniel Bessner – författare

In Democracy in Exile, Daniel Bessner explores the life of Hans Speier, one of the most significant figures in the history of US defense policy. Bessner traces Speier's intellectual development from Weimar Germany to the Cold War United States, revealing how his European roots shaped the expert-driven approach to foreign policymaking that American elites institutionalized during and after World War II. A key figure in a transatlantic network of émigré policymakers and analysts, Speier helped establish novel institutions like the RAND Corporation that transformed how US foreign policy was made. Democracy in Exile highlights how social scientists like Speier left academia to create a "military-intellectual complex" that insulated American decision-making from public opinion, and which continues to shape US defense policy today.

In the mid-twentieth century, Cold War liberalism exerted a profound influence on the US state, US foreign policy, and liberal thought across the North Atlantic world. The essays in this volume examine the history of this important ideology from a variety of perspectives. Whereas most prior works that analyze Cold War liberalism have focused on small groupings of canonical intellectuals, this book explores how the ideology transformed politics, society, and culture writ large. From impacting US foreign policy in the Middle East, to influencing the ideological contours of industrial society, to shaping the urban landscape of Los Angeles, Cold War liberalism left an indelible mark on modern history. This collection also illuminates the degree to which Cold War liberalism continues to shape how intellectuals and policymakers understand and approach the world.

In the mid-twentieth century, Cold War liberalism exerted a profound influence on the US state, US foreign policy, and liberal thought across the North Atlantic world. The essays in this volume examine the history of this important ideology from a variety of perspectives. Whereas most prior works that analyze Cold War liberalism have focused on small groupings of canonical intellectuals, this book explores how the ideology transformed politics, society, and culture writ large. From impacting US foreign policy in the Middle East, to influencing the ideological contours of industrial society, to shaping the urban landscape of Los Angeles, Cold War liberalism left an indelible mark on modern history. This collection also illuminates the degree to which Cold War liberalism continues to shape how intellectuals and policymakers understand and approach the world.

In Democracy in Exile, Daniel Bessner explores the life of Hans Speier, one of the most significant figures in the history of U.S. defense policy. Bessner traces Speier's intellectual development from Weimar Germany to the Cold War United States, revealing how his European roots shaped the expert-driven approach to foreign policymaking that American elites institutionalized during and after World War II. A key figure in a transatlantic network of émigré policymakers and analysts, Speier helped establish novel institutions such as the RAND Corporation that transformed how US foreign policy was made.Democracy in Exile highlights how social scientists like Speier left academia to create a "military-intellectual complex" that insulated American decision making from public opinion and that continues to shape US defense policy today.

In the decades following World War II, the science of decision-making moved from the periphery to the center of transatlantic thought. The Decisionist Imagination explores how “decisionism” emerged from its origins in prewar political theory to become an object of intense social scientific inquiry in the new intellectual and institutional landscapes of the postwar era. By bringing together scholars from a wide variety of disciplines, this volume illuminates how theories of decision shaped numerous techno-scientific aspects of modern governance—helping to explain, in short, how we arrived at where we are today.

This is the first volume to explore decisionism beyond the thought of Carl Schmitt. This is the first volume to trace how decisionism impacted the social sciences in the trans-Atlantic context of the United States and Europe. This is the first volume to explore decisionism from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Imperialist Realism�is a collection of essays elucidating the titular concept, which centers on a single question: What does it feel like to live in a moment in which it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of the U.S. Empire? By analyzing the theory and practice of U.S. foreign policy, Imperialist Realism�provides theoretical and empirical accounts of modern empire, liberalism, and global affairs. It combines pieces that explore everything from the ideas of individuals such as Barack Obama, George Soros, and Samantha Power to topics such as first-person shooters to issues such as left-wing foreign policy. In this way, Imperialist Realism�examines the past, present, and future of U.S. foreign relations while drawing broader conclusions about the nature of empire in both its domestic and its international contexts.

Since the late-1990s, diplomatic historians have emphasized the importance of international and transnational processes, flows, and events to the history of the United States in the world. Rethinking U.S. World Power provides an alternative to these scholarly frameworks by assembling a diverse group of historians to explore the impact of the United States and its domestic history on U.S. foreign relations and world affairs. In so doing, the collection underlines that, even in a global age, domestic politics and phenomena were crucial to the history of U.S. foreign policy and international relations more broadly.

Rethinking U.S. World Power provides an alternative to these scholarly frameworks by assembling a diverse group of historians to explore the impact of the United States and its domestic history on U.S. foreign relations and world affairs.