Cult of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security.

• Author: Lind, Michael
• Position: Eggheads and Ideas - Book review

Michael C. Desch, Cult of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 351 pp., $35.00.

In April 2008, Robert M. Gates, secretary of defense in the George W. Bush administration, asserted that the national security community "must once again embrace eggheads and ideas." Why this hope, often expressed before, was likely to be disappointed again is the subject of Michael Desch's illuminating survey of the century-long relationship between practitioners of U.S. foreign policy and the professors who study it.

Desch, a professor of international relations at Notre Dame and founding director of the Notre Dame International Security Center, explains that "from the beginning of the twentieth century, there has been a tension between the two objectives of the evolving research university system. Science and practical application were in tension generally, but the social sciences experienced it particularly acutely." In relating the history of debates about the interaction between the making and the study of foreign policy, Desch narrates the larger story of American political science, whose birth as an independent scholarly discipline can be dated to the founding of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in 1904. Desch observes that a majority of the early members of the APSA were not academics and that its early presidents like Frank Goodnow and Woodrow Wilson were progressives committed to using social science to promote social reform. But public-spirited scholars like Charles Beard, president of the APSA in 1926, were already losing out by the 1920s to the likes of University of Chicago's William Fielding Ogburn, who opined that the scholar had "to give up social action and dedicated [himself] to science."

The interwar period saw the rise of grant-making foundations and think tanks like the Social Science Research Council, the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Brookings Institution. The progressives were opposed by a long-forgotten school of "Neopositivists" in the 1920s. According to the economist Wesley Mitchell, in his presidential address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science: "The investigator who tries to persuade men that they should choose one course of action rather than another may be drawing sensible conclusions from his scientific findings, but he is certainly not doing scientific work when he does so." Two other forgotten figures in the 1920s, A.B. Hall and R.T. Crane, pushed "the proposition that 'science' meant the model of the natural sciences, particularly the use of mathematics."

In Desch's telling, during periods of war or warlike tension such as the early Cold War, national security officials attempt to mobilize scholars to aid them. In the First World War, it was the Inquiry, the brain trust organized for the Wilson administration by Colonel Edward House. Academic...