Moir on Bessner, 'Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual'

Author:  Daniel Bessner

Reviewer:  Nathaniel Moir

Daniel Bessner. Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual. The United States in the World Series. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018. Illustrations. 312 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8014-5303-8; $16.99 (e-book), ISBN 978-1-5017-1203-6.

Reviewed by Nathaniel Moir (Ernest May Postdoctoral Fellow in History at Policy, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University) Published on H-War (October 2019) Commissioned by Margaret Sankey (Air University)

A consensus should exist that Daniel Bessner's Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual succeeds as an intellectual biography. Speier, who left Nazi Germany in 1933 for the United States, became a key contributor to the "military-intellectual-complex," and he provides a fascinating vehicle for examining the relationships between intellectuals, policy formation, and American institutions in the twentieth century. Bessner's study also exemplifies a positive trend in scholarship among intellectual historians with interest in how and why the United States has embraced overly military-oriented foreign policy since the Spanish-American War. A fundamental factor in Bessner's argument centers on "appeals to crisis" as a means with which to enact and legitimize emergency measures, such as limiting democratic procedures or civil rights, to achieve efficient governance. Through the Cold War, Bessner shows how an institutionalization of emergency governance, guided by defense intellectuals such as Speier, came to define American foreign policy at the expense of greater civic participation....