Daniel Bessner, “Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual” (Cornell UP, 2018)

New Books in Sociology · Apr 11, 2018 · 1h 4m

Daniel Bessner’s Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual (Cornell University Press, 2018) provides a fascinating account of Hans Speier, an oft forgotten yet highly influential figure within the mid-century national security state. Speier, a Weimar emigre intellectual, conducted propaganda for the United States in both the Second World War and the Cold War, and helped build the institutional infrastructure of the so-called military-intellectual complex. This book is more than a biography of a single person, however. It also traces the rise of a new kind of…