Foreign policy: a practical pursuit
Apr 17th, 2009 by MESH
From Martin Kramer
“Scholars on the Sidelines” is the headline of an op-ed by Harvard’s Joseph Nye in Monday’s Washington Post. There he notes that the Obama administration has appointed few political scientists to top positions, and predicts a widening of the divide between policymaking and academic theorizing. His Harvard colleague Stephen Walt has echoed the complaint, placing the blame upon scholars who follow what he calls “the cult of irrelevance.” Michael Desch, a Notre Dame political scientist, also has written in the same vein in a new piece entitled “Professor Smith Goes to Washington,” claiming that while Obama may be “depopulating the Ivy League and other leading universities with his appointments,” it’s unlikely the academics can match the influence of the think tanks or overcome the anti-intellectualism that pervades society and government.
The driver of this year’s rehashing of the issue is the promise of the Obama administration; just a few years ago it was the threat of Al Qaeda. Ask Bruce Jentleson now a MESH member, who wrote a similar and much-discussed lament about academic insularity—exactly seven years ago.
Of course, the debate is older than that. I addressed it myself, in an article entitled “Policy and the Academy: An Illicit Relationship?” originally delivered as a lecture in 2002. The occasion was the tenth anniversary of the passing of Elie Kedourie (1926-1992), who taught politics at the London School of Economics and whose work has had an abiding influence upon many students of the Middle East, myself included. My subject was a short essay by Kedourie, dating from 1961, entitled “Foreign Policy: A Practical Pursuit.” I explored (and contested) Kedourie’s principled belief that policy and the academy should not meet, and that the divide benefited them both.
My piece is on the web and many have read it. But now that this debate has resumed, I think it useful to provide access to Kedourie’s own text—a trenchant 1,100 words—which I think speaks rather more forcefully than my synopsis of it. Read his piece first, and only then read my discussion of it. (By the way, the poet he quotes is Eliot; the poem, Gerontion. And yes, Kedourie usually did put “social scientists” in quotation marks.)
• • •
Foreign Policy: A Practical Pursuit
by Elie Kedourie
Foreign policy, it is universally agreed, is a practical pursuit. It is an activity the end of which is the attainment of advantage or the prevention of mischief. Foreign policy, in short, is action, not speculation. Is the academic fitted by his bent, his training, his usual and wonted preoccupations, to take or recommend action of the kind which generals and statesman are daily compelled to recommend or take?
Someone might say, in reply, that academics are the best fitted for this activity. They have, after all, a highly trained intelligence, they are long familiar with the traffic of ideas, and long accustomed scrupulously to weigh evidence, to make subtle distinctions, and to render dispassionate verdicts. Plato, it might be urged, was not far out in his hopes of philosophers becoming kings.
The good academic is indeed as has just been described, but it is not really wise to invoke Plato’s shade, and exalt the scholar to such a high degree. For consider: if the academic is to recommend action here and now—and in foreign policy action must be here and now—should he not have exact and prompt knowledge of situations and their changes? Is it then proposed that foreign ministries should every morning circulate to historians and “social scientists” the reports of their agents and the despatches of their diplomats? Failing this knowledge, the academic advising or exhorting action will most likely appear the learned fool, babbling of he knows what.
It may be objected that this is not what is meant at all: we do not, it may be said, want the academic to concern himself with immediate issues or the minutiae of policies; we want his guidance on long-term trends and prospects; and here, surely, his knowledge of the past, his erudition, his reflectiveness will open to him vistas unknown to the active politician, or unregarded by him. And should not this larger view, this wider horizon be his special contribution to his country’s policies and to its welfare? But this appeal to patriotism, this subtle flattery, needs must be resisted. Here the man of action may be called on in support: it is related of the great Lord Salisbury that presented with a long, judicious, balanced memorandum written by one of his officials, and abounding in wise considerations on the one hand, and in equally sage considerations on the other hand, he impatiently exclaimed: “How well do I know these hands!”
The long view, the balanced view, the judicious view, then, can positively unfit a man for action, and for giving advice on action—which, as has been said, must be taken here and now. The famed academic, Dr. Toynbee, writing his Study of History in 1935 came to the conclusion, on the weightiest and most erudite of grounds, that there was no likelihood of Peking ever again in the future becoming the capital of China! Should he not have remembered the sad and moving confession of Ibn Khaldun—a writer he much admired—that his minute knowledge of prosody unfitted him for the writing of poetry?
What is true of poetry is as true of politics, and an academic’s patriotic duty is not to confuse rulers with long views and distant prospects, for the logic of events seems to take pleasure in mocking the neat and tidy logic of ideas:
Think now [it is a poet who warns us]
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What’s not believed in, or if still believed
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
Into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear.
How difficult, therefore, to be wise, except after the event, and how every leap is a leap in the dark! To be wise only after the event is accounted a failing in men of action; but to be wise after the event is a virtue in historians. To leap in the dark requires strong muscles, steady nerves, a taste for adventure, and not too great a fear of the consequences. “I am not responsible for the consequences” Salisbury used to say, and he meant that having acted to the best of his knowledge and judgement, he could not but let the events take their course as the fates in their caprice decreed.
Shall academics then presume to instruct a man how he shall leap? Presumption is the pride of fools, and it ought to be the scholar’s pride not to presume. It is pursuit of knowledge and increase of learning which gives scholars renown and a good name. How then should they, clothed as they are in the mantle of scholarship, imitate this lobby or that pressure group, and recommend this action or that, all the time knowing full well that in politics one is always acting in a fog, that no action is wholly to the good, and that every action in benefiting one particular interest will most likely be to another’s detriment. Scholars, of course, are also citizens, and as such jealous for the welfare and honour of their country. Equally with other citizens they can recommend and exhort, but they should take care that a scholarly reputation does not illicitly given spurious authority to some civic or political stance.
Of what use then are academics? The impatient, mocking question seems to invite the short, derisive answer, which men of action and men of business have not seldom been disposed to give. But the scholar’s existence and activity does not have to be justified by his usefulness. Who, in the first place, shall be the judge of usefulness, who can tell whether the useful will not turn out to be useless and worse, and in the second, a world in which people shall live or die according as they are useful or not is one which men must feel to be totally estranged and hostile. The question therefore cannot be, of what use are academics, but rather what is it that they do. Unlike the earlier question, this one does not plunge the enquirer into the metaphysical depths, and the answer to it is very simple. Academics seek to transmit and to increase learning, one had almost said useless learning—but one does not wish to provoke. Foreign policy they leave to those who make bold to know how to leap in the dark.
First published in The Princetonian, January 4, 1961; republished in Elie Kedourie, The Crossman Confessions and other Essays in Politics, History, and Religion (London: Mansell, 1984).
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6 Responses to “Foreign policy: a practical pursuit”
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There was a time in the early ‘sixties, so the lore goes, when Harvard professors did not measure time by the clock but by plane departures from Boston Logan to Washington National. In those days, academics were tres recherches in DC, and the dean of Arts and Sciences, McGeorge Bundy, even became the first National Security Adviser.
JFK took them all—economists, historians like Arthur Schlesinger, political scientists. But these would be people like, a bit later, Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzeznski, who were first and foremost political, and not scientific. They had prepared all their academic lives for a public career. The more important point, though, is this: Political science in those days was a lot more politics and a lot less science. In fact, none of the social sciences were so number-crunchy and model-mad. In those days, this author could read the American Economic Review; today, he no longer can. Too much matrix math.
In other words, the gap between the public and the thinking life was a lot smaller then. And so, the complaint of Nye et al. should be directed not to Obama, who, by the way, has populated half his administration with luminaries large and small from Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, etc. The proper target is contemporary social and, above all, political science.
Henry Kissinger would never get tenure today, not with books like A World Restored or Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy or The Troubled Partnership. This blend of history, analytical thinking, political theory and readable English is “high-class journalism” today. If you want to move from assistant to tenured professor, you would have to write To Nuke or Not to Nuke: A Rational-Choice and Co-Variance Model of Soviet-American Behavior in the Age of Attriting Bipolarity.
Academics who aspire to science will by definition be unable to act as political advisers. In today’s political science, as practiced by the best universities, the “politics” has been taken out of the “science.” But unless our basic rat-choicer or multiple-regression maven can shed the role that made him full professor, he will not be able to advise. “Mr. President, I cannot tell you what to do. I can only tell you that Kim Jong Il’s aggressiveness rises with the number of slasher movies he has watched, with a correlation coefficient of .3.”
Larry Summers, a theoretical economist in his younger days, has bridged the gap. In fact, more economists seem capable of jumping from academia to politics than political scientists. Why? Try this for an explanation: Economists have learned that their models and regressions don’t carry very far; the rage now is behavioral economics which relies not on models (and finding data that fit them), but on observation. Political science must yet loosen the apron strings. The paradigm remains rational choice, taken straight from 19th-century microeconomics, but with an admixture of high-speed computing.
“Brother, can you paradigm?” is the motto. Try figuring out a policy on Iranian or North Korean nukes by laying out paradigms and factor analyses. Whatever you want to say today has to fit on a Blackberry screen.
Josef Joffe is a member of MESH.
Academics (intellectuals, philosophers) and politics: I am not sure whether much that is new can be said about the subject. Plato wrote that philosophers should be kings in his ideal city state, but for him philosophers were seekers of the truth, wisdom-lovers concerned with eternal truths. Max Weber dealt with politics as a vocation in his famous lectures soon after World War One as did countless others.
The relationship is not illicit. Part of the problems is that the qualities needed for the study of foreign policy are not necessarily those required for its successful conduct. Furthermore, as has been so often noted, political science since the days of Elie Kedourie’s essay has been preoccupied more and more with topics which, however fascinating, are not those of foreign policy makers.
Students were advised to get familiar with Bayesian statistics and game theory, but how to quantify fears and ambitions, religion and nationalism—or, as Hans Morgenthau early noted, the struggle for power? When two people want the same country (such as in the case of Israel/Palestine), this is not a case of cognitive dissonance. Being engaged in theory-building (grand theory, middle-range theory, etc.), the nets were cast admirably widely. The innovators borrowed from social psychology (decision-making), management (operations research), communications theory, anthropology and even biology (general systems). They immersed themselves with enthusiasm in such classics as The Structure of Scientific Revolution, sabungan (Balinese cockfights), and “exit, voice and loyalty.” I shall not even mention the various sub-disciplines (such as postcolonial studies) of postmodernism and their impact on some political scientists.
All this intellectual curiosity was very admirable and certainly contributed to a broadening of cultural horizons. But the urgent problems facing us were on a different level: how to deal with the cold war, proliferation, China, Putin, Islamism, Africa or terrorism and so on. With only a little exaggeration, political science could say, paraphrasing Jesus Christ, “Our kingdom is not of this world…” Of course there were always individual scholars following different paths, and some of them found their way into the practice of politics, but these were the exceptions.
There was also the field of area studies; their expertise was certainly needed and they faced certain specific problems of their own. (I try to deal briefly with some of them in a forthcoming book Best of Times, Worst of Times.) Is there much point in calling on political science to become more relevant? This, I suspect, is bound to happen anyway, not as the result of intellectual debate but as a consequence of economic crisis.
Walter Laqueur is a member of MESH.
Have political science professors really forsaken the policy realm in order to spend more quality time with their children (models and theories)? Have the think-tankers taken advantage of their distraction to whisper sweet policy nothings into the ears of the powerful and thereby gain the political appointments that could have and should have gone to political science professors? And to the extent that this is happening, is it really something new?
I believe that the concern expressed by Joe Nye and others about these matters may be overblown. While political science professors may not be getting many top-tier appointments, I know plenty of political science professors—some of whom are members of MESH—who consult for the U.S. Government. Nor is the U.S. Government shy about seeking out political science professors for advice. (And needless to say, many accept the call to be paid to pronounce, no matter how much they might criticize American foreign policy to their colleagues and students.) Nor have the modelers and theorizers been left out. Several offices in the Defense Department and other U.S. government agencies have paid them big bucks to develop models of various political phenomena for policymakers to make more informed policies.
Yes, think-tankers seem to be a lot more visible than they were in previous decades. On the other hand, there appear to be far more think-tanks than there used to be. And many of these think-tankers are…political scientists! And as annoying as this may be to those of us who are professors and not think-tankers, surely this is better than in previous decades when Washington sought advice more from lawyers whose training had less relevance than that of the modelers and theorizers for understanding contemporary international relations.
I have heard many complain that assistant professors are pushed to produce increasingly esoteric and inaccessible research in order to gain tenure and acceptance in the political science field. But are they really being forced to do this? I know of, or have heard of, several assistant professors who actively consult for the U.S. Government—and even corporations—while also having books accepted by respected university presses and well regarded journals. Indeed, I have heard tell that some assistant professors of political science have brazenly cited policymakers’ demand for their advice as an excuse for avoiding the mundane academic tasks of attending committee meetings, advising undergraduates, or even showing up for lectures.
Far from being increasingly divorced from the concerns of the U.S. Government, it seems to me that the period since 9/11 has marked an upsurge in opportunity for political science professors to advise the U.S. Government—if they want to do so. Just how valuable this advice has been, of course, is another matter altogether.
Mark N. Katz is a member of MESH.
Two main points come through in Joe Nye’s valuable op-ed. One is that U.S. foreign policy could benefit from more contributions from academics. It’s not that we in the academy are smarter than those in the policy realm. It’s that each of us brings to bear a particular type of knowledge and perspective that could be constructively complementary. Some of the responsibility for converting the “could be’s” to “is” lies with the policy community and its institutional culture and processes. But a lot lies with the academic community—the political science discipline and international relations subfield, to be more precise—which, as Joe and I and others have argued, is excessively oriented to abstract theory, formal models, methodological wizardry and the like.
And this gets at Joe’s second main point. Greater policy relevance in political science-IR is not some altruistic appeal. It’s in our self-interest as a subfield, as a discipline and as universities. That was also the main point of my 2002 International Security article, “The Need for Praxis: Bringing Policy Relevance Back In”—which was less a lament as Martin Kramer describes it in his post than a tough-love exhortation. Greater policy relevance makes for greater intellectual pluralism. It leads to the kind of research that can lead to theories that are more reliable, valid and resonant. It can enhance teaching of undergraduates in the best liberal arts traditions. It can strengthen and broaden the training of graduate students, all the more important in a world in which the academic job market is even more squeezed and Ph.D.s would do well to have skills that also fit policy track opportunities in government.
I’m not yet as optimistic as Mark Katz, but am hopeful. As 2009 Program Co-Chair for the American Political Science Association, I made policy relevance one of the themes for the Annual Meeting:
Thomas Weiss, current president of the International Studies Association, is going even further with the ISA 2010 conference, making “Theory vs. Policy? Connecting Scholars and Practitioners” the overarching program theme.
With the strong support of Steve del Rosso, who heads the Carnegie Corporation of New York’s International Peace and Security Program, my Berkeley colleague Steve Weber and I have a grant for helping foster “Next Generation Policy Relevant Political Scientists.” We’ve been running a number of initiatives. We’ll soon be launching a website for our overall project; I’ll post the link on MESH when we do. One of the main initiatives, now in its fourth year, is a conference designed to bring together and continue building a network of Political Science graduate students who are policy-oriented and interested in U.S. foreign policy and international politics. We ran this year’s conference last month at George Washington University’s Elliott School in collaboration with Jim Goldgeier. We had over 80 applicants from a number of the top Pol Sci Ph.D. programs in the country for about 15 slots. And the conference was run by Berkeley, Duke and GWU grad students and newly minted assistant profs.
I came back from those two days feeling inspired by these grad students, many of whom had some policy experience prior to coming back to grad school and who do want careers that have policy components but are primarily based in universities. I wished I could have been more bullish on how well this will work—and along with Joe Nye, some MESH colleagues and others will continue to try to be able to be so.
Bruce Jentleson is a member of MESH.
I actually think the link between political science and policy is becoming closer once again. Many political scientists served in government during the last administration, including Aaron Friedberg, Peter Feaver, Victor Cha, Stephen Krasner, Tom Christensen, Condi Rice, and others. Within some parts of the intelligence community, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita’s models, love them or hate them, have played an important role for a few decades. Other political scientists have also been contracted by various government agencies to do a variety of modeling tasks, both quantitative and game theoretic. Now, it is important to recognize that there are limitations to these methodologies like there are limitations to all methodologies. What matters is the knowledge of the researcher and their ability to explain, cogently, their research to a policy audience.
More importantly over the long run, there are generational issues at work. The newer generation of international relations scholars, especially, are increasingly interested in doing work that is both academically rigorous and policy relevant. This generation of scholars is comfortable both running regressions and stepping back from their statistical software to explain what their results suggest for the real world. In this regards, the initiative Bruce Jentleson mentioned in a previous comment seems quite promising indeed.
This also relates to the question of why is there a closer link between economics and policy than political science and policy. Josef Joffe posits that it is because political scientists are more wedded to their models than the economists:
Raj M. Desai and James Vreeland, professors at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, who posted on Dan Drezner’s Foreign Policy blog, have actually made the opposite argument, writing:
I think it is important to remember that rigor does not necessarily imply dogged adherence to rational choice principles. More generally, Desai and Vreeland argue that the links between economists and policy have flourished not due to a shift by economists away from rigor, but because economists in the government are more rigorous, in a relative sense, than their national security counterparts. This seems like a clear factual disagreement. Thoughts on who is right? I don’t know of any real data that would allow us to resolve this question, but hopefully someone else can shed light on this question.
Finally, Mark Katz is correct: an upswing in interest by political scientists in policy relevance and interest by the government in hearing from political scientists does not mean political scientists are giving good advice. Or bad advice, for that matter. But it does mean the opportunities for involvement are growing and very well may continue to grow over the next generation.
Michael Horowitz is a member of MESH.
The increasingly distant relationship between public policymaking and the academic study of international affairs has, I think, three distinct aspects.
The first involves what Joe Nye describes as the tendency for the work of academic political scientists to concentrate on “mathematical models, new methodologies or theories expressed in jargon that is unintelligible to policymakers.” While this disqualifies such political scientists from any influence on public policy, as both Joe and Mark Katz observe, their place has been taken by people in think tanks, who produce policy-relevant research that is impressive in its quantity and (to a somewhat lesser but hardly negligible extent) quality, and who regularly shuttle in and out of government. The character of present-day political science penalizes not the foreign policy process but rather the unfortunate undergraduates whom academic political scientists teach, who are forced to read books and articles and listen to lectures in which few of them can have any interest and that contribute nothing to one of the purposes of the education they are supposed to be receiving: helping them become well-informed citizens.
The second aspect of the issue involves the imposition of a strident, misguided, anti-American political orthodoxy, which seems, from the evidence of Martin Kramer’s Ivory Towers on Sand, to be a particular problem in the field of Middle East studies. Here, too, think tanks have begun to supply what the academy apparently will not: the evidence for this trend is the growing prominence of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (of whose Board of Advisors I am a member), the Middle East Forum, and the Saban Center.
The third aspect of the relationship between universities and the policy process concerns the fitness of people with professional training in international relations or area studies to serve as policymakers. This cannot, of course, be done by kibitzing from the academy: to shape a policy requires being in the room, or the building, or at least the organization in which that policy is being made. But some of the qualities that advanced academic training should and often does cultivate are useful in the policy world: knowledge of a particular country or region, or a subject such as nuclear proliferation, and the capacity to think analytically and write succinctly and clearly.
True, academics tend to take longer views and deal with broader subjects than do policymakers, but experience at thinking, as it were, strategically can surely be helpful in addressing the tactical maneuvers that are the stuff of day-to-day policy. On the other hand, successful policymakers must operate effectively in large organizations, and academics usually have little experience at this. Indeed, the academy can attract people precisely because they have no talent or taste for such activity.
In the end it is, I think, legitimate to wonder whether the presence or absence of a background in the scholarly study of the issues with which policymakers must grapple makes any difference at all. Consider that Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Paul Wolfowitz and Madeleine Albright all earned Ph.D.s in political science, while John Quincy Adams, William Seward, Edward Stettinius and Warren Christopher did not. If any systematic connection between skill at policymaking and the possession of a particular kind of academic credential emerges from that list, I cannot discern it.
Michael Mandelbaum is a member of MESH.