A new generation of historians argues that scholars ought to take seriously ideas about democracy generated by the American hegemon during the Cold War. The alternative, dismissing these ideas as mere epiphenomena in a fundamental clash of power and interests, is to miss an important aspect of Cold War political culture. “Democracy” stands at the center of Daniel Bessner’s many-layered and fascinating book on the German émigré social scientist Hans Speier and his role in helping to constitute the American “military-intellectual complex.” Complicating our understanding of Cold War liberal democracy in America, long denigrated as either an anodyne blend of Read more