Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual

Anyone interested in the history of U.S. foreign relations, Cold War history, and twentieth century intellectual history will find this impressive biography of Hans Speier, one of the most influential figures in American defense circles of the twentieth century, a must-read.In Democracy in Exile, Daniel Bessner shows how the experience of the Weimar Republic's collapse and the rise of Nazism informed Hans Speier's work as an American policymaker and institution builder. Bessner delves into Speier's intellectual development, illuminating the ideological origins of the expert-centered approach to foreign policymaking and revealing the European roots of Cold War liberalism.Democracy in Exile places Speier at the center of the influential and fascinating transatlantic network of policymakers, many of them German migr s, who struggled with the tension between elite expertise and democratic politics. Speier was one of the most prominent intellectuals among this cohort, and Bessner traces hi