Our Enemies and US: America's Rivalries and the Making of Political Science

249 Pages·2002·17.696 MB·English

by  Ido Oren

Our Enemies and US

Our Enemies and US
America's Rivalries
and the Making
of Political Science
IDO OREN
Cornell University Press Ithaca and London
Copyright © 2003 by Cornell University
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review,
this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any
form without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage
House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.
First published 2003 by Cornell University Press
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Oren, Ido, 1958-
Our enemies and US : America's rivalries and the making of political
science / Ido Oren,
p. cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8014-3566-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Political science—United States—History—20th century. 2. United
States—Politics and government. 3. United States—Foreign relations.
I. Title: America's rivalries and the making of political science. II.
Title.
JA84.U5 O73 2003
320 ' .0973—dc2i 2002009409
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IHN ü » ™ ,>ttN
Few discoveries are more irritating than those which expose the
pedigree of ideas.
Lord Acton, History of Freedom
All knowledge of cultural reality, as may be seen, is always
knowledge from particular points of view.
Max Weber, "'Objectivity' in Social Science and Social Policy"
Preface, ix
Introduction American Political Science as Ideology, 1
Chapter i Imperial Germany, 23
Chapter 2 Nazi Germany, 47
Chapter 3 Stalin's Soviet Union, 91
Chapter 4 Cold War Politics, 126
Conclusion Toward a Reflexive Political Science, 172
Notes, 183
Index, 227

A decade ago I was working on a mathematical and statistical study of
arms races that fell well within the substantive and epistemological
bounds of mainstream political science. I published the results in profes­
sional journals, and I remain proud of the work's quality. But even a cur­
sory glance at this book will show that my intellectual horizon has shifted
considerably. This book questions the very presuppositions of the science
of politics into which I had been socialized. How did this reorientation
come about?
After the end of the Cold War, scholarly interest in the previously pop­
ular subject of the arms race waned. With the collapse of communism and
the apparent spread of democracy, many scholars were intrigued by the
prospect of a "democratic peace." By the mid-1990s, the proposition that
democracies do not fight one another, which had had little resonance just
a few years earlier, was gaining widespread acceptance. It received sup­
port from numerous statistical analyses, and the Clinton administration
invoked it as a rationale for its foreign policy of "democratization." I was
skeptical of the notion that peace between states was enhanced by the
shared democratic character of their regimes, but had to admit that the
statistical studies of the relationship seemed technically sound. To be ef­
fective, a critique of these studies would have to rest on a foundation
other than their own scientific grounding.
In this context, a question crossed my mind: How did Woodrow Wil­
son perceive Imperial Germany — not in 1917, when he declared war "to
make the world safe for democracy," but twenty to thirty years earlier?
Wilson's legacy was consciously embraced by proponents of the demo­
cratic peace thesis, and I thought that the thesis might be undermined if
it turned out that Wilson's characterization of Germany as "autocratic"
followed, rather than preceded, the German-American conflict. I vaguely
knew that Wilson was a political scientist before he entered politics, but I
knew little else about the history of political science. At that point, I was
extremely fortunate to be able to turn to a wise colleague, Jim Farr, for in­
dispensable tutoring in disciplinary history. Jim suggested, among other
things, that my investigation might be profitably expanded to include
John Burgess, an ardent Germanophile who founded the first graduate
school of political science in the United States.
In my research on arms races, I had come to appreciate the power of
mathematical models to generate insights that might not have been read­
ily apparent otherwise. As I immersed myself in the academic writings of