Nils Gilman

This is very much history about intellectuals for intellectuals; so what's the attraction? For me, it comes in three parts. One is from being something of a student of the Cold War. Two, the men who I had as instructors as an undergrad were living in the shadow of the immediate failure of the great post-World War II dream of creating a real social science, and I wanted to get some perspective. Three, there are times when neoconservatism appears to be nothing more than the Cold War being relived as farce, making revisiting the scene of the crime a useful enterprise.

That said, Gilman is as interested in the institutional arrangements by which the new behavioristic social science was spread, with modernization theory being only one aspect of the whole. The most poignant thing is how the whole apparatus just folded their tents at the end of day, as by 1970 it made no sense to be trumpeting the United States as anyone's end goal, considering how many dreams had been shattered by Vietnam and the failures of mild social democracy at home.

Still, as much as Gilman wants to chide the modernization thinkers of the high Cold War for their sense of self-congratulation, their blinkered outlook, and their tacit authoritarianism, they were at least trying to do good. In fact, Gilman pronounces something of a curse on all the current players (neocons, globalizers, dependency-theory mavens, etc,) for failing to dream a great dream of world culture, and proposes that the new great dream is to put at the forefront personal emancipation as a goal, and building the institutions that would faciliate such an end.… (more)