Cult of the Irrelevant: National Security Eggheads & Academics
A new book decries a lack of influence by realist scholars, but is it unduly blaming the victim?
By Justin Logan • June 12, 2019
Cult of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security, Michael C. Desch, Princeton University Press, 368 pages
For decades, international relations scholars have increasingly worried that American foreign policymakers aren’t buying what they’re selling. From the Vietnam war to NATO expansion to the Iraq war, the Beltway foreign policy elite has frequently ignored the work of academics who study those subjects, often at great cost to the nation. Why do foreign policymakers so rarely pay attention to scholarship on the regions they are bombing and seeking to dominate?
Michael C. Desch, political science professor at the University of Notre Dame, lays blame at the feet of the academy. In his new book, Cult of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security, Desch writes that “the privileging of complex methods and universal models over engaging substantive issues…reduced the policy relevance of the work of many academic defense intellectuals.†In other words, by moving toward abstruse ontological questions (“Sovereignty and the UFO†comes to mind) or complex statistics or formal modeling (coefficients or Greek letters), incentives inside the academy have shifted the field in the direction of policy irrelevance.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/cult-of-the-irrelevant-national-security-eggheads-and-academics/
