The Birth of Think Tanks: History, Theory and Politics in the Long American Century

Abstract

Over the past few decades, think tanks have proliferated globally as distinctive modalities of knowledge production, circulation and authorization. This study examines the historical political function of think tanks in contemporary society by providing an account of the historico-philosophical co-ordinates according to which this function evolved. The emergence and proliferation of think tanks signifies a broad historical shift in organizational forms, intellectual practices, governance arrangements and types of knowledge produced. This study argues that the institutional modality of the think tank developed according to, exemplifies, and performs a distinctive liberal American political reason. This reason is based on a number of propositions about the nature of the social world as a self-regulating market, the function of knowledge in society as an instrument of governance, and the proper role of the state as a local enabler of the free movement of capital. To shed light on the particular political reason that think tanks express, this study examines the overlapping and intertwining between the rationalities that have informed the founding of think tanks and the main rationalities that think tanks have come to perform since the early 1970s: neoliberalism and neoconservatism. Its primary focus is on the role played by American Pragmatism in shaping social thought and intellectual practices during the Progressive Era. It claims that both sets of rationalities operate within the institutional and intellectual structures of the long American century—a period commencing in the late nineteenth century that corresponds to the rise of American power on a global scale. The study charts the development over time of intellectual conversations and institutional innovations centered on a specific set of problems and solutions. It provides a theoretical and historical background to the debate on think tanks by examining the American pragmatist conversation on “organized intelligence.” It analyses the intellectual and material forces that brought the RAND Corporation into being, and also examines the founding of the Heritage Foundation and the de- democratizing effect of the convergence of neoliberalism and neo-conservatism. It explores think tanks as a global technology of denationalization. Finally, it demonstrates how think tanks were institutionalized as a fully-fledged functionality.