Before reading the text present your understanding of the term “think tank”.

Gulliver thought the professors were out of their senses when he visited the Grand Academy of Lagado on the Isle of Balnibarbi. He was bemused by their many improbable schemes – extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, constructing houses from the roof down, and training pigs to plow with their snouts. Yet however bold and inventive the various projects and their "projectors" (as he termed the scientists) were, there remained something troubling about his visit to the academy, something fundamentally deficient about the experts and their ideas.

Gulliver grew especially melancholy in the company of the political experts:

These unhappy people [so they seemed to Gulliver] were proposing schemes for persuading monarchs to choose favourites upon the score of their wisdom, capacity and virtue, of teaching Ministers to consult the public good, of rewarding merit, great abilities, and eminent services; of instructing Princes to know their true interest by placing it on the same foundation with that of their people; of choosing for employments persons qualified to exercise them; and with many other wild impossible chimeras, that never entered before into the heart of man to conceive, and confirmed in me the old observation, that there is nothing so extravagant and irrational which some philosophers have not maintained for truth.

 

Debanking the more fantastic schemes propounded by Lagado's scientists was easy work, but Jonathan Swift's Gulliver never quite accounted for the sadness he felt, especially among the political experts whose ideas were not, after all, completely incredible. Was his melancholy brought on because the professors' reform schemes – both the silly and the sound – were hopelessly unrealistic? Or was he driven to despair because society was intractable and governments apparently immune to improvement by rational, scientific means? Were the experts and their ideas deficient? Or were political leaders incapable of putting moral truth and scientific knowledge into practice? For Jonathan Swift – the pamphleteer of proposals, modest and otherwise, and a cleric who served both Whigs and Tories – the question of how to link knowledge and power was a matter both of theory and of practical political ambition.

Intellectuals and their diverse academies have been the subject of Utopian speculation since antiquity, and the relationships of learned advisers to rulers have remained central themes in political histories, biographies, and books of practical statecraft. Yet modem policy experts and their research institutes – no longer fanciful inventions but a fundamental feature of modern political life – have attracted far less attention. And their role in American politics is no less ambiguous than that of Lagado's Grand Academy.

On occasion, the schemes and visions that emanate from contemporary policy research institutes may seem impractical, politically unrealistic, or arcane – although not as comic as Lagado's. More often, the research is diligently pursued, and practically oriented recommendations ensue. Nevertheless, one can visit contemporary policy centers and institutes and feel an even deeper disappointment than Gulliver's. A certain melancholy (an archaic word but apt in this connection) still arises from our all-too-familiar recognition of the gulf that he observed, so long ago, between knowledge and politics. It is compounded by a growing awareness that the financial and intellectual resources that are committed – and have been committed over the past century – to organized social science research and to the invention of expert advisory institutions have not made our politics appreciably more rational, political debates more intelligent, or policies more certain of success.

This is not a book about the relatively small and exceptional group of intellectuals and experts, a Woodrow Wilson, a Paul Douglas, or a Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who have run for office and become political actors. Nor is it about intellectuals of primarily literary, philosophical, or theoreticalinclinations. Rather, it concerns a group that now encompasses tens of thousands of experts, operating within or on the margins of government, who advise, consult and comment tirelessly on public issues includes a Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski among its more famous foreign policy specialists and Rivlin, Charles Schultze, Herbert Stein, and Michael Boskin among its prominent economists. It is an amorphous but influential class of people – first discernible around the turn of the century – who serve in government and whose ideas sometimes shape policy choices or are incorporated into governmental programs and whose reports and studies – their impact often magnified by the mass media – define the boundaries of our policy debates.

The history of policy experts and their role in American life is comprised of three intertwined threads. The longest continuous strand is the attempt, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, to create a “social” science and to justify it both as a method of scholarly investigation and as a practical tool of social improvement. It concerns the professional training and career paths of those who have used their academic expertise to gain political influence. The second is the ongoing effort to press the experts’ knowledge and analytic techniques into public service through a variety of institutional mechanisms, including ad hoc commissions, executive and congressional advisory staffs, and governmental research agencies. It is the story of government and quasi-governmental organizations – Herbert Hoover's research commissions, the Council of Economic Advisers, the Congressional Budget Office, and many others – that have either brought experts into routine contact with political decision makers or made experts responsible for policy decisions. The third, and the central concern of this book, is the emergence of those quintessentially American planning and advisory institutions known as think tanks – the private, nonprofit research groups that operate on the margins of this nation's formal political processes. Situated between academic social science and higher education, on the one hand, and government and partisan politics, on the other hand, think tanks provided a concrete focus for exploring the changing role of the policy expert in American life.

The colloquial term think tank itself conveys something of the ambivalence that our democratic society feels about experts. Borrowed from World War II military jargon for a secure room where plans and strategies could be discussed, the term was first used in the 1950s to describe the contract research organizations, such as the RAND Corporation, that had been set up by the military after the war. By the 1960s, "think tank" had entered the popular lexicon, but it is an imprecise term that refers to all sorts of private research groups. It is a curious phrase, suggesting both the ratified isolation of those who think about policy, as well as their prominent public display, like some rare species of fish or reptile confined behind the glass of an aquarium or zoo.

Despite their generic label, policy research institutions in the United States are a varied lot. They differ in their sources of financial support, the constituencies they choose to serve, the balance they strike between research and advocacy, the breadth of the policy questions they address, the academic eminence and practical political experience of their staffs, and their ideological orientations. Almost all, including such mainstays of the Washington policy community as the Brookings Institution and American Enterprise Institute (AEI), owe their continuing survival to philanthropic contributions from foundations and corporations, and their fortunes can vary drastically as relations with the philanthropic sector change. Although Brookings, one of the few to have accumulated a significant endowment (some $90 million), has enjoyed close relations with foundations, it has weathered several financial crises during its seventy-five-year history. AEI, with few financial assets, was the beneficiary of energetic philanthropic efforts by conservatives in the 1970s, but saw its contributions, with its staff and budget, shrink dramatically during the early 1980s before rebounding under new leadership. Other institutions, including the RAND Corporation and the Urban Institute, were spawned and are largely sustained by government research contracts and have devoted most of their energies lo problems defined by their clients in governmental agencies. Still others, such as the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University or the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, have operated within a university orbit, albeit with considerable autonomy, relying to some extent on outside funds from foundations, corporations, or individual donors. Yet another cluster, which includes the Heritage Foundation and the Institute for Policy Studies, has been created by partisan or ideological activists. Supported by committed individuals and sympathetic foundations, their research serves ends that are more explicitly activist than academic.

More than one thousand private, not-for-profit think tanksnow operate in the UnitedStates, approximately one hundred of them in and around Washington, D.C. Brookings, Heritage, RAND, and perhaps a dozen more are reasonably familiar to the public. But despitethe grandiose titles they give themselves, most think tanks are tiny and often ephemeral operations – the entrepreneurial venture of a scholar-activist, a Washington-based foundation research project, or a political candidate's short-lived campaign research unit. Think tank may conjure up images of elegant town houses or ultramodern offices in which scores of intellectuals with distinguished academic degrees dreamily contemplate the future. The more mundane reality is a warren of rented offices in which a handful of researchers monitor the latest political developments, pursue short-term research projects, organize seminars and conferences, publish occasional books or reports, field telephone calls from reporters, and work hard to obtain foundation grants or corporate support to keep their enterprises afloat.

Think tanks proliferated in the 1970s and 1980s, but they are not a new invention, nor are they necessarily more influential than they were earlier in this century (indeed, their sheer number and clamoring for attention have probably diffused their impact). Yet they are one of the most distinctive ways in which Americans have sought to link knowledge and power. And their existence is a reflection of such elemental political realities as the constitutional separation of powers; a party system historically grounded in electoral political ambitions, rather than ideology; and a civil service tradition that gives leeway to numerous political appointees. They are also shaped by the philanthropic habits of individuals and foundations, intellectual currents in the social sciences, the changeable structures of graduate and professional education, and the efforts of energetic intellectual entrepreneurs.

The first generation of policy research institutions was founded around 1910, an outgrowth of Progressive Era reform and the "scientific management" movement. Established and sustained by private philanthropy, they operated in an era when the government had few intellectual resources at its command, and they were a welcome adjunct to the then much-smaller public sector, often prodding the government to assume new social responsibilities. A second generation – the first to bear the label think tank – was created in the twenty years or so after World War II, when the government sought to marshal sophisticated technical expertise for both the Cold War national security enterprise and the short-lived domestic war against poverty. Their services were provided to the government on a contractual basis. A third generation, more numerous but generally with smaller budgets and staffs, was founded in the 1970s and 1980s; these think tanks were outgrowths of the ideological combat and policy confusion of the past two decades. Many of them are geared toward political activism and propaganda, rather than toward scholarship.

Think tanks are largely twentieth-century inventions, but the expert adviser and the intellectual working in the shadows of power have had a role in political life for more than two millenia. Political advising in the West began with the famous teachers who tutored young princes and prepared them for leadership. The list is distinguished: Aristotle tutored the young Alexander; Seneca taught Nero; Gerbert of Aurillac instructed both a future German emperor, Otto III, and a king of France, Robert Capet; Thomas Hobbes saw to the education of the young Prince of Wales who would become Charles II; and Cardinal Mazarin took time from other duties to see to the training of Louis XIV. Enduring advisory relationships between intellectuals and rulers often had their beginnings in such youthful associations.

Policy experts continue to serve as teachers even in the late twentieth century. Rexford G. Tugwell thought he and his fellow members of the Brains Trust (as it was originally called) had transformed a simplistic-thinking Franklin D. Roosevelt into a formidable, well-informed candidate. Walter Heller acknowledged using his post on the Council of Economic Advisers to tutor John F. Kennedy in Keynesian economics. And in preparing for the 1964 tax cut, Kermit Gordon, Lyndon B. Johnson's budget director, attended to the president's advanced training in fiscal policy. Now, Straussian-trained political theorists William Kristol and Games Lord, who are on Vice President J. Danforth Quayle's staff, are reportedly supervising his education, supplying their pupil with works of history and the biographies of great men.

Some leaders have taught themselves, turning to books for solitary counsel. Long before cost-benefit analyses, terse decision memorandums, or wordy reports from national commissions, political advice came in more artful literary forms. Abraham Lincoln studied Aesop's Fables, for example, finding useful political wisdom in the tales. He described the author not as a teller of children's stories but as a "great fabulist and philosopher" – a sign not only of Lincoln's wide-ranging intellect but of his almost reflexive recourse to historical and literary sources, for political guidance. In his own day, Aesop, though his life is clouded by myth, was reputedly much sought after as a political counselor. Among presidents who came of political age in the twentieth century, only Harry S Truman seems to have sought counsel in books, reading widely in historical works.

But experts and intellectuals have been more than private tutors to a willing prince or president. As ancient and medieval governments grew more complex, such basic skills as writing and calculating gave intellectuals a set of tools that helped shape the emergence of an expert class within nascent governmental bureaucracies. Experts worked as scribes, record keepers, and officials of the chancery and exchequer, serving in rudimentary advisory institutions and commanding the information that rulers needed to make intelligent decisions. Such practical experience often gave them a vantage point from which to reflect on the nature of knowledge and power.

Niccolo Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini, for example, drew on their experiences in the Florentine government to craft books that have served as practical manuals for many generations of aspiring politicians. Indeed, much early writing about statecraft – with frequent injunctions to seek wise counsel (no doubt many authors wrote with their own qualifications in mind) – is to be found in the so-called Mirrors of Princes, which provided exemplary images against which a ruler might be judged. Yet The Prince, the most famous (and notorious) example of the genre, was also designed to advance Machiavelli's career by attracting the attention of a potential new patron. Although his courting of Lorenzo de Medici was unsuccessful, Machiavelli's brief tract on virtue and necessity revolutionized political theory and practice. It also permanently stained the reputation of the political adviser, making it all too obvious that knowledge was eager and willing to serve power, rather than higher moral ends (indeed, Machiavelli denied that there were any higher moral ends). Such books, apparently intended to educate or instruct, have long been intertwined with the ambitions of their authors. Proximity to power or ambition for power still inspires the writing of books – and the public's suspicion of some who write them.

There has always been something worrisome about the wise man who seeks to advise the king. Knowledge and expertise are inherently suspect when they become a basis for claims of political influence. Often the expert's power is rooted in arcane skills. Sometimes it is a form of power that challenges traditional authority. And usually it is a kind of power that seems to undermine popular democratic choice. Clinging to a visceral anti-Intellectualism, many Americans freely indulge their native suspicion of experts, especially those who aspire to advise the powerful.

In democracies, such suspicion easily shades into ridicule. Socrates, perhaps the first to inspire a think tank, was comically depicted by Aristophanes as descending from the heavens in an observational basket; the playwright satirized the Athenian philosopher and his "Thoughtery" or "Studio of Wise Souls" in a comedy, The Clouds. In reality, of course, Socrates' life and death exemplify as tragedy the persistent tensions between speculative thought and political action. Even in the Athenian democracy, where free inquiry was held in high esteem, the intellectual was feared, as well as respected. Plato's portrayal of Socrates poses the dilemma starkly: Either intellectuals and experts can operate on the margins, challenging received opinion and political authority (and suffering the consequences) or they can attempt to serve the powerful, bolstering and justifying a particular regime.

Truth speaks to power in many different tones of voice. The philosopher and cloistered intellectual, free of the ambition to serve a leader directly, can speak with an authority that does not need to bend the truth to justify pressing political ends or personal ambitions. To the philosopher or scientist, the search for truth is central; political power is merely incidental. The policy expert and adviser, however, if they aspire to be of use, must speak to power in a political and bureaucratic context; and they must speak a useful truth. Their claims to speak the truth must always be viewed in light of their relationship with power. Although the insights of some scholars have been seized upon by those in power and have inadvertently drawn the scholars into political controversy, the policy elite comprises those who address policies in explicit terms and who intend to use their knowledge in the policy arena.

Some four hundred years ago, Francis Bacon, a philosopher with political aspirations, took note of the "inseparable conjunction of counsel with kings." An archetype of later experts, he was one of the first to envision a modern research institute, the so-called Salomon's House described in his unfinished treatise, New Atlantis. Molded in the arts of statecraft at Cambridge University and Cray's Inn, Bacon, like many who now toil in Washington's think tanks, knew the enduring frustrations of the man of superior intellect who must court the high and mighty to win office. Relegated to the margins of power during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, he was appointed lord chancellor in 1618 by James I, only to be indicted three years later for accepting bribes. In his essay "Of Counsel," one of the shrewdest accounts of the advisory relationship, he concluded – intellectually chastened by the knowledge of his half-spoken truths to power and bitter at his steep fall from grace – that the best advisers are the dead, for books "speak plain when counsellors blanch."

The books that Bacon had in mind – histories, fables, proverbs, and utopias by long-deceased counselors – are certainly not the first recourse of contemporary decision makers. Modern advising is no longer rooted in early education, nor is it based on sweeping historical reflection, moral admonition, or broad principles of statecraft. Advising is now the province of cadres of specialists, and it involves helping officials to frame policy choices, to make particular decisions, and to articulate the reasons for their choices. Indeed, it is now a fully institutionalized function, both within the government and in the research organizations that operate outside it. The advisory institutions – not merely the fanciful inventions of utopian literature but a real and bustling universe of activity – have grown for good reason. The decisions that elected officials make – as well as the choices that citizens make when voting – demand more knowledge than ever. And the ways a society organizes knowledge and puts it into public service are of vital political concern.

Contemporary advisory relationships suggest not only a different kind of adviser, proffering more specialized advice, but a different kind of political leader, one who is considerably more dependent on specialists. The experts set policy goals, chart directions, monitor results, and (having first measured public sentiments) craft the words that will move the electorate. Even though modern presidents are literate (ancient and medieval kings generally were not), they still depend on experts to draft the words they speak and to study and outline the policy choices they confront. Medieval kings who were dependent on their counselors were sometimes dismissed as "feeble creatures." But modern presidents – and other political officials – are arguably feebler still, since government has grown vastly more complex, with leaders becoming far more dependent not only on their immediate counselors but on experts who are scattered throughout the bureaucracy.

Nelson Rockefeller, who served briefly in the 1950s as a special assistant for foreign policy to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, once convened a group of academics to discuss the country's long-range international objectives. Among the experts who assisted him in this and later policy reviews was Henry A. Kissinger, then a young professor at Harvard University. In the initial volume of his memoirs, The White House Years, Kissinger described the first encounter between the eager advisers and the buoyant Rockefeller, slapping backs and greeting each scholar amiably by name.

Rockefeller sat stoically through the session as each professor offered his shrewdest practical advice on bureaucratic maneuvers, political manipulations, and tricky interpersonal relations. Having been summoned to Washington, they assumed that the occasion called for tough-minded advice. After taking it all in, Rockefeller said, "I did not bring you gentlemen down here to tell me how to maneuver in Washington. That is my job. Your job is to tell me what is right." Indeed, Kissinger, who dedicated his volume to Rockefeller – a gesture reminiscent of those Renaissance advisers who had dedicated their (much slimmer) political tracts to patrons and princes – concluded, "Of all the public figures I have known he retained the most absolute, almost touching, faith in the power of ideas."

Ideas are indeed powerful political instruments. Masses can he moved, misled, or immobilized by them. Political leaders can seize upon ideas to uplift, to misinform, or to serve personal ambitions. Expert advisers, courtiers, and bureaucrats can use them to challenge authority, to curry favor, or to improve our understanding of politics and human affairs. The story of both ancient intellectuals and modern experts is often one of knowledge coupled with ambition. Few intellectuals and experts are so free of Faustian pride that they do not secretly believe they are better qualified to execute policy than are the elected or appointed officials they advise. Thus, it is not surprising that the relationship between the expert and the leader has often been problematic, raising questions about who is really ruling whom. As Swift once angrily wrote of the earl of Oxford, whom he advised, "If we let these great ministers pretend too much, there will be no governing them." The relationship between the expert and the body of citizens who rule in a democracy is no less ambiguous, and in our time, one must ask whether the experts as a class have used mystifying jargon and an array of bewildering models and specialized tools to interpose themselves between the citizenry and their elected leaders.

Any survey of the ways in which knowledge and politics have been linked in the United States – a nation in which unparalleled resources have been channeled into social science research and into the creation of a huge infrastructure of private advisory institutions – can be only tentative. It can be a voyage no more final or definitive than Gulliver's; a solitary traveler cannot visit every island in the sea or stay for long on any one of them. In exploring some of the nation's think tanks, I have not attempted to recount their histories in detail but have focused on their founding and their moments of greatest impact, since these moments reveal the most about the changing nature and uses of policy expertise. I have also found it useful to view expertise from another vantage point, that of the American presidency – though not by any means exhaustively – since the different uses presidents have made of experts provide a way both of gauging our leaders' changing views about political knowledge and of tracking the evolution of practical advisory mechanisms.

While Gulliver described and debunked many of the projectors' ideas in describing the ruin of Balnibarbi, I have not aimed to provide a thorough inventory of the experts' policy ideas nor to praise or blame them. Although experts have become an integral part of American government, unlike Swift, I do not think our modern experts are leading us to ruin. Nevertheless, there is something troubling about the relationship among experts, leaders, and citizens that tends to make American politics more polarized, short-sighted, and fragmented – and often less intelligent – than it should be.

 

1. statecraft – искусство управлять государством, искусное управление государственными делами

2. an ambiguous role – сомнительная, неопределенная, неоднозначная роль

3. to emanate from – происходить, быть результатом чего-л.

4. to run for office – баллотироваться на пост

5. to be incorporated into smth. – быть включенным

6. to magnify one’s impact on (upon) smb./smth. – усилить свое влияние на кого-л./что-л.

7. intertwined threads – (зд.) пересекающиеся, взаимосвязанные направления

8. ad hoc commissions – специальные комиссии

9. significant endowment – значительный, существенный вклад (взнос)

10. to weather a financial crisis – пережить финансовый кризис

11. a non-for-profit (non-for-profit, non-profit-making) organization – некоммерческая организация

12. to keep afloat – держаться на плаву, не тонуть

13. to clamour for (зд: attention) – требовать (зд: внимания)

14. to give leeway to smb. – предоставить свободу действий кому-л.

15. an outgrowth of smth. – следствие, результат; естественный ход, развитие (событий и т.п.)

16. to be adjunct to smb./smth. –быть помощником; дополнением, приложением

17. to prod the government to do smth. – побуждать, принуждать правительство сделать что-л.

18. to assume responsibilities – взять на себя обязанности

19. to make intelligent decisions – принимать разумные решения

20. to command information – владеть, располагать информацией

21. a vantage point – выгодное положение, выигрышная позиция

22. to draw on smb's experience – использовать чей-л. опыт

23. to bolster a regime – поддерживать режим

24. to proffer advice – предлагать совет

25. public sentiment – общественное мнение, настроение