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Elitism, Think Tanks, and American Politics: A Review Essay
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 October 2011
Extract
I have spent my professional career studying and writing about American politics. I have yet to integrate satisfactorily the antipolitical attitudes that remain so prevalent among intellectuals in our system. Perhaps I take it as a personal defeat that a lifetime of teaching and research can have so little impact. Whatever the cause, I still register astonishment upon encountering the variety and depths of disdain for the American political system within our academies. The most recent evidence of the pervasiveness of antipolitics to come to my attention is that contained in three fine studies of philanthropy and policy institutes (or “think tanks”). They are the subject of this review essay.
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- Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 1993
References
Notes
1. Smith was commissioned by the Brookings Institution to produce a volume commemorating its sevety-fifth anniversary. It is more a chronicle than a critical evaluation. Brookings at Seventy-Five (Washington, D.C., 1991).Google Scholar See also the earlier chronicle by Saunders, Charles B. Jr, The Brookings Institution: A Fifty-Year History (Washington, D.C., 1966).Google Scholar
2. Wildavsky, Aaron, Speaking Truth to Power: The Art and Craft of Policy Analysis (Boston, 1979), 405.Google Scholar
3. Ibid., 405.
4. Smith, Brookings at Seventy-Five, 33.
5. The original endowment was $125 million, at a time when that amount was real money, and not merely an asterisk in the national budget.
6. For a description and analysis of one of the more prominent new-generation think tanks, see Bjerre-Poulsen, Niels, “The Heritage Foundation: A Second-Generation Think Tank,” Journal of Policy History 3:2 (1991): 152–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Among other points raised by Bjerre-Poulsen is the issue of how to estimate the impact of a think tank like Heritage that has a “flair for public relations.”
7. Schattschneider, E. E., Two Hundred Million Americans in Search of a Government (New York, 1969), 53.Google Scholar