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Elitism, Think Tanks, and American Politics: A Review Essay

Review products

CritchlowDonald T., The Brookings Institution, 1916–1952: Expertise and the Public Interest in a Democratic Society (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1985).
LagemannEllen Condliffe, The Politics of Knowledge: The Carnegie Corporation, Philanthropy, and Public Policy (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989).
SmithJames A., The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite (New York: The Free Press, 1991)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2011

Charles O. Jones
Charles O. Jones
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
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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.

Type
Review Article
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 5 , Issue 4 , October 1993 , pp. 453 - 460
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 1993

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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