The Making of the Cold War Enemy: Culture and Politics in the Military-Intellectual Complex

by Ron Theodore Robin

At the height of the Cold War, the U.S. government enlisted the aid of a select group of psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists to blueprint enemy behavior. Not only did these academics bring sophisticated concepts to what became a project of demonizing communist societies, but they influenced decision-making in the map rooms, prison camps, and battlefields of the Korean War and in Vietnam. With verve and insight, Ron Robin tells the intriguing story of the rise of behavioral scientists in government and how their potentially dangerous, "American" assumptions about human behavior would shape U.S. views of domestic disturbances and insurgencies in Third World countries for decades to come.


Based at government-funded think tanks, the experts devised provocative solutions for key Cold War dilemmas, including psychological warfare projects, negotiation strategies during the Korean armistice, and morale studies in the Vietnam era. Robin examines factors that shaped the scientists' thinking and explores their psycho-cultural and rational choice explanations for enemy behavior. He reveals how the academics' intolerance for complexity ultimately reduced the nation's adversaries to borderline psychotics, ignored revolutionary social shifts in post-World War II Asia, and promoted the notion of a maniacal threat facing the United States.


Putting the issue of scientific validity aside, Robin presents the first extensive analysis of the intellectual underpinnings of Cold War behavioral sciences in a book that will be indispensable reading for anyone interested in the era and its legacy.

Genres: Science, American History

296 pages, Paperback

First published January 15, 2001

Reviews

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 3 out of 5]

That's three stars for the specialist, but for a layperson like me, it's more like two stars. And that's not for a lack of trying. Robin certainly knows his shit, putting on offer a deep and deft exploration of the extant and available sources that reveal various think-tank/government machinations to build up a kind of Cold War behavioralism. Sounds cool, right?
Unfortunately, the book focuses more on the institutional development of this utterly insipid field, going into much detail on the linkages with the military and government (not uninteresting, mind) but skimping on a lot of the actual wacky shit that was perpetrated.
There are good sections on the studies done at Koje Island and domestic experiments in social engineering like Project Revere but all one really comes away with is a better understanding on the intricate strokfest between government and poorly attuned academia than anything else.

[Rebecca Crunden]

⤑ research tag: in an effort to organise my shelves, I'm going to be labelling the books I'm using for study purposes as I tend to dip in and out of these.

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

In The Making of the Cold War Enemy: Culture and Politics in the Military-Intellectual Complex Ron Robin examined the intellectual development of the academic discipline of behavioral sciences after World War II. Robin posited that psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists came to exert an inordinate amount of influence over government and military policy during the Cold War, and through their quest to explain human behavior through a set of rational “laws” undermined public understanding of the complexity of Asian cultures and motivations. The contempt behavioralists exhibited for the power of ideology and values in determining human behavior both reinforced and mirrored common cultural and political mores within the United States and reductively attributed primitiveness to the enemy as an explanation for their otherness. This viewpoint, Robin argued, imposed culturally familiar organizational order onto a chaotic world situation and served to reinforce notions of superiority for American social and cultural constructs.
Robin's critique of behavioralism serves a dual purpose. In a literal sense he argued that the rise to prominence of the behavioral sciences in the post-World War II world was a reflection of domestic political issues regarding race, class, and political orthodoxy. The behavioral sciences assumed that human behavior could be explained by universal “laws” and could therefore provide explanatory meaning to the horrors of the twentieth century while simultaneously reinforcing commonly held cultural and political mores. The research conducted by behavioralists was politically comforting in an age of McCarthyism and existential nuclear angst. In a metaphysical sense Robin also criticized the “government-academic nexus” that rewards political orthodoxy at the expense of intellectual rigor.