Foundations of the American Century Read online

  What was the impact of network construction on actual economic development and raising mass living standards? “The ultimate goal of institution-building is of course national development—to widen the range of choice open to the general population, improve the quality of life, and serve the most important needs of the people,” according to the Ford and Rockefeller foundations.39 That this, on the whole, did not occur is well recognized by foundation officials and their scholarly sympathizers. A Rockefeller-backed assessment of the role of Third World universities in national development criticized them as “dysfunctional and disoriented,” which was attributable to their adoption of American and other Western university structures “with little thought or effort given to questions of how this mode of academic organization would fit or serve existing conditions.”40 This suggests that the foundations’ success even in a core objective—building strong, effective institutions for development—must be qualified.

  A major report in 1976 by Kenneth W. Thompson (a former vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation) also added its voice to “disillusionment… within the agencies [of foreign aid] because it was believed that assistance had not yielded the hoped-for results.” Indeed, he noted the persistence of structural and social inequality. Further, he commented that “most institutions of higher education abroad were ivory towers, elitist in character, and… unresponsive to the urgent needs of their people.”41 Instructively, the way forward identified by Thompson was based on the cooperation of Western and Third World scholars, i.e., human capital that American philanthropy and other aid agencies had developed since the 1950s. That is, established networks were to be used to redefine the mission of the university in development, despite their failure to meet the needs of Third World peoples. It was hoped that a more cooperative style of First World–Third World negotiation would help develop better economic planning and lead quite quickly to the alleviation of poverty.

  Yet, the main thrust of Thompson’s report remained focused on network development through further aid to universities for innovative ideas, “career security for staff… and strategies to meet the problem of the brain drain.” It was recommended that “agencies should continue to help build a reservoir of scholars, faculty members, and development-oriented educators in developing countries.” One way to do so might be “to maintain and strengthen the present network of educators in developing countries.”42 And when we look closely at the network assembled by Thompson, it is clear that it is thoroughly enmeshed in the foundation-sponsored community: representatives from the foundations themselves (such as David Court of the Carnegie Corporation, Rockefeller’s Michael Todaro and George Harrar, and Ford’s F. Champion Ward), from universities and institutes long funded by the foundations (such as Universidad del Valle, Cali, Colombia; and University of Ife, Nigeria), and from scholars and university leaders who had received funding from U.S. philanthropy (Indonesia’s Soedjatmoko and a host of African university leaders).43 The network endured even as failures were revealed and development strategies were refined: its members were considered “highly respected and responsible Third World educators”44 who would produce legitimate and fundable knowledge. As Arnove argues, the principal benefits lay in the incorporation of Third World scholars “into regional and international networks of individuals and institutions conducting the type of research the Ford Foundation [among others] thinks is appropriate and useful.”45 Arnove further contends that foundation knowledge networks “facilitate the movement of ideas among nationals of a region and between the metropolitan centers and the periphery.” The production and consumption of policy-related “network” ideas is thereby separated from the locale and the “masses” and incorporated within elite discourses.46 In this way, even the relatively radical ideas they generate may become diluted, domesticated, and metamorphosed into incremental reforms that fail to address the structural conditions of global inequality.

  Foundations build networks for their own sake because they produce results by virtue of merely being constructed (i.e., due to a range of “internal” functions they perform) and, second, because networks achieve ends other than those publicly stated (their “external” functions). Foundation networks foster and create frames of thought that cohere the network; they generously finance spaces for the production and legitimization of particular types of knowledge; networks build careers and reputations; they fund key scholars, policy makers, universities, journals, professional societies, and associations, connecting scholars from the “core” metropolitan centers with those in the “periphery”; networks provide sources of employment for intellectuals within a system of “safe” ideas, strengthening some ideas, combating others, and, merely through generating and disseminating ideas and empirical research preventing, or at least making a lot less likely, “other thoughts”; networks identify and develop pro-U.S. elite cadres that, in the Cold War, backed (and benefited from) capitalist modernization strategies and that, today, back and benefit from neoliberal globalization strategies.

  Foundation networks are system-maintenance systems that, usually after a sufficient period of foundation patronage, self-perpetuate (as most organizations try to do). Their self-perpetuation becomes a vested interest of the networks’ key constituencies. Networks produce “legitimate” scholars linked with “legitimate” ideas and policies endorsed by or at least engaged with “legitimate” organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and U.S. Department of State, among others. They help to maintain the status quo and, more frequently, act as intrasystemic reformers.

  CONCEPTUALIZING THE STATE-PRIVATE NETWORK

  Though links between states and private transnational actors are recognized in numerous empirical studies, there is little conceptualization of such relationships. This constitutes a genuine problem in the study of foundations that, on one hand, appear to straddle the “state-private” divide while, on the other, appear to be fiercely independent of the state. However, a number of international historians have developed the concept of “state-private networks” to conceptualize the interconnections and consensus-building activities between a range of civil-society organizations and the (American) state.47 Such an approach is among several that offer much more persuasive and novel ways of understanding “how power works,” with special reference to philanthropic foundations, at both domestic and global levels, and a number of those approaches—such as epistemic communities, parastates, corporatism, the Establishment, Gramscian hegemony theory—are further explored in this chapter. I will argue, however, that Gramscian analysis provides the most comprehensive framework for this study and that the other perspectives may be subsumed within it.

  The cooperative relationship of the modern American state with elite foreign affairs and other organizations blurs the distinction between the public and private sectors and calls into question theories (such as pluralism, statism, and instrumental Marxism)48 that advance a zero-sum view of power and pit the state against private interest groups or vice versa. Yet, cooperative state-private elite networks have played a powerful historical role in mobilizing for U.S. global expansionism, and such networks can best be appreciated by examining concepts that emphasize shared and mutual state-private elite interests and go beyond the conventional theories of state interests and private interests in competition. The advantages to the state of such arrangements were/are that official policy objectives could be met, or at least advanced, especially in “sensitive” areas, by purportedly unofficial and nongovernmental means. American foundations are and historically have been particularly close to the state and therefore provide ideal illustrative cases of public-private “bridging” organizations.

  According to Michael Mann, one of the most significant powers of the modern state is its infrastructural capacity, in addition to its considerable and growing coercive power. That is, the state’s power has increased to reach deeply into its “own” society and draw upon reservoirs of legitimacy and popular goodwill, in addition to extracting
tax revenues and using the benefits of a productive economy, such as bank loans.49 Gramsci, on the other hand, maintains that one of the most significant powers of dominant classes is the ability to establish private institutions that become fundamental to the exercise of state power. Elite self-organization and the organization of private life by state agencies creates the basis of interpenetrated organizations and networks of political, ideological, and cultural power, and this has far-reaching consequences for practically every sphere of modern life. Such interpenetrations have forced historians and political scientists to reevaluate and reconceptualize state-private relations and to develop a better understanding of how power works in modern democracies such as the United States.

  Each of the following four conceptual frameworks stands against theories that posit an all-powerful state (such as statism or realism) or that posit a weak state against all-powerful private interests (pluralism). Each of the four formulations of the private-state network go beyond the zero-sum view of power that strong state/weak group theories and strong group/weak state theories favor (although corporatism does retain certain elements of its pluralist origins).50 This chapter explores these four major conceptualizations and then argues that, although each of them advances useful ways of understanding the behavior of the American state and elite private groups, their insights may be subsumed within the more comprehensive view of power advanced by a neo-Gramscian analysis of power. The role of the following four conceptualizations, therefore, is principally to place more empirical/historical flesh on what are broader and more abstract Gramscian categories and notions, such as historic bloc, hegemonic project, and state spirit.

  THE ESTABLISHMENT

  According to the historian Godfrey Hodgson, the Establishment, which he dates back to World War II (but in this book is shown to have a longer lineage), is “the group of powerful men who know each other… who share assumptions so deep that they do not need to be articulated; and who continue to wield power outside the constitutional or political forms: the power to put a stop to things they disapprove of, to promote the men they regard as reliable; the power, in a word, to preserve the status quo.”51 More precisely, at its heart, the Establishment is made up of three core groups: internationally minded lawyers, bankers, and corporate executives from New York; government officials from Washington, D.C.; and elite university academics (including the heads of the major philanthropic foundations). These three groups were united, Hodgson argues, by a common history, policy, aspiration, instinct, and technique.

  The historical origins and unity of the postwar Establishment lay in winning World War II, developing and implementing the Marshall Plan, founding NATO, and confronting the Soviet Union. Their agreed policy was to oppose isolationism and to promote “liberal” internationalism, to deprecate national chauvinism but press the case for American power, advocate restraint but admire the use of high-tech military force, and to act with conscience but not permit it to prevent robust action. Their shared aspiration was to nothing less than “the moral and political leadership of the world”—to fill the vacuum left by the British Empire. To Hodgson, the fundamental instinct of the Establishment was for the political center, “between the yahoos of the Right and the impracticalities of the Left.” Finally, Hodgson believes that the Establishment’s technique was to use the executive branch of government—the White House, National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency—rather than the U.S. Congress and public opinion. The Establishment claims to take private action for the public good.

  Although Hodgson mentions the place of foundations only in passing, his conceptualization fits several aspects of the foreign policy roles of the Big 3, who saw themselves as bipartisan and ideology free, opposed isolationism, supported liberal internationalism, and worked tirelessly for American global leadership. Foundation leaders were drawn from similar social and educational backgrounds to those of Hodgson’s Establishment. In effect, Hodgson identifies the cohesive elite forces that dominate American foreign policy and that bridged the gap between state and society. Although neo-Gramscians would expect a historic bloc to be broader than Hodgson’s Establishment, they would certainly find Hodgson’s concept useful within a broader formulation, because it permits the specific historicization of Gramscian abstractions. It is also important, of course, in showing that non-Gramscians too recognize that, despite the rhetoric of democracy and egalitarianism, there is indeed disproportionate power wielded in America by unelected, unaccountable, unrepresentative, and highly secretive elites who work outside “the constitutional or political forms.”52

  THE CORPORATIST SCHOOL

  Corporatism is a variant of pluralist theory, sharing its idea that the American state is essentially weak, incapable of independent action, and dominated by private interests. Nevertheless, where pluralism focuses on political conflict and competition, corporatism emphasizes mechanisms for conflict management and collaboration between functional blocs (corporations, government, organized labor, agribusiness). Functional blocs cooperate better to manage economic and political transformations, harmonize conflicting interests, and promote political stability.

  Corporatists such as Michael Hogan and Ellis Hawley trace the history of functional blocs to the Progressive era, a period of rising corporate power, mass immigration, rapid urbanization, and perceived social chaos.53 Consequently, big business and government became increasingly intertwined, creating an “organizational sector” above party competition and narrow sectional interests. The “organizational sector” is viewed as “an enlightened social elite,” a benign source of policies favoring the whole nation, seeking a middle way between “laissez-faire… and… paternalistic statism.” Specifically, the interpenetration of functional blocs and government agencies enhanced the possibilities of pragmatic New Deal reform and an internationalist foreign policy, because the blocs were focused on capital-intensive industrial and financial institutions and with organized labor, all of which had a stake in economic growth and international stability. Such structural changes, in effect, led to the emergence of new elites—an aspect neglected within corporatist literature—that transformed America internally and projected their New Dealism abroad. Michael Wala’s analysis of the role of the Council on Foreign Relations is an excellent example of a corporatist account that can be applied to philanthropic foundations.54

  The corporatist analysis, also, in some ways, fits within a neo-Gramscian framework. Indeed, the corporatists Thomas Ferguson and Thomas Mc-Cormick allude to concepts used in both perspectives. Ferguson actually uses the term “historic bloc” for the New Deal coalition built by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.55 Certainly, the enlightened self-image of the “organizational sector” accords with Gramscian “state spirit,” and the corporatist emphasis on the coalescence of interests between internationally oriented, capital-intensive industries and financial institutions as well as organized labor are fundamental elements of Gramsci’s historic bloc. What is missing, however, in corporatist analysis is any compelling account of the role of intellectuals and knowledge institutions. A Gramscian approach adds much by analyzing knowledge-network construction and mobilization of intellectuals by philanthropy.

  PARASTATES

  As noted previously, the Progressive era witnessed the rise of a variety of reform-oriented and modernizing organizations. Broadly, reformists concentrated on attempts to relieve poverty, promote moral renewal, reform government and politics, and transform America’s place in the world.56 Eldon Eisenach calls these organizations “parastates” because they stood for the “national public good,” claiming to represent “the authentic nation.” Working outside the established channels of the party machine and electoral politics, parastates favored extending federal executive authority into labor rights, health and safety at work, slum clearance, public health, and so on.57

  In fact, parastates made no distinction between themselves and “the state,” which they saw in Hegelian terms as the embodiment of the faith of a peop
le. In this view, it was taken for granted that “the state must be no external authority which restrains and regulates me, but it must be myself acting as the state in every smallest details of life.” The “good citizen,” therefore, is “state oriented” in the sense of seeking to achieve a larger public good in his or her everyday actions. But this, in the Progressive era, was the aspiration, not the fact. The interests of a weak federal state and of active parastates coalesced around the mobilization of public opinion: the parastates would educate public opinion behind a reformist agenda at home, through a strong federal state, and via the export of American values abroad. “Good citizens” would also staff the most statist public offices as well as exercise citizenship in publicly oriented private organizations (foundations, charities, etc.). Parastates backed New Deal reform, globalism, and the institutions that underpinned them—the universities, foundations, churches, and public opinion.