The world view of the Atlantic ruling class as academic discipline

Abstract

The disciplinary structure of academia achieved its contemporary form in the USA. It combined the agnostic empiricism pioneered in England with the strategy of North American business to create an academic intelligence base to support its national and transnational hegemony. When Woodrow Wilson intervened in World War I, the world view of the most advanced elements in the Anglo-American ruling class that world order should be organised around a white English-speaking heartland found its expression in a strategy of projecting a Lockean liberal universe of sovereign nation-states open for business. The Russian Revolution only added urgency to this programme whilst shaping a subordinate strategy of confrontation and regime change. In the 1920s Walter Lippmann, the confidant of Wilson’s circle and his emissary to the British ruling class proposed reorganising US academia to serve policy planning as an academic intelligence base. Out of it grew an infrastructure of politics and IR research and policy advice although it was only after the influx of emigre scholars fleeing Nazi Europe that the post-war discipline obtained the intellectual capital to enable it to sweep across Europe and on to the rest of the world.