The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite.

The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite

THEY ARE CALLED think tanks, but if you work in one and all you do is think, you get fired. So a think-tanker spends a lot of time concocting theories as to why the nation's op-ed pages all turned down his latest submission, "Senegalese Liberation Forces: Deja Vu All Over Again?"

Now that think tanks are an important or at least vocal part of the political landscape, it is time somebody really got inside one and explained the behavior patterns of its denizens. What, for example, drives a person to spend twenty years writing essays on, say, the limitations of the GATT process? The human mind, unfettered by some sort of strange incentive structure, simply will not dwell on the sorts of topics that are the stuff of think-tank policy analyses.

Are think-tankers angling for an Administration job? Are they driven by dreams of writing one of those books with titles like The End of Ideology, which are remembered as readily as the book's entire contents are forgotten? In the world of think-tank rivalry, does the person who sits on the most conference panels win?

One suspects that a public-choice analysis would reveal that think-tankers are driven by surprising career incentives, and that the resulting behavior has unintended consequences for public policy.

James Allen Smith's The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite is not such a book. In fact, Mr. Smith embodies the think-tank ethos more than he describes it.

Mr. Smith did not set out to write this book because he had a provocative thesis about think tanks, and when he was finished he had not arrived at one. He seems more concerned with responsibly describing his subject than with being interesting. The compliment that could be given to it is that it is a professional job. This book could have been written on a government contract.

Mr. Smith begins his work with descriptions of the policy experts of the progressive era. Dutifully, he limns the intellectual premises of each new policy institution as it comes along, often describing the ideological predilections of its founder, and then spending five or ten pages describing the work of the institution.

In style, Mr. Smith owes a great deal to the college textbook. It is a bloodless world he is describing. There is no effort to convey what it feels like to work inside a think tank, what an individual think-tanker's career path may look like. There is not much emphasis on individuals at all. The institutions are the major actors.

When his chronology arrives at the present he is faced with the problem of drawing conclusions. Here is the crucial paragraph on the last page of his book:

"The relationship between knowledge and politics is one that demands constant scrutiny and reflection. It summons us to ask, again and again, what we really need to know to govern ourselves well. It demands that we test our theoretical knowledge by confronting real choices and their consequences. It requires us to use knowledge not as an intimidating bludgeon, but as a tool of education and persuasion, honestly exploring first premises and accepting the uncertainties of evidence. Above all, it compels us to admit that political wisdom is different from knowledge of the physical world and that social science can neither replace politics nor relieve us of the responsibility for making valueladen choices. Finally, it calls for a healthy egalitarian skepticism of the authority of experts."

Mr. Smith worked months or perhaps years on this book to say that? A normal person doesn't turn on his word processor in order to reach such timid (though telling) conclusions.

The tone of this paragraph is the tone State Department officials use in after-dinner speeches: exhortatory banality. Many policy intellectuals seem to have persuaded themselves that they are part of the ruling culture. They have adopted the cautious, professional manner of government officials and the joyless tone of the government policy memo.

This self-importance has produced not ambitious projects, but rather timidity. We want government officials to be cautious, but writers as circumspect and unopinionated as, say, Mr. Smith are merely dull. And a little bit annoying.

What would happen if think-tankers ignored all the exhortations in Mr. Smith's paragraph? The Republic would probably be no worse off. Maybe things would be better. The influence think-tankers have on policy is indirect and obscure. Bludgeon-wielders such as Michael Harrington and George Gilder have had more influence than hundreds of those centrist books with "Policy Implications" chapters in the back.

Twenty years ago the influence of government on intellectual life was not so strong. These are the five lead stories of the winter 1971 issue of a magazine called Modern Occasions, edited by Philip Rahv: "Culture Now: Some Animadversions, Some Laughs," "What and Where Is the New Left?" "The American Empire," "Lionel Trilling: Criticism and Illusion," and "The Sexual Revolution."

If you are a think-tanker who considers each essay an application for a government job, these are exactly the sorts of grand and freewheeling subjects you are not going to address. If you are a policy intellectual who aims to write circumspect essays for the good of the Republic, these are the sorts of flamboyant topics you are going to avoid. They are not "professional."

Think-tankers are liberated from the pedantry of academia. It is sad when they succumb to the sobriety of government.