Professor Daniel Bessner will discuss his new book, “Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual,” a biography of Hans Speier, a defense analyst who worked for the RAND Corporation think tank in the 1950s and 1960s.

Professor Bessner’s book shows how the Weimar Republic’s collapse and the rise of Nazism informed Hans Speier’s work as an American policymaker and institution builder, delving into Speier’s intellectual development and illuminating the ideological origins of the expert-centered approach to foreign policymaking, revealing the European roots of Cold War liberalism.