Think Tanks in America - by Thomas Medvetz (Paperback)

About the Book

Some commentators on the Left have been raising alarms about the lethal combination of money, power, and education that they claim the right wing has used to develop ideological infrastructures to produce its own narrativeand thereby to control debate in the public sphere.Something like $3 billion has been spent over 30 years to build a network of conservative public intellectuals, think tanks, and media outlets.Names like the Heritage Foundation, the Olin Foundation, the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, are just a sampling of the organizations linked to this movement.Tom Medvetz here deals with think tanks on both the right and the left.He tracks the rise of a different style of think-tank production starting in the 1960s, when many of them started to become advocacy tanks, more oriented to the mass media, alert to the need for rapid response production of short synthetic materials as opposed to scholarly research.Even the venerables, like the Brookings Institution and Council on Foreign Relations, moved toward the faster, shorter, more media-oriented production. How did this process evolve, and what are we to make of the world of think tanks now in our midst?Medvetz gives us a timely book, brilliantly succinct and extremely instructive about the cultural landscape of knowledge and policy production in America."

Book Synopsis

Over the past half-century, think tanks have become fixtures of American politics, supplying advice to presidents and policy makers, expert testimony on Capitol Hill, and convenient facts and figures to journalists and media specialists. But what are think tanks? Who funds them? What kind of "research" do they produce? Where does their authority come from? And how influential have they become? In Think Tanks in America, Thomas Medvetz argues that the unsettling ambiguity of the think tank is less an accidental feature of its existence than the very key to its impact. By combining elements of more established sources of public knowledge-universities, government agencies, businesses, and the media-think tanks exert a tremendous amount of influence on the way citizens and lawmakers perceive the world, unbound by the more clearly defined roles of those other institutions. In the process, they transform the government of this country, the press, and the political role of intellectuals. Timely, succinct, and instructive, this provocative book will force us to rethink our understanding of the drivers of political debate in the United States.

Review Quotes

"Thomas Medvetz does us a huge service by analyzing the development of policy expertise, its shifting institutional locations, and the impact of both on academic social science and public affairs. This is an important book on an important issue."--Craig Calhoun, London School of Economics

--Craig Calhoun, Director "London School of Economics and Political Science"

"Over the past half century, few developments in the US political system have influenced the content of actual legislation more than the rise of think tanks. But until now, information and analysis of this phenomenon have been mostly anecdotal and known only within the Washington Beltway. Thomas Medvetz provides a much needed and thoughtful analysis of the history and relevance of these important institutions. Think Tanks in America is an invaluable resource."--Kenneth Dam "Brookings Institution"

"Succinct, thorough, and masterfully researched--Thomas Medvetz has written a subtle and timely history of these fixtures of public debate in the United States. In the realms of culture studies, policy, and policy formation, there is no book quite like Think Tanks in America. Plus which, no one has understood, interpreted, then used Pierre Bourdieu's ideas better--so well that Bourdieu himself would have been pleased."
--Charles Lemert "author of Why Niebuhr Now?"

"Think tanks have become hugely important actors in the Washington policy process, but have also become increasingly political in recent years. Thomas Medvetz's well-researched book will teach you almost everything you ever wanted to know about these ever-changing institutions."
--Tevi Troy "Hudson Institute"

About the Author

Thomas Medvetz is assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, San Diego.