Think Tanks in America

by Medvetz, Thomas

• ISBN13: 9780226517292
• ISBN10: 0226517292
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-09-06
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

Over the past half-century, think tanks have become fixtures of American politics, supplying advice to presidents and policymakers, expert testimony on Capitol Hill, and convenient facts and figures to journalists and media specialists. But what are think tanks? Who funds them? And just 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.

Table of Contents

List of Tables and Figures	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xi
Abbreviations	p. xiii
Prologue: Gaining Ground: The Rise of the Policy Expert	p. 1
Indistinction: Rethinking the Think Tank	p. 23
Experts in the Making: On the Birth of Technoscientific Reason	p. 47
The Crystallization of the Space of Think Tanks	p. 84
The Rules of Policy Research	p. 130
From Deprivation to Dependency: Expert Discourse and the American Welfare Debate	p. 181
Conclusion: Anti-intellectualism, Public Intellectualism, and Public Sociology Revisited	p. 213
Note on Data Sources	p. 227
Supplementary Graphs and Tables	p. 236
Notes	p. 241
References	p. 273
Index	p. 313
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