Foundations of the American Century

by Inderjeet Parmar

  Holding such fictions as articles of faith permits foundations to act as unifiers of a political system divided by sovereignties and characterized by mass democracy and group competition. The Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie philanthropies mediate among the concerns of the state, big business, party politics, and foreign policy–related academia; articulate a divided system; and constitute and create forums for constructing elite expertise, consensus, and forward planning. Nevertheless, foundation networks did not always succeed and, importantly, were most successful during conditions of crisis,16 such as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the outbreak of the Korean War, and after 1989. However, the foundations are adept at network building and well prepared to interpret and promote crises as opportunities to policy makers and public alike.17

  FOUNDATIONS AND THE AMERICAN STATE

  The foundations enjoyed a close relationship with the American state even if there were times when they found themselves marginalized—particularly during the 1920s and early 1930s. Despite its “private” character, U.S. philanthropy sees itself as directed at the “public” good. Philanthropic foundations have served as a catalyst for powerful reform movements—including temperance, social assistance for the poor, health and safety legislation, against corruption in politics, educational reform, and “Americanization” programs for immigrants. This publicly oriented self-concept emerged as opposition to the “local” and support for the “national.” Powerfully opposed to parochialism, the party machine, the congressional pork barrel, and mass politics, the foundations favored the construction and strengthening of the federal executive branch and the mobilization of elite opinion18—academics, policy makers, journalists, students, corporate directors, the attentive publics—initially behind programs of American globalism and, after the Cold War, behind globalization, democracy promotion, and global civil society building. In short, the foundations were created and led by self-conscious Progressive-era state builders, private citizens who backed state power for globalist ends; today, they are self-conscious global civil society builders.

  The foundations were established when America’s federal executive institutions and “national” consciousness were weak and the individual states strong; the foundations spent hundreds of millions of dollars in encouraging private parastate institutions to carry out functions such as urban renewal, improving schools, and promoting health and safety in workplaces, which were later subsumed and developed by the federal state, as well as to develop a supportive base in public opinion; the foundations helped to “nationalize” American society. Today, they are trying to achieve similar aims at the global level. Where the global system is institutionally relatively weak and nation-states jealously guard their sovereignty, the foundations are assisting in global institution building and in constructing a global “civil society” that sustains and develops such institutions,19 and this is also part of developing the infrastructure for continued American hegemony.

  FOUNDATIONS AND NETWORKS

  Domestically, the big foundations sponsored a vast range of programs that, inter alia, transformed the American academy, sustained an array of globalist foreign policy think tanks, and vigorous foreign affairs media coverage. Foundation sponsorship helped the State Department to improve the training of its foreign-service officers as well as funding academics to boost the department’s research capacities. In the universities, the foundations pioneered area studies and IR programs in elite academies such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Additionally, and perhaps more profoundly, such new disciplines were armed with positivistic social-scientific methods that, despite their scientific claims, were particularly effective in generating results of policy-related use. Foundation leaders, in effect, helped to create and perpetuate elite networks of academics, think tanks, publicity organizations, emerging mass media, and public officials. These networks proved powerful in constructing and mobilizing a globalist elite and broader support in the United States, a nation renowned for its strongly “isolationist” tendencies, on the political left and right.20

  Overseas, the foundations were active in network building and perhaps even more influential, especially in the areas of political and economic development, in promoting capitalist “modernization.”21 Through the mobilization of academics in area studies, political science, economics, and sociology, the big foundations built elite academic institutions overseas, networks of scholars focused around “centers of excellence,” academic hubs radiating intellectual influence well beyond the levels of financial investment by the foundations. Such networks were established in strategically important countries and regions—such as Indonesia, Chile, and Nigeria—specifically to ensure a regional and continental multiplier effect: cadres of academics imbued with knowledge and training aimed at orienting them toward a pro-American/Western approach to “modernization” and “development” as opposed to nationalist or procommunist strategies. In addition, and relatedly, some regions/countries were targeted by foundations as strategically important but especially prone to anti-Americanism (or superpower “neutralism”) and, therefore, appropriate recipients of funding for American Studies programs. Of course, foundations’ investments did not always achieve their goals and sometimes even generated unintended opposition to American influence. This, however, had relatively little effect in the long run and was often viewed as a “bearable” cost of American power.

  A significant analytical thread that runs throughout this book is the idea of foundations’ knowledge networks as both the ends and means of hegemonic social and political forces. Useful here in conceptualizing the role of networks are some of the critical ideas of Pierre Bourdieu, Robert Brym, and Manuel Castells. Castells argues that knowledge flows are unequal: some actors are excluded from knowledge flows, while others are included; some kinds of knowledge are valued, while others are marginalized; some intellectuals are central, while others peripheral. Knowledge flows, however, are not just unequal: they also reorient “mentalities” or “mind sets,” particularly by shifting scholars’ reference points from their locale to a broader or global logic. In The Informational City, Castells advances an appealing argument on the denationalizing impact of metropolitan core-based foundation sponsorship and network building on Third World scholars. Castells argues that as global networks strengthen, “local” actors’ logic becomes increasingly divorced from their local culture and preoccupations and more locked in to relative “placelessness,” with the latter incorporated into the “hierarchical logic of the organization,” in our case the logic of the global knowledge network.22

  Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of fields (or networks or social arenas within which struggles occur for scarce resources) and symbolic capital deepen our understanding of the network not only as a system of knowledge flows—an instrument or means—but also as an important phenomenon in its own right. Foundation networks may therefore be seen as fields, as specific social spaces constructed by foundation elites that reproduce themselves (those spaces) to socialize the current generation and to pass on a set of ideas, practices, orientations, habits of interaction with those who are likeminded, and habits of intellectual-political combat with others, to strengthen self-awareness and develop common cultural codes. The prestige associated with those social spaces (networks)—of scholars, policy makers, corporate lawyers—transforms those ideas, practices, and habits into symbolic capital that is seen as legitimate in the wider global social system, thereby reinforcing power relations and elite cohesiveness.

  Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, a system of dispositions that originate in social structures but are so deeply internalized by actors that they generate behavior even after the original structural conditions may have changed, is also useful.23 In the context of U.S. foundation networks, habitus suggests that merely establishing and maintaining the structural properties, internal hierarchies, intellectual-academic predispositions, and spaces of a network is likely to socialize scholars with specific dispositions about “realistic�
� or “scientific” research, favoring policy-oriented research strategies. This would then encourage a hierarchy of intellectual-academic endeavors that privileges positivistic and pragmatic approaches over overtly normative or value-oriented ones.

  Finally, Bourdieu’s ideas about the role of intellectuals in modern societies, especially as it is a specific type of intellectual—the (broadly) policy-related academic researcher or scholar—that U.S. philanthropy seeks to mobilize, are useful for us here. Intellectuals occupy a contradictory position as owners of cultural capital in a system in which cultural capital is subordinated to economic capital. Yet their functions in unequal social systems are vital, especially in defining the social world in ways that lend credibility to the status quo. Should the subordination of intellect to financial-economic power be found in the case studies below regarding the relative power positions of corporate philanthropy and university researchers, the assertions to the contrary of Karl and Katz,24 two leading “conservative” scholars of philanthropy, would be undermined. It is precisely the increasing role in intellectual production that large-scale bureaucratic organizations—favoring technocratic expertise—have come to play that Bourdieu emphasizes and that have more and more subordinated independent intellectual efforts. In effect, philanthropic foundations are among the strategic-leading players in the intellectual field: they have great influence in determining—through grants—who defines what is legitimate and illegitimate knowledge. Their power to establish new disciplines—such as international relations, for example—as well as their theoretical, methodological, and empirical preoccupations are not “simple contributions to the progress of science… [they] are also always ‘political’ maneuvers that attempt to establish, restore, reinforce, protect, or reverse a determined structure of relations of symbolic domination.”25

  It is also the case, according to Robert Brym, that intellectual institutions and knowledge networks are, at least in part, aimed at the incorporation and employment of intellectuals, thereby consolidating their attachment to existing political arrangements and processes of change.26 Intellectual unemployment or underincorporation within elite cultural and political institutions has long been associated with political radicalism, while integration tends to lead to greater levels of political moderation and stability. U.S. foundations’ role in the modernization of Third World nations has been motivated by the conviction that “anything less than their [intellectuals’] smooth and complete integration in the economic, political and cultural spheres will produce radicalism—that is, collective attempts to speed up the retarded pace of modernization by political means, sometimes of a violent nature.” In more highly modernized and integrated systems such as the United States, where there has occurred “increasing absorption of intellectuals into various parts of the ‘establishment,’” intellectuals engage in “conflict… within rather narrowly defined limits.”27

  Robert Brym’s ideas converge with those elaborated by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci.28 Gramsci argues that intellectuals play a vital role in developing their specific social group’s or class’s economic, political, and social self-awareness and ideas about organizing society, so as better to consolidate class positions. The intellectuals’ own political-ideological development is determined by their primary, secondary, and tertiary socialization as well as by the posteducational structure of opportunities available to intellectuals to become occupationally and politically tied to a variety of social groups. U.S. philanthropic foundations have attempted to create strong networks precisely to recruit and mobilize the most promising academic intellectuals for a whole range of large-scale projects, including assisting the development of the American state in domestic and foreign affairs. The intellectuals so mobilized are provided with strong career-building opportunities, well-funded programs, opportunities for policy influence, and are systemically well integrated, and they tend therefore to produce research of a utilitarian, technocratic character that is methodologically compatible with the positivistic orientations of foundation leaders.29 This is not to suggest that foundations directly interfere with researchers or research results, let alone pressure researchers. It is only to suggest that given the conditions of perpetual financial crisis within academic institutions, the large-scale funding programs of foundations prove very attractive to researchers and influence the selection of research topics, research questions, and methodologies.30 It is plainly possible that, as Berman points out, researchers could always draw conclusions radically at odds with foundations’ implicit or explicit intentions, thereby challenging hegemonic thinking.31

  Overall, such organic intellectuals’ work functions largely to elaborate a consensus for the “harmonization” of divergent social and economic forces and the perpetuation of unequal systems of national and global power. By constructing knowledge networks, the most powerful states, in which the richest foundations are based, develop a system of flows of people, ideas, and money suited to the maintenance of the existing global hierarchy of power. Third World intellectuals are incorporated into network spaces constructed, funded, and heavily influenced by—if not led and populated with—scholars and foundation, corporate, and state elites from the metropolitan core. The former are, to an extent, transformed into cosmopolitans or transnational forces that respond, to an increasing degree, to extranational, global logics. Crudely, such “extraction” of intellectuals approximates the extraction of resources, the global flows of wealth from the underdeveloped to developed nations. Foundations have helped to develop spaces which “house” global elites and within which elites circulate and communicate with one another, developing ideas, programs, and, most of all, symbolic capital. The World Social Forum provides an interesting example of this process.32

  For American foundations, the construction of global knowledge networks is almost an end in itself; indeed, the network appears to be their principal long-term achievement. Although foundation-sponsored networks also attempt to operate as means of achieving particular ends, generally speaking, those ends are not necessarily the ones publicly stated. However, despite their oft-stated aims of eradicating poverty, uplifting the poor, improving living standards, aiding economic development, and so on, even the U.S. foundations’ own assessments of their impact show that they largely have failed in these efforts. On the other hand, those very reports lay claim to great success in building strong global knowledge networks that sustain foundation investments, such as their funded research fellows, research programs, and lines of communication across universities, think tanks, makers of foreign policy, and foreign academics.

  NETWORK BUILDING, NOT SOLVING SOCIAL PROBLEMS

  According to Landrum Bolling, a researcher closely linked with the Council on Foundations, Third World university network building was a key objective of U.S. philanthropy—creating “strong universities in a few of the strategically located and potentially important developing countries… [with the hope] that these investments could help bring about… a critical mass of scholars [as] instruments for broad national development.”33 However, despite his support for the foundations’ aims, Bolling concludes that their well-intentioned programs failed to improve the lives of ordinary people. Even as American philanthropy successfully created “professionally elite universities,” critics felt that the “‘trickle down’ benefits to the whole society were not sure enough or fast enough.”34

  Bolling cites Francis X. Sutton, who long served the Ford Foundation (1954–1983), to demonstrate that one of the main achievements of Ford in Latin America was the development of networked cadres of social scientists. Ford backed the formation of professional and scholarly associations to train, cohere, and incorporate Latin American social scientists, including the Latin American Social Science Council and the Brazilian Society of Agricultural Economics.35

  Additionally, Bolling demonstrates the extensive system of sponsorship and network building that U.S. philanthropy established across kindred overseas organizations. The Ford Foundation p
rovided funding to organizations that back development programs similar or complementary to its own: the Overseas Development Institute, to develop expertise (at Oxford and Cambridge universities) and public discussion on development issues in Britain; the Royal Institute of International Affairs, an elitist counterpart to the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, to research Latin American development issues; the German Institute for Developing Countries, to train technical experts to serve overseas; and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.36

  From a Gramscian viewpoint, Robert Arnove argues that foundations’ sponsorship of expert-training programs across the world was largely aimed at developing leadership and “competence” in the professions, the managerial classes, and in government and was undergirded by the technocratic belief that societies only change and develop if they have competent leaders. The Rockefeller Foundation saw as its most coherent historical mission “the development of institutions to train professional people, scientists and scholars in the applied disciplines, who in turn will train succeeding generations of students, advance the state of knowledge in their fields.” This approach sidelines “mass-based” programs and networks, preferring to invest instead in elite institutions and networks, an inherently elitist political and ideological strategy.37 Hence, Ford funded the construction of “centers of excellence” that were to “induct [scholars] into regional and international networks… conducting the type of research the Ford Foundation thinks is appropriate and useful.” Ford grants for research, travel, conferences, and journals integrated and assimilated regional and international scholars with specific standard literatures, dominant disciplinary assumptions, and appropriate research methodologies. And to ensure that its funded students are not neglected after graduation, Third World scholars return from the United States, according to Ford’s annual report in 1975, “often to be employed in an emerging network of Foundation-supported research centers.”38