Abstract

Who decides the national interest in a mass democracy? This article combines international, political, and intellectual history to demonstrate that a significant theoretical and practical debate about the relative power of experts and publics continued within the U.S. foreign policy community well into the Cold War. Arguing that ‘public opinion’ and related concepts should be treated as constructions rather than innate realities, it uses the history of the Foreign Policy Association to show how the rise of a radical ‘elitist theory of democracy’ among political scientists was contested by those in the foreign policy community who believed that broad participation in the making of U.S. foreign policy was both possible and desirable. Great Decisions, an expansive, enduring program that began in Portland, Oregon, in 1955, was the Association’s attempt to prove elitist theory wrong, but its attempt to contest the new political science at scale faltered precisely because it conceived of participation in ways that tended to appeal to white, educated, usually wealthy citizens. With the failure of Great Decisions, the foreign policy community gave up on participation, the assumption becoming widespread that foreign policy was, and could only be, the domain of experts and elites.

摘要

谁决定大众民主的国家利益？这篇文章结合了国际、政治和思想史，证明在冷战期间，美国外交政策界一直在进行关于专家和公众相对权力的重要理论和实践辩论。主张“舆论”和相关概念应被视为建构而非内在现实，它利用外交政策协会的历史来展示政治科学家中激进的“精英民主理论”的兴起如何受到政治科学家的质疑。外交政策界认为广泛参与美国外交政策的制定既可能又可取。Great Decisions 是一项广泛而持久的计划，始于 1955 年在俄勒冈州波特兰市，是该协会试图证明精英主义理论是错误的，但它在规模上与新政治科学竞争的尝试却步履蹒跚，正是因为它设想的参与方式往往会吸引白人、受过教育、通常是富有的公民。随着伟大决策的失败，外交政策界放弃了参与，这种假设变得普遍，即外交政策是而且只能是专家和精英的领域。