America's elite research universities had a good Cold War from a financial perspective. Increased federal funding, combined with vastly expanded grant income from the giant philanthropic foundations, created a convivial research environment for social-science scholars to engage in the task of analysing and combating the appeal of Marxism–Leninism. Scholars as varied as Talcott Parsons, Margaret Mead, Walt Rostow, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Marshal Shulman, Richard Pipes and Condoleezza Rice launched major research projects, and indeed academic and political careers, addressing Cold War exigencies. The two important books under review here offer nuanced interpretations of the varying ways in which American academia reconciled scholarly objectivity with partisan direction.

David Engerman's deeply researched new book reminds us that knowing the enemy was the essential first step to strategizing an effective response. The discipline of “sovietology” emerged as the Second World War ended and Cold War began, with its dual institutional foci initially based at Harvard and Columbia. From that august base, professors and students of “Soviet studies” proliferated – by 1964 there were thirty-three Russian area centers based at American universities – creating a remarkable body of research, some of which was brilliantly conceived and executed, and some discernibly less so. The Harvard-led Refugee Interview Project (RIP), for example, produced enlightening results. Through interviewing Soviet citizens stranded in displaced-persons camps, social scientists were able to discern hitherto opaque patterns in the repressive Soviet system, and gathered important insights into the fabric of everyday life under Stalin. The four-hundred-page final report, How the Soviet System Works, was a work of scholarly quality and practical utility – based as it was on a generous federal research grant worth $1 million (or $8 million in today's terms). But for every success there were at least one or two failures. As Engerman notes, the RIP project was “clearly superior in both quantitative and qualitative terms” to other less-successful endeavours, such as the “Troy-plus/Soviet Vulnerability” project (an MIT–Harvard collaboration) which markedly failed to undermine Soviet control over its populations and territories through propaganda, diplomacy and political warfare (68).

Based on one hundred interviews and prodigious research in scores of archival collections, Know Your Enemy constitutes exemplary Cold War scholarship, combining institutional, intellectual and diplomatic history to fascinating effect. Engerman follows Soviet studies from its inception to the end of the Cold War, tracing the innovative and fractious way in which the discipline was established across American academia, involving the usual disciplinary turf wars and outsized academic egos. His book also contains fascinating chapters on Slavic literary studies and the development of Russian history as “past politics,” including a discussion of Checkhov Publishers, a New York-based publishing house which published the Russian literature that the Soviet state repressed. Sadly, despite George Kennan's best efforts, poor sales meant the publisher was forced to close in 1956, ending one of the nobler chapters in America's cultural Cold War. Engerman concludes wisely that Soviet studies “was an intellectual success when government funds flowed because it attracted an especially wide range of scholars and because its founders conceived of their aims very broadly” (339). Problems arose later, through the 1960s and beyond, when the government remit tightened, sovietology became more compromised, and the new left's response precluded reasoned debate.

David Ekbladh's The Great American Mission shares some ground with Engerman in that its central focus is the influence of ideas – in this case, modernization theory – on policymaking circles. The books begins by tracing the genesis of modernization theory which Ekbladh discerns in French positivism, the Reconstruction era, the US occupation of the Phillipinnes, American interests in interwar China, and the history of the Tennessee Valley Authority. This bravura opening chapter sets the tone well, for this is an erudite and ambitious book. The Great American Mission shows that the line of continuity from Henri Saint-Simon and Comte to Jeffrey Sachs and Paul Wolfowitz is straighter than one might imagine.

One of Ekbladh's aims is to show that comprehending a key strand of twentieth-century US foreign policy requires one to turn away from government action and focus instead on the “voluntary groups, missionaries, advocacy groups … universities … [and] business [that] were vital to the process … Private groups were not mere adjuncts or toadies to government action. For the United States, a long history of comparatively weak central state with halting interest in overseas development was offset by vibrant civil society activism” (6). Ekbladh is adept at tracing the manner in which this activism affects executive-branch action, observing that “ideas matter. It is a bland truism to note that they motivate and legitimate action” (11). His scholarly range and felicitous literary expression make The Great American Mission an illuminating and compelling read. The range of research is unimpeachable and the book nicely complements Nils Gilman's Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (2004).

One minor shortcoming in The Great American Mission is a certain diffidence in conclusion – I longed to read more declarative statements. Ekbladh successfully builds a case that US-directed development was a central Cold War strategy, and this drove American policy toward the “modernization” of northeast and southeast Asia. But what were the major consequences, both positive and negative, of this emphasis in US foreign policymaking? Indeed, the efficacy of “development” policy is a hotly contested issue today, just as it was through the Cold War. Does Ekbladh agree with Jeffrey Sachs that foreign aid holds the potential to heal the world's scars, or does he concur with William Easterley and Dambisa Moya that the hubris inherent in Western-directed modernization has been profoundly unhelpful to the developing world? Ekbladh details the main points of the debate and expresses admiration for Amartya Sen's “judicious” views on development. But a little more argumentative vim would not necessarily have made this book a polemic.