Thread by @sopjap

Thread: I’ve said it before: the US hasn’t produced a serious thinker since the USSR fell. And now I know why. Ironically, Cold War intellectuals were sharper because they were state-funded. When the state withdrew, privatized chaos took over—and thinking collapsed with it.

The Cold War wasn’t just a geopolitical standoff—it completely reorganized intellectual life. In the US and beyond, it reshaped universities, research, academic freedom, and even the meaning of knowledge.

During WWII, massive military funding flowed into science. After 1945, attempts to shift that into civilian hands failed. Instead, the university-military-industrial complex was born—cemented by the 1957 Sputnik panic.

Entire universities were subsidized in the name of national security. Academic freedom was strategically tolerated—it helped portray Western democracies as intellectually free, unlike the USSR.

This system didn’t just fund hard sciences—it restructured the university itself. Teaching and research merged. Graduate education exploded. Foreign students were brought in to shape elite allies in the Third World.

By 1980, that Cold War model started to collapse. The military pulled back from managing science. A new regime took over:
- Knowledge privatization
- Public disinvestment
- Tech transfer
- “Entrepreneurial universities”
- Adjunctification
- Global expansion (e.g. NYU Abu Dhabi)

This shift ended Cold War knowledge production and replaced it with “knowledge management”—flexible, global, corporate. Think "just-in-time" startups, not "citadels of national science."

Disciplinary knowledge also hardened under the Cold War. Though interdisciplinary collaboration was celebrated, universities enforced strict disciplinary hierarchies to control and professionalize knowledge.

True interdisciplinary innovation was outsourced—to RAND, Los Alamos, MITRE, etc. Outside the ivory tower, military funders could tolerate more experimental research.

Inside universities: rigid disciplinarity + peer review = quality control + ideological conformity.
Outside universities: think tanks like RAND or MIT’s Lincoln Labs could bypass academic bureaucracy.

Even when interdisciplinary centers were built inside universities, they often failed. Harvard’s Social Relations dept., Chicago’s math-bio lab, and others collapsed under disciplinary tension.

Meanwhile, Cold War opposition to socialism helped launch the Mont Pèlerin Society (1947), an elite anti-socialist think tank. It produced the foundations of what we now call neoliberalism.

Mont Pèlerin created an alternative intellectual universe, bypassing universities to reshape liberal thought in the shadow of WWII and the Great Depression. It prefigured today's political think tanks.

The intellectual structure of the Cold War also relied on what Paul Edwards called "closed world ontologies"—assumptions that the world was knowable, controllable, and every threat could be mapped.

This closed-world mindset appeared across disciplines:
- Game theory (Nash equilibrium)
- Rational choice theory
- AI and behavioral psychology
- Modernization theory
- Cybernetics + systems theory

These theories portrayed social life as self-contained systems. They kept democratic publics out of science policy. Only elite experts could speak for truth. Only trained technocrats could plan the future.

Even creativity was boxed in. It became a “trait” measurable by Cold War psychology—distinguished from “authoritarian personalities.” Risk, chaos, and uncertainty were to be eliminated.

But since the 1990s, closed world systems began to break down. Neoliberal restructuring has erased the boundary between universities and think tanks. Today’s knowledge economy is fragmented, privatized, and performative.

We now live under open world ontologies—emergence, chaos, networks, flexibility. Think Santa Fe Institute, Latour’s Parliament of Things, or Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things.”

The Cold War gave us a highly structured, militarized, disciplined model of intellectual life. Its collapse didn’t bring freedom—it brought a new regime of fragmented, market-driven knowledge.

To understand Cold War thought, not just Cold War policy, we must study how its logic shaped how we know, what counts as knowledge, and who gets to produce it.

This is a summary of the article: "A History Best Served Cold" by Philip Mirowski in the book "Uncertain Empire."

"It was not only government functionaries who learned this lesson of the need to outsource interdisciplinarity in the Cold War. Powerful interest groups who were dissatisfied with the state of existing disciplines and of learning in the university tended to mimic this pattern. Perhaps the most important for later developments was the institution of the Mont Pèlerin Society, founded as a private closed interdisciplinary discussion group in 1947 in order to counter the governmental monopoly on knowledge production within universities in the immediate postwar era. The MPS rapidly formed the core of an entirely alternate universe of knowledge production, extending from right-wing foundations to
dedicated political think tanks and beyond. 21 The MPS existed because no academic discipline alone was itself capable of revising the whole of liberal thought to better respond to the twin disasters of the Great Depression and World War II. Lippmann, fabricator of the moniker of “‘Cold War,’ was also the original source of inspiration for bringing together many of the subsequent MPS members in a precursor dubbed the “Colloque Walter Lippmann.” Although the MPS was undeniably a Cold War phenomenon, in the sense its members were first and foremost animated by a desire to oppose socialism in all its guises, it eventually provided the wherewithal to theorize the justifications for the new regime of knowledge management that superceded the Cold
War system. It was the MPS network that eventually produced the distinctive body of thought now designated as “neoliberalism,” probably the most consequential innovation for intellectual life in the entire period, one that became the white hot center of the program of the eventual commercialization of the
entirety of knowledge production." From the article