Revolution

Social psychological perspectives also pervaded the study of political upheaval in the Third World in the period after World War II, in large part because the striking pattern of interdisciplinary teamwork during World War II had left as much of a mark on many sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and economists as it had on those with formal psychological training. The tendency toward the study of "total societies," for example, required a patchwork of methods and theories drawn from throughout the social sciences. The new

prominence of psychological research in fields conventionally associated with political science or sociology helped to push the center of gravity in research done by nonpsychologists toward the consideration of psychological variables.^[61] As early as 1939, Robert Lynd had offered the following comment and advice in his critical discussion of the direction of U.S. social science: "With its field thus fortunately concentrated on the central powerhouse of culture, individuals, [psychology] is in the strategic position of having the other social sciences turn increasingly to it for the solution to realistic problems—mental health, education and child development, labor problems, advertising and market research, public opinion and propaganda. It is a safe prescription to almost any young social-scientist-in-training to 'get more psychological underpinning.'"^[62]

By the early 1960s much of mainstream social science was committed to a behavioral science approach to the analysis of Third World revolution, an orientation that would significantly shape policy, as well as research, during the Vietnam era. Influential books like Walt Rostow's The Stages of Economic Growth (1960) made it obvious not only that societies needed to be jolted into modernization (typically by revolution), but that an appropriate psychological outlook—characterized by rationality, risk taking, and desire for growth and consumption—was a prerequisite to national "take-off."^[63] A Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist during the 1950s, Rostow became a Vietnam War policy-maker and controversial advocate of counterinsurgency in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations as chairman of the Department of State Policy Planning Council and deputy to National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, another academic-turned-policy-maker. He testified before Congress about the advantages behavioral experts brought to "winning the Cold War" and singled out the psychologist for special mention as "a valued collaborator in penetrating the operation of the Communist mind and the attractions which communism offers certain kinds of people."^[64]

By the early 1960s the analytical concept of "political culture" had also injected a new appreciation for psychology into the study of comparative politics. The very use of the term, according to its originator, Gabriel Almond, a Stanford University political scientist, indicated a "psychological orientation toward social objects."^[65] Directly descended from World War II analyses of national character, political culture illustrated just how central a psychological orientation had become for so-

cial scientists not formally identified with psychological training, in this case political scientists interested in Third World revolution and development.^[66] According to Lucian Pye,

The concept of political culture assumes that each individual must, in his own historical context, learn and incorporate into his own personality the knowledge and feelings about the politics of his people and his community. This means in turn that the political culture of a society is limited but given firm structure by the factors basic to dynamic psychology. . . . [Political culture combines] the revolutionary findings of modern depth psychology and recent advances in the sociological techniques for measuring attitudes in mass societies.^[67]

While they depended heavily on World War II—era national character studies, political culture advocates were also likely to criticize them for being biased toward the unconscious and insufficiently attentive to rational, adult motivation. They prided themselves on the theoretical flexibility with which political culture could encompass both conscious and unconscious psychological factors. This balanced emphasis, however, did not so much depart from the direction of psychological theory, as conform to it. In the years after World War II, interest in conscious motivation and ego development revived, including among psychoanalytic theorists such as Heinz Hartmann.^[68]

The definition of development—political and economic—that paralleled political culture made it clear too that the point was to delineate a national personality profile, but through more exhaustive and systematic comparisons than had been possible for World War II-era social psychologists. Political culture advocates included in their notion of political development precisely the kinds of findings just detailed in the work of psychologists Leonard Doob and David McClelland. They also harked back to the World War II discovery that individual subjectivity, could be the key to untangling social and political processes. "Political culture does not refer to the formal or informal structures of political interaction," one key advocate remarked. "Nor does it refer to the pattern of interaction among political actors. . . . It refers not to what is happening in the world of politics, but what people believe about those happenings."^[69]

The popularity of the political culture concept was fueled as much by policy-makers' immediate concerns as by the theoretical momentum of social science. Its multidisciplinary approach to the problem of nation building certainly seemed appropriate to the complicated analysis of whole political systems, a kind of bridge between the microanalysis

of life histories and the macroanalysis more typical of political sociologists and historians.^[70] But the concept also promised to "yield more understanding about the possibilities and limitations for consciously changing a political culture in order to facilitate national development."^[71] It was partly because of the blueprint it offered for engineering political change in the Third World—a prime concern of much U.S. foreign and military policy during the Cold War years—that the political culture perspective became a dominant one by the mid-1960s.

Its advocates were concentrated in the Social Science Research Council's Committee on Comparative Politics.^[72] That committee's chairman was Lucian Pye, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology political scientist and one of the DOD's many advisors on behavioral research. Pye argued that the main challenges Third World societies faced in becoming modem nation-states were psychological. "Fears of failure in the adventure of nation building create deep anxieties, which tend to inhibit effective action. . . . The dynamics of such psychological inhibitions to effective action, particularly in relation to the politics of modernization, can permeate and restrain the entire process of nation building."^[73]

Like McClelland on economic development, Pye pointed out that political development would go nowhere if Third World personalities were not emotionally suited to the requirements of such a national "adventure." Referring frequently to the writing of psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, who had published the widely read Childhood and Society and Young Man Luther since his wartime studies of Hitler's psychology and Nazi mentality, Pye suggested that modernizing the political structures of Third World states would require the inculcation of new forms of identity through a revamped socialization process. Also like McClelland, personalities stood, for Pye, at a critical juncture between individual psychology and a country's political institutions. They were the critical variable and, further, they were reformable. By supporting the development of a modernizing identity among emotional elites in the Third World, the United States could promote peaceful movement toward Western models of political organization and minimize the chances of bloody, Communist-inspired revolutions.

Pye and others considered the question of national identity—whether and to what extent people developed a self-confident psychological affiliation with and sense of belonging to a nation-state—especially delicate. Instilling a clear national identity was understood to be the source of legitimacy for political institutions and elites. Patriotic

service to the state during war had, after all, been the origin of their own power, and they assumed it was equally essential to stabilizing shaky Third World political systems. Analysts suggested that providing new states with assistance in building national self-identity was a task of political socialization equivalent to the family's manufacture of personal self-identity.^[74] True, it occurred on the level of international relations rather than interpersonal relations, but the difference was more one of location than of kind.

Even with these new and important intellectual developments, many of the old themes of crowd psychology, which had informed psychologists' policy-oriented work during World War II and before, remained sturdy and largely unchanged, appearing at the center of behavioral schemes to understand and manipulate Third World revolution, including Camelot. In fact, Rex Hopper, the Brooklyn College sociologist who was eventually chosen to direct Project Camelot, took the crowd psychology tradition so seriously that he summarized its contributions to the literature on revolution in a 1950 article rifled "The Revolutionary Process: A Frame of Reference for the Study of Revolutionary Movements."^[75]

Working squarely in the tradition of Le Bon and McDougall, as well as the more recent World War II-era analysts of race rioting, Hopper laid out a series of stages through which revolutionary movements passed: "the Preliminary Stage of Mass (Individual) Excitement, the Popular Stage of Crowd (Collective) Excitement and Unrest, the Formal Stage of Formulation of Issues and Formulation of Publics, and the Institutional Stage of Legalization and Societal Organization."^[76] Each stage corresponded to a particular psychological mood, to which revolutionary elements (leaders, organizations, and ideologies) had to conform. As individuals were transformed into a "psychological crowd," and as that crowd eventually became a revolutionary public and the basis for a new society, people experienced the typically painful consequences of dramatic psychological change: wish repression, oppression psychoses, motivation disturbances, and general psychological exhaustion.

Although he was a Latin America specialist himself, Hopper's summary of the literature was purely theoretical and did not single out any particular national case, or even region of the world, for examination. Nor did Hopper give any indication that the effort to predict, guide, or prevent revolution might raise ethical questions for behavioral scientists. In all likelihood, his straightforward endorsement of the notion

that "a generalized description is a necessary prerequisite to any attempt to control" indicated that "the revolutionary process" he was describing was located safely on territory outside the industrialized west.^[77] Years later, when he directed his attention toward dramatic shifts in the domestic social structure of the United States, his attitudes were far less neutral. With waves of cultural alienation and technologically induced unemployment becoming more frequent, "the probabilities are great that revolutionary changes will occur," he noted in dismay. "My own guess is that we shall move toward a militarized and cybernatized totalitarianism of the right."^[78]

In the early 1960s, mainstream social and behavioral scientists were fully engaged with developing the kind of predictive indices that grew organically out of theoretical chronologies like Hopper's. Systematically identifying the constellation of factors that caused "internal war" was, at the time, a major effort. For example, the Princeton Symposium on Internal War, hosted in September 1961 by the Princeton Center for International Studies and funded by the Carnegie Corporation, brought together a small group of prominent social and behavioral scientists, including Gabriel Almond, Daniel Bell, Kenneth Boulding, Harold Lasswell, Seymour Martin Lipset, Talcott Parsons, Lucian Pye, and Sidney Verba.^[79] For several days, they discussed the general pre-conditions of internal war and topics such as "The Commencement of Rebellions and the Art of Controlling Rebels." Although a purely theoretical effort on its face, the organizer of the symposium, Harry Eckstein of Princeton, presented his paper (titled "Introduction to the Study of Internal Wars: The Problem of Anticipation") to the Smithsonian Institution's Research Group in Psychology and the Social Sciences, charged with advising the DOD on the direction of military behavioral science, just a few months later.^[80] Eventually, Eckstein became one of Camelot's consultants.

Edward Tiryakian, a sociologist from Duke University and another one of the participants in the Princeton symposium, later contributed his work on the prediction of Third World upheaval to a conference directly associated with the Camelot effort.^[81] Tiryakian's predictive model assumed that revolutionary upheaval was necessarily destructive and endorsed political stability as the ideal state. (His hypothetical society, distinguished primarily by the absence of conflict, was called "utopia.") His "Model of Societal Change and Its Lead Indicators" developed an "index of revolutionary potential" complete with "advance warning signals" that measured increases in social pathology and insta-

bility via such indicators as the spread of sexual promiscuity and cults. Because these factors were located in the social unconscious (he called it the "social underground"), far removed from the superficial political and economic targets of revolutionary movements, they were, according to Tiryakian, by far the most reliable predictors of war's psychological preconditions.