Past Fellows at the Institute of International Studies

Reinhard Bendix Memorial Research Fellows, 1997-1998

Oz Frankel, History: Discovering Society: The Politics, Culture and Rituals of Social Investigations in Britain and the United States, 1830-1870. This dissertation explores the emergence of two essential features of modern political culture: the social "investigation" as a public ritual and the social "report" as a unique type of document. Both were, Mr. Frankel argues, at the center of a new form of politics, based on the accumulation, presentation, publication, analysis and manipulation of facts about society. As he demonstrates, these practices and texts were important vehicles of modernity, by anchoring politics in printed texts, and undermining local ties and intermediate knowledge in favor of national (or international) communities of decision-makers, experts and readers. Drawing upon a range of case studies in both countries, Mr. Frankel follows the rituals of investigative work and the experience of investigators: philanthropic "tourism" to factories, inspection of mines and prison cells, or field trips to remote Indian tribes and the reconstructed South. He also researches the production of reports -- the process through which information was "digested," printed and disseminated. Indeed, at the center of this project is the history of the social report as a distinctive political-discursive form that, he argues, pre-dates and co-exists with professional social sciences.

A. Dirk Moses, History: In Weimar's Shadow: German Conservatism, 1965-1982. This project analyzes and explains the features of political and intellectual conservatism in the Federal Republic in the second half of its existence. Until the late 1960s, conservatism was virtually dead as a plausible political and intellectual current, having been implicated in the downfall of the Weimar Republic. In the wake of the New Left and student movement, however, the tradition was revived and has become perhaps the most important current in German political life. Conservative administrations have governed Germany at the federal level since 1982. Mr. Moses' dissertation tells the story of this transformation.