Mearsheimer and Walt: Not Scholarship's Finest Moment

At the Volokh Conspiracy, David Bernstein addresses the point--raised by Mearsheimer and Walt--that by virtue of their numbers, Neoconservatism is a Jewish movement. Bernstein writes:

M & W suggest that because Jews make up about 2/3 of prominent neoconservatives, and because neoconservatives are hawkishly pro-Israel, we can assume that neconservatism is a "Jewish" movement (e.g., "Jewish Americans are central to the neoconservative movement" (p. 132), and several later pages where the authors suggest that neocons are part of the "broader Jewish community" e.g., p. 243), and that neocons' hawkish positions on Israel can be traced to their primarily Jewish origins.

There is an exceptional logical flaw in this. Once we acknowledge that around 1/3 of prominent neocons are not Jewish, and that these neocons share the Jewish neocons' general position on Israel (not to mention that some of the Jewish neocons, like Wolfowitz, are significantly more dovish on Israel than most Gentile neocons), the question is, why attribute the neocons' views on Israel to their Jewishness...?

Ahh, you might say, but what about the fact that 2/3 of neocons are Jewish? Well, Richard Posner, in his book Public Intellectuals, notes that of around 600 leading public intellectuals, approximately 50% of Jewish. 66%, then, is well within the general stats for public intellectuals...

Jews, indeed, are often represented at levels above 66% in intellectual movements. Consider leading American libertarians between, say, 1950 and 1980. By common consent, the greatest libertarians of this time period were Rand, Von Mises, Hayek, and Friedman--3 out of 4 (all but Hayek) Jews. If you look at second-tier libertarians, the next group would have to include Nozick and Rothbard, and, in the 50s, perhaps Chodorov. Then you have the whole Ayn Rand circle (the Brandens, Greenspan, et al.), Israel Kirzner, Gary Becker, Richard Posner, Aaron Director, Julian Simon, Sam Peltzman, and so on.

I think it's fair to say that at least on the intellectual level, for quite some time libertarianism was virtually dominated by Jewish thinkers, and they are still well overrepresented in those circles (consider the authors of this blog). That doesn't make libertarianism a "Jewish movement."

For that matter, in the 1960s, about half of all leading activists (think Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin) were Jewish, but the peace movement wasn't a "Jewish" movement. The leadership of the ACLU has been at times overwhelmingly Jewish, but that doesn't make the ACLU a "Jewish" organization. If you look at Brian Leiter's list of the most cited law faculty, you will find that seven of the top eight are Jews. The same is true for the younger cohort of most cited scholars. Jews, in general, are well-overrepresented on the faculties of top law schools, and especially in the field of constitutional law. That doesn't make constitutional law a "Jewish" field.

One could go on in a similar vein, but the point by now should be clear: Jews are extremely prominent in various intellectual fields and movements, and the fact that they happen to constitute 2/3 of neoconservatives doesn't mean that neonconservatism is "Jewish" in the sense that as a movement its goal is advance specifically Jewish goals, any more than libertarianism, ACLUism, etc., are Jewish.

Read the whole thing.

Putting aside issues of Anti-Semitism and the like, the kind of intellectual sloppiness alluded to by Bernstein is mentioned by others.

Geoffrey Kemp of the Nixon Center writes:

By my count there are 1,247 footnotes; only three refer to correspondence with a source and only two mention interviews with sources. I could find no references to any communication with key players in the U.S. government, the Israeli lobbies and Israel who might have had some interesting confidential comments on the matter in question. It seems that their research lacked extensive field work, including background interviews, especially among the Washington elite who make up both the lobby and its targets. This is not a trivial matter...

Leslie H. Gelb, of the Council on Foreign Relations, also makes this point:

as my mother often said, "They asked for trouble" — by the way they make their arguments, by their puzzlingly shoddy scholarship, by what they emphasize and de-emphasize, by what they leave out and by writing on this sensitive topic without doing extensive interviews with the lobbyists and the lobbied.

Gelb then goes into detail, giving various examples to buttress her point.

Keep in mind that Kemp and Gelb find the book relevant--despite the shallowness of the scholarship behind it.

So much for the power of the Israel Lobby.

[Hat tip: Instapundit]

Technorati Tag: Israel Lobby and Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.