Generational Restraint

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Generational Restraint Brent J. Steele

[email protected] University of Utah

Paper presented at the 2015 ISA annual meeting, New Orleans This paper combines insights from both generational analysis, and a broader

theorization of restraint, to examine the challenges of restraint during times of expected

‘change’. The paper theorizes restraint as a combination of mind and body, agents and

structures, and a value retained and respected, or resisted and ridiculed, by particular

generations. Restraint can be applied to generational rhythms, as the latter have been

used to understand more interventionist (vitalist) and non-‐interventionist (restrained)

moods and paradigms of US foreign policy through time. Yet while liberal democracies

are known for being more willing to enter into reciprocally restrained relationships

(Kupchan 2010), such polities can also be activated or stimulated (emotionally, visually,

and physically) in ways that make restraint difficult to realize. We may consider in this

sense how quickly the ISIS beheadings in 2014 were able to transform US and UK public

opinion in favor of air strikes.1

Further, because of the contested nature of restraint as not only a policy mood,

but a value, and because polities have mixed ‘levels’ and factors that influence policy

preferences, the transition from vitalism to restraint in foreign policy is wrought with

political contestation. In this brief Introduction, I seek to establish how restraint is

important, its stakes quite high, and then lay out the goals of the paper. I then discuss

how restraint can be enriched by consulting generational analysis, especially the ‘non-‐

intervention v. intervention’ cycles sometimes used in generational frameworks.

An investigation of restraint proves worthy for several non-‐mutually exclusive

reasons. First, restraint is highly relevant, and even urgent, for understanding and

coping with our contemporary IR ‘setting’. What Michael C. Williams noted almost a

decade ago that ‘haunts’ the type of Wilful Realism he advocated for remains even more

true today, namely that restraint is a rhetoric of limitation which seems ‘difficult … to 1 This transformation is especially stark considering the general fatigue with intervention that prevailed amongst the US public in the late 2000s and early 2010s following the wind-‐down of US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-‐w-‐kearn/attacking-‐the-‐

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propagate politically – especially in an era where the chastening effects of a material

balance of power are less available to support a policy of restraint’ (2005: 203). An era

of what Simon Glezos titles a ‘ressentiment against speed’, and specifically, the

acceleration of globalization, seems upon us (Glezos 2014). Yet the dearth of restraint’s

conceptual treatment in International Relations is somewhat inversely related to this

contemporary urgency, towards the speed and hyperactivity of late modernity. Put

another way, if we surmise that international politics is characterized by anarchy, or

even hierarchy or ‘negarchy’ (Deudney 2007), then the restraining of nation-‐states, and

their political communities, is a historical and social possibility that requires some

deliberation and exploration.

Second, restraint is a referent – or process – shot through with politics and,

especially if we so define it using Lasswell’s (1936) oft-‐repeated understanding of it as

‘who gets what, when and how’. Who or what or when or how someone, or some thing,

is restrained, are key questions that can only be answered via political processes related

to power, authority, and discipline (of the self or others). Further to this, restraint is a

philosophically and theoretically important practice and process, one that shatters the

binaries oft-‐assumed in political theoretical investigations. We may consider restraint to

be focused on the individual – yet if this was the case, then the term ‘self-‐restraint’

would be redundant. Instead, such a term implies that restraint is conditioned by a

variety of factors, including what force or influence one restrains themselves from, as

well as who is doing the restraining. Restraint is both relevant as a mental and bodily

process – in fact in cannot be understood without reference to both mental processes

and bodily control. In this mind-‐body binary we also see analogies to agents and

structures(see Kessler 2007).

As a result, a third set of issues restraint recalls are normative ones. How can we

restrain, who should be restrained, how should we restrain, and when? Put another

way, which processes may stimulate calls for action, or reaction, and what accounts or

arguments are used to resist such action? This normative contestation of and over

restraint is considered especially during times of generational conflict below.

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I provide no overarching definition of restraint, but I can provide a quick

reference to several lay definitions of restraint. Restraint is ‘a way of limiting’, ‘a device

that limits a person’s movement’, and ‘control over your emotions and behavior’.2 It is a

‘measure or condition that keeps someone under control or within limits’, and, perhaps

tellingly, ‘unemotional, dispassionate, or moderate behavior’.3 Note here that there is

still movement within the restrained entity, but it is a channeled or conditioned

movement, and there is an assumed agency on the part of the restraining party – they

have a choice to restrain, and by how much, or to not restrain at all.4 Restraint can be

confused with aloofness – it may even include some genuine aloofness or even

disinterest. But restraint as both idea and material, mind and body, sees an urge to act

that is resisted or conditioned otherwise.

With these purposes and informal definitions foregrounded , we can here posit,

and then on occasion revisit, three assertions regarding restraint:

1. Restraint involves both the body and mind, materials and ‘ideas’ 2. Restraint involves both agents and structures 3. Restraint has a moral quality, but one that is polyvalent (subject to competing

interpretations and judgments) As I discuss below, the generation overlaps with all three of these assertions as well.

Generations have particular ideas about the proper role of their nation or groups vis-‐à-‐

vis the world, and they also occupy the resources (materials) of a society to implement

those ideas. Generations are both agents (of a nation) as well as a structure (group

within the nation). And, they contain a moral quality – not only seeing their

understanding of causal logics as a ‘truth’ regarding social relations, but imbuing those

with a normative sense of what is right and wrong.

The main overarching goal of the paper is to evaluate restraint as its own

explanandum, as a phenomena that appears and then dissolves in social relations

2 http://www.merriam-‐webster.com/dictionary/restraint 3 http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/restraint 4 This is captured nicely in the title of Stanley Hoffmann’s 1962 study on ‘Restraints and Choices in American Foreign Policy’ (Hoffmann 1962).

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through time. More specifically, I ask if the rarity or unpopularity of restraint is unique

to contemporary politics – specifically to the increased speed of late or post-‐modernity

and the vitalist mood to do something in the face of an event or visceral development?

Or, is restraint a value we see invoked, albeit rarely, in eras past? If so, what explains the

appearance/valuing of restraint, and then in periods of change its denigration or

dismissal? I use insights from generational analysis to explore the possibility that

restraint appears for ‘reactive’ generations in the form of a rejection of the ideologies

and practices of vitalist generations. Following specifically from William Howe and Neil

Strauss’s four-‐part typology of generations (1991; 1997), the infrequency of restraint in

at least American settings over the past three centuries can be explained because (1)

reactive generations are only one of four generations to emerge in US political settings

and (2) reactive generations are ‘recessive’ (as opposed to dominant) and play a

prominent role in the political, social, and cultural institutional settings of a polity for

only brief (~one or two decades) period of time.

One related point of the paper, sketched briefly in the following section, is that

structurationist social theory (with its centralizing of these themes) is particularly suited

towards explicating restraint’s import for International Relations. Because restraint is

relevant to both agents – who are restrained or restrain themselves or others – and

‘structures’, which constrain or stimulate behaviors that facilitate (or preclude) restraint

by agents, opportunities arise with viewing restraint within national generations – which

are both structures and agents. Restraint inevitably involves the mixing of materials and

ideas – connected both to physical processes that check actions and reactions as well as

philosophies that either valorize, genderize and/or castigate restraint as a policy or

practice. Generations, too, come into being both through ideational/social processes

and through their access to a society’s material/institutional resources, the latter used

to shape the national Self and its expressions in a variety of ways.

Thus, like the generation, restraint is both an inward-‐focused phenomenon, but

also a relational and societal one as well. It is thus uniquely situated for scaling to a

variety of ‘levels’ that have been centralized in global politics (Waltz 1959; Singer 1961).

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Jonathan Acuff and I flirted (to the extent that two old men like us flirt with anything

anymore) with this idea – that generations relate to agents and structures -‐ in the

Introductory chapter to our generational analysis volume (Steele and Acuff 2012, 9-‐10):

More than just … ‘responsible’ state agents enter into a national context. Generations do as well, and when in power are to some degree ‘structured’ by the agency of the state. While rearticulating what the nation ‘is’ (a matter of ontology), they must also act within the context of what it has been … In Giddensian terms, generations have the ability to shape and be shaped by a nation-‐state. Thus, structuration theory, an old tune I and others have played before, provides the

central ground from which I theorize both restraint and generational change in this

paper. I develop this argument and provocation through two further sections. The

following reviews how generational analysts have theorized ‘change’, and how restraint

fits into that theorization, if it does. The second section provides some illustrations of

generational conflict regarding change, with special focus on the tensions between two

well-‐known US Cold War force postures – containment and ‘rollback’ – within a broader

context of a shift in the 1960s to a broader, more vitalist ‘national purpose’ of US

politics, as sensed by the work of Arthur Schlesinger (1960). Bringing the discussion to

contemporary global politics, that section engages how some national and transnational

structures confound the ability to restrain a polity based on their own routines, standard

operating procedures and the like.

Generations, Change, Structuration, and Vitalism versus Restraint One additional point, relevant to the panel theme, that has yet to be addressed

up front is how restraint, and the generation, relate to change. What does restraint

have to do with ‘change’? Considering that restraint is perhaps the prevention or

slowing down of action that could itself lead to change, this may seem to be a curious

and even contentious thematic pairing. Yet, restraint has usually been invoked

historically in relation (and reaction) to times of traumatic or disruptive change. Some

examples may illustrate this relationship.

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As articulated by Luke Ashworth’s recent study (2014) and Halvard Leira’s

seminal engagement of his thought (2008), Justus Lipsius’s writings in the early 17th

Century provide a sustained articulation for the value of restraint – both of the prince

and of his subjects. As Ashworth notes, Lipsius’s ‘striving for a stoic Senecan aloofness

can in part be seen as a reaction to the passions released by the religious conflicts that

haunted him throughout his life’ (2014, 31). More broadly, the restraining potential of

the secular, sovereign state was supposed to be one of its foremost virtues and

functions in the dawn of the Westphalian system, or at least in the wake of the Thirty

Years War and other religious conflicts in Europe.

Emile Durkheim’s later work focused on a similar transitional crisis, that which

characterized the change from pre-‐modern to modern society. How, Durkheim explored

(1951), might we effectively restrain individuals and groups in a time when pre-‐modern

societies and institutions were being fragmented by modernity? How, put another way

could ‘anomie from the excessive individual freedom and lack of moral control that is an

extension of the capitalist order’ be confronted, if not eliminated (Acevedo 2005, 83)?

Restraint has also proven to be attractive when the forces of order face a

potential opening of political rights in a society, and thus as a disciplinary device that

orders society and re-‐imposes existing lines of authority. Ethan Shagan’s (2011) work on

moderation shows how restraint in early modern England was used as a device to corral

particular segments of society deemed incapable of moderation on their own –

including women, the poor, and minorities. More broadly, restraint is invoked as a

counter-‐weight to more democratic or populist influences on society. The more

irrational or unpredictable judgments and preferences of the public, for instance,

concerned a variety of elites in the early stages of the Cold War. From Gabriel Almond

(1950) and Walter Lippmann, whose ‘consensus’ on public opinion shaped that field’s

analysis in the 1950s, to the early Cold War ‘realists’ who were concerned that elites

would succumb to the electoral incentives present in turning up the rhetorical heat on

the Soviet adversary, restraint proves on occasion a prudential sensibility in the face of

populist activation.

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The 1990s provide another setting where the topic of restraint re-‐emerged,

especially for policy-‐linked IR scholars who were concerned about the ways in which the

one remaining superpower might engage the world following the end of bipolarity. G.

John Ikenberry articulated the concept of strategic restraint in a series of studies (1998;

2001). Strategic restraint could be both a conscious choice by the United States (to

reassure ‘weaker states that it would not abandon or dominate them’) as well as an

outcome of international institutions, and especially their ‘stickiness’ (Ikenberry 1998,

45). The flipside of this coin was the possibility that a hyper-‐active US hegemon could

instead generate resistance and balancing on the part of other rising or great powers if

it too enthusiastically engaged in moves to maintain a preponderance of power, let

alone a remaking of the international system in liberal democratic form. Considering the

preferences of the liberal internationalists and neoconservatives in the 1990s, many of

which would find their expression in the policies of the 2000s, this concern was not

unfounded.

Thus, it is in the wake of or shortly following periods of perceived change where

restraint emerges as a possible function or value for certain polities to pursue.

In this section I briefly engage how change is theorized in some uses of generational

analysis. I attempt to re-‐articulate generational ‘types’ – the interventionist (and its

complements) as ‘vitalist-‐progressive’, the non-‐interventionist as ‘restraint-‐

conservative’, which allows for several further assertions or theoretical expectations.

This re-‐articulation of types sees change and stasis as less symbiotic than other accounts

of generational change or transition by demonstrating through Strauss and Howe’s

typology that only one of every four generational types are prone to restrain their

polity.

Generations as Structures and Agents

Acuff and I characterized generational analysis research as developing through

the 20th Century in several waves or series’. We claimed that the first wave went back to

the 1930s through the early 1960s, focusing on the ‘moods’ or ‘tides’ of especially

American politics (Schlesinger 1939; Klingberg 1952). A second wave of research, from

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the 1970s and 1980s, engaged the rise and fall of generations. These works were

influenced heavily by Thomas Kuhn’s work on scientific revolutions and specifically the

rise and fall of analytical paradigms. Kuhn’s (1962) argument in the Structure of Scientific

Revolutions formulated how different paradigms lead to different perceptions of the

same phenomenon. Yet it is not simply that there is disagreement stemming from

different perceptions that characterize different paradigms, but that what is actually

seen and not seen depends on a variety of factors including the socialization of one into

a paradigm. The paradigm enables and limits what one sees, leading to intense

disagreement during times of scientific ‘crisis’ and, thereafter, revolution.5 Roskin’s

(1974) Kuhnian interpretation of generational ‘paradigms’ proffered the ways in which

two sets of elites, especially in policy discussions, completely talk past one another.

Such generational conflicts ensue and are intense precisely because the two generations

– based on different traumatic periods and collective experiences – not only see the

world differently but experience it differently, in space and time, as well. Roskin settled

on the terms ‘interventionist’ and ‘non-‐interventionist’ to distinguish the different

generational paradigms that have constituted US foreign policy, and extended this

typology back through the middle part of the 19th Century.

Acuff and I then posited that several developments in IR theory in the 1990s

through today – most especially the increasing prominence of ‘constructivist’ social

theory in IR – could be paving the way for a ‘natural affinity’ with generational analysis.

As suggested by the aforementioned pairing of generational analysis with structuration

theory that Acuff and I engaged in our 2012, generations can be considered both agents

and (social) structures because they exert an influence upon a society when they

capture the latter’s resources. This is a key aspect of Giddens’s social theory combining

active agents with changeable structures (1984; 1991). Agency is not the same as free

will, to wit it ‘refers not to the intentions people have in doings things but to their

capability of doing those things in the first place (which is why agency implies power),

5 For a take on the possibility that Kuhn’s work was influenced by not only the intense political times leading up to his publication of Structure, but also Richard Hofstadter’s ‘take’ regarding certain ‘paranoid’ US political styles, see Reisch (2012).

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(Giddens 1984, 9). Resources ‘are structured properties of social systems, drawn upon

and reproduced by knowledgeable agents in the course of interaction …[they are also]

media through which power is exercised’ (15-‐16). Both ‘allocative’ (materials) and

‘authoritative’ (rules) resources are equally important for a generation to shape its

society (as structure) and transform its routines, cadences, sensibilities, and policies.

Giddens uses the term ‘storage’ of these resources as referring to ‘the retention

and control of information or knowledge’, such storage includes three aspects. First, it

‘presumes media of information representation, [second] modes of information

retrieval or recall and, as with all power resources, [third] modes of its dissemination’

(1984, 261, emphasis original). Generational cohorts thus do not unproblematically

transform a polity or community by their mere emerging presence – they must capture

the storage sites for these resources, and then deploy them to shape, routinize and

habitualize actions going forward. We can graft the generational analysis ‘story’ onto

Giddens’s structurationist take on ‘resources’ to delineate the politically-‐contested

manner in which change occurs.

The set of traumatic experiences or ruptures (akin to the ‘critical situations’ of a

‘radical or unpredictable kind’ discussed by Giddens, 1984, 61) coloring an emerging

generation’s formative years provide an opportunity or opening for that generation

once it accesses that society’s resources. The opportunity is for not only a public recall

of this traumatic national experience, but a dissemination of a causal narrative linking

the previous thinking and action (interventionist or not) of the generation waning from

power to that traumatic experience. In a previous study, I discussed this ‘causal story’

contestation occurring during generational transitions through an ‘if-‐then’ formulation:

if there is: (a) a formative event and (b) a strong “cut-‐point” of a politically awakening generational cohort that can (c) causally link such an event to the excesses of a previous generation, then such an experience will generate momentum for a “gestalt shift”—a different way of thinking about the world to avoid this event’s recurrence (Steele 2012, 40) This transition is thus not inevitable (although evaluating other generational analysis

accounts makes it seem that way), but contingent. One of the key aspects that

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influences this contingency is not only the amount or depth of access to resources, but

to the general reception and affirmation by the wider polity or society to the type of

causal narrative that the emerging generation tells. Some narratives (what I term below

‘vitalist’) may be more inspirational or influential than others (ie: those foregrounding

restraint).

Vitalist-‐Progressive Generations

An interesting angle, or twist, on the generational cycle argument can be found

in Kustermans and Ringmar’s study on boredom and war (2011), which both invokes the

concept of a generation and also refers to work on moods by Dallek (1982). Kustermans

and Ringmar posit boredom as a function of modernity. Both the eras they examine –

prior to WWI and the 1990s into the early 2000s – are characterized through

generations who experienced ennui or an emptiness. In the former case, the two refer

to a study conducted in 1913 by Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde, who found by then

that:

A generational shift had taken place. For much of the nineteenth century young people had indeed been listless and lacking in direction, but now things were rapidly improving. The new generation is not sitting around philosophising, they concluded, instead they want ‘to get things done’ (Kustermans and Ringerman 2011: 1784). The two found in students of that era a ‘vitality in action’. This was an expression of a

wider form of what was being termed then ‘vitalism’, popularized during that time in

both the sciences (biology especially), and through the work of philosophers such as

Henri Bergson (1907).6

The term ‘vitalist’ may better characterize broader ‘interventionist’ generations,

because it provides an even starker juxtaposition with non-‐interventionist ones on

questions that go much deeper than simply whether a national polity should ‘intervene’

or not abroad. Let me provide some background on this term, and why it may be a

better referent than Roskin’s ‘interventionist’ one for these types of generations. 6 Bechtel and Richardson (1998) provide an overview of vitalist philosophies and accounts from the early 20th Century.

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A somewhat casual understanding of vitalism is found in Merriam-‐Webster

definition of it as ‘a doctrine that the processes of life are not explicable by the laws of

physics and chemistry alone and that life is in some part self-‐determining’.7 Vitalism has

a long and varied history, perhaps dating back to the work of Aristotle, and extending

into both the life sciences as well as the humanities and arts (Driesch 2010), permeating

and sometimes embodied through the work of a variety of modern thinkers from

Bergson (Burwick and Douglass 2010) to Nietzsche (Reichert 1964). As it relates to global

politics, few of us would deny that human forces are at work in helping to shape (if not

determine, let alone self-‐determine) relations. But ‘vitalist’ views tend to take this

assumption to another level, asserting that particular decisions or forceful events can

overwhelm the agency of others and that these decisions can help shape history.

Richard Wolin, for instance, understands political vitalists as those who assume a

political action as having the potential for a ‘magical omnipotence’ which helps to bridge

the ‘gulf between the abstract and concrete’ (Wolin 1990: 298). Such views also focus

on how such action re-‐vitalizes a particular community behind a common cause. Such

vitalization is both ideational and emotional, but also material and physical – (de)-‐

‘positing’ members of a community towards some crisis or occurrence ‘out there’ that

vitalists find needing rectification.8

Vitalist-‐progressive generations are more popular and influential through time.

To see this, and how less influential or visible what I title ‘conservative-‐restrained’

generations to be, we can engage one ambitious, bold, and somewhat overly confident

thesis on generations that was proffered by William Strauss and Neil Howe in their 1990

book, as well as their follow-‐up study (1997). Stauss and Howe argue that the ‘great

failure of generations writing’ was that even if writers from ‘Comte through Mannheim’

produced works on the generation that were ‘colorful, eloquent, and painstakingly

empirical’ they were ‘seldom explanatory’. For Strauss and Howe, the key towards

7 http://www.merriam-‐webster.com/dictionary/vitalism 8 This is an oblique reference to Tarik Kochi’s lively concept of ‘positing’, and specifically his understanding of war as an ‘act of positing’. Kochi defines this as both an ‘act of thinking and acting’, and sees positing as a practice of ‘humans in modernity attempt[ing] to control, shape, and re-‐create our physical and social world through action’ (2009, 236).

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engaging the explanatory (ie; predictive) power of generational cohorts was in providing

an account of how they arise, how they change, and how they have any particular

length. Such an account is needed since ‘you can read endless tomes of generations

literature looking for answers to these questions. [But] you won’t find any’ (Strauss and

Howe 1991, 440).

Of course, this isn’t quite the case, for perhaps the only two aspects separating

Strauss and Howe’s articulation of generational change from others before them is (1)

the purpose of explanation and (2) the comprehensive, clean (regulatory or rational

checking and balancing through time), and confident theorization of generational cycles.

Considering that their typology does overlap, if not perfectly graft-‐upon, the

interventionist-‐noninterventionist typology of others working on generations, it bears

some notice for our purposes here.

Strauss and Howe’s typology presented four ‘types’ of generations which recycle

every 200 years – Idealist, Reactive, Civic and Adaptive. All generations are formed by

‘social moments’ – a set of traumatic or iconic experiences that each generation

engages during its formative years (~18-‐29 years of age). The formative experience

socializes a generation – and it can encode particular causal logics for that generation

that distinguish it from the generation in power, and others emerging after it (Steele

2012).

Idealist and Civic generations are both interventionist, and they are both vitalist-‐

progressive in the sense that they associate their views of policy as imbued with a

universal meaning connecting to something greater, broader, and grander than their

own temporally contextualized formative experiences. Idealist generations –

exemplified by the Missionary generation of the late 19th Century, and the more recent

Baby Boomer generation (George W. Bush, Bill Clinton), see progress in breaking down

existing institutions that are in the way of progress. Civic generations seek out progress

not by tearing down institutions, but by building them. Adaptive generations are just

that – complementary and conforming to the directions the older Civic or the younger

Idealist generations seek to channel the national community (see also Winograd and

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Hais 2008, 25-‐26). Yet in some instances adaptive generations, too, are filled with a

universalist faith, as evidenced by Woodrow Wilson’s generation, which Strauss and

Howe title ‘Progressive’ (1991, 217-‐227).

It is only the Reactive generations –who when reaching mid-‐life prove to be

‘pragmatic managers of secular crises’ – that can be characterized as prone to a type of

restraint (Strauss and Howe 1991, 74). This generation-‐type in its early years can be

characterized as counter-‐cultural and somewhat reckless, but tends to be pragmatic,

reserved, and philosophically conservative when and if it comes to power.

Caveats abound, of course, for once again we are making generalizations (gen

type) upon a generalization (generation). This ignores the agency of individuals and

groups within these generations let alone the fact that the referent of the national Self

is also being totalized as a (perhaps the only?) referent. Indeed, as the brief discussion

of containment and US foreign policy in the early stages of the Cold War illustrates

below, certain individuals (even elites) buck their generational type. Further, one

problem that continues to bedevil the generation and noted by even some of its

analytical proponents (see Steele and Acuff 2012, 6) is whether it is a relevant referent

or phenomena outside of particular national contexts and societies, including as

Tocqueville (1945, 62) suggested the egalitarian American one where generations seem

to be uniquely prominent.

Reactive Generations through time

Nevertheless, with these caveats in mind, I would like to push nward with

Strauss and Howe’s characterizations of Reactive generations. Doing so discloses the

possibility for discovering what generates, and conversely overwhelms, restraint in a

polity. For of the four generational types in Strauss and Howe’s cycle, the Reactive

(precisely because it rejects universalism) is the only one prone towards changing a

polity by restraining it. This particular context and typology still provides an opportunity

for a plausibility probe inquiring to the challenge of restraint and its relationship to

change. If, again, plausible, this paper seeks to augment Roskin’s ‘interventionist-‐

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noninterventionist’ framework. An examination of restraint’s presence or absence

through time may help explain, in inverse fashion, why vitalist-‐progressivism in the

United States is the more dominant generational type (more dominant than Roskin’s

interventionist-‐non-‐interventionist cycle would suggest). Further, while Strauss and

Howe’s four-‐century-‐long grand-‐sweep of American history is indeed too

comprehensive and overwhelming of a dataset to effectively analyze in one paper, by

reducing our focus upon the Reactive generations they identify we can in an albeit

cursory manner assess what factors may predispose such generations towards restraint.

Strauss and Howe examine five Reactive generations. In general, these

generations tend to experience some type of hardship as children and young adults, and

being children of Idealist generation-‐type parents, are raised with more neglect or

indifference than any other generational type. Examining each of the five Reactive

generations discussed in Strauss and Howe’s 1991 study provides further inductive

generalizations about Reactive generations.

The first of these that prove the most difficult to evaluate is the Cavalier

generation, born between 1615-‐1647. Like other generations examined in their

‘Colonial’ cycle, this generation was one of immigrants, originating according to Strauss

and Howe mainly from southwestern England before settling in the New World. The

formative experiences for this generation are thus harder to peg, although like the

aforementioned Lipsius whose work was being disseminated around this time, Strauss

and Howe point to the ending of the wars of Religion and the emergence of a ‘realpolitik

of hungry new superpowers’ characterizing the environment of the ‘Cavalier character’

that first ‘took shape in the Old World’ (131). One key aspect of the Cavalier that

Strauss and Howe focus upon is their rejection of the moral authority of the Puritan

generation preceding them, and a general skepticism regarding the ‘lies’ told by that

Idealist generation. One prominent member the two identify is Increase Mather, whose

general pragmatism and restraint was evidenced in his calls for a restrained treatment

of evidence during the Salem Witch Trials, as well as a less ideological approach towards

restoring the Massachusetts Charter. This restraint contrasts starkly with those of an

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emerging ‘Glorious’ generation – including Mather’s son Cotton – the latter

enthusiastically supported the trying and execution of the Salem ‘witches’.

The second Reactive generation Strauss and Howe title, appropriately, the

‘Liberty’ generation. With members born between 1724-‐1741, it included some of the

United States’s Founding Fathers, most prominently George Washington, John Adams,

Patrick Henry, and Paul Revere (1991 166). The Liberty generation could be considered a

revolutionary and thus Idealist one considering that their rise to prominence coincided

with the Revolutionary War. Yet Strauss and Howe argue that the bloody, ambiguous

and costly French and Indian War – within which many Liberty members fought – was a

much more visceral formative experience from which this generation took its instruction

on social relations. The authors argue that it is Washington’s prudence both as a general

and then in two-‐terms as the US’s first President that exemplifies this generation’s

pragmatic and even restrained stance towards politics. It should be noted that Hans

Morgenthau, writing (not coincidentally) in 1950, argued that the United States:

Owed its existence and survival as an independent nation to those extraordinary qualities of political insight, historic perspective, and common-‐sense which the first generation of Americans applied to the affairs of state (Morgenthau 1950, 833)9 Strauss and Howe, following the satirical novel of Twain and Warner (1873) that

titled the era, call America’s next Reactive generation the ‘Gilded’, born between 1822-‐

1842. The Gilded were the most remarkable and ‘un’-‐Reactive generation in the sense

that due to the US Civil War in the middle of the century, they were required (again,

according to Strauss and Howe) to ‘fuse’ their reactive tendencies with a Civic duty to

correct and reconstruct American society in the latter half of the 19th Century. Thus, and

beginning with Ulysses S. Grant, the Gilded produced more US Presidents (six) than any

other Reactive generation before or since. Yet their traumatic experiences in the US Civil

War, and their skepticism and reactions to the moralism surrounding the US

9 Morgenthau, like Strauss and Howe, place the ‘break’ in generation between Adams and Thomas Jefferson, with Morgenthau characterizing Jefferson’s foreign policy as part of the ‘Ideological’ (rather than Realistic) era of American Foreign Policy and Strauss and Howe pegging Jefferson as part of the Republican generation that followed the Liberty.

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participation in the Spanish-‐American War, evince a concern with and even rejection of

absolutist or universalist understandings of the US’s place and ‘mission’ in the world. To

illustrate, in a 1906 speech, Mark Twain reflected on the assertions by then President

Theodore Roosevelt (a member, like Wilson, of the Progressive generation which

followed Twain’s Gilded) that the recent Battle of Moro Crater (termed the ‘Moro

Massacre’ thereafter), was a ‘brilliant feat which upheld the honor of the American flag’.

Twain responded:

with six hundred engaged on each side, we lost fifteen men killed outright, and we had thirty-‐two wounded-‐counting that nose and that elbow. The enemy numbered six hundred -‐-‐ including women and children -‐-‐ and we abolished them utterly, leaving not even a baby alive to cry for its dead mother. This is incomparably the greatest victory that was ever achieved by the Christian soldiers of the United States.

And then, with the updated news that the number was closer to 900, Twain updated his

assessment, ‘I was never so enthusiastically proud of the flag till now’ (Clemens 1906).10

The fourth Reactive generation engaged by Strauss and Howe is the Lost

generation, born between 1883 and 1900. Here we find a host of familiar members,

including Reinhold Niebuhr, William James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and

Walter Lippmann. This generation’s key formative experiences were the First World War

and the decadent Roaring 20s. Strauss and Howe again focus on the more reckless years

of youth, and then the pragmatic and restrained middle-‐age years, that like other

Reactive generations characterized the Lost. I discuss this generation and its ‘moment’

of restraint when in power in the late 1940s and 1950s below.

The final Reactive generation, and the one still present in contemporary US

society, is what Strauss and Howe title the ‘13er’ generation, born between 1961 and

1981 (ages 34-‐54 in 2015). The formative experiences and tendencies characterizing this

generation are harder to identify for Strauss and Howe, since they are writing their

study at a time when the 13er generation is emerging (1991). Nevertheless, this 10 Twain’s sarcasm, perhaps difficult to detect for the innocent, is revealed in a juxtaposed assertion later in the speech. Regarding Roosevelt, Twain notes ‘He knew perfectly well that to pen six hundred helpless and weaponless savages in a hole like rats in a trap and massacre them in detail during a stretch of a day and a half, from a safe position on the heights above, was no brilliant feat of arms’, Ibid.

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generation, titled following Douglas Coupland’s novel of the same year ‘Generation X’,

has been the subject of a number of studies and is invoked in popular discussions on

generations quite frequently with terms hearkening to the Reactive type (see Winograd

and Hais 2008; Gordinier 2008).

What does this whirlwind tour of Reactive generations tell us about the

tendencies, experiences, or general outlooks that could explain a propensity for valuing

restraint? There are, generally, three factors in common across these five Reactive types

that can be posited as making Reactive generations the unique ones in terms of valuing

restraint. First, each Reactive generation was sandwiched in-‐between generations who

considered their outlook on America, and its place in the world, through divine,

absolutist, or universal notions. Second, and not unrelated, most (Cavalier excepted)11

experienced and in many cases participated in a costly and even catastrophic war

(French-‐Indian [Liberty], US Civil War [Gilded], WWI [Lost], US War on Terror [Gen X]).

That these wars were often accompanied by lofty rhetoric to justify US or American

participation is also noteworthy. Third, and again not unrelated to the first and second,

all witnessed at some point a general domestic crisis where civil liberties were curtailed,

with particular groups within American society targeted, swamping or overcoming any

of the protections in place to protect such liberties. Government intrusion, with the

support of the wider society, was the hallmark of each of these crises {Salem Witch

Trials [Cavalier], suspension of Habeus Corpus [Gilded]; Alien and Sedition Acts and

McCarthyism [Lost], Patriot Act, the return of torture, and its complements [Gen X]).

What this whirlwind does not provide us is any explanatory account for how

such sensibilities become internalize, let alone promoted, in these Reactive generations.

The most we might expect is an illustration of how one of these may have sought –

through policy, writings, and organized theoretical arguments and referents – to

promote restraint to the wider US public for the (brief) period of time it contained the

allocative and authoritative resources to do so.

11 Although as mentioned, some of the Cavalier generation did experience the end of the Relgious Wars of Europe, including the Thirty Years War, before emigrating to America.

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Containment, Rollback, and National Purpose Following the end of the Second World War, and with the emergence of the bipolar

structure, the United States embarked on a strategy of containment of the Soviet Union.

George Kennan, under the pseudonym ‘X’, discussed the nature of the Soviet threat in

his famous ‘Sources of Soviet Conduct’. For Kennan, the Soviet Union’s:

political action is a fluid stream which moves constantly, wherever it is permitted to move, toward a given goal. Its main concern is to make sure that it has filled every nook and cranny available to it in the basin of world power. But if it finds unassailable barriers in its path, it accepts these philosophically and accommodates itself to them (1947) Thus, such ‘barriers’ could be placed in the Soviet Union’s path by containment, via ‘the

adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting

geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet

policy’ (1947).12

These are often the only points emphasized regarding Kennan’s missive, but

further sensibilities, relevant to a Lost Generation sense of stoicism and restraint,13

should be noted from this key document. The following passage, quoted at-‐length for

purposes of its vivid illustration of the conservative-‐restrained sensibility, captures the

more important practice of containment (one that implies continuous effort rather than

static ‘blocking’ of the Soviet threat):

such a policy has nothing to do with outward histrionics: with threats or blustering or superfluous gestures of outward "toughness." While the Kremlin is basically flexible in its reaction to political realities, it is by no means unamenable to considerations of prestige. Like almost any other government, it can be placed by tactless and threatening gestures in a position where it cannot afford to yield even though this might be dictated by its sense of realism. The Russian leaders are keen judges of human psychology, and as such they are highly conscious that loss of temper and of self-‐control is never a source of strength in political affairs. They are quick to exploit such evidences of weakness. For

12 http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/23331/x/the-‐sources-‐of-‐soviet-‐conduct 13 Strauss and Howe place Kennan in the GI (or today sometimes called the ‘Greatest’ or WWII generation), although his birth of 1904 puts Kennan on the borderline between that cohort and the slightly older Lost Generation of Truman and Eisenhower (and Lippmann and Niebuhr, for that matter).

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these reasons, it is a sine qua non of successful dealing with Russia that the foreign government in question should remain at all times cool and collected and that its demands on Russian policy should be put forward in such a manner as to leave the way open for a compliance not too detrimental to Russian prestige (1947, emphases added) Containment can be, and often is, considered as part an interventionist policy. Indeed,

the ‘Truman Doctrine’ speech from March 1947, often combined with Kennan’s dispatch

as a cornerstone document of containment, was an address to the US Congress calling

for aid to assist the Greek and Turkish governments in their fight against Communist

adversaries. That document also served as a blueprint for ‘economic and financial’

assistance extended to all ‘free peoples … resisting attempted subjugation by armed

minorities or by outside pressures’.14

Yet containment, once implemented, involved consistent and continuous effort

to realize restraint. Two items, at minimum, bear notice here. First, Kennan reorients an

understanding of strength, criticizing ‘histrionics’, ‘gestures of outward “toughness”’, or

otherwise ‘tactless’ gestures. Rhetoric and emotions of the US Self, its politicians, and its

citizens should be restrained in containment. Second, restraint is important for social

reasons – it demonstrates to Russia more resolve and strength via ‘self-‐control’ than a

more ‘forceful’ or ‘hawkish’ rhetorical stance ever could.

But it is not just the document formulated by a state agent like Kennan that

bears notice here – for the policy of containment would not only be tested in its infancy

but also throughout the following decades precisely for its restraint and seemingly

limited nature. It is the context within which Kennan issues containment, the ways in

which other early Cold War ‘realists’ would seek to imbue a type of restraint into US

foreign policy during this time, and the ways in which the challenge that modifications

or even rejections of containment were confronted or resisted during the 1950s.

With the knowledge, especially after the first successful Soviet atomic test in

August of 1949, that both superpowers could annihilate one another, came a particular

urgency and set of reflections regarding the proper strategy to engage the Soviet threat.

In this context, it was the voice of the US-‐based ‘Realists’ who, in the words of David

14 Truman Doctrine speech accessed at: http://www.trumanlibrary.org/teacher/doctrine.htm

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McCourt, ‘chime[d] in with the zeitgeist so strongly’ in the 1950s (2012, 62; see also

Guilhot 2008). Calling these realists a ‘generation unit’, McCourt notes three assertions

for the rise (and fall) of this group: (1) Institutional support from the Rockefeller

foundation; (2) Realists’ ideas were taken on by both the academy and the

governmental sphere (evidenced by Kennan’s role in both); and (3) realists would, by

the 1960s, and for generational reasons of wane, lose ‘control’ over their realism to the

behavioralists (McCourt 2012, 62-‐64).

Indeed, if we review some of the works appearing by this group of realists in the

1950s, we can see the theme of restraint appearing quite frequently. Robert Jervis, in

Guilhot’s (2011) more recent edited volume on this period, summarizes the context

quite succinctly:

In the mid-‐1950s, with the memory of Hitler still fresh, with Stalin just having died, and with the behavior of Joseph McCarthy looming large … realists believed that … Leaders had to fight some of the impulses they were sure to harbor, had to resist the easy rationalization that the requirements of national security always trumped other values …Furthermore, this struggle would never end (Jervis 2011, 34, emphasis added) That it would never end meant (again) that restraint required constant effort and

vigilance. It also motivated the realists to find some particular devices – analytical,

normative or otherwise – that could ‘teach’ policymakers and other scholars alike about

the ‘realities’ and contingencies of international politics. Morgenthau’s 1950

‘Mainsprings’ article promoting the balance of power , which invoked Washington’s

Liberty generation as a favorable model of ‘realistic’ foreign policy, was mentioned

above. It too should be read in light of the cautionary tale of restraint invoked during

this period.

Let me provide a further example from John Herz’s formulation in 1950 of the

‘security dilemma’. Through careful examination of a variety of Idealist ‘Nationalisms’

that were purposed in intent and identity as Inter-‐Nationalisms, Herz evaluated what

has been the general pattern across these movements, from the French to the

Bolsheviks. These movements were ‘revolutionary’ ones whose ‘birthplace and actual

theater’ were ‘regarded as merely accidental starting points of what was conceived as a

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world-‐embracing development; such movements were thus world-‐revolutionary in the

strict sense’ (Herz 1950: 164).

Herz progresses through each of these idealisms – and how their certainty as

universalisms ran into, eventually, the security dilemma. Each revolutionary movement

thought that they were part of a historical cut-‐point, representing a universally valid

movement and set of principles that translated across national boundaries. Yet each,

when seeking out a broader movement, were greeted with resistance, triggering a

security dilemma, defined by Herz as when groups seeking to acquire more power ‘can

ever feel entirely secure in such a world of competing units, power competition ensues,

and the vicious circle of security and power accumulation is on’ (Herz 1950: 164).

Mentioning in the case of the Soviets that the transition from an idealistic universalism

(World Communism) to Stalinism took around ‘thirty years’, Herz observed that

As a unit in international affairs the Soviet Union now acts with at least the same degree of insistence on self-‐preservation "sovereignty," security, and power considerations as do other countries. Whereas world-‐revolutionary ideology upheld the primacy of international over "national" proletarian considerations, Stalinism acts on the assumption that no interest anywhere can possibly be above the existence and maintenance of Soviet rule in Russia. Whatever appears today as Soviet internationalism has in reality become subservient to a primarily "national" cause, or rather, the maintenance of the regime of one specific "big power." (Herz 1950: 171, emphasis added)

One reading of Herz’s claim sees it as a warning call -‐ one perfectly in-‐line with the

realist admonition to idealists to beware of adversaries, to be skeptical of trust in an

anarchic world. Yet, imagine an American reading this in, say, 1950 -‐ why is a statement

like this, at that time, so important?

One answer is that it is a forceful, although nuanced, call for a multilayered form

of restraint in US foreign policy. If every case of revolutionary universalism collapsed,

ultimately, into a realist nationalist project, then while such countries represent a threat

in terms of a clash of national interests, one need not meet them as if they represent an

existential threat to humanity itself. The United States need not over-‐react to the

Soviet threat, because international politics has already social and structurally

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restrained it as a transnational movement into something still serious but more

colloquial – a great power that seeks out national interests first and foremost, even

though it continues to deploy the rhetoric of transnational revolution and idealism.

Thus, armed with the knowledge in an ‘atomic age’ that the security dilemma provided

‘some kind of stability and order from which to work’, Herz could then ‘reinvigorate’ the

‘art of diplomacy’ (Sylvest 2008: 448).

My argument here, to re-‐set, is that these foci on restraint were conditioned by

generational factors – it was the Lost generation, which included Kennan, but also

Truman, Eisenhower, and many other state agents (including a swath of the US public as

well), that as a Reactive generation was receptive (again, on the whole) to such calls for

restraint. In this context, we might also evaluate the key policy departure of the

Eisenhower administration from the previous Truman administration. The move was

from containing the Soviet threat, to rolling it back – Kennan’s ‘containment’ to John

Foster Dulles’s ‘Rollback’. Containment was not enough – and in fact according to Dulles

it was was an immoral and even ‘evil’ policy that ‘abandons countless human beings to a

despotic and godless terrorism’ (quoted in Bodenheimer and Gould, 12).

And yet, during this time, as one historian notes, ‘rollback was never a realistic

alternative. Eisenhower, once installed in the White House, confronted the same grim

realities as had his predecessor’ (Mayers 1983, 59). A policy of rollback that even

included the possibility of a pre-‐emptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union instead was

‘rejected’ (Bodenheimer and Gould, 13), and the Eisenhower administration continued,

overall, the containment policies of its predecessor. The restraint of Eisenhower’s

foreign policy was illustrated in several key moments of the 1950s, including the

reactions (or lack thereof), to the East German revolt of 1953, Hungary intervention by

Soviet forces (Morgenthau 1961/1970, 91-‐92), the break with the Brits, French, and

Israelis during the Suez Crisis (both in 1956), the Berlin crisis of 1958, and the muted

response to the shooting down of the U-‐2 spy plane in 1960. Rollback, on the other

hand, went beyond the measured sensibilities of Eisenhower, and although rhetorically

powerful it went against, ultimately, the prevailing ‘mood’ of the US as a polity in the

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1950s. As Arthur Schlesinger would note in his 1960 essay, looking back on the previous

decade, the mood was of ‘passivity and acquiescence’.

By 1960, Schlesinger’s essay, printed in Esquire, seems quite prescient for the

contrasts it draws between the two decades it was published (1950s v. 1960s), and

especially its predictions or suggestions of a vitalism brewing in the US polity that would

suggest a much more active country on the world stage in the decade to follow.

‘Somehow the wind is beginning to change’, Schlesinger wrote, with Americans

‘seek[ing] a renewal of conviction, a new sense of national purpose’ (Schlesigner 1960).

Such a renewal may after the 1950s seem to be intuitive, yet even during that decade,

Schlesinger notes, there were ‘the threats of communism and nuclear catastrophe’ that

should have been ‘enough to give us this sense of purpose’. But alas, those threats did

not. What explains this shifting mood in 1960?

Schlesinger doesn’t clearly state a reason – he does explain the ‘torpor’ of the

1950s as a result of ‘exhaustion’ from the crises of the 1930s and 40s. But the transition

coincides with the increased emergence and visibility of the GI or ‘greatest’ generation

in American society. Such contrast between ‘exhaustion’ and ‘vitalism’ appeared with no

greater clarity than in the transition of administrations and presidencies from

Eisenhower to Kennedy. The 1960s were marked by the escalating US presence in

Vietnam, an escalation opposed by almost all US-‐based realists at the time (‘a greviously

unsound venture’, in Kennan’s assessment).15 That decade may better be considered

the genuine shift from Containment to Rollback, from restraint to vitalism. It should

also be noted that Schlesinger’s ‘analysis’ is really a political document advocating for

this precise ‘shift’ in the societal mood, meant to critique the ‘holiday from

responsibility’ that the United States took in the 1950s, that the ‘1950s were fatal years

for us to relax on the sidelines’ (1960). And, of course, when we also duly note that

Schlesinger was a speechwriter, advisor and assistant to John F. Kennedy, this makes

even more sense.

15 Frank Costigliola, (2011) Is this George Kennan? New york review of books, December 8, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/dec/08/is-‐this-‐george-‐kennan/

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Conclusions, Caveats and Shortcomings As mentioned above, this study was more of a plausibility probe into the relationship

between generational cycles and restraint, and following from Strauss and Howe’s

typology contextualized only within the United States. The conclusions reached, already

conditioned and caveated, are no more than mildly suggestive. There are even in the

context of the United States in the 1950s two important, thorny issues for a ‘clean’

reading on that decade as one articulated via a Lost generational sensibility of restraint.

First, there is the notable anomaly of John Foster Dulles, the architect of rollback.

Despite the fact that rollback was not effectively or even partially implemented even

after the Eisenhower administration took over, it needs to be noted that Dulles, too,

was a member of the Lost generation. Some of his unique sensibilities compared to

others of the same generation can be explained via his more unique experiences – he

did not serve in WWI (the army rejected him because of bad eyesight) and he was much

more deeply religious than many other government officials. The influence of his family

– namely his grandfather John W. Foster and his uncle Robert Lansing (both of whom

served as Secretaries of State as well), seem to have shaped Dulles more than any

experiences he had during the First World War (see Morgenthau 1961/1970, 89). Like

the distinctions Acuff (2012) details between different First World War German soldiers

(front line service or not) that built different ‘entelechies’ that would clash when it came

to the German doctrine of blitzkrieg in World War II, such formative experiences can

differ within the same ‘age-‐unit’ of a generation. Further, the rhetorical radicalization

within the US Republican Party, of which Dulles had been a member, and the ‘fate’ of

Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, also seem to have influenced Dulles’ public

stance, making him much more evangelical in his public pronouncements against

Communism (Morgenthau 1961/1970).

Second, while we can point to the late 1940s and the entire decade of the 1950s

as exemplifying the restraint intended by the Containment doctrine, we must also, to be

honest, disclose the covert departures from restraint that also characterized that

25

decade, including the CIA-‐led overthrows of the Mossadeqh government in Iran and the

Arbenz government in Guatemala. As historians have noted for at least a decade or

more (Mitrovich 2000; Grose 2000), and as Kennan intimated as far back as a mid-‐1980s

article in Foreign Affairs, many containment advocates including Kennan himself would

support this more subterranean form of conflicts. That it would appear to be, in

Kennan’s words, ‘clandestine skullduggery’ that he would ‘regret’ looking back on the

period (1985/1986) does not detract from the ways in which such covert operations ran

against the sensibilities of a supposedly restrained containment policy.

And yet, these caveats return us to what was observed earlier in this paper and

returned to obliquely throughout – restraint may often times be necessary and

preferred. But it is also, at least in the context of different US interactions with the

broader world, a challenge that its citizens, leaders, and even its most skeptical

generations are for the most part not up to fulfilling. In an era of late (post?) modernity

where hyper-‐reactions are the norm, it is on this grim and saturnine note where I will

end my paper.

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_______________(1991) Modernity and Self-‐Identity. Stanford University Press. Jeff Gordinier (2008) X Saves the World: How Generation X got the Shaft but can still keep everything from sucking. Penguin Press. Peter Grose (2000) Operation Rollback: America's Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain. Mariner Books. Nicholas Guilhot, editor, (2011) The Invention of International Relations Theory: realism, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the 1954 conference on theory. Columbia University Press. ______________(2008) The Realist Gambit: Postwar American Political Science and the Birth of IR theory, International Political Sociology. 2: 281-‐304. John H. Herz (1950) Idealist Internationalism and the security dilemma, World Politics, 2, 2: 157-‐180. Stanley Hoffmann (1962) Restraints and Choices in American Foreign Policy, Daedalus, 91, 4: 668-‐705. G. John Ikenberry (1998) Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Persistence of American Postwar Order." International Security 23, no. 3 (Winter 1998/1999): 43-‐ 78 _____________ (2001) After victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars. Princeton University Press. Robert Jervis (2011) Morality, Policy and Theory: reflections on the 1954 conference, in Guilhot, editor, The Invention of International Relations theory, 33-‐53. George Kennan (1947) The Sources of Soviet Conduct. Foreign Affairs. _____________(1985/86) Morality and Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, 64, 205-‐217. Oliver Kessler (2007) From Agents and Structures to Minds and Bodies. Journal of International. Relations and Development 10 (3): 243–271 Frank Klingberg (1952) The Historical Alternation of Moods in American Foreign Policy. World Politics 4, no. 2: 239–73. Tarik Kochi (2009) The Other’s War. Birkbeck Press: London. Charles Kupchan (2010) How Enemies Become Friends. Princeton University Press.

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Thomas, S. Kuhn (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jorg Kustermans and Erik Ringmar (2011) Modernity, Boredom and War: a suggestive essay. Review of International Studies. 37: 1775-‐1792. Harold Lasswell (1936) Politics: who gets what, when, how. McGraw Hill. Halvard Leira (2008) Justus Lipsius, political humanism and disciplining of 17th century statecraft, Review of International Studies, 34, 669-‐92. David Mayers (1983) Eisenhower's Containment Policy and the Major Communist Powers, 1953–1956, International Historical Review, 5, 1: 59-‐83. David M. McCourt (2012) The ‘Problem of Generations’ Revisited: Karl Mannheim and the Sociology of Knowledge in International Relations, in Steele and Acuff, editors, Theory and Application of the Generation, Palgrave, 47-‐70. Gregory Mitrovich (2000) Undermining the Kremlin: America's Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, 1947-‐1956. Cornell University Press. Hans Morgenthau (1950) The Mainsprings of American Foreign Policy: the national interest versus moral abstractions, American Political Science Review, 44, 4, 833-‐854. _______________(1961) ‘John Foster Dulles’, reprinted in Truth and Power: essays of a decade, 1960-‐1970, Praeger. Nicholas Onuf (1989) World of Our Making. University of South Carolina Press H. Reichert (1964) ‘Nietzsche and Georg Kaiser’, Studies in Philology 61(4): 85–108. Michael Roskin (1974) From Pearl Harbor to Vietnam: Shifting Generational Paradigms and Foreign Policy, Political Science Quarterly, 89, 3: 563-‐588. Arthur Schlesinger, jr. (1939) Tides of American Politics. Yale Review, 39, 219-‐224. _________________(1960) ‘The New Mood in Politics’, Esquire, January, accessed at: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/schles-‐pol-‐of-‐hope.html Ethan Shagan (2011) The Rule of Moderation: violence, religion and the politics of restraint in Early Modern England. Cambridge University Press.

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Generational Restraint

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