14 - Collective Security for Common Men and Women: Vera Micheles Dean and US Foreign Relations

Summary

Vera Micheles Dean’s career took her from a PhD at Radcliffe to the Foreign Policy Association and then to the University of Rochester and New York University. As a scholar, her theoretical stance was realist with a thorough grounding in social psychology. Yet, despite her academic grounding, she was a public intellectual, embracing a ‘common-sense cosmopolitanism’ that sought to make the world relatable to ordinary citizens. In her writings, Dean acknowledged the centrality of the non-Western world in the Cold War, an analytical move taken decades before Cold War historians and IR scholars began to ‘decenter’ the United States and the Soviet Union in their accounts. An expert on Soviet Russia, Dean argued for a policy of mutual understanding, advocating collective forms of economic organization and the pooling of sovereignty. Ideologically, she was committed to global social democracy, anti-racism and, importantly, a holistic understanding of security that encompassed psychological aspects.