36 SOCIAL SCIENTIST of industries that are particularly concerned with their decisions. It is furthermore, no doubt true that at some point ideology takes on a motive force of its own. There are other interacting, and for the most part mutually supportive factors: the interest of the 'state management9 in the Pentagon in enhancing its own power; the role of government-induced production of rapidly obsolescing luxury goods (largely military) as a technique of economic management, with a resulting need to secure strategic raw materials; the usefulness of an external enemy as a device to whip the taxpayer into line, in support of the production of waste and the costs of empire; the heady sense of power, to which academic ideologues in particular seem to succumb so readily. Such factors as these produce a fairly stable system to support the basic imperial drive, which is second nature to the men of power in the state executive in any event. There are many specific factors that must be considered in a detailed examination of particular decisions, such as those that led us ever more deeply into Indochina. Nevertheless, it seems reasonably clear that American policy, like that of any great power, is guided by 'national interest5 as conceived by the dominant social groups. At the same time, ideologists labour to mask these endeavours in a functional system of beliefs. It is possible to give some useful advice to an aspiring political analyst who wants his work to be received as thoughtful and penetrating—advice, I am sure, which applies to any society, not merely to the US. This analyst should, first of all, determine as closely as possible the actual workings of power in his society. Having isolated certain primary elements and a number of peripheral and insignificant ones, he should then proceed to dismiss the primary factors as unimportant, the province of extremists and ideologues. He should rather concentrate on the minor and peripheral elements in decision-making. Better still, he should describe these in terms that appear to be quite general and independent of the social structure that he is discussing ('power drive', 'fear of irrelevance9, etc). Where he considers policies that failed, he should attribute them to stupidity and ignorance, that is, to factors that are socially neutral. Or, he may attribute the failure to noble impulses that led policy-makers astray ('tragic irony'), or to the venality, ingratitude and barbarism of subject peoples. He can then be fairly confident that he will escape the criticism that his efforts at explanation are 'simplistic5 (the truth is often surprisingly simple). He will, in short, benefit from a natural tendency on the part of the privileged in any society to suppress— for themselves as well as others—knowledge and understanding of the nature of their privilege and its manifestations. 1 This is the approximate text of a talk delivered at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi on November 14, 1972. It is a counterpart to a talk delivered the day before, entitled "Science and ideology'*, as the Nehru Memorial lecture, published by the Nehru Memorial Fund. Parts of both appear also in a forthcoming book. For Reasons of State, Pantheon Books, 1973.