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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.923
EAN num: 9780321013491
ISBN number: 0321013492
Label: Longman
Manufacturer: Longman
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 440
Printing Date: January 29, 1999
Publishing house: Longman
Sale Popularity Level: 10779
Studio: Longman
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One of the most influential political science works written in the post World War II era, the original edition of Essence of Decision is a unique and fascinating examination of the pivotal event of the Cold War. Not simply revised, but completely re-written, the Second Edition of this classic text is a fresh reinterpretation of the theories and events surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis, incorporating all new information from the Kennedy tapes and recently de-classified Soviet files. The Second Edition refines the arguments presented in the original book in light of Graham Allison's experience as the Assistant Secretary of Defense and the founding Dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. The Second Edition also features a new co-author, Philip Zelikow, author of the best-selling and critically-acclaimed The Kennedy Tapes, which was published by Harvard University Press in 1997. Essence of Decision, Second Edition, is a vivid look at decision-making under pressure and is the only single volume work that attempts to answer the enduring question: how should citizens understand the actions of their government?
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Rated by buyers -
Delivered early. Great condition. Good delivery info provided. I'll do it again.
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This is a political-sciency version of the closest we came to a nuclear war, in effect using the crisis to introduce the reader to a methodology on how people make decisions. The authors see three ways that things get decided, and when observers confuse them, dire consequences may follow. First, there is the rational-actor who does things for explicit reasons, as if there were one decisionmaker who controls everything from conception to implementation. Second, there is the political decision, often made for purposes of manipulation rather than for stated goals and hance are harder to read. Third, there is bureaucratic decison-making, according to which actors on the ground carry out orders in the way that they are trained (i.e. by standard operating procedures, or SOPs).
Basically, in my reading, they argue that these modes were mixed in the Cuban Missile Crisis - the US thinking that there was a (rational actor) policy to militarise Cuba with nuclear weapons when in fact much of the provocatively appearing construction was due to SOPs of the military who installed the missiles. Thus, the US had less to fear, but its political reality made an over-reaction inevitable.
Now, these are very useful distinctions and the analysis is interesting. However, they do not make for very interesting reading or very good history. That makes this book a slog, which limits its appeal to academics rather than the general reader. I read this for a class - otherwise, I would never have gotten through it.
Recommended on balance, but go elsewhere if you are looking for a good story rather than a rather staid acadeimic analysis.
Rated by buyers -
Reading "Essence of Decision" resonates with Kurosawa, or maybe Stoppard. We have a central story - one of the great non-events in human history, the moment when the Soviet Union and the United States "came eyeball to eyeball" (as Dean Rusk is said to have said) before someone blinked. We hear it three times: one, from the standpoint of the "rational actor;" second from the internal logic of organizations; and third, from the perspective of politics where people more or less rub along together.
It's an event that bears retelling and, with qualification, the device works. The upshot is that we get some insight into the missile crisis. But not at all incidentally, we get some insight into the academic study of politics (I resist calling it "political science"), and a whiff of what it might have to offer for our better understanding of the world.
Aside from the Kurusowa effect, there is another structural innovation. We have, in a sense, two books interleaved, like Faulkner's "Wild Palms." The even-numbered chapters tell (and retell) the basic story. The odd-numbered chapters offer a framework of "theory."
I suppose you might read just the even-numbered chapters - indeed the authors themselves suggest as much, though rather half-heartedly. And indeed, the odd-numbered chapters can be heavy going. One cannot help recalling the old canard about the sociologist as a person who gets a government research grant to find the bordello subsequent door. You are tempted to say that their theory is what sophisticated people know anyway, and the clueless will probably never figure out.
But there is an answer to this dismissal. That is: most (or at least) a lot of history gets told from the standpoint of the "rational actor." A survey of the competing approaches makes it clear just what this approach leaves out. And if the polyphonic approach is so obviously superior to the single narrative line, then why have historians from Thucydides to Henry Kissinger been willing to do without it? One answer might be: for all their talents, they simply haven't learned the way to tell a story in any other way.
So on the whole, retelling works. But not, perhaps, as well as it might. Another reviewer has said that this isn't really a case to illustrate "organization" theory here because this is not a case that highlights organizations - rather, at least for the United States, the response to the Cuban missile crisis was the work of a small group of men, working together in close cooperation. There is some merit to this view: concededly, you do not get the clash of bull elephants that you might have got at another time when Defense makes war on State, and both work together to fend of Intelligence. But you get a taste of it: we find that the Joint Chiefs were most hospitable to an invasion; that State thought that maybe we could talk it through; and that John McCone from the CIA was the one person who most clearly anticipated the threat. Moreover, you see the "organization" problem in a somewhat different light, when you see how the President's orders were massaged or modified by the military (sometimes, even, within the military).
But perhaps in any event, I need not get too distracted by the framework. Along the way, there are any number of nuggets that stand pretty well on their own. I liked in particular, for instance, the discusion of the role of committee work. We tend to stick up our nose at any project done by committee. But, argue our authors, in World War II it was Churchill, high-handed as he was, who worked through committee-and virtually always followed the committee's advice. The "strong leader" who kept things close to his vest, was Hitler.
But more generally - I was already an adult at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, and I remember it well. Specifically, I remember how frightened were so many people in my surroundings. I wasn't that frightened; I figured that one way or another, we would rub along. In the end, of course, I was right - we did rub along. But I think in retrospect, it was I who was kidding myself and the Nervous Nellies who had the right attitude. We did rub along, but as Wellington said about the Battle of Waterloo, it was a near thing. I particularly like Robert Kennedy:
"The fourteen people [in the American inner circle] were very significant-bright, able, dedicated people, all of whom had the greatest affection for the U.S. ... If six of them had been President of the U.S., I think that the world might have been blown up."
[Final technical note: one or more of the other reviews appear to be discussing the very first edition of this book. The (current) seocnd edition is not a mere cosmetic update, but substantially a new book].
Rated by buyers 
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I'm currently doing a History course for the IB. A reasonable percentage of final grade orignates from my internal Assessment.
For this i need two realiable sources. This source proved itself to be very helpful and explanatory for it is written in a manner that the reader wants to always know more. The book explains why the Soviet put Nuclear Missiles in Cuba how the Jupiter Missiles influenced this and at the end, it shows how the Americans were able to make the Soviets withdraw their missiles form Cuba.
An execellent book. I recommend!
Rated by buyers -
A great number of books and articles has been published attempting to explore and explain the Cuban missile crisis that had brought the world to the brink of a thermonuclear world war. Allison and Zelikow, in Essence of Decision, explain the Cuban missile crisis through three different lenses, that is, The Rational Actor Paradigm, Organizational Behavior Paradigm and Governmental Politics Paradigm, each of which is based on a different set of assumptions, each of which has a distinct bundle of organizing concepts and, each of which brings different general/specific propositions for the issue under question. Allison and Zelikow investigate the Cuban missile crisis through the lenses of three models in turn by asking three simple questions:
1. Why did the Soviet Union decide to place offensive missiles in Cuba?
2. Why did the United States respond to the missile deployment with a blockade?
3. Why did the Soviet Union withdraw the missiles?
The analyst looking to Cuban missile crisis through the lens of "rational actor model" conceives of governmental action as a "choice" made by a unitary and rational nation or national government. In this model, national government is treated as if it is an "individual" identifying problem, producing solution alternatives and picking one of those alternatives up whose result would satisfy the expected utility function of the nation best based on the "purpose" of the nation. The rational actor model analyst generates hypotheses, for example, about why the Soviet Union decided to send nuclear missiles to Cuba: to defend Cuba, rectify the nuclear strategic balance, or provide an advantage in the confrontation over Berlin? The virtue of the model comes from its power of explanation especially in case it is able to expose the "purpose" of the nation/state. So all the puzzling pieces of the relevant issue under question are to be tied into a coherent and satisfactory story.
The rational actor model falls short of fully understanding of the issue under question in that it does not take account of other equally important considerations. Admittedly, the rational actor model neglects the organizational processes and capabilities that structure the issue or problem under question, and, limit or extend the policy alternatives available to "rational" policy actors. In final instant, it is manifest that policy executives have to decide policy alternative from the "menu" that current organizational technologies and capabilities write. In organizational behavior model, the analyst investigates, for example, the standard operating procedures (SOP) of government organizations in order to understand which policy alternatives are available to political actors and which one is chosen and why. So, the organizational behavior paradigm closes the gaps of the rational actor paradigm.
Finally, the governmental politics model conceives of governmental policy under question not as a rational actor choice or organizational output but as a "resultant" of bargaining along regular circuits among players positioned hierarchically within the government. In this model, the political actors and their intentions, positions and interests, their relative power, the action channels through which the political actors input and exert their influence, decision rules and similar matters stand to the fore in analysis.
The three models, according to Allison and Zelikow, are complementary to each other. "Model I fixes the broader context, the larger national patterns, and the shared images. Within this context, Model II illuminates the organizational routines that produce the information, options, and action. Model III focuses in greater detail on the individuals who constitute a government and the politics and procedures by which their competing perceptions and preferences are combined" (p. 392). Rather than giving different answers to the same question, each of the three models illuminates one corner of the issue and contributes to our understanding. By integrating the factors identified under each lens, the authors argue, explanations can be significantly strengthened.
The final chapter of the book in which the authors hypothetically demonstrate how the interaction of the factors identified under each lens can lead to a nuclear war should be perused by those who firmly believe that after the collapse of the Soviet Union there no longer exists the precipice of a nuclear slaughter.
Though I believe this book is a must-read for everybody (not necessary to mention all the fields), I recommend this masterpiece especially to students of strategic management who have read Strategy Safari by Mintzberg et al. (1998) for which I believe Essence of Decision will be an excellent field book and to students who have read Case Study Research by Robert Yin for which I think Essence of Decision will be a perfect workbook.
Overall, this ... Read More
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