Drawing on archival records, interviews, and an original database of the educational and career backgrounds of policy experts, this paper develops both an objectivist topography and a constructivist phenomenology of the growing space of American think tanks. Adapting Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of field, I argue that think tanks make up an emergent, constitutively hybrid “proto-field” that traverses, links, and overlaps the divergent worlds of academics, politics, business, and journalism. Think tank-affiliated experts understand their distinctive social role in terms that mirror their intermediate structural location, through the competing idioms of the academic scholar, the policymaker, the business entrepreneur, and the journalist. The study of think tanks destabilizes the category “intellectuals” and thereby challenges the common notion that they are a negligible presence in American politics. Instead, it points to the existence of a highly developed, differentiated, and dynamic – but heteronomous – field of intellectual production
