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This paper is an interpretation of how ideology influenced one research project, and of how we tried to achieve objectivity despite or by means of our ideological differences. The project involved about a dozen people working together for three to six years in research on bargaining in international crises. We tended to think of our ideological differences as differences of location on a radical-liberal-conservative or left-right dimension, vaguely defined. However, in retrospect a more relevant difference was in our attitudes toward the U.S. and the Soviet governments, the main crisis antagonists in our research. Our attitudes ranged from loyalty to hostility toward the U.S. government, and we had both defenders and critics of the United States involvement in Vietnam. Unfortunately we had no loyal defenders of the Soviet Union and Soviet foreign policy; our attitudes ranged from near neutrality to strong hostility. We consulted published works that ranged over the whole spectrum of attitudes toward both the U.S. and S.U., a broader spectrum than we ourselves could represent.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-1458-7_1

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