| Democracy in exile: Hans Speier and the rise of the defense intellectual D Bessner Cornell University Press, 2018 | 73 | 2018 |
| How realism Waltzed Off: liberalism and decisionmaking in Kenneth Waltz's neorealism D Bessner, N Guilhot International Security 40 (2), 87-118, 2015 | 57 | 2015 |
| Nazism, neoliberalism, and the Trumpist challenge to democracy D Bessner, M Sparke Environment and Planning A 49 (6), 1214-1223, 2017 | 38 | 2017 |
| Karl Heinzen and the intellectual origins of modern terror D Bessner, M Stauch Terrorism and Political Violence 22 (2), 143-176, 2010 | 31 | 2010 |
| Organizing complexity: the hopeful dreams and harsh realities of interdisciplinary collaboration at the rand corporation in the early cold war D Bessner Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 51 (1), 31-53, 2015 | 30 | 2015 |
| The decisionist imagination: Sovereignty, social science and democracy in the 20th century D Bessner, N Guilhot Berghahn Books, 2018 | 26 | 2018 |
| Recentering the United States in the historiography of American foreign relations D Bessner, F Logevall Rethinking US World Power: Domestic Histories of US Foreign Relations, 15-47, 2024 | 25 | 2024 |
| Weimar social science in cold war America: the case of the political-military game D Bessner More Atlantic Crossings?: European Voices and the Postwar Atlantic Community …, 2014 | 25 | 2014 |
| Don’t let his trade policy fool you: Trump is a neoliberal D Bessner, M Sparke The Washington Post, 2017 | 23 | 2017 |
| Murray Rothbard, political strategy, and the making of modern libertarianism D Bessner Intellectual History Review 24 (4), 441-456, 2014 | 19 | 2014 |
| Reaction, resilience, and the Trumpist behemoth: Environmental risk management from “hoax” to technique of domination M Sparke, D Bessner Environmental Governance in a Populist/Authoritarian Era, 233-244, 2020 | 18 | 2020 |
| The Weimar Analogy D Bessner, U Greenberg Jacobin, 2016 | 17 | 2016 |
| Toward a theory of civil–military punishment D Bessner, E Lorber Armed Forces & Society 38 (4), 649-668, 2012 | 14 | 2012 |
| “Rather more than one-third had no Jewish blood”: American progressivism and German-Jewish cosmopolitanism at the New School for Social Research, 1933–1939 D Bessner Religions 3 (1), 99-129, 2012 | 14 | 2012 |
| The Night Watchman: Hans Speier and the Making of the American National Security State D Bessner | 10 | 2013 |
| How the QAnon cult stormed the capitol D Bessner, AAL Frost Jacobin, January 19, 2021, 2021 | 8 | 2021 |
| House of Cards: Can the American University Be Saved? D Bessner The Nation 8, 2020 | 7 | 2020 |
| How having reasons became making a decision: the Cold War rise of decision theory and the invention of rational choice P Mirowski The Decisionist Imagination, 135-72, 2019 | 6 | 2019 |
| A moral stain on the profession D Bessner, M Brenes Chronicle of Higher Education 26, 2019 | 5 | 2019 |
| The ghosts of Weimar: the Weimar analogy in American thought D Bessner social research 84 (4), 831-855, 2017 | 5 | 2017 |
