American Power and International Theory at the Council on Foreign Relations, 1953–54
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Revised Pages AMERICAN POWER AND INTERNATIONAL THEORY AT THE COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS, 1953– 54 Between December 1953 and June 1954, the elite think tank the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) joined prominent figures in International Relations, including Pennsylvania’s Robert Strausz- Hupé, Yale’s Arnold Wolfers, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Kenneth Thompson, government advisor Dorothy Fosdick, and nuclear strategist William Kaufmann. They spent seven meetings assessing approaches to world politics— from the “realist” theory of Hans Mor- genthau to theories of imperialism of Karl Marx and V. I. Lenin— to discern basic elements of a theory of international relations. The study group’s materials are an indispensable window to the develop- ment of IR theory and illuminate the seeds of the theory- practice nexus in Cold War US foreign policy. Historians of International Relations recently revised the standard narrative of the field’s origins, showing that IR witnessed a sharp turn to theoretical consideration of international politics beginning around 1950 and remained preoccupied with theory. Taking place in 1953– 54, the CFR study group represents a vital snapshot of this shift. This book situates the CFR study group in its historical and historiograph- ical contexts and offers a biographical analysis of the participants. The book includes seven preparatory papers on diverse theoretical approaches, penned by former Berkeley political scientist George A. Lipsky with the digest of dis- cussions from the seven study group meetings. American Power and Interna tional Theory at the Council on Foreign Relations, 1953–54 offers new insights into the early development of IR as well as the thinking of prominent elites in the early years of the Cold War. David M. McCourt is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California– Davis. Revised Pages Revised Pages American Power and International Theory at the Council on Foreign Relations, 1953– 54 Edited by David M. McCourt University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor Revised Pages Copyright © 2020 by David M. McCourt Some rights reserved This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Note to users: A Creative Commons license is only valid when it is applied by the person or entity that holds rights to the licensed work. Works may contain components (e.g., photographs, illustrations, or quotations) to which the rightsholder in the work cannot apply the license. It is ultimately your responsibility to independently evaluate the copyright status of any work or component part of a work you use, in light of your intended use. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Published in the United States of America by the University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid- free paper First published February 2020 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data has been applied for. ISBN 978- 0- 472- 13171- 6 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978- 0- 472- 12638- 5 (e- book) ISBN 978- 0- 472- 90122- 7 (open access e- book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11301034 This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)— a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries— and the generous support of the University of California, Davis. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: openmonographs.org Cover image courtesy Shutterstock.com Revised Pages Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction: The Council on Foreign Relations Study Group on the Theory of International Relations, 1953– 54 1 First Meeting: E. H. Carr and the Historical Approach 53 Second Meeting: Hans J. Morgenthau and the National Interest 80 Third Meeting: The Theory of Harold D. Lasswell 109 Fourth Meeting: Marxist Theory of Imperialism 140 Fifth Meeting: Political Geography vs. Geopolitics 169 Sixth Meeting: Wilsonian Idealism 208 Seventh Meeting: The Problem of Theory in the Study of International Relations 242 Notes 277 References 287 Index 295 Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11301034 Revised Pages Revised Pages Acknowledgments ood fortune pervades this volume, perhaps more than most. First, dis- Gcovery of the documents reproduced here was entirely by accident: I had traveled to Princeton in early 2014 to push forward a project on the role of think tanks in postwar US foreign policy, not the history of International Re- lations (IR) and the Cold War social sciences. Scrolling through the superbly curated archive of the Council on Foreign Relations— for which Daniel Linke and all the staff at the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library deserve praise—I was excited beyond reason to see the papers of a “Study Group on the Theory of International Relations, 1953– 54.” Working with the documents has been a labor of love since, a side project frequently taking me away from my main work on the institutional architecture of American hegemony. I could not have hoped for such a stimulating academic hobby. Second, the papers would likely have remained just a file on my laptop had it not been for the good fortune of encouragement from Inderjeet Parmar, my favorite scholar of said institutional architecture of American hegemony. Listening to me extol the virtues of the study group records, Inderjeet, against a good deal of hesitation on my part, urged that I seek publication. So too did my longtime friend Jack Gunnell over frequent coffees in Davis, which sadly ended after Jack packed up and headed back to the East Coast. Encour- agement and affirmation of the documents’ interest also came from a group of IR historians who took the time to read the papers—and write their own assessments— for a roundtable at the 2017 meeting of the International Stud- ies Association in San Francisco. My sincere thanks to Luke Ashworth, Emily Hauptmann, Adam Humphreys, Felix Rösch, Or Rosenboim, Brian Schmidt, Bob Vitalis, and Jon Western. Colleagues and staff members here in the remarkably congenial Depart- ment of Sociology at the University of California– Davis deserve a note of thanks for their support in all my endeavors. I hope the centrality to the study group of Columbia sociologist Robert MacIver and Dorothy Fosdick of Smith College will provide sufficient evidence that I have not strayed too far be- yond the discipline’s thankfully porous borders. My IR friends—Jon Acuff, Revised Pages viii Acknowledgments Jack Amoureux, Alex Barder, Dave Blagden, Harry Gould, Jarrod Hayes, Eric Heinze, Andy Hom, Daniel Levine, Mark Raymond, Brent Steele, Michael Struett, Jeremy Youde, and Ayse Zarakol— always deserve thanks. Third, I was fortunate that the Council on Foreign Relations gave me permission to seek a publisher for the study group records. My sincere appre- ciation goes to Alysse Jordan, director of library and research services at the Council, for all her efforts. Preparing the documents for publication would have likely been beyond me, fourth, had it not been for my good fortune in finding Annika Altura to transfer the documents from some poor quality photographs to high quality Word documents. Elizabeth Demers and everyone at the University of Michi- gan Press were, once again, a joy to work with. Finally, my good fortune to have such a supportive family should be noted. This book is for Stephanie, Leighton, and Julian. Revised Pages Introduction The Council on Foreign Relations Study Group on the Theory of International Relations, 1953– 54 ver seven months between December 1953 and June 1954, the presti- Ogious think tank the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) held a study group dedicated to the theory of international relations (IR). The group brought together select members of the CFR and prominent thinkers on in- ternational affairs. Some are still well-known to scholars of IR, like Yale’s Ar- nold Wolfers and Kenneth W. Thompson from the Rockefeller Foundation. Others have faded from prominence but were influential at the time, such as leading political scientist Robert Strausz-Hupé, from the University of Penn- sylvania, and Dorothy Fosdick, an early member of the Policy Planning Staff at the State Department before a long career as advisor to Democratic sena- tor Henry “Scoop” Jackson. Together, the experts collected at the CFR spent some thirty- five hours dissecting a variety of approaches to the study of world politics, from the new “realist” theory of Hans Morgenthau, to the theories of imperialism of Karl Marx and Joseph Schumpeter, to the psychological per- spective of Harold Lasswell. The group’s aim was to discern the basic elements of a theory of international relations. Hidden until now in the CFR archives at the Seeley G. Mudd Manu- script Library at Princeton University, this volume reproduces the digests of discussions from the study group. Also presented are seven papers that laid the groundwork for the group’s conversations. The author of the preparatory papers was George A. Lipsky, a former University of California–Berkeley po- litical scientist spending the academic year 1953–54 at the CFR as a Carnegie Fellow. Lipsky’s papers introduced the topic to be considered at each meeting, with the discussions ranging far beyond the thinker at hand to the nature of international relations itself, the possibilities and limits of theory, the place of values in theorizing international relations, and the role of the scholar in foreign policy making. Revised Pages 2 American Power and International Theory at the cfr, 1953– 54 In this introduction to the documents, I ask why should scholars care to remember a seemingly obscure Council on Foreign Relations study group almost seventy years later? The answer is that the materials of the CFR study group are an invaluable resource for historians of IR, students of US foreign policy during the early Cold War, and historians of social science.