David M. McCourt - 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 Pennsylvanias Robert Strausz-Hup, Yales Arnold Wolfers, the Rockefeller Foundations Kenneth Thompson, government advisor Dorothy Fosdick, and nuclear strategist William Kaufmann. They spent seven meetings assessing approaches to world politicsfrom the realist theory of Hans Morgenthau to theories of imperialism of Karl Marx and V. I. Leninto discern basic elements of a theory of international relations.

The study groups materials are an indispensable window to the development 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 fields 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 195354, the CFR study group represents a vital snapshot of this shift.

This book situates the CFR study group in its historical and historiographical 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 discussions from the seven study group meetings. American Power and International Theory at the Council on Foreign Relations, 195354 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 CaliforniaDavis.

Edited by David M. McCourt

University of Michigan Press

Ann Arbor

Copyright 2020 by David M. McCourt

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Published in the United States of America by the

University of Michigan Press

Manufactured in the United States of America

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 Librariesand the generous support of the University of California, Davis. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: openmonographs.org

Cover image courtesy Shutterstock.com

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

Good fortune pervades this volume, perhaps more than most. First, discovery 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 Relations (IR) and the Cold War social sciences. Scrolling through the superbly curated archive of the Council on Foreign Relationsfor which Daniel Linke and all the staff at the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library deserve praiseI was excited beyond reason to see the papers of a Study Group on the Theory of International Relations, 195354. 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. Encouragement and affirmation of the documents interest also came from a group of IR historians who took the time to read the papersand write their own assessmentsfor a roundtable at the 2017 meeting of the International Studies Association in San Francisco. My sincere thanks to Luke Ashworth, Emily Hauptmann, Adam Humphreys, Felix Rsch, Or Rosenboim, Brian Schmidt, Bob Vitalis, and Jon Western.

Colleagues and staff members here in the remarkably congenial Department of Sociology at the University of CaliforniaDavis 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 beyond the disciplines thankfully porous borders. My IR friendsJon Acuff, Page viii 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 Zarakolalways 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 appreciation 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 Michigan 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.

Over seven months between December 1953 and June 1954, the prestigious 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 international affairs. Some are still well-known to scholars of IR, like Yales Arnold 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-Hup, from the University of Pennsylvania, and Dorothy Fosdick, an early member of the Policy Planning Staff at the State Department before a long career as advisor to Democratic senator 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 perspective of Harold Lasswell. The groups aim was to discern the basic elements of a theory of international relations.