Emigre Scholars And The Genesis Of International Relations

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Although International Relations is a relatively young discipline, there is an increasing interest in its own intellectual and academic development. The growing discomfort with positivistic science and the increasing complexity of multipolar world politics have led to a reconsideration of classical scholars in International Relations.

This volume explores the intellectual development of International Relations as a discipline, analysing the influence of European emigre scholars on the foundation of American International Relations. Contextualising the thought of scholars including Hans J. Morgenthau, Waldemar Gurian, Hans Kelsen, Carl Joachim Friedrich, Franz L.

Neumann, and John H. Herz, the international contributors to this volume consider the emigration, personal experiences, and intellectual backgrounds of these founding thinkers, who have so far received little attention in Anglophone International Relations. The collection argues that European emigre scholars were of significance for the establishment of the discipline, even though the different ontological and epistemological traditions in Continental Europe and the United States led to their academic marginalization.

This volume makes a unique contribution to the history and sociology of political science and International Relations and provides the first coherent discussion of the influence of European emigre scholars as well as their thinking on the crisis of modernity, and in doing so offers important insights into current political theorizing and policy-making.

Review: We may wonder why, exactly, it has taken so long for the field of International Relations to not only notice but to properly and comprehensively analyze the overwhelming influence of emigre scholars upon the evolution of IR as a discipline. Yet even if you are not a big believer in fate, you will come away from this fascinating, historically-rich, and theoretically sophisticated volume inspired that the first-ever 'take' on this topic is one that does justice to the European impact on the 'American' field of International Relations.

This volume traces, contextualizes, and then situates into the present day these connections in lively detail. Roesch has gathered together a forceful set of contributions, and contributors, for this volume that complement one another perfectly in sequence, content, and argument. Scholars interested in the history, and historiography, of the IR 'discipline' in their research and in their courses now have a transformative and imperative work at-the-ready that reorients our understanding of no less than the entire history of the development of the 'American' IR field.

Chapters in this volume delineate the influences that continue to shape our understanding of International Relations today from the conventional to critical, from mainstream to the dissident. Emigre Scholars breaks through the 'silence' on this topic not merely with an additional voice on the history of IR, but with a sonic boom. - Brent J.

Steele, University of Utah, USA