Quincy Wright's 'A Study of War'

In this paper, I draw on extensive archival materials to offer the first complete historical excavation of one of the founding texts of International Relations: Quincy Wright’s 1942 'A Study of War'. The book was the culmination of an intensive, interdisciplinary investigation into the ‘Causes of War’ launched at the University of Chicago in 1926. The idea was to synthesise sixteen years of research, conducted by dozens of scholars, within a general theoretical and methodological architecture. Wright offers us a magisterial precis of a lost approach to the study of conflict, eclipsed after WW2 by the outbreak of the behavioural revolution, and the degeneration of liberal internationalism. Methodologically, he is indebted to the philosophical pragmatism of John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, the civilizational histories of Herbert Spencer and Arnold Toynbee, and the work of Harold Lasswell, Charles Merriam, William Fielding Ogburn, and other social scientific colleagues at Chicago. Wright believed that there was no absolute ‘point of view’ from which to adduce the truth, that every social scientific statement referred to a contingent historical configuration that was liable to change, and that social theory does not stand apart from the world - closeted in seminars - but enters into and changes it. Analytically, Wright believed that humankind was undergoing an epochal transition to a cohesive world-system, propelled by the accelerating technological powers of production, communication and transport, and the cultural integration which it forged. The tumult of the interwar years reflected the ‘lag’ of political and legal systems behind the colossal revolutions wrought by a globalised technology and culture. A Study of War helped found several fields of research, including integration studies and the statistical study of conflict. Yet his successors extended his empirical insights while jettisoning his reflexive, methodological eclecticism. I contend that Wright offers us a glimpse of a proto-disciplinary moment that grants us critical purchase on post-war International Relations. It shows us a route that was not taken, and what we might have lost.