Karl W. Deutsch Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Karl Wolfgang Deutsch (1912–1992) was a social and political scientist, born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, who became a naturalized U.S. citizen. He earned degrees from the Deutsche Universität and Charles University in Prague and a doctorate from Harvard University in 1951. After teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale University, Deutsch returned in 1967 to Harvard, where he became Stanfield Professor of International Peace. He was elected president of the American Political Science Association in 1969, the International Political Science Association in 1976, and the Society for General Systems Research in 1983. Deutsch was a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the academies of sciences of Austria and Finland. He received honorary doctorates from seven universities in the United States, Germany, and Switzerland, and the Commanders Cross Order of Merit, with star, of the German Federal Republic.

Deutsch’s dedication to social science was linked to a moral passion for improvement in the world. His dissertation and first book, Nationalism and Social Communication, sought to explain the impact of the process of “social mobilization,” an expression that he coined, whereby people become uprooted from their traditions and become available for new patterns of communication and behavior. Deutsch analyzed literacy, mass media exposure, urbanization patterns, language usage, religious belief, and other indicators, preferring quantitative analysis. Social mobilization, he argued, was likely to accelerate the fragmentation of states whose peoples did not already share the same language, traditions, and basic social institutions, but it would increase the likelihood of political integration among peoples in states whose people did so share. Published in 1953, this research helps us understand the forces that contributed to the decomposition of the Soviet Union and the unification of Germany.

In The Political Community and the North Atlantic Area, Deutsch sought to specify the background conditions for the political integration of what he called “security communities” in the North Atlantic world through a series of conditional hypotheses, which he sought to test with empirical qualitative evidence. He introduced the concept of “security communities” to describe relations between states where war had become unthinkable notwithstanding a history of severe interstate conflict. From that concept, he derived empirical propositions to be tested on the historical experience of peoples on both sides of the North Atlantic, though especially to understand political integration in Europe. This analysis, in fact, pertains to international politics worldwide.

Deutsch’s Nerves of Government was a more theoretical work. In his own prospectus for this book, he noted that he based it on “the comparative study of many systems of communication and control, ranging from electronic computers to biological and nervous systems, and to human organizations and societies. ”The book aimed, he wrote, to reorient “political thought toward a greater interest in seeing government and politics as potential instruments of social learning, of social and economic development, and of intellectual and moral growth.” He was an early proponent of the use of quantitative methods in political science and also of the utility of making large-N data sets freely available to other students and scholars, whoever they were and wherever they worked, in order to foster replicability of research findings and launch new scholarly projects to advance the frontiers of social science knowledge.

Bibliography:

Deutsch, Karl Wolfgang. Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1953.
The Nerves of Government: Models of Political Communication and Control. London: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963.
Politics and Government: How People Decide Their Fate. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970.
Deutsch, Karl Wolfgang, Sidney A Burrell, and Robert A. Kann. Political Community and the North Atlantic Area: International Organization in the Light of Historical Experience. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957.
Deutsch, Karl Wolfgang, Lewis Edinger, Roy C. MacRidis, and Richard L. Merritt Deutsch. France, Germany, and the Western Alliance: A Study of Elite Attitudes on European Integration and World Politics. New York: Scribner, 1967.