Quincy Wright Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Philip Quincy Wright (1890–1970) was an American political scientist and a pacifist. He is well known for his role in the early development of quantitative and interdisciplinary studies on human conflict and international relations. In spite of his normative and legal foundations, he soon found himself affiliated to Chicago’s positivist behavior list approaches to research, crystallized through his monumental and far-reaching work A Study of War (1942). Wright was convinced that the scientific understanding of war was a prerequisite for its complete abolition from human life and focused his efforts on the development of such a program.

Wright was born in Medford, Massachusetts, in 1890, and grew up in a family that always fostered scientific creativity. In 1923 he joined the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago, where he remained for the whole of his academic career. While at the university, he cofounded the first international relations graduate program to be introduced in the United States (1928). He was instrumental in the establishment of the International Political Science Association, becoming its first president (1949–1952), and also served as president of the American Association of University Professors (1944–1946), the American Political Science Association (1948–1949), and the American Society of International Law (1955–1956).

Beyond his academic career, Wright was an advocate for U.S. participation in the League of Nations and was also an active member of the United Nations Association during the cold war. As a fervent opponent of fascism, he supported the Spanish Republic and acted as an adviser to Justice Robert H. Jackson during the Nuremberg trials. He also opposed U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War (1959–1975) from its early stages and openly challenged its legal, political, and moral basis, providing further grounds for the growing antiwar movement.

Wright’s A Study of War is a vast encyclopaedic effort that combines a large series of statistical data with an in-depth analysis based on such disciplines as anthropology, biology, economics, history, psychology, and geography. His explanatory theory for deadly conflicts is laid out through four levels of analysis: technological, legal/normative, sociopolitical, and biopsychocultural. Following Wright’s approach, deadly conflict is more likely to occur when the mechanisms that control human relations at any level, preserving a nonviolent equilibrium, are overloaded and fail to perform. Peace, defined as a state of “equilibrium among many forces,” must be intentionally organized, carefully maintained, and promptly restored if broken. Even thought it did receive criticism for inconsistencies regarding its technological determinism, most scholars agree that more than half a century later A Study of War is still a valuable resource and a model for interdisciplinary research.

Wright has been considered a forerunner of peace research, anticipating the health sciences model that identifies war and violence as a preventable disease. Other works by him, such as Mandates under the League of Nations (1930) and The Study of International Relations (1955), also had a wide readership and were frequently used as standard texts in university curricula. Wright was nominated by Czech political scientist Karl Deutsch and fourteen other colleagues for the Nobel Peace Price in 1970, the year of Wright’s death.

Bibliography:

Deutsch, Karl. “Quincy Wright’s Contribution to the Study of War.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 14, no. 4 (1970): 473–478.
Wright, Quincy. Mandates under the League of Nations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930.
The Study of International Relations. New York: Appleton-Century Crofts, 1955.
The Role of International Law in the Elimination of War. New York: Oceana, 1961.
A Study of War. 2 vols. Rev. ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965.

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