International Law, Émigrés, and the Foundation of International Relations

Abstract

It is increasingly accepted among historians of international political thought that the stylised stories of the emergence of International Relations as a discipline, stories usually centred on an epic first debate between idealists and realists in which the latter triumphed, are hopelessly inadequate and often entail considerable distortion of the ideas of the supposed protagonists. It is also increasingly accepted in the same circles that a more adequate account has to give a significant place to the impact of that great cultural migration constituted by the flight of European and especially German-speaking scholars from Nazi persecution. More specifically, it has to take into account the impact of German-speaking scholars trained in law who themselves became political scientists with a greater or lesser specialism in International Relations, most notably, but not only, Hans Morgenthau and John Herz. Constructing this account is a complex matter because it is inevitably a series of overlapping accounts. It is, at one level, an account of the trajectories of the lives of individual scholars, trajectories which varied widely and were often determined by the contingencies and capriciousness of exile (Epstein 1991: 116–135). Some of these trajectories would end in assimilation while others would not. It is an account of the emergence of a discipline or subdiscipline, in this case one whose identity was contentious and even in doubt in the eyes of some (Guilhot 2011).