Policing Intellectual Boundaries? Émigré Scholars, the Council on Foreign Relations Study Group on International Theory, and American International Relations in the 1950s

Abstract

During the 1950s, several intellectual endeavors on both sides of the Atlantic aimed to further theoretical principles of IR. One of these endeavors was the Council on Foreign Relations Study Group on International Theory that met between December 1953 and June 1954. It brought together scholars from across academic disciplines and professions, but particularly noteworthy is the involvement of émigré scholars. Tracing their contribution, this article takes a critical stance toward common historiographical accounts of the discipline in which émigrés’ involvement is characterized as a gambit to secure space for their alternative visions of scholarship in a hostile academic environment and that they had turned into critics of American liberal democracy due to their experiences with fascism in Europe. By contrast, this article calls for a reconsideration of the role of émigrés by arguing that their engagement in IR’s move to theorization was intended to help retain the discipline’s pluralism in an effort to bridge theory and practice. Getting involved in this interdisciplinary field constituted their attempt to sustain intellectual pluralism across American social sciences, as they believed that behavioralism could endanger American democracy by reducing the contingency, ephemerality, and relationality of human life to questions of social planning.