Quincy Wright: an appreciation

Abstract

Quincy Wright had a lifelong interest and professional concern in the problem of controlling war, but his unique approach was clearly shaped by his family's scholarly pursuits. His great-grandfather, a mathematician, set up the first actuarial tables in the United States. His father, Philip G. Wright, was an economist with the US Tariff Commission. Quincy's older brother, Sewall, is an internationally known mathematical geneticist and his younger brother, Theodore P., was an internationally renowned aeronautical engineer. Thus all of his immediate family on the male side were scientists, applying mathematical techniques in their fields. Quincy in his way began to look for mathematical applications to the study of war. Karl Deutsch points out in the preface to the second edition of A Study of War (1965) that Wright was one of the first scholars to make use of quantitative data in research on war, adding, If he were writing A Study of War today, he would probably abbreviate some of the historical and legal arguments and integrate his behavioral and quantitative data into his main text rather than segregate them. . However, as a former student of Quincy Wright, I believe that this would vitiate his contribution. While Quincy can be regarded as the founder of modern peace research, which relies heavily on mathematical or quantitative methods of analysis, there still reposes in his work a strong and wide core of immutable legal and historical knowledge which is not only descriptive but also analytical in the traditional sense. He was, like most of the scholars of his generation, originally trained as a legalist. His academic mentor, James W. Garner of the University of Illinois, was in his day one of the most distinguished scholars in international law, especially the law of war, prize law, etc. Quincy's first important scholarly study was on the relationship of international law to domestic law, particularly its enforcement in the courts. But even before he took up the study of international law, Quincy was very much concerned with the problem of war. A childhood classmate of his once recounted to me Quincy's delivering a high school oration on peace and war about the time of the Second Hague Conference of 1907. Undoubtedly that era of concern over establishing some sort of system to control war had an enormous impact on his formative period. In his international law phase, Quincy's scholarly output was prodigious. It moved into high gear by the time he was thirty, which coincided with the first year of the League of Nations. In the twenties, he began to travel abroad and visit Geneva, The Hague, the Middle East, and the Far East. It was these observations on the scene that probably prompted him to combine his legalistic approach with some of the historical and cultural aspects of current international problems. This period culminated in his impressive and massive scholarly work, Mandates Under the League of Nations. Beginning in the middle twenties his articles