International Relations

http://ire.sagepub.com The Virtue of Adversity

Kenneth N. Waltz International Relations 2009; 23; 498 DOI: 10.1177/0047117809340488 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ire.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/23/3/498

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The Virtue of Adversity

Kenneth N. Waltz

Abstract
This article is a personal account of how the author came to write his two best-known books, Man, the State, and War and Theory of International Politics. He explains the context of his early career, his army service, and some key academic inuences. The article then discusses the origins of his two other major works, on foreign policy and democratic politics and on the implications of the spread of nuclear weapons. In commenting on the course of his long writing and teaching career, Professor Waltz highlights the critical importance and inuence of his wife, Helen Waltz. Keywords: foreign policy, international relations theory, Man, the State, and War, nuclear weapons, philosophy of science, theory, Theory of International Politics, Helen Waltz, Kenneth N. Waltz

Ken Booth, formerly E. H. Carr Professor in the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth University, convened a conference to celebrate the anniversaries of two of my books, Man, the State and War, published in 1959, and Theory of International Politics, published in 1979, and to discuss drafts of the papers for this special issue. I found the conference one of the liveliest and most interesting in a long life of conference-going. The conference was a tribute to Ken as well as to me, and I am sure others agree. I have sampled the papers written for the conference and found them excellent. Because I have not read all of them, however, it would be unfair to comment on any of them. Since the conference was about my books, it may be appropriate to say how I came to write them. It all began with my doctoral dissertation. In 1949 and 1950, a series of good and bad events impinged on my life: my wife became pregnant; I was called from the inactive army reserve to serve in Korea; and I took the two-hour oral examination, prerequisite to writing a doctoral dissertation at Columbia University. In preparing for the exam, I hoped to slight one of my two elds international politics and work hard on the other political theory. To that end, I arranged with Professor Nathaniel Peffer to concentrate on imperialism and diplomacy and leave aside such matters as international law and organization. Then the axe fell. Professor Peffer, suffering illness, withdrew from the examination committees of all students minoring in his eld. The alternative was W. T. R. Fox, recently arrived from Yale and referred to by all graduate students as Superpower Fox. (His recently published book had introduced the term to the world.) When I informed him of the arrangement Professor Peffer and I had made, he said he had never heard of any such thing. The all-knowing
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departmental secretary conrmed the arrangement. The examination was only three weeks off, and I expected to spend the time reviewing theory. Rumor had it that two-thirds of all candidates unked; the truth was probably nearer to three-fths. I explained to Professor Fox that I could not postpone the examination until the fall, because by then I would be back in the army. He was unmoved, saying that I had to cover all of international relations and not parts of it. To postpone the examination would mean waiting until I got out of the army. Who could know when that might be? My wife and I decided to go ahead with the examination. We scurried around libraries gathering works that touched on power. Then we tried to make sense of them. Three weeks of frantic reading left me perplexed. Authors seemed to be talking past one another. Why should that be? I began to realize that authors were starting from different assumptions about cause. Some found the cause of international political outcomes in human nature, some found them within states, and still others found them in the international system. I jotted the notion down on a piece of yellow paper, which I may one day nd, and I used it to organize my reading. It worked. I passed both parts of the exam handily. Heaving a big sigh of relief, my wife (ne Helen E. Lindsley but known to her friends as Huddie) and I used her familys car for a tour around Connecticut. En route we discussed my little idea. We decided it might serve as the basis of a dissertation. Four months at Fort Lee was a prerequisite of my Korean War adventure. While living in Petersburg, Virginia, we worked up a long and absurdly detailed dissertation prospectus and sent it to Professor Fox. While staying with Huddies family on the way to Korea, I went to see Professor Fox. His verdict was that the prospectus could serve as the basis for a course I might someday teach. Meanwhile, I should go back and boil it down to a few pages. I did so and sent it to him for approval by the departments tenured members. Weeks later, his letter found me in Korea. I well remember its words: Nobody understands what you propose to do. Everybody agrees you should go ahead and do it. My dissertation would have taken longer and been less good without Huddies help. Gamely, she did the reading for the behavioral science chapter and sent detailed notes to me on books and articles. The notes reached me in Pusan, South Korea, often with the plaintive questions: Havent I read enough of this stuff? Cant I stop now? Having spent so much time with the manuscript, she began to think that, as she put it, Everybody knows all this stuff. If you write a book about it, nobody will buy it. She was usually right, but not always. I began teaching in the spring of 1950 in response to a call from John D. Lewis, head of Oberlins department of government. He persuaded me to ll in for a suddenly departed member of the faculty. If you can be here in four days, he said, you will miss only your rst class. I was to teach American government, international law and organization, and a joint seminar with Professor Lewis on European reconstruction. I had taken one semester of American government, taught by John Lewis, and no courses in international law and organization, but John was persuasive and Huddie supportive.

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The rst weeks were hectic. Huddie wrote the syllabus for American government, and I put something together for international law and organization. For much of the semester, we were just one step ahead of the class. In the rst meeting of international law and organization, one person in the room was a fellow I remembered from our freshman year. I assumed he had dropped in to say hello and talk about the old days after class. No, he said, Im taking your course. I am sure it was not the best one he ever had. At the end of that semester, we spent three months in Europe, a trip lobbied for and brilliantly planned by Huddie. (I thought I should be working on my dissertation, but Im awfully glad she won.) We got by with cheap chartered ights and an average expenditure of $7 a day in Western Europe, England, and Scotland. The next round of teaching came when I was writing my dissertation: rst a one-year course in international politics in 1953 and 1954, with contemporary civilization added in 1955. When I returned to Columbia in October of 1952, Professor Fox offered me a research assistantship in the Institute of War and Peace Studies. I was to spend half time editing a manuscript written by Alfred Vagts, and half time writing my dissertation. I nished the dissertation in the late spring of 1954, and the Vagts manuscript in the late summer of that year. The latter was published by Kings Crown as Defense and Diplomacy: The Soldier and the Conduct of Foreign Diplomacy in 1956. Man, the State, and War, the book that emerged from my dissertation, was published by Columbia University Press in 1959. The Rockefeller Foundation, through Columbia, was willing to nance my next book project. I sent a proposal to Professor Fox, this time suggesting a book comparing the politics of foreign policy making in the UK and America. The proposal was better than my preparation for implementing it. I had never studied comparative politics, nor, I began to realize, had I ever studied politics at all, certainly not when studying mathematics at Oberlin and the University of Michigan; certainly not when working on economics at Oberlin, American University, and Columbia; certainly not when deciding to drop economics and spend a semester auditing courses in literature at Columbia; certainly not when concentrating on political theory and international relations. Yet there are some advantages in undertaking a project with a clear (and empty) head. In June of 1959, Huddie, I, and the kids, ew to London with no academic afliation and no place to stay other than a bed and breakfast establishment. The beds were not comfortable and the breakfasts were not good. We needed a better place. My wife found one. She also found a school, the House on the Hill, founded by Anna Freud, that would take our three boys (from one-and-a-half to almost eight years old) for the summer. Meanwhile I looked for a at. I found one with six rooms and one-and-a-half-baths on Abbey Road, about a block from the Beatles recording studio. Our younger boys were able to stay at the House on the Hill. The eldest enrolled in what was said to be one of the best County Council schools in London, the nearby George Eliot School on Finchley Road. Then I got to work. I read a lot, especially on party politics and British government. I hung out at the research departments of the Conservative and Labour parties.

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I interviewed many MPs and former ministers. At the outset I believed, along with most students of British and American politics, that their system was better than ours. I soon began to wonder. If better, then why was the British record in foreign and domestic policy dismal through the two decades between the wars? And how could the Tories win elections running on such slogans as Give us a doctors mandate and Dont rock the boat? The doctor hadnt been able even to alleviate the pains of a sick economy or to fashion even a mediocre foreign policy. The boat was slowly sinking. Britains political performance was worse than that of the United States. How could one reconcile the miserable performance of the parliamentary system with the high regard in which it was held? Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics: The British and American Experience (published in 1967) tried to answer the question. Some people, Huddie among them, liked the book a lot, but it went through only three printings before Little, Brown dropped it. (Berkeleys Institute of Governmental Studies reissued it in 1992.) Before publication, it acquired two more sponsors the Institute of War and Peace Studies again and Harvards Center for International Affairs, where I spent a lively year from 1963 to 1964 at the invitation of Thomas C. Schelling. Theory of International Politics was my next book, initially published by AddisonWesley and now under the auspices of McGraw-Hill. As usual, the book came slowly. The National Science Foundation, realizing that theory and science are interwoven, provided the initial nancing. Later others joined in. I was able to spend an academic year in the philosophy department at the London School of Economics a department devoted to the philosophy of science. One might think that philosophers of science would begin by asking what theories are and how one makes them. Instead they skip quickly to guring out how theories can be tested. I decided to start at the beginning. My denition of theory, Im told, coincides with denitions now widely accepted by people who think about such matters. Having to plough hard ground to plant fragile seeds and harvest the crop took even more time than I had spent on earlier books. Shortly after I sent the manuscript for Theory of International Politics to the publisher, John Kerry King of the Central Intelligence Agency called. He asked me along with others to write a paper for a conference on nuclear weapons. I had written a few words here and there about nuclear questions, but I had never thought long and hard about their implications. I accepted the invitation. The more I thought about nuclear questions, the more optimistic my answers became. Nuclear weapons, I began to believe, are the best peace-keeping weapons the world has ever known. In fact they are the only ones that have served the maintenance of peace rather than the making of war. We are in the midst of the longest peace among major powers that the modern world has known. We should count our nuclear blessings. My musings on nuclear weaponry are recorded in the paper I wrote for the conference. With some revisions, it was published as Adelphi Paper 171 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies), with the title The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better, and in my portion of the book I co-authored with Scott Sagan, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate (W. W. Norton, 1995). The second edition of the book (2003) adds thoughts about Indian and Pakistani weaponry,

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and the third will encompass Iran and consider the likelihood of Iran and perhaps others joining the still-exclusive nuclear club. My books are few in number, but I have long said that we dont need more books, we need better ones. I have tried. Along the way I did write a number of essays. Many of them are gathered in Realism and International Politics (Routledge, 2008). Most of those in our line of work are teacherscholars. I weigh each term equally. I have said many times that I will continue teaching as long as I enjoy it. I still do, but I am now more often reminded that although the mind may be willing, at 85 the body begins to wilt. Over a long career, my wife and I became especially fond of two universities, Columbia and the LSE, and of two cities, New York and London. For 27 years we enjoyed Berkeley, but our hearts were always elsewhere. In 1997 we returned to Columbia and never regretted the move. Ill end by thanking Ken Booth again for putting a nice punctuation mark near the end of my long career, Eurwen Booth for unfailing hospitality, and the wonderful faculty and students who graced and enlivened the Aberystwyth conference.

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