Sprout, Harold (1901–1980)

Harold Sprout was a pioneer in the development and promotion of the systematic and rigorous study of international politics. He received a BA in political science from Oberlin College in 1924 and a PhD in political science and law from the University of Wisconsin in 1929. In 1931, he accepted an assistant professorship at Princeton University and remained there until his retirement in 1969. His writings, most of which were coauthored with his wife, Margaret Sprout, focused on naval power, geography, environmental problems, and capability analysis in international politics. During World War II, the Sprouts developed a set of readings for use in officer training programs that came to be used in many American university courses in international relations. These readings were published in 1945 in Foundations of National Power.

In 1956 the Sprouts circulated a working paper titled “Man-Milieu Relationship Hypotheses in the Context of International Politics,” which rejected their earlier approach to capability analysis. Whereas earlier approaches, including their own, had emphasized foundations or elements of national power, such as geography, population, weapons, and the economy, the Sprouts now argued that these elements of national power had no political significance whatever unless they were set in the context of a framework of assumptions specifying who is trying to get whom to do what under what conditions. They called this set of assumptions a policy-contingency framework. Almost all previous theorizing about international politics, the Sprouts argued, was based on implicit or explicit assumptions that specified the ability to win conventional wars as the ultimate measuring rod for a nation's power. The Sprouts contended that the development of nuclear weapons, the continuing rapid rate of technological change, and the increasing importance of nonmilitary variables called into question the classical realist assumptions based on military force. A revised version of this essay was published in 1965, titled The Ecological Perspective on Human Affairs, With Special Reference to International Politics.

In the 1970s the Sprouts continued their work on environmental problems and were forerunners of the environmental movement. In 1971, they published a widely used textbook titled Toward a Politics of the Planet Earth, which brought together their revised approach to statecraft and capability analysis and their longstanding concerns about the earth and its environment.