Wright, Quincy (1890—1970)

Quincy Wright was among the most productive and influential scholars of international relations, law, and war during his lifetime. The high regard he enjoyed is evidenced by his long-term tenure as editor of the American Journal of International Law and his election to the presidencies of the American Society of International Law, the American Political Science Association, and the International Political Science Association.

Wright received his undergraduate degree from Lombard College in Galesburg, Illinois, in 1912, and his MA in 1913 and PhD in 1915 from the University of Illinois. His professional career was most closely associated with the University of Chicago, where he was a faculty member from 1923 until his retirement in 1956. He continued as a faculty member at the University of Virginia while lecturing around the globe. The complete bibliography of his publications is over 70 typed, single-spaced pages in length.

The breadth and importance of Wright's contributions to international relations theory and practice, international law, and, most notably, to the study of the causes and prevention of war can only be highlighted, not comprehensively surveyed, in the brief compass of this entry. His major legacy is the works A Study of War and The Study of International Relations. A Study of War, a magisterial volume of over 1,500 pages, is remarkable. It is the first systematic survey and synthesis of the principal extant literature on the causes of war from primitive to modern societies. While A Study of War draws profoundly on the knowledge of the traditional academic disciplines, its principal objective is more practical: to end wars by understanding their causes. This led Wright to approach the problem of war from a fundamentally problem-solving and interdisciplinary perspective. Breaking with tradition, Wright conceptualized war as the converse of peace. If the causes and conditions under which war was prompted could be identified and empirically verified, then remedies could be devised and applied, much like a physician in treating a disease, to inhibit or preclude the eruption of war and limit its duration and destructiveness. It might be said that A Study of War opened the study of war to scientific analysis. By insisting on research protocols used in the physical sciences, Wright blazed the trail for the development of scientific measures, validated by quantitative evidence, to verify contesting propositions or conjectures about the causes of war. He is universally credited to be among the founders of peace science, which is now an established research and teaching discipline at major research universities around the globe.

Wright's The Study of International Relations is also important for its wide-lens conceptualization of the field. While his notion of field theory amounted primarily to an elaborate taxonomy of disciplinary knowledge and professional skills relevant to international relations rather than a theory, he demonstrated that solving the problem of war, or any social ill, has to be driven by the search for knowledge from all quarters rather than be limited to a single discipline or profession.

Wright's capacious understanding of human thought, behavior, and creativity was also a precursor of global studies today. Following Wright's lead, scholars working in this field resist being confined to prevailing disciplinary paradigms in their efforts to explain globalization as a phenomenon and as a problem confronting the world's populations. As William T. R. Fox, a student of Wright's and an internationally recognized international relations theorist, observed, Wright's scholarship was dedicated to making the world free of war. That could only be accomplished by accounting and controlling for the full scope of human [Page 723]action that was disposed either to war or to peace. In the widest sense, Wright “was prescribing for a world society as a whole.”

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