An IR Textbook in the Interwar Period: Reflections on the Contents of a Quincy Wright “Time Capsule”

Abstract

Abstract A recently opened “time capsule” from the 1930’s reveals how the marketing of a prominent textbook on International Relations (IR) was done then and how one opinion-leading scholar responded to that textbook’s marketing, but especially, to its overall approach. The textbook was Simonds and Emeny’s The Great Powers in World Politics (1935), putatively the “most widely sold book in its field.” The scholar was Quincy Wright, one of IR’s founders and most distinguished interwar figures. This essay shares the time capsule’s background, then assesses its fascinating contents, focusing particularly on Professor Wright’s scholarly response, which until now has remained undocumented. In the interwar period, higher education was a much smaller domain than it is today, and the IR field was in its nascency. Even so, IR textbooks were being written and their publishers were already manifesting aggressive and sophisticated advocacy. In that environment, Quincy Wright proved an engaged but critical audience, having by then developed quite robust views on his subject and how it should be studied. A review of this textbook episode offers compelling vignettes of both interwar IR’s milieu and one of its most intriguing personalities. More specifically, an examination of this incident underscores the importance of a discipline’s textbooks, enriches our understanding of Quincy Wright as intellectual, scholar, and teacher, and powerfully reminds us that the questions with which Wright and the IR discipline engaged almost a century ago remain salient and their answers highly contested. Moreover, revisionist accounts of Quincy Wright’s scholarship and IR’s early stages find strong support.