"Foreign policy in the making"

Carl J. Friedrich's realism in the shadow of Weimar politics

Paul Petzschmann

pp. 154-175

in: Felix Rosch (ed), Émigré scholars and the genesis of international relations, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014

Abstract

European émigrés played an important role in the history of International Relations during the 1930s and beyond. The German origins of the "American discipline" have been well documented, particularly in the case of Hans Morgenthau (Frei 2001; Scheuerman 2009). Such recontextualisations have challenged traditional interpretations, yet have focused largely on international law. Consequently, the contributions of political scientists and scholars of public administration to the study of international politics have been somewhat neglected. In this chapter, I will explore the work of the political scientist Carl Joachim Friedrich, better known for his theory of totalitarianism, developed in the 1950s (Friedrich and Brzezinski 1956). By that time Friedrich had already enjoyed a long and distinguished academic career in the United States, devoting himself to a wide variety of issues ranging from the translation of the medieval Calvinist philosopher Johannes Althusius to the study of the Swiss civil service (Althusius 1932; Friedrich and Cole 1932).

Cited authors

Friedrich Carl-Joachim

Morgenthau Hans