From international law to international relations

émigré scholars in American political science and international relations

Alfons Söllner

pp. 197-211

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

Abstract

Scholarly interest in the flight into exile of intellectuals after 1933 has only recently transformed into a more systematic engagement. While most of the early contributions focused either on single biographical elaborations or on academic schools of thought (Jay 1976; Young-Bruehl 1982; Coser 1984), contemporary scholarship aims to provide a more comprehensive picture by examining the influence of German émigré scholars on entire disciplines and cultures. This change in perspective differs from "exile studies' — negative concepts like displacement or the fate of the exile no longer guide our research (Möller 1984; Jay 1985; Heilbut 1997); instead, positive concepts such as knowledge transfer and acculturation are increasingly being employed (Krohn 1993; Strauss 1999). In this chapter, I aim to apply these concepts — knowledge transfer and acculturation — to a small cluster of émigré scholars who impacted on the intellectual and institutional development of political science and International Relations in the United States.