Content area
Full Text
MORTON A. KAPLAN, Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, Senior Editor of International Journal on World Peace, publisher of the World & I magazine, President of Professors World Peace Academy, Chairman of the International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences, and author of many articles and books, passed away September 27, 2017. He was 96.
This tribute to his life and work is written by three people who knew and worked with him at different stages of his life: René Wadlow as his student at the University of Chicago in 1957, Gordon Anderson who worked with him 32 years as Secretary General of Professors World Peace Academy, and Inanna HamatiAtaya, who worked on summarizing his work with him the last decade of his life.
MORTON A. KAPLAN: DEVELOPING SYSTEM AND PROCESS IN INTERNATIONAL POLITICS
René Wadlow
Editor, Transnational Perspectives, and Member of the Editorial Board of International Journal on World Peace.
Morton A. Kaplan and I both came to the University of Chicago's Department of Political Science in 1956, Professor Kaplan as a professor and I as a graduate student. The department was a loose confederation of people "doing their own thing"-a combination of international relations, political philosophy, and empirical political science largely devoted to the analysis of US voting patterns.
The international relations teaching was largely in the shadow of Hans J. Morgenthau. Considered by the Nazi government as Jewish, he had left Germany for Geneva and as the war clouds gathered, then left Geneva for the USA.1 His book Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (1948) in the mid 1950s was replacing Frederick L. Schuman's International Politics as the leading college text book in international relations. Morgenthau had replaced Schuman who had left the University of Chicago for Williams College in the East.
Kaplan began his seminar on "System and Process" in the winter quarter of 1957, an effort to create a more scientific approach to international relations by developing models that would help readers to think methodically about different ways the international system might be organized.
Also in the department was Leo Strauss who, like Morgenthau, was formed in the German classic tradition and was very doubtful of "scientific approaches" within the department fearing that...