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Frederick Sherwood Dunn and the American Study of International Relations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

William T. R. Fox
William T. R. Fox
Affiliation:
Yale Institute of International Studies
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Extract

As a legal officer in the Department of State in the 1920's, Frederick S. Dunn developed a curiosity about the decision-making process of which he was a part. The dissatisfaction which he felt with prevailing explanations of state behavior, and particularly with single-factor explanations, was the spur to a lifetime of scholarly activity. His quest for greater knowledge relevant to the ordering and control of foreign affairs was to lead him successively to Johns Hopkins, Yale, and Princeton Universities and far afield from the methods and subjects of interest to his colleagues in international law; but there was a forty-year continuity of interest in a set of questions whose answers would lead to improved decision-making.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , October 1962 , pp. 1 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1962

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References

1 Frederick Sherwood Dunn (1893–1962) was born in New York City. He graduated from Princeton University in 1914 and took a law degree at New York University in 1917. He served in France in World War I in the A.E.F. as First Lieutenant in the Tank Corps. In the 1920's he was Assistant Solicitor in the Department of State. He was associate counsel in the American and British Claims Arbitration and attorney for the United States Agency in the Mixed Claims Commission, United States and Mexico. Professor Dunn took his Ph.D. degree at Johns Hopkins in 1928 and was from 1930 to 1935 executive secretary of the Walter Hines Page School of International Relations at Johns Hopkins and Creswell Lecturer in International Law at the same institution. In 1935 he became Professor of International Relations at Yale and from 1940 to 1951 was in addition Director of the Yale Institute of International Studies. Princeton University awarded him an L.L.D. degree honoris causa in 1949, and in 1951 invited him to return as Albert G. Milbank Professor of International Law and Practice and as Director of its new Center of International Studies. He retired in 1961 and during 1961–1962 taught a course in international relations at Bryn Mawr College.

2 See, for example, his Introduction to Peace-making and the Settlement with Japan, to be posthumously published by Princeton University Press in 1963, in which there is a self-contained essay on the dilemmas and perplexities of the decision-maker in foreign affairs (pp. xii–xviii).

3 The Practice and Procedure of International Conferences (Baltimore 1928); The Protection of Nationals (Baltimore 1932); and The Diplomatic Protection of Americans in Mexico (New York 1933). See also the journal articles cited below for the 1927–1930 period.

4 Protection of Nationals, 10.

5 “Mr. Welles Dissents,” Yale Review, XXXVI (Winter 1947), 343–44.

6 Cambridge, Mass., 1950.

7 Political Science Quarterly, LXVI (June 1951), 303.

8 Whitehead, A. N., The Function of Reason (1929)Google Scholar, quoted in Dunn, , Protection of Nationals, 4.Google Scholar

9 “The New International Status of the British Dominions,” Virginia Law Review, XIII (March 1927), 376–77.

10 This is the title of Chapter 6 of Protection of Nationals.

11 Ibid., 12–13.

12 Ibid., 28ff. Professor Dunn had earlier written that “… if we examine the cases in which the responsibility of states for injuries to aliens within their borders has been successfully invoked, we find that this minimum standard of justice is nothing more or less than the ideas which are conceived to be essential to a continuation of the existing social and economic order of European capitalistic civilization. … And so long as these states remain dominant in the international society, it is the fundamentals of their civilization which will determine the content of the standard of justice embodied in the international legal system.”—“International Law and Private Property Rights,” Columbia Law Review, XXVIII (February 1928), 175–76.

13 Protection of Nationals, 355–58.

14 Ibid., 85.

15 Ibid., Chapter 6.

16 Ibid., 24.

17 Peace-making and the Settlement with Japan, Introduction.

18 “International Law and Private Property Rights,” 175.

19 Ibid., 170.

20 Ibid., 170–71 (italics added).

21 “New International Status of the British Dominions,” 357.

22 “International Law and Private Property Rights,” 169–70.

23 Ibid., 178.

24 Ibid., 180.

25 Protection of Nationals, 187.

26 Diplomatic Protection of Americans in Mexico, 423.

27 “International Legislation,” Political Science Quarterly, XLII (December 1927), 576. In a similar vein, he quotes Brierly on the same page: “Law is still thinking in terms of rights; states are thinking of interests and demanding that they be protected” (British Yearbook of International Law, 1924, p. 16).

28 The catholicity of Mr. Dunn's interest in whatever social science would help him in answering his questions is illustrated by the precocious concern he showed in 1928, in his first book, for what would now be called “small-group sociology.” Thus, in discussing factors affecting the procedure of international conferences, he wrote: “… the mere matter of size is an important factor in determining the course of conference procedure. This is true whether the conference be one of diplomats or of dentists. It is common experience that where a large number of persons confer together for the purpose of reaching a common agreement, certain difficulties of procedure are encountered which are not present in small gatherings. There seems to be, in fact, a definite limit to the size of the group which can carry on an intelligent exchange of views without formal organization. This limit varies somewhat with the character and composition of the conference, but it exists for every deliberative body no matter how homogeneous.”—Practice and Procedure of International Conferences, 25.

29 Ibid., 10.

30 Ibid., 40.

31 “International Legislation,” 587.

32 The Yale University Graduate School Announcement of the Graduate Program in International Relations for 1962–1963 still lists “Methods and Instruments of Control” as one of the five fields of instruction.

33 Peaceful Change: A Study of International Procedures (New York 1937). This study was also printed as “U.S. Memorandum No. 3” for the Tenth International Studies Conference held in Paris in June and July of 1937. Professor Dunn was the rapporteur of the subcommittee on procedural methods of peaceful change of the Committee of Experts which planned the American studies for that conference. Other members of the subcommittee were John Foster Dulles (chairman), Hamilton Fish Armstrong, Philip C. Jessup, and Walter Lippmann. The book bears, however, the unmistakable stamp of the rapporteur.

34 Carr's Twenty Years' Crisis (London 1939) and Dunn's Peaceful Change differed in essential respects. Carr's book was published after the Munich settlement and could be interpreted as a defense of the appeasement policies of the Chamberlain government. Dunn's book had by no means the same prescriptive implications.

35 A Working Peace System (London 1944).

36 Peaceful Change, 51.

37 Ibid., 127–28.

38 Ibid., 125.

39 Each volume in the series contained this phrase in its frontmatter, as did volumes in the later series of the Princeton Center of International Studies.

40 See, for example, p. ii of Corbett, Percy E., Law and Society in the Relations of States (New York 1951).Google Scholar This volume, the last published under Institute auspices, before the Institute was disbanded in 1951, has a complete list of Institute monographs on the same page.

41 By Nicholas J. Spykman, William T. R. Fox, David N. Rowe, Annette B. Fox, Percy E. Corbett, Frederick C. Barghoorn, and Bernard Brodie, respectively.

42 By Percy E. Corbett, Robert A. Dahl, and Gabriel A. Almond, respectively.

43 “International relations,” Dunn wrote, “is concerned with the questions that arise in the relations between autonomous political groups in a world system in which power is not centered at one point.”—“The Scope of International Relations,” World Politics, 1 (October 1948), 144.

44 Brodie, Bernard, ed., The Absolute Weapon (New York 1946), 3–17.Google Scholar In this essay Mr. Dunn was exemplifying in a special case a point of view he had long held about international law in general. “International law,” he had earlier written, “is in the last analysis nothing more than a sociological mechanism for making smooth the path of intercourse between nations and providing a solvent for their conflicting interests. This being the case, the proper approach to a study of it would seem to be according to the nature and subject matter of the relationships it is intended to regulate. These relationships are more or less clearly defined social phenomena, and are not derived from the fundamental rights of nations around which the present system of classification seeks to group them.“—Review of Charles G. Fenwick, International Law (New York 1924), in Columbia Law Review, XXV (November 1925), 983.

45 New York 1950.

46 See especially ibid., Chapters 3–5.

47 Ibid., 110.

48 Ibid., 94.

49 See, for example, the studies of Klaus Knorr and William W. Kaufmann.

50 See, for example, the studies of Gabriel A. Almond, Lucian W. Pye, and Myron Weiner.

51 Cohen, Bernard C., The Political Process and Foreign Policy (Princeton 1957).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

52 Peace-making and the Settlement with Japan, Introduction, xviii.

53 Max Millikan, Director of the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Arnold Wolfers, Director of the Washington Center of Foreign Policy Research associated with Johns Hopkins University; Klaus Knorr, Director of the Center of International Studies at Princeton University; and William T. R. Fox, Director of the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University.

54 “The Present Course of International Relations Research,” World Politics, II (October 1949), 81–95.