Brodie graduated in 1938 with a degree in philosophy, high marks and a reputation as an outstanding student. In March, two months before Brodie received his baccalaureate, Hitler’s troops crossed into Austria. Earlier in the decade, Japan had invaded Manchuria and fascists had taken over the republic of Spain. Like many aware young men of the day, Brodie grew concerned about world affairs. That, combined with his military interests, led him to enter the university’s graduate school of international relations.
The social science departments at Chicago were widely considered to be among the nation’s finest, certainly the most innovative. And in the interwar period, they were virtually an anomaly on the American intellectual scene. It was a time of isolationism for the United States, a sentiment embraced by masses, politicians and intellectuals alike. The European war of 1914–1918 had been a bleakly disillusioning experience. Woodrow Wilson had sent American boys off to fight for democracy and freedom; they helped win the war for the Allies, but the aftertaste was sour. War had not been the glorious affair it was promised to be. After the war, the Senate voted down American entry into the League of Nations, refusing to soil once more the country’s unique brand of democracy in the brutish dirt of the Old World’s balance-of-power politics.
In the 1930s, when war loomed again on the European horizon, most Americans wanted no part of it. In 1928, Secretary of State Frank Kellogg and French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand were the first to sign the Kellogg-Briand Pact, a multilateral agreement that outlawed war.
In the years between the two world wars, most American universities reflected the popular notion that America was a unique creation, something apart from and beyond the politics of its European ancestors. Political science was taught as if politics were composed of organization charts, venerable static institutions and the Articles of the Constitution. International relations was considered synonymous with international law, its curricula crowded with summaries of peace-treaty provisions and the message that peace and world order were essentially the products of well-drafted international legislation and mutual good will.
Against this rather bland and abstract tradition that contradicted everything that was going on in the world, the Chicago school splashed a bracing tonic of realism. Charles Merriam led the way with his provocative discourses on American politics, expounding on the now common but then utterly earthshaking thesis that the essence of all politics lay not in structures of organizations or the Bill of Rights or the Electoral College, but in power—who uses it, for what ends, in what political context, against whom.
The Merriam school of thought carried over into Chicago’s department of international relations, mainly through Professor Quincy Wright, an institution all to himself. In 1926, Wright commenced a study on the causes of war that would not be published for sixteen years. The very existence of such a project at a major American university was astonishing. Even at Chicago, there were, as late as the mid-1930s, professors of international relations who would not allow war to be discussed in class because its very mention as a serious topic violated the spirit of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, implied that war might not be illegal.
The Wright project was a major departure, a huge endeavor entailing a vast collection of data not just from international law but from every field of scholarship imaginable—anthropology, economics, sociology, psychology, geography, biology, data on technological change, the balance of power (loathed phrase of the day), the history of armaments, public opinion and the press. Wright liked numbers: public-opinion poll data, excursions on a quantitative model of the arms race developed by mathematician Lewis Richardson, quantitative analyses of the contents in mass media.
When completed, the two-volume work, called A Study of War, had about it a dazzling sense of unity. It was heavy going and turgid, but it was so comprehensively interdisciplinary that it represented a quantum leap for the study of international relations.
Bernard Brodie was Quincy Wright’s star student in his graduate-school days. In 1939, the year that he began his dissertation, Brodie won the department’s only fellowship, an award of $350, and was assigned to assist Professor Wright, then in the final phase of his leviathan. The next year, when Brodie was about to face the job market, Wright sent well over a dozen letters to acquaintances in top-notch colleges across the country advertising “an A-number-one man, Bernard Brodie.”
Brodie also greatly admired Jacob Viner of the economics department, another new thinker. Viner was physically small but intellectually towering. Once a star student at McGill in Canada, then at Harvard, he joined the Chicago faculty and introduced a course new to the field of economics—the politics of international economic relations. Viner had been a consultant in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first Administration, and was profoundly struck by how rare it was that economic theory alone provided an answer to any serious problem. As a scholar, he was interested in the history of pamphleteering, which naturally led him to a study of mercantilism, the relations between the free market and the state. This interest, combined with his Washington experience, inspired Viner to see the true nature of economics as an interdisciplinary subject—and one dominated by considerations of political power. While many of his colleagues went thrashing about in the newfangled field of econometrics—an attempt to predict economic behavior by the imposition of vast mathematical models—Viner, in part because he never was much of a mathematician, liked to say, “After all, this subject was originally called political economy.”
From Wright and Viner, Brodie learned some valuable lessons that Brodie’s contemporaries in other universities were, in the main, not getting even by the end of the 1930s. From Wright, Brodie learned about the multiple causes and complexities of war. He picked up a well-blended mix of realism and idealism: a view that peace relies on more than provisions of international law, but also that, as Wright said, “opinions and ideas are an element in political power no less, and perhaps more, important than armies, economic resources and geographic position.”
Wright founded the Study of War project on the belief that by better understanding war one could better ensure the keeping of peace. At the same time, he had a Realpolitik view of national security and was no pacifist when it came to defending what he saw as national interests. He was a major figure in the Hyde Park branch of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, an anti-appeasement organization of some influence in 1939 and 1940 that favored repealing the Neutrality Act so that the United States could ship arms to Britain and France. Wright petitioned several senators on this cause.
The lessons from Jacob Viner reinforced those of Wright’s and added a new dimension. Power, thought Viner, could be surrendered only to something more powerful still. Governments will not lay down their swords before a world government simply out of good will or in the name of international cooperation. Doing so would violate their sovereign interests, and no nation could be expected to submit voluntarily to so clear a request of surrender.
In 1938, his senior year as an undergraduate, Brodie wrote a term paper for Quincy Wright titled “Can Peaceful Change Prevent War?” The paper was prompted by a popular thesis held by many political scientists and statesmen of the day: that, given the decay of the postwar settlements of 1919 and a resurgence of international violence, a method must be devised of establishing procedures for allowing changes in the international system, of avoiding war by accomplishing peacefully the ends for which nations might otherwise despairingly resort to war. This would serve the cause not only of peace but also of justice.