Kenneth Neal Waltz (; June 8, 1924 – May 12, 2013) was an American political scientist who was a member of the faculty at both the University of California, Berkeley, and Columbia University and one of the most prominent scholars in the field of international relations. He was a veteran of both World War II and the Korean War.
Waltz was one of the original founders of neorealism, or structural realism, in international relations theory and later became associated with the school of defensive neorealism. Waltz's theories have been extensively debated within the field of international relations. His 1979 book Theory of International Politics is the most assigned book in International Relations graduate training at U.S. universities.
Early life, education, and military service
Waltz was born on June 8, 1924, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he grew up and attended high school. He then enrolled at Oberlin College in Ohio, where he initially majored in mathematics. His college studies were interrupted by service in the United States Army from 1944 to 1946 during World War II. Waltz served in the Pacific theater of the war, rising in rank from private to 1st lieutenant, and was stationed in Japan during the U.S. occupation.
He graduated from Oberlin with an A.B. degree in 1948, having switched his major to economics. He was a Phi Beta Kappa and also named an Amos Miller Scholar.
In 1949, he married Helen Elizabeth Lindsley, known as "Huddie". They had three children together. After attending Columbia University to obtain an upper graduate degree in economics, he switched to political science because political philosophy was more interesting to him. He received his M.A. degree from there in 1950. He was an instructor at Oberlin for a while in 1950. A member of the US Army Reserve, he was called upon to serve again during the Korean War, which he did during 1951–1952 as a first lieutenant.
Returning to Columbia, he obtained his Ph.D. under William T. R. Fox in 1954. During his PhD studies, Waltz was most interested in political theory, but gravitated towards international relations due to the academic job market and the pressure of his dissertation advisor. While preparing for his comprehensive exams, Waltz came up with the ideas that would ultimately become his dissertation and his 1959 book Man, the State and War.
Waltz became a lecturer and then assistant professor at Columbia from 1953 to 1957. He became one of the early group of scholars at Columbia's Institute of War and Peace Studies and acted as a research assistant from 1952 to 1954 and a research associate from 1954. Later saying that he and his wife had been unsettled by the prospect of raising small children in New York City, Waltz left Columbia for Swarthmore College, where he was an assistant professor and then a professor from 1957 to 1966. He then moved on to Brandeis University for a stint from 1966 to 1971, the last four years of which he held the Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Politics chair.
In 1971, Waltz joined University of California, Berkeley, where he was appointed the Ford Professor of Political Science. Meanwhile, Waltz held a number of additional research positions. He was affiliated with the Institute of War and Peace Studies until 1964. He was a fellow of Columbia University in Political Theory and International Relations from 1959 to 1960 in London. He was a research associate at Center for International Affairs at Harvard University in 1963 to 1964, 1968, 1969, and 1972. He held a National Science Foundation grant from 1968 to 1971 to develop a theory of international politics. He was a Guggenheim Fellow for 1976 to 1977 and a fellow at the Institute for the Study of World Politics in 1977. He was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 1979–1980. He then became a research associate with the Department of War Studies, King's College London. Waltz taught at Peking University for two months in 1982, and he later taught at Fudan University as well. He lectured at a number of institutions in the US, including the Air Force Academy, the National War College, the Army War College, and the Naval War College. Similarly, he lectured at many other institutions around the world, including the London School of Economics, the Australian National University, and the University of Bologna. Waltz served as an instructor at MIT Seminar XXI.
Waltz retired from his position at Berkeley and returned to Columbia University in 1997. There, he became an adjunct professor as well as a senior research scholar at the Institute of War and Peace Studies.
Waltz served as Secretary of the American Political Science Association in 1966 to 1967 and then as its president in 1987 to 1988. He was President of the New England Section of the International Studies Association in 1966 to 1967. He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and served stints on the boards of editors of several scholarly journals. He has described Hans Morgenthau as a strong influence on his work.
Waltz's initial contribution to the field of international relations was his influential 1959 book, Man, the State, and War. It classified theories of the causes of war into three categories, or levels of analysis. He referred to those levels of analysis as "images" and used the writings of one or more classic political philosophers to outline the major points of each image. Each image was given two chapters: the first used the classical philosopher's writings mainly to describe what that image says about the cause of war, and the second usually had Waltz analyze the strengths and weaknesses of that image. Waltz's wife was essential in contributing the research that became the basis for the book.
The first image argued that wars are often caused by the nature of particular statesmen and political leaders such as state leaders, like Napoleon, or by human nature more generally. That is basically consistent with classical realism, which then dominated the international relations discipline, but Waltz would contest it more fully in his next book, Theory of International Politics.
Theories of war that fall under the rubric of Waltz's second image contended that wars are caused by the domestic makeup of states. A prime example that Waltz referred to is Lenin's theory of imperialism, which posits that the main cause of war is rooted in the need for capitalist states to continue opening up new markets in order to perpetuate their economic system at home. Today, a more familiar example in the Western world is the notion that nondemocratic states, because of their internal composition, start wars.
Waltz next assessed the first two images as being less influential in general than the third image but as ultimately necessary in understanding the causes of war. The third image posits that the cause of war is found at the systemic level and the anarchic structure of the international system is the root cause of war. In that context, "anarchy" was defined not as a condition of chaos or disorder but one in which no sovereign body governs the interactions between autonomous nation-states. In other words, in domestic society, citizens can theoretically rely on law enforcement agencies to protect their persons and property, but if a state is invaded and calls "9-1-1," it cannot be sure that anyone will answer.
Similarly, when two citizens have a dispute, they can appeal to the courts to render a verdict and, more importantly, the law enforcement agencies to enforce the court's ruling. However, there is no body above nation-states that can establish rules or laws for all the states, decide how they apply in specific cases, and compel the states to honor the court's ruling. As a result, if an issue at stake is important enough to a state, it can achieve a satisfactory outcome only by using its power to impose its will on another state(s). The realization that any state can resort to armed force anytime forces each state to be always prepared for that contingency.