Educating American modernists : the origins of the New Haven School

Abstract

This thesis reconstructs an intellectual history of the ‘New Haven School’. It employs archival material previously unused by researchers, in some cases completely unseen since recording or storage, to explore what for Lasswell and McDougal were the origins of the ideas that would become identified in the field of international law as this school. A widespread contemporary understanding of the New Haven School considers it a post-war response to international relations realism, a positivist-empiricist theory of international law in an epoch of American empire. The history recovered in this thesis emphasises the significance of three of strands of ideas not centrally addressed by this narrative. First, it places Lasswell and McDougal’s ideas in the cultural context of 1920s and 1930s modernism. Second, the political commitments of policy-oriented jurisprudence are traced to New Deal redistributionism and European socialism. Third, two bodies of thought are identified that for Lasswell and McDougal represented the intellectual origins of New Haven School theory – psychoanalysis and philosophical pragmatism. The thesis explores this history and these ideas in the following way. In Chapter 1, the 1968 moment when the New Haven School was named by former students of Lasswell and McDougal is reconstructed. The thesis then begins to seek the origins of the ideas that prompted this naming by working backwards through time – in Chapter 2, to Lasswell and McDougal’s initial 1943 statement of their legal theory, and in Chapters 3 and 4 to the earlier lives of Lasswell and McDougal respectively. In Chapter 5, the thesis concludes by returning to the post-war period in which the New Haven School was named, exploring the seminars through which Lasswell and McDougal inspired a group of students to identify as the New Haven School.