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Karl W. Deutsch
 Karl W. Deutsch |
Karl Wolfgang Deutsch, Stanfield Professor of International Peace, Emeritus, was born in Prague in 1912 and died on November 1, 1992. He received his first university degree from the Deutsche Universitaet in 1934 and a law degree from Charles University in 1938, both in Prague. Shortly thereafter, he emigrated from Czechoslovakia. In 1939 he was awarded a fellowship to study at Harvard, from which he received a PhD. in 1951. During World War II, he worked for the Office of Strategic Services and took part in the 1945 San Francisco conference that resulted in the founding of the United Nations. He taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1945 to 1956 and then at Yale until 1967, whereupon he returned to Harvard as a Professor of Government.
Deutsch’s dedication to social science was linked to a moral passion for improvement in the world. His dissertation and his first book, Nationalism and Social Communication, remains a landmark work on its subject. This book was Karl’s first attempt to understand why the world of his youth was destroyed by war, racism, and fratricide. This was no mere scholarly project. Karl said that political science should be considered a branch of medicine, for the purpose of understanding and doing politics well was to prevent death and relieve suffering.
Deutsch’s greatness as a social scientist was due to his erudition and his ability to develop new concepts that led to insights on fundamental issues, such as nationalism and political integration or disintegration within and among states. He devoted much of his career to the effort to link theory with evidence systematically and, preferably, quantitatively.
—Memorial Minute, Adopted by The Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University
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