The Charter of San Francisco is the modest end-product of the mightiest collective literary effort in history. Fifty delegations, comprising literally thousands of principal and subordinate personnel, labored feverishly for two months to achieve agreement on a constitution for the new world security organization.1 In contrast, the Covenant of the League of Nations was drafted by one of the commissions of the Peace Conference of Paris, on which there sat two representatives of each of the five major powers and one representative from each of nine of the secondary powers. This group of nineteen men met fifteen times.2

The very broad participation of the smaller powers in the San Francisco Conference is obviously not to be explained in terms of their growing influence in world politics. Although the number of prospective permanent seat-holders in die Council of the proposed world organization was the same at Paris and at San Francisco, there had been in the intervening quarter-century a reduction rather than an increase in the number of powers of greatest influence.

With undue and perhaps false modesty, E. H. Carr described his brilliant contribution to what he called ‘the infant science of international polities’, The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations, as ‘already a period piece’ in 1946 when a second edition appeared.1 Teachers of the subject have not accepted Carr's ‘period piece’ characterization. For more than forty years it has been prescribed reading for many of their students and has had to be reprinted many times.

Primarily by reference to the writings of Charles E. Merriam, the impact of the Chicago school of political scientists on the study of world politics is assessed. Differences between that school's pragmatist pluralism and political realism are examined, as are differences between Merriam's ideal of cross-cutting human associations in a world of shared power and that of advocates of world government. Better adjusted personalities and international civic education would in Merriam's Utopia of science and reason lighten the task of governance within and between states, but he recognized the difficulty of achieving a warless world so long as “the antagonism of value systems which run below the obvious surface of the world” continues.

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.

INTERNATIONAL relations, as a subject of instruction, has flourished more in the United States than elsewhere and more in recent years than ever before. What forces explain its growth and its present shape? How have methods of teaching it been affected by the goals of the teacher, by his relation to research, and by the formal organization of international studies in American colleges and universities? To what extent is the American experience so rooted in uniquely American conditions that it is unlikely to be repeated elsewhere? These questions will be considered in turn.