Karl Deutsch Research Paper

Karl Deutsch’s contributions to the advancement of social sciences can be summed up in five domains:

(a) Building empirically grounded concepts and theories, such as nation-building, social mobilization, national and international integration, center–periphery, distribution of power, and understanding macrosocial processes. His definition of integration of a society is still in use in the literature: the capacity to receive and transmit information on wide ranges of different sectors with little delay. One of his writings appears retrospectively as predictive: ‘Cracks in the monolith, possibilities and patterns of disintegration in totalitarian systems’ (Deutsch 1954).

(b) Pioneering, cross-national research. Deutsch remains a leading figure of the first post-War generation of comparativists. In the late 1950s and 1960s, he did comparative research, using aggregate data at a time when other great comparativists, such as Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, preferred the survey method for comparing countries.

(c) Quantitative methodology. Karl Deutsch advanced the introduction of statistical analysis in political science. Such a vocation could be explained by the fact that, as the son of an optician, early in life, Deutsch considered the possibility of becoming one himself, and consequently studied mathematics. He did quantitative analysis on the size of government, growth of governments, foreign trade as a percentage of GDP, global modeling, two-way: channels of communication between elites and mass. Deutsch was in the forefront of the so-called ‘data movement.’ His contribution to Quantitati e Ecological Analysis in the Social Sciences (Deutsch 1969) was considered as a research agenda.

(d) Work on communication theory, particularly cybernetics. He developed Wiener and Neumann’s research, focusing on politics and society. The subtitle of The Nerves of Government, ‘Political Communication and Control,’ (Deutsch 1963) paraphrases Wiener’s definition of cybernetics: ‘Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine.’

(e) Bridges between disciplines, by importing in political science concepts and theories from various disciplines (anthropology, social psychology, economics, and biology). Nationalism and Social Communication (Deutsch 1953) is an eminently interdisciplinary work, where Deutsch’s intimate knowledge of European history and geography appears in all chapters. Deutsch was a leading contributor to Advances in the Social Sciences 1900–80 (Deutsch et al. 1986).

Retrospectively, it can be said that Deutsch’s most eminent book is his first, Nationalism and Social Communication: an Inquiry into the Foundation of Nationality (1953). This is his most cited work, and has been so since its publication. The subject of this book is related to his personal experience. Born to a Sudeten German family in the Austro-Hungarian empire, a multinational state, ‘Deutsch put his emotional and intellectual energy into scholarship focused upon nationalism and formation of large-scale political communities’ (Merritt and Russett 1981, p. 6). As a teenager, Deutsch witnessed the collapse of three empires and the emergence of many new independent nation-states in Eastern Europe and the Balkans.

The success of this book can be explained by Deutsch’s capacity to interpret statistical data with an intimate knowledge of the historical and social contexts. There are social scientists who write about countries they have only read about in books and who, in spite of their statistical virtuosity, too often offer superficial explanations. They should contemplate the following: ‘We will always need the clinician who knows the problem from having seen many cases, who knows the countries, the cultures, the areas where the problem takes place, and who knows the particular syndromes. It is by equipping the clinician with the work of the technicians, by having clinical judgement and technological and scientific evidence side by side, that we are likely to make the most progress’ (Deutsch 1980 p. 19).

In a survey of the most commonly cited political scientists, Deutsch’s name ranked eighth between 1945 and 1960, fourth from 1960 to 1970, and tenth between 1970 and 1976. After 1980 his name still appears on the list of the three dozen most-cited political scientists. Between 1970 and 1979, his name was cited 1870 times. Between 1996 and 1999 he has been cited 60–90 times per year. Most of them concern the following three books: Political Community at the International Level (Deutsch 1954), Nationalism and Social Communication (Deutsch 1953), and The Nerves of Government (Deutsch 1963).

It is interesting to note that Deutsch’s two most successful books were conceived and written simultaneously, and were published only one year apart, in 1953 and 1954. Undoubtedly the fundamental ideas for these two works were already present in his mind when he escaped from the totalitarian regime. The Nerves of Government does not appear to be Deutsch’s most popular book. It has been cited less frequently than the other two and, when it has been cited, the citations were in many cases perfunctory, the content not being commented upon. This book was published in 1963, at a time when Deutsch had already been at the front of the stage. Such perfunctory practice has been described by Robert Merton in his Sociology of Science.

The high ‘mortality’ rate of articles in political science, particularly in the field of international relations, is a well-known phenomenon. In several other disciplines, the life expectancy rate of articles is longer. Karl Deutsch published as author, co-author, editor, and co-editor a total of 16 books. In addition, between 1943 and 1980, he published 240 articles in academic journals and chapters in collective works, approximately half of them in collaboration with other scholars. According to the SSCI, which covers as sources only journals, excluding books, some of these 240 contributions were still being cited during the 1990–5 quinquennium. The content of some of Deutsch’s articles has become chapters of his books, particularly in The Nerves of Government. Other articles, among the best Towards an Inventory of Basic Trends and Patterns in Comparative and International Politics (1960) and Social Mobilization and Political Development (1961), have become standard information and common knowledge, and, consequently, do not need to be cited. What had been previously innovative has been superseded by more recent studies based on more precise data, analyzed with more refined methods. When writing about microbes, Pasteur need not be cited. When using social indicators, Karl Deutsch, Gabriel Almond, and Daniel Lerner no longer need to be cited. The concept of social mobilization already belongs to the common patrimony of the social sciences.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, Yale’s Department of Political Science was one of the most attractive for graduate students, many of whom converged in Deutsch’s seminars. One of these seminars inspired the conception of an important book entitled World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators, which users of quantitative data had named ‘the Yale bible,’ by Bruce M. Russett in collaboration with H. R. Alker, K. Deutsch, and H. Lasswell (Russett et al. 1964).

The following are among Deutsch’s intellectual progeny: Hayward Alker, Jorge Dominguez, William Foltz, Michael Hudson, Peter Katzenstein, Manfred Kochen, Arendt Lijphart, Richard Merritt, Donald Puchala, Bruce Russett, Charles Taylor, these and others recognized as outstanding political scientists. They honored their mentor in a collective book From National Development to Global Community, edited by Richard L. Merritt and Bruce M. Russett (1981).

Stein Rokkan’s tribute to Deutsch’s intellectual leadership deserves to be cited at length: ‘Karl Deutsch taught my generation of social scientists to develop models and to test them against the data of history. My own early research was heavily influenced by Deutsch’s ideas. My later work on dimensions of state formation and nation-building was directly inspired by Deutsch’s path-breaking study Nationalism and Social Communication; he taught me to look out for the decisive characteristics of center-building networks and to study the functions of the printed media’ (Rokkan 1981 p. 70).

Deutsch was an interdisciplinary scholar, comfortable in many fields. In his latter days he became interested in ‘the conditions favoring major advances in the social sciences.’ In 1986, he co-edited a volume focusing on this subject in collaboration with Andrew Markovits and John Platt (Deutsch et al. 1986).

Those who encountered Deutsch were impressed by his encyclopedic erudition. In his book Nationalism and Social Communication (Deutsch 1953) some 2000 authors are mentioned. His historical knowledge appears in a particular light in an article published in 1945 on ‘Anti-semitic ideas in the Middle Ages,’ based on the reading of very old literature (Deutsch 1945). This research paper merits to be included in any modern anthology of historical sociology.

Soon after the publication of The Limits to Growth by the Club of Rome in 1972, a new trend appeared in political science, imitating economists, demographers, and ecologists. Karl Deutsch had alerted the specialists: ‘Computers can assist thought, but not replace it. Mathematical thought produced new ideas and techniques, such as game theory and coalition theory, scaling, latent structure analysis, matrix analysis and a succession of increasingly sophisticated models of social and political structures and processes … Some of us have tried to deal with this by over-specialization, risking to fall into the old trap of learning more and more about less and less’ (Deutsch 1978). Nevertheless, in the 1980s, he was seduced by the siren of ‘world modeling.’ Under his directorship at the Wissenschaftzentrum in Berlin, modeling became a priority. The virtue of Deutsch’s effort in Berlin was to combine mathematical modeling and solid empirical referent. Abstract mathematical modeling has attracted the attention of a limited number of political scientists outside the circle of the builders of reductionist models.

World trade was one of Deutsch’s favored topics, which he discussed in several writings. He measured the ratio of foreign trade to national income for almost half a century. He presented an impressive amount of statistical data demonstrating a decline in international trade between 1913 and 1957 (Deutsch and Eckstein 1961). But this period was marked by World War One, the Great Depression, protectionism, and autarchy practiced by several great powers in the 1930s, World War Two, and the post-War reconstruction of the devastated European countries and Japan. In the 1950s, only 6 percent of the American GNP depended on foreign trade. Deutsch did not explicitly predict a continuing decline of international transaction. More recent developments do not invalidate Deutsch’s historical observation.

One of Deutsch’s main ideas was the importance of intertwining economies for political integration. This thesis is still validated: half of France’s foreign trade takes place with Germany, and reciprocally. Economic integration has preceded political integration of the European Union, even for Britain.

Since the publication of Nationalism and Social Communication, the nations of Western Europe, with the exception of Greece and Ireland, have experienced a rapid decline of nationalist tendencies, reversing a historical trend (Dogan 1993), at a moment when, in contrast, many developing countries in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa have been mobilized by movements of national independence, developing an exacerbated ethnic nationalism. The concepts designed by Deutsch and other scholars—social communication, rapidity of assimilation, rate of mobilization, spread of national consciousness, population clusters, linguistic cleavages, center–periphery—have been transplanted from the continent to which they were first applied to many new nation-states, where Deutsch’s theories are more relevant.

Karl Deutsch’s professional career was one of exceptional brilliance. He was elected President of the American Political Science Association in 1969 and of the International Political Science Association (IPSA) in 1976, playing an important role in the development of the research committees within IPSA. In collaboration with Richard Merritt, as program director, he organized the IPSA World Congress in Moscow in 1979, building a bridge between East and West for political scientists. A member of the American Academy of Sciences, he lectured in many European universities. Deutsch received honorary doctorates from seven American and European universities and the Commander’s Cross Order of Merit from the German Federal Republic.

Bibliography:

1. Deutsch K W 1945 Anti-semitic ideas in the Middle Ages. Journal of History of Ideas 6: 239–51
2. Deutsch K W 1953 Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA; 2nd edn., 1966
3. Deutsch K W 1954 Political Community at the International Le el, Problems of Definition and Measurement. Doubleday, Garden City, NY
4. Deutsch K W 1957 Political Community and the North Atlantic Area. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ (in collaboration with seven other scholars)
5. Deutsch K W 1963 The Nerves of Government: Models of Political Communication and Control. Free Press, New York; 2nd edn., 1966
6. Deutsch K W 1969 On methodological problems of quantitative research. In: Dogan M, Rokkan S (eds.) Quantitati e Ecological Analysis in the Social Sciences. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 19–39
7. Deutsch K W 1978 Major Changes in Political Science 1952– 1977. Research paper. Internationales Institut fur Vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung, Berlin, p. 28
8. Deutsch K W 1980 On the utility of indicator systems. In: Taylor C L (ed.) Indicator Systems for Political Economic and Social Analysis. Oelgeschlager, Gunn, and Hain, Cambridge, MA, pp. 11–23
9. Deutsch K W, Alker H, Stoetzel A (eds.) 1973 Mathematical Approaches to Politics. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco
10. Deutsch K W, Eckstein A 1961 National industrialization and the declining share of the international economic sector 1890–1959. World Politics 13: 267–99
11. Deutsch K W, Edinger L 1959 Germany Rejoins the Powers: Mass Opinion, Interest Groups and Elites in Contemporary German Foreign Policy. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA
12. Deutsch K W, Markovits A S, Platt J 1986 Advances in the Social Sciences 1900–1980. University Press of America, New York
13. Deutsch K W, Platt J, Senghaas D 1971 Conditions favoring major advances in the social sciences. Science 171: 450–9
14. Dogan M 1993 Comparing the decline of nationalisms in Western Europe: the generational dynamic. International Social Science Journal 136: 177–98
15. Dogan M, Rokkan S 1969 Quantitative Ecological Analysis in the Social Sciences. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
16. Jodice D H, Taylor C L, Deutsch K W 1980 Cumulation in Social Science, Data Archiving. A study of the Impact of the Two Handbooks of Political and Social Indicators. Wissenschaftzentrum, Berlin
17. Merritt L R, Russett B M (eds.) 1981 From National Development to Global Community. Allen and Irwin, London
18. Rokkan S 1981 Variations within Western Europe. In: Merritt L R, Russett B M (eds.) From National Development to Global Community. Allen and Irwin, London, pp. 115–44
19. Russett B M, Alker H R, Deutsch K, Lasswell H 1964 World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT
20. Taylor C L 1968 Aggregate Data Analysis: Political and Social Indicators in Cross-national Research. Mouton, Paris