Kenneth Waltz

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.

Waltz was born on June 8, 1924, in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

He grew up and attended high school there.

He then attended Oberlin College, where he started out majoring in mathematics.

That was interrupted to serve in the Army of the United States from 1944 to 1946 during World War II, when he rose in rank from private to first lieutenant.

Waltz served in the Pacific theater of the war and was stationed in Japan during the U.S. occupation of Japan.

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 1951–52 as a first lieutenant.

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.

Waltz became a lecturer and then assistant professor at Columbia from 1953 to 1957.

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.

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.

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.

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 was affiliated with the Institute of War and Peace Studies until 1964.

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.

He held a National Science Foundation grant from 1968 to 1971 to develop a theory of international politics.

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 a Guggenheim Fellow for 1976 to 1977 and a fellow at the Institute for the Study of World Politics in 1977.

His 1979 book Theory of International Politics is the most assigned book in International Relations graduate training at U.S. universities.

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.