Mearsheimer Profile; Chicago vs. Harvard

JHS
Thu, 12 Jan 2012 11:56:06 +0000

There is a really interesting profile of controversial Chicago political science professor John Mearsheimer in the current Atlantic magazine.

[Why John J. Mearsheimer Is Right (About Some Things) - Magazine - The Atlantic](Why John J. Mearsheimer Is Right (About Some Things) - The Atlantic)

The article is worth reading for its main topic (Mearsheimer’s approach to foreign policy), but it also includes this interesting bit on Mearsheimer’s view of the difference between Chicago and one of its better-known peers:



After stints at the Brookings Institution and Harvard, he went to the University of Chicago in 1982, and has never left.

Whereas Harvard, at least in Mearsheimer’s telling, is inclined to be a “government-policy shop” with close ties to Washington, the University of Chicago comes closer to a “pure intellectual environment.” At Harvard, many students and faculty members alike are on the make, networking for that first, or next, position in government or the think-tank world. The environment is vaguely unfriendly to theories or bold ideas, Huntington being the grand exception that proves the rule. After all, social-science theories are gross simplifications of reality; even the most brilliant theories can be right, say, only 75 percent of the time. Critics unfailingly seize on any theory’s shortcomings, damaging reputations. So the truly ambitious tend to avoid constructing one.

The University of Chicago, set off the beaten path in a society dominated by bicoastal elites, explains Mearsheimer, has always attracted “oddballs” with theories: political scientists who, while deeply respected, are at the same time not truly embraced by the American academic power structure. These iconoclasts have included Hans Morgenthau, as well as Leo Strauss, another German Jewish refugee, whom some link with neoconservatism. Realists especially have been outsiders in a profession dominated by liberal internationalists and others to the left.



Mearsheimer also describes the architectural style of his university office building as “East Germany circa the 1960s.”