Arnold Wolfers

rdf:langString Arnold Wolfers

rdf:langString Arnold Oscar Wolfers (June 14, 1892 – July 16, 1968) was a Swiss-American lawyer, economist, historian, and international relations scholar, most known for his work at Yale University and for being a pioneer of classical international relations realism. Educated in his native Switzerland and in Germany, Wolfers was a lecturer at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik in Berlin in the late 1920s and then became its director in the early 1930s. Initially having some sympathies with the ideas of Nazi Germany, he left that country to become a visiting professor at Yale in 1933, stayed there, and became a U.S. citizen in 1939. In 1935 he was co-founder of the influential Yale Institute of International Studies. As master of Pierson College at Yale, he played a significant role during World War II by recruiting for the Office of Strategic Services. In 1957 he left Yale and became director of the Washington Center of Foreign Policy Research at Johns Hopkins University, where he served in that role until his retirement in 1965. Wolfers' two most known works are Britain and France Between Two Wars (1940), a study of two foreign policies during the interwar period, and Discord and Collaboration: Essays on International Politics (1962), a collection of papers on international relations theory.