Joseph Nye Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Theory and Practice in International Relations: Conversation with Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Dean, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University; 4/8/98, by Harry Kreisler

Photo by Jane Scherr

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Background

Professor Nye, welcome to Berkeley.

Thank you. It's nice to be here.

Tell us a little about your background. What accounts for your focus on the study and practice of government and state power?

Well I didn't intend to go into academic life. I had been at Oxford as a student on a scholarship and I came back to Harvard to do some graduate work. I thought I might go into the State Department; I'd become interested in international things. And in the process of doing my thesis, which I actually did in Africa, I got a letter from Harvard saying, "Would you like to start teaching here?" And I said I would try it for a little while, and a little while stretched out. But then in the Carter administration I was asked to take a political appointment and I did that in the State Department. And then again in the Clinton administration I did it both in the intelligence community and in the Defense Department. So it turns out that I spent five years of my adult life in federal service, though I had originally intended to spend more.

Going back to these earlier years, what books most influenced you?

As an undergraduate at Princeton I had been very powerfully influenced by Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. I was fascinated by the interplay between politics and economics. And when I was at Oxford I read a degree called Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, which followed the same sort of thing. So I've been intrigued by the interplay of politics and economics for quite some time.

And in Schumpeter's case it was really about how institutions adapt to the great technological innovations?

Well, Schumpeter was known both for his work on the effect of technology innovations, but more so he had a theory that capitalism was killing itself by its successes and that democracy and capitalism couldn't coexist. He didn't like this but he thought this was the way the world was working out. And he made a very strong case for it, though I didn't necessarily agree with it. But it was a case that at least planted firmly in my mind this question of how democracy and capitalism, or politics and economics, work with each other and against each other.

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