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Law and the shaping of American foreign policy: From the Gilded Age to the new era (Elihu Root, William Howard Taft, Philander Knox, Joseph Choate)

Posted on:2003-08-21Degree:Ph.DType:Dissertation
University:Harvard UniversityCandidate:Zasloff, Jonathan MarkFull Text:PDF
GTID:1466390011984715Subject:History
Abstract/Summary:
This dissertation investigates the relationship between the prevailing legal culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which I call “classical legal ideology”, and patterns of American foreign relations during the same period. More than five decades ago, George Kennan complained that “moralistic legalism” suffuses American foreign policy. Since then, commentators have routinely noted the influence of lawyers on US external policy; yet no one has identified how it affected the development of the United States into superpower status.; The dissertation explores this question through investigating the role of legal ideology in the formation of US foreign relations during the first two decades of this century. During these decades, lawyers dominated the formation and execution of American foreign policy. It attempts to reconstruct the ideological world from which these foreign policymakers emerged, which it gleans from the source materials from the late 19th and early 20 th century, including judicial opinions, treatises, appellate briefs, private correspondence, and published essays. I argue that classical legal ideology influenced US foreign policy by suggesting that international law and institutions could significantly increase global stability, and simultaneously by implying that traditional realpolitik based upon the balance of power was unnecessary and even damaging to world order.; The dissertation then focuses on Elihu Root, the founder of the US foreign policy establishment and the nation's leading lawyer from 1890 to 1920, to show how these assumptions played out in practice. More than other contemporaries, Root thought through the assumptions and goals of both American foreign policy and American law during this period. It also gives considerable attention to prominent lawyer-diplomats such as William Howard Taft, Philander Knox, and Joseph Choate.; Through this exploration, I hope to answer to some of the lingering mysteries of American policy during the period, viz., how fundamental clashes of interests could be seen as mere misunderstandings; how deep-seated international conflicts could be dismissed as petty political squabbling; how structural imbalances of power could be viewed as the basis of a stable international order.
Keywords/Search Tags:American foreign policy, Law, Root, Legal
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