1. Getting from Then to Now: A Personal Intellectual Autobiography

While I read as early as possible, my parents told me that I did not begin to speak until I was almost three. They also said that I hadn’t stopped talking since—as most of you can attest.

Again, people who know me understand I speak in an annoying combination of parentheses, footnotes, and perhaps even Ptolemaic epicycles…

Indeed, when I entered Martin Van Buren high school in the Fall of 1960, I am pretty sure I was the second shortest male student out of the 5000 students who attended that school using three different time schedules.

For example, despite my dedication to reading, I was a full-fledged child of TV, with some of my first memories of Washington Heights involving sitting in front of the black and white Philco TV in our living room. While my childhood was filled with hundreds of hours of TV, I watched almost no TV of any kind my freshman and sophomore years. Except for coverage of the Kennedy assassination, the one TV memory of my freshman year was jamming into the communal TV room one Sunday night to see the Beatles debut on the Ed Sullivan show.

Both undergraduate and graduate students will recognize this description—it was exactly how I used the blackboard in my classes—with arrows and loops and diagrammatic structuring. I later learned that studies had indicated that such visual cues were positively related to learning the material.

I got it!

I still see and correspond with one of those young professors, the Africanist Claude Welch, who came to UB a newly minted Oxford Ph.D. in 1964 at age 25. He retired in 2017 but is still going strong.

My Research Design paper for Johnson’s Honor’s Course was, “Policy Dilemma of the American Public: Attitudes Concerning the Distinction Between the National Interest/Foreign Policy of the United States and the Military Policy of the United States.”

The next day I aced the first two final exams and received A’s in both courses. The third exam of the day was Glenn Snyder’s 400-level strategy course—got an A on the first essay, a B+ on the second essay, a B+ on the exam and a B+ in the course. All the grading was done by Snyder’s teaching assistant, whose name I still remember to this day, but will not reveal.

Of course, no student identities were involved, only code numbers that could connect scores with the appropriate experimental group and the other variables that had been included.

My Honors paper for Milbrath was: “Niagara Falls Project: Legitimacy and Learning Techniques.”

The fact that the Niagara Falls Project involved a research team, along with learning the basics of philosophy of science and research design, exposed me to the fundamental idea that science is a “social enterprise.” This important but underappreciated truism is developed at greater length below.

My first two years at Yale I lived in the Hall of Graduate Studies. Political Science also had offices and seminar rooms in HGS. I could sleep, eat, and go to class in the same building. Straight out the front entrance of HGS it was a short half-block to a side entrance of Sterling Memorial Library, where the great bulk of my time during those two years was spent in the Graduate Reserve Book Room (which I always thought would be a good name for a folk-rock band). If I went out the main entrance to Sterling, it was another half block to cross the street to the Yale post office where I would collect my mail. My universe was thus (usefully) constrained.

I have presented papers or served as a discussant at the annual meetings of the: American Historical Association, Association of American Geographers, International Society of Political Psychology, and the Linguistic Society of America. I have also reviewed NSF proposals not only for the Political Science, but six other programs including Geography, Economics, Decision Science, Law, and Methodology/Measurement/ Statistics. The activities with Linguistics can be found on the webpage for ConflictAnalytiX (https://​www.​conflictanalytix​.​com/​), the consultancy founded by Stan Dubinsky (a linguist) and myself.

Note that one purpose of Iqbal/Starr (2016) was to bring systematic analysis to bear on the full range of the state failure process.

This is not to deny that we all might have a series of mentors at different stages of a career, or at different institutions, etc.—only that one person usually stands out as this foundational mentor.

I have often spoken of things that I read in graduate school that “made my brain explode.” These were many and varied. But I have identified about a dozen books (trying to find articles would have been quite overwhelming) that could be included as such readings. Most clearly at the top of such a list would be Anatol Rapoport’s Fights, Games, and Debates and Karl Deutsch’s The Nerves of Government. Four more books that would complete the top half of those dozen or so works: Thomas Schellings’ The Strategy of Conflict, Lewis Coser’s The Functions of Social Conflict, Kenneth Boulding’s Conflict and Defense, and Charles Lindblom’s The Intelligence of Democracy. Note how this list reflects the multidisciplinarity discussed above: Schelling, Boulding and Lindblom were economists; Coser was a sociologist; and Deutsch is a political scientist (although he also held a law degree). Rapoport defies categorization. A Ukrainian Jew, he was initially trained in Vienna as concert pianist who moved into both conducting and composition. With the rise of Nazism, he moved to the United State and received a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago. After serving in WWII he returned to Chicago and joined the Committee on Mathematical Biology. He was Professor of Mathematical Biology at the University of Michigan, and then Professor of Mathematics and Psychology at the University of Toronto. Kopelman (2019) pays tribute to Rapoport: “Rapoport’s contributions spanned scientific disciplines and included the application of mathematical models to biology and the social sciences, alongside metatheoretical work bridging semantics, ethics, and philosophy.”

As you might have guessed, all of this culminated in Barber’s most famous work, the 1972 book, The Presidential Character.

Later to become the Walker Institute of International and Area Studies.

To get a full feel for Russett’s range of interests and expertise, and publications, see Starr (2015a).

Although I should note that the paper I wrote for Puchala was also the paper for my course on Southeast Asia (Puchala and Robert Tilman had agreed to allow me to submit the same paper for their seminars). Puchala liked the paper, but Tilman liked it so much he sent it to another scholar at an Asian studies journal asking whether he thought it was submission ready. While this was as far as it went, I was greatly encouraged that a Yale faculty member thought my first-year paper was good enough for an external academic to look at.

The Merritt et al. piece noted that Deutsch also helped graduate students “with the challenges of getting a job, writing assignments, conference invitations, and other opportunities,” (pp. 7–8).

Still, my work on this paper led to another “publication”—a letter to the New York Times Book Review pointing out critical omissions in a review of a book titled Superhighway, Superhoax (July 19, 1970, pp. 34–35).

Indeed, my last major research project, on state failure, with Zaryab Iqbal, was concerned with the consequences of internal social conflict and external conflict on the occurrence of state failure.

In 1970–71 the Yale Department made me an Acting Instructor. This was a position offered to only one or two individuals in any given academic year and provided graduate students the only opportunity to teach their own courses. I taught one each semester—one on the policy-making process, and one on comparative democracy. I assume Russett knew of this and the Department’s belief in my ability to teach on my own.

When I asked my first wife (who is confirmed Anglophile) if she would rather spend a year in Philadelphia or Scotland—the answer was a no brainer.

Thanks Dad!

But, as noted, still too late for the earlier December Yale graduation ceremony.

It turns out there was another major plus for taking the Indiana job. There were no women on the Buffalo faculty until my senior year. There were no women on the Yale faculty, nor on the Politics faculty at Aberdeen. At Indiana, however, there were several women faculty in the department when I arrived (with more to come in my first few years). More importantly, two of those women became important role models: Dina Zinnes, essentially the leader of the IR faculty with whom I worked in many different arenas, both research and teaching; and, as noted, Lin Ostrom with whom I connected initially given our mutual interests with collective goods and collective choice. Later, Lin chaired the department for the four years prior to my becoming chair in 1984. As chair (both at IU and South Carolina) my first question when confronted with any issue, problem, or situation was WWLD? (What Would Lin Do?)

The “agent-structure problem” is a complicated one, relating to ontological and epistemological debates. See Gil Friedman and Harvey Starr, Agency, Structure, and International Politics (1997) for a fuller discussion of this literature, and how we argue that the opportunity and willingness approach handles many of the issues and problems raised in that literature.

See also the ‘Preface’ to the 2015 re-issue of the Most and Starr book.

This section draws directly from Starr (2018).

Note that substitutability was the subject of a special issue of the Journal of Conflict Resolution: “Substitutability in Foreign Policy: Applications and Advances” (Palmer 2000).

Note also the international editions: Indian second edition by Vakils Feffer & Simons, Ltd., Bombay, 1986; Italian third edition by Il Mulino; Taiwan fourth edition by Wu Nan Book Co.; Russian fifth edition by Svetlychor; Japanese sixth edition by Japan Uni Agency; seventh edition in English with Chinese introduction, Peking University Press, 2004; Chinese ninth edition. Impressive, but Russett and I are pretty sure we never saw any substantial royalties from these foreign editions.

See, for example the discussion of “substitutability” in Most/Starr 1989, especially the new Preface to the 2015 re-issue. Let me also note that Choice named Anarchy, Order, and Integration one of its “Outstanding Academic Books” in 1998.

At the time of his death Ben had a draft of a manuscript which expanded and updated the dissertation to turn it into a book, especially expanding his analysis of policymaking processes. I directed the enterprise of turning this draft into a book (Most 1991).

This work also includes the study of “protracted social conflict,” as exemplified in Starr (1999).

It was during this period I initiated a correspondence with Charles Tilly concerning the various areas of overlap of our work, the differences as well as complementarities. I very much value this experience, and only wish it had been more extensive.

See Starr/McGinnis (1992); Simon et al. (1994).

See: Simon/Starr (1996, 1997, 2000); Starr/Simon (2017).

See Starr/Bain (1995), Starr/Thomas (2002, 2005) and Starr (2005a) for Political Science articles. The two Geography articles were Starr (2001) and (2002).

I also made extensive use of Stephen Walker’s (1977) article on Kissinger’s operational code; it too used Holsti’s work as a template.

As examples, the first philosophical question: “What is the ‘essential’ nature of political life? Is the political universe essentially one of harmony or conflict? What is the fundamental character of one’s political opponents?” The third instrumental question: “How are the risks of political action calculated, controlled, and accepted?”

The way in which Most and I thought about these logic of inquiry issues was very similar. I do not want to undervalue his impact on our work or my thinking.

This is the title, taken from the classic Beatles song, of one of the most influential early articles on collective goods in international relations by Frohlich/Oppenheimer (1970). I have found it appropriate in so many areas of IR; see especially Iqbal/Starr (2016) and Starr (1997a).