lewis fry richardson and the study of the causes of war

Lewis Fry Richardson and the Study of the Causes of WarAuthor(s): Michael NicholsonSource: British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Jul., 1999), pp. 541-563Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/194150 .

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B.J.Pol.S. 29, 541-563 Copyright ? 1999 Cambridge University Press

Printed in the United Kingdom

Review Article: Lewis Fry Richardson and the Study of the Causes of War MICHAEL NICHOLSON*

Lewis Fry Richardson (1881-1953) was one of the most original thinkers ever to apply their minds to the study of war and its causes. In a strict sense he was an amateur in that he held no position of profit dedicated to the pursuit of these researches. He was always employed to do something else and did the research at week-ends and in his retirement. He never taught in the field or anything close to it. Nevertheless he was a prolific publisher on a very wide range of topics, as the two volumes of his collected papers published by Cambridge University Press testify, though his work rarely reached the international relations or political science community at the time.' It was after his death that his work had its impact.

The publication of Richardson's Collected Papers, under the general editorship of Philip Drazin, is an appropriate time to review the significance of Richardson's work especially in international relations. However, it must be put into the broader context of his work as a whole. Richardson made contributions of great originality to three different fields: meteorology; quantitative psychology or psychometrics; and international relations or conflict research (also called peace research). In meteorology, Richardson's work was recognized at the time; he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1926. His work in psychology was controversial but his methods are now accepted as both innovative and legitimate. His work in international relations is still controversial, reflecting disputes in the field which are still active. He was the first to apply mathematical models and statistical tests to international relations which, in the view of many, makes him the founder of the serious systematic study of the discipline.

Volume 1 of the Collected Papers contains the papers on 'Meteorology and Numerical Analysis'. This is over 1,000 pages long and ranges from the first paper in the journal Engineering in 1907 (at 26 this is not particularly early for someone who was to be published so prolifically) to a paper in 1952 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. Volume 2, a more modest 756 pages, contains

* I am greatly indebted to Oliver Ashford, Claudio Cioffi-Revilla, J. C. R. Hunt, Phil Schrodt, Cedric Smith and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this review article.

1 Lewis Fry Richardson (ed. P. Drazin et al.), The Collected Papers of Lewis Fry Richardson, Vols. 1 and 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), from now on referred to as Collected Papers.



















542 NICHOLSON 542 NICHOLSON 542 NICHOLSON

the papers in 'Quantitative Psychology and Studies in Conflict'. Overall there are twenty-nine papers on meteorology, twenty-seven on war causation, nine on approximate solutions, eight on scientific instruments, seven on quantitative mental estimates, six on the 'dynamics of detection' and four on other aspects of psychology. (Reading Richardson infects one with the statistical habit.) The Collected Papers do not include his book Weather Prediction by Numerical Processes, a very original if not very practical piece, which was one of the bases of his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS).2 Nor do they include as such the two posthumously produced books on the causes of war, Statistics of Deadly Quarrels and Arms and Insecurity,3 though most of the material from them is in fact included in one form or another. These two books are the best known pieces of Richardson's work in the social sciences but, regrettably, both were printed in small numbers and are very hard to get hold of. With a few exceptions I discuss below, they contain most of Richardson's work in international relations. A common theme which runs through them all is mathematical analysis, particularly calculus methods, and the use of rigorous statistical methods. Richardson's scientific reputation in his lifetime was primarily as a meteorologist, where his work was recognized and esteemed. His papers in that discipline were published mainly in prestigious, mainstream scientific journals. In 1972, after Richardson's death, an extension to the British Meteorological Office was opened and called the Richardson Wing. In the dedication he was referred to by the then Director as 'one of the greatest meteorologists of his and any other generation'. His scientific reputation in that field is firm, secure and uncontroversial and was so during his lifetime.

Richardson was at various times seriously interested in two fields in the social sciences - individual psychology and peace research or international relations.4 Though the titles he gave his papers (such as the Mathematical Psychology of War to an early work in peace research) give the impression of a large overlap, in fact these two areas of work were largely separate. His first work in

2 Lewis Fry Richardson, Weather Prediction by Numerical Processes (London: Cambridge University Press, 1922).

3 Lewis Fry Richardson, Statistics of Deadly Quarrels (Pittsburgh, Penn.: Boxwood Press, 1960), and Arms and Insecurity: A Mathematical Study of the Causes and Origins of War (Pittsburgh, Penn.: Boxwood Press, 1960).

4 'Studies of Conflict' is how the editors of the Collected Papers describe Richardson's work in the area of causes of war, arms races and so on, and this is as good a term as any. 'International relations' and 'peace research' were not names that Richardson used though most people working in such areas today would normally refer to themselves as working in one or both of those fields. In particular, the term 'peace research' did not come into widespread use until the 1960s. However, Richardson is claimed by peace researchers as one of their own and, indeed, as a founding member of the field. The term 'peace research' has always been looked at rather suspiciously in Britain as being something which looks uncomfortably left-wing or, at least, shows a degree of commitment improper in a supposedly detached social scientist. There have been no such inhibitions in Germany and Scandinavia and also, perhaps surprisingly, the term has been used quite readily in the United States. 'Polemology' is used in France and the Netherlands. 'Irenology' has been tried but never became popular.













Review Article: Lewis Fry Richardson and Causes of War Review Article: Lewis Fry Richardson and Causes of War Review Article: Lewis Fry Richardson and Causes of War

international relations was done during the First World War and, understand- ably, under its impact. He then seemed to lose interest. It is not clear why, though possibly he thought the world seemed more peaceful and investigations into war less pressing. He returned to the field in 1935 and from then on did his major work in the field, almost abandoning the work in psychology. His psychological work was done largely between the end of the First World War and the mid-1930s. To help in this, he took a Bachelor's degree in psychology from London University at the age of 48 and three years after his election to the Royal Society. In the Collected Papers E. C. Poulton describes and evaluates his psychological work. It involved such things as the measurement of sensations and in particular sound, which was the most widely taken up. In this he showed his typical characteristics of originality and indifference to received opinion in that he carried out measurements which many psychologists of the time regarded as impossible to perform.

Richardson was the founder of two fields in social scientific international relations, those of statistical international relations and of formal modelling. How seriously one takes Richardson depends on how seriously one takes statistical international relations. For someone, like myself, who believes that a crucial element in the development of international relations involves the development and testing of hypotheses in the general empiricist mode,5 Richardson is a giant who foresaw the field. Unfortunately, not all scholars share this view and, for them, if Richardson is a giant, then it is a misguided giant who stubbornly went off in the wrong direction. My purpose in this article is to give an account of Richardson's work, relate it to other traditions in the social sciences, and enquire how significant his role has been in developing the academic field of international relations. I shall also look at the context of his ideas, in that Richardson was surprisingly detached from the various powerful intellectual currents of the time.

LIFE

First, however, we need to give an account of Richardson's life and in particular his academic career.6 The relationship between life and work is important, particularly as far as his work in peace research is concerned.

Richardson was born into a Quaker family in 1881 and educated in the Quaker School at Bootham in York. In 1900 he went to King's College, Cambridge, to

5 I talk of 'testing' as the primary form of the confrontation of theory with fact rather than 'refutation'. Social statistics involve index numbers or indicators and hardly any unambiguously defined variables. Thus, refutation becomes trivially easy simply by the selection of an appropriate measure. To the horror of any dedicated Popperian, social scientists are often trying to confirm hypotheses rather than refute them. I discuss this in more detail in Michael Nicholson, Causes and Consequences in International Relations (London: Pinter, 1996), particularly in Chapter 7.

6 This section is largely derived from Oliver Ashford's useful biography of Richardson, Prophet - or Professor? The Life and Work of Lewis Fry Richardson (Bristol and Boston: Adam Hilger, 1985).



LIFE







LIFE





543 543 543




read Natural Sciences, very successfully. Thereafter he practised as a physicist, and occasionally as a chemist, in various places such as Aberystwyth where he was a demonstrator for a year, and Manchester College of Technology where he was lecturer and demonstrator. In 1913 he made the significant move into meteorology, a field in which be rapidly became very distinguished. In that year he was appointed superintendent of the Eskdalemuir Observatory which was run by the Meteorological Office. This was despite his lack of previous meteorological work. At this stage he was essentially a good all-round physical scientist, who could turn his hand to most natural scientific problems, particularly if they involved mathematics. In 1913 be had ventured briefly into the human sciences with a brief and speculative paper for the Eugenics Review on mental attributes. This was essentially about the inheritance of intelligence.

The First World War interrupted his researches, though his work would have kept him out of the army and the isolated part of Scotland in which the Observatory was situated was less directly affected by the war than most places. However, for Richardson it was not so simple. As a Quaker, he was a pacifist and would have refused to fight anyway. Also as a Quaker he was deeply concerned about the war and could not ignore it. In 1916, before the onset of

conscription, he joined the Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU) and spent most of the rest of the war in France. Like many people of the time, Richardson was

deeply affected by the war and wished to do something which would prevent any recurrence. Wilfred Owen, Seigfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and other litterateurs wrote poems, autobiography and autobiographies disguised as novels; Richardson wrote equations. He believed that war would be abolished

only if we understood its causes and that these would be revealed by a scientific

analysis of the situations in which war occurred. Science, for Richardson, meant

following the procedures of the natural sciences, in particular physics. During the last part of his war service, Richardson worked out and wrote The Mathematical Psychology of War.7 Like Wittgenstein, he seems to have found

danger and discomfort intellectually stimulating. The Mathematical Psychology of War was a monograph of 35 pages, printed in the Collected Papers, in which Richardson proposed an elaborate theory of the causes of war expressed in mathematical form. It was not well received - indeed it was hardly received at all and was published privately. It was an extraordinary and original piece being the first to use mathematical methods to talk about the relationships between states and the causes of conflict. Few people were very interested. He submitted a manuscript for publication which was turned down despite Bertrand Russell's recommendation that it be published. In his reader's report, Russell called the

manuscript 'a remarkable piece of work which deserves great respect'.8 Richardson printed it privately and commented rather sadly 'it was little noticed. Some of my friends thought it funny', reminding one of Hume's equally sad

7 Lewis Fry Richardson, Mathematical Psychology of War (Oxford: W. Hunt, 1919), reprinted in Collected Works.

8 Ashford, Prophet - or Professor?


























remark about the first edition of A Treatise of Human Nature, that it fell 'dead-born from the press'.9

During the war, Richardson also wrote a paper 'International Voting Power' on voting in international organizations for a journal War and Peace. Assuming that an international assembly would weight the votes of states according to some rough criterion of power, he was concerned to devise some system for the automatic adjustment of the weights as the relative positions of the powers changed. Though nothing like his scheme has ever been adopted, this is one of the few occasions where Richardson was involved in contributing to a discussion which was being held in politically active circles. His brother Hugh was corresponding with Leonard Woolf in 1917 and forwarded earlier versions of Richardson's schemes to him.10 He returned to this problem at the very end of his life in a much more carefully worked out version of his original ideas based explicitly on index numbers. This paper, 'Voting in an International Organiza- tion', was not published before it appeared in the Collected Papers."

Perhaps discouraged by the reception of his monograph, but encouraged by the possibility that the world would not immediately plunge itself into another frenzy of killing, Richardson abandoned his study of the causes of war, temporarily at least. A letter to The Friend in May 1926 on voting in international organizations was all he wrote in the area for many years. He turned to psychology as well as continuing work in meteorology but his meteorological work was now hampered by his moral convictions. The Meteorological Office was taken over by the Air Ministry. As a pacifist Quaker, Richardson felt unable to work for them. He got a job as a lecturer in physics at Westminster Training College. In 1929 he became Principal of Paisley Technical College (later to become Glasgow Caledonian University), a position which combined an arduous teaching load (at times sixteen hours per week) with demanding administrative duties. In 1940 he took early retirement in order to devote himself to the analysis of the causes of war which he now saw as imperative. From 1935 until his death in 1953 he did his crucial work in this field. Even his work in the natural sciences became subordinate to his work on war and his publications in the natural sciences declined markedly from the late 1930s onwards.

The motivation for Richardson's work was explicitly moral. As a Quaker, he believed war to be fundamentally evil. His first-hand experiences of war in France had confirmed his theological disposition. However, his strong moral feelings did not affect the rigour and intellectual honesty with which he pursued his task. Truth was also an absolute for him, he never let what he hoped to be the case influence his analysis of what was the case.

9 David Hume, 'My Own Life', in T. H. Green and T. W. Grose, eds, Essays, Moral Political and Literary (London: Longman, 1889), Vol. 1, p. 2.

10 Leonard Woolf Papers (SxMsl3) I L10 d. University of Sussex Library. I am indebted to Peter Wilson of the London School of Economics for directing me towards this.

1 This paper was dated about a month before his death and found in a folder.















545 545 545




AN OUTLINE OF RICHARDSON'S WORK IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Richardson's work in peace research can be placed under two broad headings. First, there is the work on deductive models, particularly the analysis of the arms race or hostility model, which appears in its final form in Arms and Insecurity. Secondly, there is the mass data-collection programme he conducted, where he collected statistics of what he called 'Deadly Quarrels' (which he had earlier called 'Fatal Quarrels'). This was much more than a data-collection programme, however. He also used the statistics to test a whole variety of hypotheses about deadly quarrels with the use of often sophisticated statistical techniques, many devised by himself. Much of this is contained in the book Statistics of Deadly Quarrels. A major piece called 'The Problem of Contiguity', though referred to as an appendix to Statistics of Deadly Quarrels, does not in fact appear there (a chapter with the same title is much shorter and rather different). It is usefully contained in the Cambridge collection. These hypotheses were, for the most part, ad hoc, and not part of a formal deductive structure which was to be tested as was the arms race model. A third pair of papers in Psychometrica deals with 'War Moods' and is slightly separate from the rest of his work, though clearly in the same mode.12 Though theoretically intriguing, this has not been so influential as the rest. At both the beginning and the end of his social science career he worked on voting procedures for international organizations. Though he clearly saw these as practical suggestions, they have never been taken up.

This puts Richardson as a pioneer in two of the three major social scientific endeavours in behavioural international relations, namely, formal modelling, and the collection and analysis of data. About the third, decision theory, rational choice theory and the theory of games, Richardson had nothing to say. There is nothing in his work which can be interpreted as pioneering the theory of games or any other aspects of rational choice behaviour (or indeed any other approach to choice). There is no mention of the work of von Neumann and Morgensternm3 and it seems he was (not surprisingly) ignorant of it. His work on voting is the nearest he comes to what has subsequently become known as the rational choice literature.

To anticipate and be a pioneer in two of the major areas of moder thought in the area is an impressive achievement. I shall discuss the two major classes of contribution separately.

12 Lewis Fry Richardson, 'War Moods: Part I', Psychometrica, 13 (1948), 147-74; 'War Moods: Part II', Psychometrica, 13 (1948), 197-232. Also reprinted in the Collected Works.

13 John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenster, The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953 (1st edn 1944)).
















The Arms Race and Hostility Model

Richardson's basic model of the arms race is expressed in terms of two differential equations which are now routinely referred to as the Richardson Equations:

dx/dt = ky- ox + g (1)

dy/dt = Ix- fly + h (2)

In the interpretation of this model as an arms race, x and y are the level of arms of two countries, called A and B respectively, which are hostile towards each other. Thus, Equation 1 reads 'The rate of change of A's armaments (denoted by dx/dt) is related positively to the level of B's armaments (denoted by y multiplied by a positive constant k), dampened by the level of its own armaments (x multiplied by a negative constant a) and with a constant 'grievance factor' (denoted by g)'. The terms in Equation 2 are interpreted analogously. The justification for this equation is that, in a state of hostility, the level of a rival's armaments stimulates arms building. Hence the rate of change of armaments (in this case rearmament) is positive. However, armaments cost money and have absolute and opportunity costs, so the level of one's own armaments acts as a dampening factor. There is also a constant grievance factor, which is independent of the level of arms. This can also be interpreted as a 'friendliness' factor and would hence be negative. However, the term is a constant whichever it is. In this there is nothing which requires dx/dt and dy/dt to be positive. They can be negative, indicating disarmament, or zero, indicating no change.

Richardson's approach shows his grounding in the natural sciences and in particular physics, both in terms of the questions he asked and the techniques, namely differential equations, which he used. The arms race is posed as a problem in dynamics where the aim is to get a time path of the relevant variables. It is important to derive equilibria but also important to derive the paths by which the system achieves equilibrium and ascertain whether equilibria are stable or unstable. An economist of the era would probably have approached the problem as an issue in comparative statics where determining the equilibrium was the main problem and the paths along which a system moved to achieve it was a subsidiary issue if considered at all. This was also true of the earlier development of game theory where the primary question is to establish the existence (or non-existence) of an equilibrium without much concern for the paths by which the system moves there. This is still true of much of game theory. Richardson's choice of differential equations as a mathematical tool also indicated his background. Differential equations are a basic stock in trade of a physicist. Again, if a contemporary economist had considered a dynamic model, difference equations rather than differential equations would probably have been used as they were used in trade cycle models of the late pre-war and early post-war era.14 Above all, of course, was the analysis of the issue in terms of

14 For example, J. R. Hicks, A Contribution to the Theory of the Trade Cycle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950). Samuelson also discusses this in Paul A. Samuelson, Foundations of EconomicAnalysis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1947).















547 547 547




a simple model and a small number of variables. This was also a physicist's approach, though one shared with all theoretical subjects. It was very different from the way in which a historian would have posed the issue.

Let us return to a brief analysis of the model. If the variables are interpreted as armaments then x and y both must lie in the positive quadrant. We shall assume this initially. They can have an equilibrium in the positive quadrant where dx/dt = dy/dt = 0, though there is nothing in the equations which requires this. In this case there would be neither rearmament nor disarmament. Richardson explored the stability or otherwise of the equilibria. The conditions for a stable equilibrium, such that at all points in the system the armaments level would move towards the equilibrium point, were aoB > kl. If the level of arms were below the equilibrium level, then this would result in an arms race, but one with a clear limit. It could also involve mutual disarmament or, in certain circumstances, one party disarming while the other armed. The condition that the arms race is unstable such that, if the system is not at the equilibrium point it will move further away from it and not towards it, is af < kl. In the second case this means that there will be an arms race without limit or, alternatively, that there will be mutual disarmament. This can be seen by the analysis of the differential equations. There are many expositions of this result.15 These equations are the core of his work in this area. It is very important work in that it shows first, that there can be different kinds of arms races or, more generally, arms movements. Further, there are points where comparatively minor changes in the system, such as changes in the relative strengths of the various coefficients, can change the qualitative behaviour of the system. Thus it might switch from a stable system moving towards an equilibrium to an unstable one leading to disarmament or a runaway arms race.

In Arms and Insecurity Richardson develops the work in two way. First, he elaborates the theory itself. Thus he analyses a theory of three nations and outlines its extension to a theory of n nations, an extension which was developed very much later by Schrodt.'6 Secondly, he tries to test it. Much of the book is concerned with finding appropriate measures for the variables and trying to apply the model to actual instances. This whole approach was totally novel in international relations at the time. It is a hypothetico-deductive model produced long before any other in international relations and when such an approach was still relatively new in any form of the social sciences. Further, Richardson, in his tests, is well aware that many of the variables he is considering are either

15 Kenneth Boulding, Conflict and Defense (New York: Harper and Row, 1962); Anatol Rapoport, Fights, Games, Debates (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1974 (1st edn. 1960)); Michael Nicholson, Formal Models in International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), and Rationality and the Analysis of International Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

16 Philip A. Schrodt, 'Richardson's n-nation Model and the Balance of Power', American Journal of Political Science, 22 (1978), 364-90, and Preserving Arms Distributions in a Multi-Polar World: A Mathematical Study (Denver, Colo.: Monograph Series in World Affairs, University of Denver, 1984).














difficult or impossible to measure directly. He uses indicators and is ingenious in his selection of these and sophisticated in his awareness of their problems and potentialities.

I interpreted the model above as an arms race model. This is certainly one interpretation and it can stand on its own merits as a model of arms races as such. Most subsequent scholars have interpreted it in this way. However, Richardson himself regarded arms levels as an indicator of general hostility. Hostility is viewed as a mass phenomenon and not just a characteristic of governments. If this is the case, we can make it a hostility/friendliness model where friendliness is the negative of hostility (or the other way round). This means that the model can be interpreted in all four quadrants though, normally, one would expect it to be either in the positive-positive quadrant or the negative-negative quadrant. There are clearly problems of measurement, as Richardson recognized. He needed an indicator of friendliness, for which he favoured trade. The over-all measure (or indicator) of hostility is thus armaments minus trade, both measured in monetary units. However, people trade for a whole range of reasons and it is quite possible for high trade and high hostility to go together. Furthermore, a monetary measure of armaments is just one possibility and by no means the best. Nevertheless, the concept of a hostility/friendliness system is perfectly sensible even if its operationalization is difficult. Indeed, it has been developed in a manner which acknowledges its indebtedness to Richardson by Zinnes and her collaborators.17 Richardson was greatly encouraged (perhaps over- encouraged) by the success of his model in describing the Anglo-German arms race of 1909-13 where, with appropriate manipulation of the variables, the comparison of theory to fact is quite good. It has been less satisfactory when applied to other arms races.

Statistical Work

Richardson's work on the statistics of deadly quarrels itself can be divided into two. First, there was his mammoth collection of data on wars and their categorization. Secondly, there was the analysis of various statistical propositions about war using this data.18 To some extent the data collection was a general collection with the aim of finding all the wars - or more properly deadly quarrels - during the period (he died in 1953). Most of his analysis was done on the period ending in 1945 and sometimes earlier. He also collected data on other phenomena he regarded as relevant to deadly quarrels, such as that on

17 Dinna A. Zinnes and John V. Gillespie, Mathematical Models in International Relations (New York: Praeger, 1976). These have been followed by many papers, e.g. Dina A. Zinnes and Robert G. Muncaster, 'The Dynamics of Hostile Activity and the Prediction of War', Journal of Conflict Resolution, 28 (1984), 187-229.

18 David Wilkinson re-analysed a lot of Richardson's data in David Wilkinson, Deadly Quarrels: Lewis Fry Richardson and the Statistical Study of War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).



Statistical Work






Statistical Work




549 549 549




bandit gangs in Manchukuo in 1935, with which he aimed to test various specific propositions.

Richardson collected all the cases of deadly quarrels he could find in the period and listed them with a brief, stylized account. Conspicuous, though, was his categorization of deadly quarrels by the number of people killed in them, believing this to be a major characteristic of wars. One of the problems in this is a very wide spread of estimates of the casualties in a particular war, making any precise estimate very suspect. Consequently, rather than take the direct numbers of deaths, he defined the magnitude of a war as the logarithm to base 10 of the number of people killed. This made the errors in a war proportional rather than absolute. The principle and its rationale are the same as for the Richter scale of measuring the severity of earthquakes.

He categorizes wars according to this criterion in units of magnitude from 32

to 41 (that is, with deaths in the range of 3,160 to 31,160), from 5 1, 6 ? ? and 7 ? 1. Below magnitude 3? wars get very small and easy to overlook. He still counts them, but frequently queries the specific magnitudes and raises cautions that some may be missing.

Simply as a data-collection exercise, Richardson' s work is impressive. He did it on his own and without any research assistance. Moreover, the care with which he notes contradictory evidence and the importance he gives to classification mean that for a long time it was the most important and most reliable dataset, though available only on micro-film in the British Library until 1960. It has now been superseded by other collections of data,19 but this does not diminish its earlier importance.

There were other collections of data being built up at roughly the same time, notably by Quincy Wright. Richardson became aware of these and in the later

years he was less intellectually isolated than he had been earlier. In 'Is it Possible to Prove General Statements about Historical Fact?', published in 1952, he

compares his work with that of Quincy Wright, Sorokin and Toynbee,20 gently but clearly criticizing Toynbee for a lack of rigour in the testing of his numerous assertions. Quincy Wright is the person to whom he was closest, though Richardson has much higher standards of rigour both in the collection of data and the testing of hypotheses than Wright. It is clear, however, that each held the other in high esteem.

Richardson did much more than collect data. He carried out sophisticated statistical analyses of various propositions about war and its causes, asking, for

example, whether there was any periodicity in the starts of wars (he argued there

'9 A well-known dataset is the Correlates of War for which see J. David Singer and Melvin Small, Resort to Arms (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1982). See Claudio Cioffi-Revilla, The Scientific Measurement of International Conflict: Handbook of Data Sets on Crises and Wars 1495-1988

(Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Reiner, 1990), for a description of some more recent datasets. 20 Quincy Wright, A Study of War (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1942); Pitrim Sorokin,

Social and Cultural Dynamics (n.p.: American Book Co., 1937), A. J. Toynbee (abridged by D. C.

Somervell), A Study of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949).
































was not). He tested whether some nations (a word be uses almost invariably for 'state') are more war prone than others, whether some language groups are more prone and whether some religious groups are. Many of his results come up negatively, though he found that Spanish-speaking Catholics are somewhat more likely to go to war than other groups.

War Moods

A separate piece of work from the rest, though with strong similarities in methodology are the two papers on 'War Moods' in Psychometrica.21 Richardson proposes a model to explain the growth of enthusiasm for war and its decline during and after it as a response to war weariness. Again Richardson shows ingenuity and originality, though with less success. He suggests war moods are similar to epidemics and proposes an epidemiological model. He does not use any of the existing epidemiological models, though he cites Volterra who worked on such problems, but proposes his own. He argued that people's attitudes, or some of them, were contagious. Thus people could 'catch' or be 'infected by' the attitudes or opinions of other people they came in contact with, in much the same way as they catch infectious diseases. He posed a crude model of individuals in which their attitudes or mental states are divided into two, the overt and the covert. The covert is explicitly regarded as some sort of psychoanalytical unconscious. Though Richardson was the hardest of hard- nosed empirical investigators in his psychological work, he was quite open to concepts of the unconscious. There are other favourable passing references to psychoanalysis in his work. He postulates three attributes of people towards other nations: 'friendly', 'hostile' and 'war-weary' which appear in pairs. Thus 'friendly: hostile' means that people are overtly and consciously friendly but unconsciously hostile. However, only five of the nine possible pairings appear, though why is not clear. The five considered are:

friendly: friendly

friendly: hostile

hostile: friendly

hostile: war-weary

war-weary: hostile

People move from one category to another, encountering members of another category but the movements are not necessarily reversible. Thus a friendly: friendly can move into either friendly: hostile or hostile: friendly but the last two cannot move back to friendly: friendly. This is similar to disease, where sick people do not become healthy merely through mixing with healthy


War Moods


friendly: friendly

friendly: hostile

hostile: friendly

hostile: war-weary

war-weary: hostile



War Moods


friendly: friendly

friendly: hostile

hostile: friendly

hostile: war-weary

war-weary: hostile


21 Richardson, 'War Moods', Parts I and II. 21 Richardson, 'War Moods', Parts I and II. 21 Richardson, 'War Moods', Parts I and II.

551 551 551




people, whereas the reverse can happen. Richardson postulates sets of differential equations for the rates of change of the proportion in one category to the proportions themselves in other categories. This is done both in the person's own nation and that of the rival. Relating rates of change to levels of a variable leads to a set of differential equations which are closely parallel to the arms race equations. However, when the whole theory is put together we are faced with sets of non-linear differential equations which need simulation procedures to get time paths. This is a very 'Richardsonian' hypothesis. He seems to have retained his fascination for processes which can be represented by differential equations, again showing his physicist's background.

Richardson was particularly interested in applying this model to the beginning of the First World War. Unfortunately, the data was suggestive at best and Richardson by this time was too much of a skilled empirical investigator of the social scene not to be fully aware of this. It is not even clear what would be appropriate data. How would one distinguish between a friendly: friendly and a friendly: hostile? This issue is not considered. Subsequent investigations of war-weariness have concentrated on much more readily identifiable variables (such as what people say). Given that war moods can alter very quickly, even crude data to test a simplified version of this model would be difficult to get. To measure war moods at the time of the Falklands War, for example, would have required daily or near-daily measures of opinion. Even today, this is hard to come by except at elections.22 This, then, is Richardson in a speculative mood, somewhat akin to his first work in the area in 1919. What is interesting is the

style of the model. There is rigorous analysis but empirical testing, which is such a feature of most of the rest of Richardson's later work, is absent on this occasion.

RICHARDSON'S METHODOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT

One of the things that becomes clear in this collected edition of Richardson's work is how much his work developed and, in particular, how his methodology developed. In his 1919 monograph, the Mathematical Psychology of War,23 he

developed a complex theory of the causes of war involving a large number of

separately defined variables and constants. His summary of the theory involves

thirty equations which assert hypotheses and are not just definitional or

rearrangements of each other (though there are some overlaps). This is of great interest because of its wholly new approach to the study of war. The use of mathematics and formal, deductive systems had never before been used in this sort of context and it was to be almost three decades before it was to be used

again. While an obvious precursor of Richardson's later work, it fell into some

22 After the Falklands/Malvinas War the author had optimistically hoped to do just this, only to find that the available data was so sparse as to make the testing of a Richardson-style model almost

impossible. 23 Richardson, Mathematical Psychology of War.




























traps of which Richardson himself later became very aware. First, despite saying that 'entities are not to be postulated without necessity', Richardson, in this monograph, is promiscuous with his postulation of equations and variables for almost anything that might possibly be relevant. Secondly, it is a totally theoretical piece with no attempts to test it. This is as well. There are so many variables, many without obvious measure, that the theory is virtually untestable in practice. However, this is very different from the later Richardson, one of whose major contributions to international relations was as a pioneer in the testing as well as formulation of hypotheses. Finally, the Mathematical Psychology of War is a massive statement of various propositions in mathematical form but with few deductions. Again this differs from Richard- son's later theoretical work where powerful conclusions are drawn from a parsimonious set of assumptions. This is especially noticeable in the later arms-race (or hostility) work. Thus, there were to be major developments and improvements in his methodology. Mathematical Psychology of War is impressive for its originality, but in itself it is not a very useful piece. If this had been Richardson's only contribution, it would have been little more than a curiosity.

Richardson's next significant contribution to peace research was in 1935 with two short papers in Nature both called, like his earlier work 'The Mathematical Psychology of War'. In these, he implies he isjust summarizing the earlier work, but in fact he develops it. In the second paper, the first explicit statement of what became known as the Richardson equations appears. These contain the core of his theory of the arms race. In 1939 Cambridge University Press (though they required persuasion) published a major piece called Generalised Foreign Politics: A Study in Group Psychology as a monograph supplement to the British Journal of Psychology. This work is truly remarkable. It is much more impressive than the earlier Mathematical Psychology of War. The first piece was very original and very provocative but did not get very far in itself. However, Generalised Foreign Politics is a masterly tour de force in which a theory is posed with postulates and deductions and consequences drawn from this. It is a magnificent piece of social science in a period when such strictly worked-out theories, models and testing were still just developing in any area. Such methods were totally unknown in the field of international relations. Given when it was written, it was a work of genius - the word is used advisedly. It was the basis of his later monograph, Arms and Insecurity, which was published in microfilm and, after his death, in full book form. Though he was to develop his arms-race work further for the later monograph, the core of the work is here.

With the increased time he had available with his retirement, he turned his attention to data collection and data analysis. His major empirical work was done from 1940 on until his death in 1953, when he was still working on it and projecting further work. During these years he published numerous articles and short papers in such journals as Nature and statistical journals such as the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society and the Journal of the American Statistical Association. Most of this is material that appears in one form or







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another in his two books. The work is firmly in the methodological mode which had become explicit in the 1939 monograph, exhibiting this clear empiricist methodology in a pioneering way for the study of international relations.

We noted above that Richardson's work has a superficially deterministic ring. Richardson was sensitive to this. In one of his dialogues, a technique he uses from time to time in his writing, he replies to the objection of the critic that 'the equations are merely a description of what people would do if they did not stop to think' (Arms and Insecurity, p. 12). Just a few lines on he is even more explicit: 'The process described by the ensuing equations is not to be thought of as inevitable. It is what would occur if instinct and tradition were allowed to act uncontrolled' (italics in original), His work is of an 'if-then' nature where the 'then' is rigorously deduced from the 'if'. However, the 'if' is not inevitable, but to alter what follows from it, one has to know what caused it and what to put in its place. This is what Richardson was aiming to do and what all social scientists who are concerned with policy and are of this empiricist tendency aim for. The impression of determinism is increased in Richardson's case in that, for a lot of the time, he interprets the terms in his equations as relating to large groups of people. He is thus able to rely on statistical determinism in the formulation of his results even if there is not individual determinism. The work on war moods and most of the work in Statistics of Deadly Quarrels is clearly in this mode. The work on arms races is ambiguous. Inasmuch as the armaments are merely indicators of hostility, the variables that denote mass hostility, the model is an exercise in statistical determinism. Thus, if Richardson's 'ifs' are to be violated there must be a collective move to virtue, which seems improbable. Richardson seems to have favoured the hostility interpretation, which is why he might have thought of the decision-theory and game-theory approach as something very different from his own, even if he had known of it. However, many commentators have interpreted the model as an arms-race model in its own right, as I argued above. This makes the implications in terms of policy conceptually easier to formulate though not very easy in practice.

Richardson's interpretation of his work as an analysis of social phenomena in the mass rather than as anything which can be called a theory of decision is confirmed in a chapter in Arms and Insecurity, optimistically called 'Applica- tions to Practical Politics'. He imagines a dialogue between himself and a sceptic where he defends the status of his theory against the charge that Hitler and the Nazis planned for war and where the decisions can at best be regarded as those of an oligarchy. He argues that they are still effectively mass phenomena in that even autocratic leaders need to be supported by their populations. This may be so sometimes, but not for many states during the period since the Napoleonic Wars, which Richardson uses in his other studies. His model can be interpreted as a decision model just as easily, though not an optimising one, as in much of rational-choice theory, much less a strategic one, as in the theory of games. The theory can be interpreted as working through the consequences of a set of decision rules which are very plausible and could be derived from a set of optimizing assumptions. While theories involving non-optimizing decision










rules are less widespread in social science than rules derived from optimizing assumptions, they are perfectly acceptable (see Cyert and March, Simon).24 They are used in various contexts such as the behavioural theory of the firm. The model is more convincing as a decision-rule model than as a model of mass behaviour.

THE INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT OF RICHARDSON'S WORK

Richardson's work is strikingly 'modem' in tone and, apart from its idiosyncratic and often entertaining style, passes unnoticed for its methodology in any modem, behavioural analysis of the international system. By the time we get to Generalised Foreign Politics in 1939, his work is characterized by three features. First, propositions in international relations are formulated in a strict hypothetico-deductive form. Assumptions are made and deductions made from them. Secondly, Richardson formulated the propositions within the theory mathematically, thus increasing the deductive potential of the system. Thirdly, the propositions and deductions were tested or, at least, put in testable form. He regarded the issue of empirical testing as crucial. In this, Richardson was a good, moder empirical social scientist. Such an approach would go unremarked from the 1960s onwards but it was unusual at the time he was writing. Richardson was the first person to use it in international relations which makes his work remarkable. He was a good two decades ahead of the field in his methodology (and perhaps further ahead if we note that his mathematical and statistical rigour was beyond many of his successors). Furthermore he had a big influence on a group such as Deutsch,25 Rapoport26 and Boulding,27 who were to take up his sorts of ideas in the late 1950s and the early 1960s.

Though Richardson's methodology was novel as far as international relations was concerned, it was part of a trend towards the mathematization of whole areas of knowledge. Many theories have been formulated mathematically in fields which were earlier thought to be outside the scope of mathematical reasoning. A conspicuous case is biology. As early as 1917, D'Arcy Thompson published Growth and Form, a mathematical analysis of growth in form in biology.28 Lotka published Elements of Mathematical Biology in 1926.29 In the interwar and early post-war years J. B. S. Haldane was developing the application of sophisticated statistical techniques to biological phenomena.30 All this was a

24 Richard M. Cyert and James G. March, A Behavioral Theory of the Firm (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963); Herbert A. Simon, Models of Man (New York: Wiley, 1957).

25 Karl Deutsch, Nerves of Government (New York: The Free Press, 1964). 26

Rapoport, Fights, Games, Debates. 27

Boulding, Conflict and Defense. 28

D'Arcy Thomson, Growth and Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917). 29 Alfred J. Lotka, Elements of Mathematical Biology (New York: Dover, 1926). 30 J. B. S. Haldane's work, along with his vast bibliography of both technical and popular work,

is discussed in Ronald Clark, JBS: The Life and Work ofJ. B. S. Haldane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).





















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part of the development of testable and tested hypothetico-deductive models in biology, using mathematics. The problems facing biologists seemed to need more powerful methodologies and techniques which would exploit to the full the deductive implications of the systems they were looking at.

In the social sciences this was becoming more marked, particularly in economics. There had been some powerful mathematical analysis of economic systems in the nineteenth century. Cournot31 and Walras were conspicuous (though Walras was not translated into English until 1954, which, for Richardson, might have been a deterrent).32 Subsequent analysis had deviated somewhat from Cournot's austere path, but economic theories were frequently expressed in diagrammatic form at least. There was a strong mathematical background to the work of economists such as Marshall as we see by looking at the mathematical appendices to his Principles of Economics.33 Econometrica was founded in 1936 explicitly to promote the development of both mathematical and statistical economics. Psychometrica had been going for much longer. However, while measurement and statistical testing of hypotheses had been to the forefront in individual psychology, mathematical modelling was less a feature. In the early post-war period Rashevsky was producing his highly original mathematical analyses of social, biological and other affairs.34 Rashevsky has not had much influence on mathematical social sciences other than as a provider of intellectual excitement and scepticism in approximately equal doses. He seems to have had none on Richardson.

The application of mathematical models to a whole range of phenomena, and in particular social phenomena, was going on apace at the time Richardson was

working in a similar way. It is tempting to say that Richardson was part of this tradition. However, he seemed largely unaware of it. He was part of the movement in terms of his later influence, but he was not a self-conscious member of any school of mathematizers. There is no reference to mathematical

biology. There are references to other statistical work on wars (of which more later) but he was unaware of the development of the mathematical social sciences outside psychology. He refers to Marshall on various occasions as a source of economic data and ideas but there is no reference to someone like Courot, whose approach to economics he would have found congenial. More

unfortunately, he was not in touch with the econometricians and mathematical economists of the time who were developing this approach to economics. The

31 A. A. Courot, Researches into the Mathematical Principles of a Theory of Wealth, trans. N. T. Bacon (London: Macmillan, 1899; reprinted, 1929; first published in French, 1838).

32 L. Walras, Elements of Pure Economics, trans. W. Jaffe (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1954; first published in French, 1874-77).

33 Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics (London: Macmillan, 1897). Marshall had been second wrangler in 1865 at Cambridge (that is, he got the second-best result in mathematics in his

year). 34 Nicolas Rashevsky, A Mathematical Theory of Human Relations (Bloomington, Ind.: Prinapin

Press, 1948), and The Mathematical Biology of Social Behavior (Ann Arbor: Chicago University Press, 1951, 2nd edn, 1959). Rashevsky was one of the editors of Arms and Insecurity.


























problems of data and statistical analysis which Richardson faced so clearly were problems shared by him and by the econometricians. Communication would have been to the benefit of both.

THE IMPACT OF RICHARDSON'S WORK: WAS RICHARDSON

NEGLECTED?

The reasons why Richardson was unaware of what other mathematical social scientists were doing, and they of him, are neither particularly difficult to find nor sinister when found. In the context that Richardson found himself in, there was no reason for him to come across such people, and awareness of related work, such as that of Quincy Wright, depended on either chance meetings or chance readings. This is the way people often find out about work that is not in their own direct line of interest. Richardson was not working in a university where such work might have been being done. Even if he had been, the departmental structure, much stricter then than now, might have meant he would still be in ignorance of it. There were few enough social scientists interested in mathematical methods. After his retirement in 1940 he worked on his own at home. This, compounded by the Second World War, meant an almost inevitable isolation. Few social scientists, of whatever inclination, would have had the time for speculative discourse on any topics even on the causes of war. The slow acceptance of Richardson's work is not very surprising. It was outside the mainstream tradition in international relations or even of the tradition's tributaries.

The barriers to its acceptance in the international relations community inasmuch as it existed at the time is even less surprising. Few people before 1939 were identified as international relations specialists. There was a chair in Aberystwyth and a chair at the London School of Economics. The Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House was a major institution, even in those days, with several research workers. However, the field was small. More to the point, it was largely a historian's world with a niche for the lawyers. Few had any knowledge of mathematics or indeed of the scientific method as strictly construed by Richardson. Most of Richardson's work would have been incomprehensible. By training and temperament, few in the field would have had much sympathy with such an approach and fewer would have been technically equipped to follow the work. Richardson recognized that there were problems raised by a mathematical approach and that it needed justification. In a paper to the British Psychological Society in 1939 he writes an amusing though essentially serious dialogue between himself and imagined opponent on the validity of using mathematics. In his first paper there is a section called 'an apology for the use of mathematics'. However, having apologized and justified, he makes few concessions to those who lack facility with differential equations. This is, of course, legitimate inasmuch as these were necessary to establish results and do the necessary tests. These are research papers and addressed to a research community - unfortunately, almost non-existent at the time. But it



NEGLECTED?





NEGLECTED?



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is not surprising that it takes time to spread to the wider research community, who were not equipped with the appropriate methodology, nor, given the earlier development of the subject, was there any reason why they should have been.

Richardson's thought was not much influenced by other social scientists at least until 1941 when he became aware of Quincy Wright's work.35 As far as his own intellectual influence is concerned, the story is more complicated. The traditional tale told by his admirers is that his work was ignored during his lifetime and that this reflects a curious indifference to such work in the academic community.36 It is true that initially his work in peace research had little impact either on the international relations community or on the broader community of the social scientists, even those who were interested in mathematical and statistical social sciences. However, we should look at the timing of the work as well as at the work itself and the structure of the academic community. The delay in the recognition of Richardson's work is less than is sometimes thought and the charge of 'neglected in his own lifetime' is true but misleading.

As noted above, Richardson's first highly original piece, The Mathematical Psychology of War, was published in 1919. This was ignored and it was a pity that it was so. However, in the intellectual context of 1919 it is not surprising. The world is full of ignored papers which, if appreciated, would have speeded up academic progress. There is then a big gap between this and 1935 when he

published his two short papers in Nature also called 'The Mathematical

Psychology of War'. The papers were short and the developments natural. An

applied mathematician of Richardson's skill is unlikely to have spent very long on them. Thus, it was sixteen years after the publication of his earlier work before he again published in peace research. Nor does it seem that he was

working but not publishing. Outside meteorology, his research interests were in psychology. It is hard to escape the conclusion that Richardson himself did not think the development of his work in peace research was urgent. If even he did not, then it is not surprising that others were not eager to carry the banner. He neither developed the work scientifically nor sought to expound it in a more

popular and accessible form. The original monograph itself, at a little under 20,000 words, was a very awkward length. It was too long for an academic article, even if an appropriate journal had existed, but too short for a book. There is no evidence that Richardson thought of rewriting it to make it more appealing either to book publishers or journal editors. Richardson must have been aware of the issue. He was not an unworldly academic: as a successful director of the

geophysical observatory, he must have acquired many worldly skills. He was also an experienced academic writer who was fully aware of the practical issues of publication. He must have decided not to pursue things, or, at least, he must have put them low on his list of priorities.

The lack of urgency may have come from the spirit of the times. The 1920s were not wholly peaceful years but it was reasonable to hope that the First World





















35 Quincy Wright, A Study of War, 2 vols. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1942).

36 The author held this view until the preparation of this article.








War had been an aberration. It was during the 1930s that the world became a much more sinister place and a scientific understanding of peace and war more necessary. Under the threat and then the actuality of the Second World War, Richardson returned energetically to peace research and made the developments for which he is justly so renowned.

In choosing Nature as the vehicle for his return to peace research and for many of his subsequent shorter papers, Richardson directed his work to a very particular audience. While Nature is extremely prestigious and widely read amongst natural scientists, few social scientists read it. It is unlikely that anyone working on arms races and the like at the time would have thought of looking there. Richardson was presumably aware of this and was knowingly addressing a limited public. However, from then, Richardson's work in peace research gathered momentum and became the central part of his life.

With Richardson's renewed interest and with the publication of the path-breaking Generalised Foreign Politics, his work began slowly to be noticed. The beginning of the Second World War was an unfortunate time to be producing highly original works on anything, even the causes of war. Thus the delay in noting it is not very surprising. However, it did have some impact and was read by Quincy Wright, who was preparing his two-volume A Study of War in Chicago at the time. This was published in 1942 and suffered the same fate as Richardson's work did initially (and for that matter von Neumann and Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, which was first published in 1944). People were too busy and preoccupied to read it during the war. Quincy Wright refers to Richardson's work frequently and was clearly influenced by it. The influence was reciprocal and, though the two never met, they corresponded frequently until Richardson's death. Quincy Wright was one of the editors of Arms and Insecurity and Statistics of Deadly Quarrels.

In the period after the war, Richardson made more efforts to draw his work to the attention of social scientists, though they were still not strenuous. He published an account of his work, adding some work on the pacifying effect of intermarriage in the Eugenics Review in 1950. Also in 1950 he contributed two chapters to T. H. Pear's Psychological Factors of Peace and War.37 In 1952 he published an account, referred to above, in the British Journal of Sociology, which was rather misleadingly called 'Is It Possible to Prove Any General Statements about Historical Fact?' (Oddly, for a fluent and often entertaining writer, Richardson frequently gave his papers poor and misleading titles.)

For a decade or so after the war it is disappointing that there was not a more rapid acceptance of the usefulness of Richardson's approach. However, given the context, the impact of his work was not outrageously slow in developing. The picture of Richardson as the neglected genius has only partial validity.











37 T. H. Pear ed., Psychological Factors of Peace and War (London: Hutchison, 1950), chaps. x and xI.



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RICHARDSON'S POSTHUMOUS IMPACT

Richardson's death in 1953 and the rapid increase in the impact of his work roughly coincided. A major step in broadening the awareness of Richardson's work came in 1956 when Newman reprinted the two chapters Richardson had contributed to Pear's book, mentioned above, in the widely read World of Mathematics.38 Shortly afterward, Anatol Rapoport wrote a lengthy paper in the Journal of Conflict Resolution called 'Lewis Fry Richardson's Mathematical Theory of War'.39 This journal, which started in 1956, was the professional journal devoted to the explicit social scientific approach to conflict, whose absence Richardson had noted when wondering what to do with his original Mathematical Psychology of War in 1919. In the United States, the spread of his influence then became explosive in the context of the development of behavioural international relations and peace research. It explicitly influenced earlier approaches to it, notably in Rapoport's Fights, Games and Debates and

Boulding's Conflict and Defense. Both these books were widely influential and it is through them that Richardson's work became widely known and influenced a broad range of scholars.

Richardson's posthumous influence came about because, at last, the intellectual environment was congenial to such work. When he was working, hardly anyone interested in the substantive problems which concerned him had

any sympathy with or awareness of the significance of what was then a

revolutionary methodology. Even in the immediate post-war years, the

constituency remained small and uncertain. The same fate initially befell the

theory of games, which became widely known amongst political scientists and international relations specialists only with the publication of the books of

Rapoport and Boulding along with the work of Thomas Schelling.40 There are a number of reasons why the constituency grew for the sort of work

done by Richardson. There were major methodological developments within

political science and international relations which led to there being a significant group of people who were technically equipped to appreciate Richardson's work. Social scientists as a whole were becoming less concerned about their traditional borders. Thus, Boulding was an economist and Rapoport a mathematician who had worked as a mathematical biologist (amongst other

things). Scholars of political science, such as Karl Deutsch and Herbert Simon (who started as a political scientist), were becoming prominent and advocating more rigorous methodologies in theory statement and testing. This was not true before.

The 1950s and 1960s were times where work of Richardson's genre could flourish as it did, being to some measure a cause and a consequence of the spirit

38 James R. Newman, The World of Mathematics, 4 vols. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956). 39 Anatol Rapoport, 'Lewis Fry Richardson's Mathematical Theory of War', Journal of Conflict

Resolution, 1 (1957), 249-99. 40 Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,

1960).
















1960).
















1960).




of the social scientific age. They were times of rational optimism for social scientists in general. Keynesian economics seemed to have solved unemploy- ment, one of the greatest problems of capitalist systems. This is ironic in the light of future developments of market systems. Economic growth seemed as if, in the long run, it would alleviate the poverty of the Third World. Social science seemed to be developing along a path of cumulative knowledge which would lead to the improvement of the way we live. The development of empiricist modes in the philosophy of science during the 1930s and post-war period seemed to justify this sort of approach. Even the major negative feature of the period, the Cold War, with its perpetual latent promise of becoming a hot one, seemed to favour a positive attitude to peace research. Finally, the computer gave scholars more confidence that the complexity of social systems could be tackled. In this context, Richardson's work became very appealing. He became an acknowledged father of the discipline as much for his methodology as for his results as such. He developed a procedure for generating knowledge which, in a still infant discipline, is as important as the knowledge itself.

Richardson's influence has always been primarily in the United States. In Britain, where he lived and worked all his life, many still regard him as a minor figure.41 The academic and intellectual situation was rather different in the two cases. The success of operational research methods in the Second World War had given a great deal of impetus to the use of mathematical methods by bodies sympathetic to the US government, notably RAND. For the North Americans, Richardson' s work had the merit of also being rigorous, while clearly orientated towards peace. Important in the context of the post-war years, it was also clearly non-Marxist.42 This attracted a breed of scholar which was both technically proficient and committed to scientific procedures but broadly idealistic and eager for a peaceful world. The work could not be sneered at as covert Marxism. Richardson's work showed that there were alternative uses of mathematics and that mathematical methods and statistical methods in themselves were neutral.

Non-Marxist credentials were not necessary in Europe and Britain in particular. Indeed, at the time of Vietnam, Marxist approaches to the social sciences and peace issues were very popular. However, this is not the whole story. Richardson's appeal is not just that his methods were non-Marxist. Indeed, there is no particular reason why they should not be incorporated into a Marxist framework. In Britain, there is a greater distrust of the use of mathematical and statistical methods in the social sciences outside economics and parts of psychology. The behavioural movement in political science in general was much more muted in Britain than the United States and this was even truer of international relations. It is noticeable that elsewhere in Europe most formally and empirically minded scholars have spent significant periods

41 The Richardson Institute for Peace Research at the University of Lancaster, founded in London in 1970 on the basis of the Peace Research Centre in Lancaster, is to some extent a counter to this. The institute returned to Lancaster as a part of the university in 1978, where it remains.

42 I am indebted to Phil Schrodt for this point.











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562 NICHOLSON

in the United States. For some reason, even while the university system was expanding in the context of the vogue for inter-disciplinarity in the 1960s, the boundaries between disciplines seemed stronger than in the United States. In particular, the links between mathematically based subjects and non-mathematically based subjects were never really made. Scholars trained in historically based disciplines were effectively barred from understanding such work as that of Richardson (who, admittedly, made few concessions to his readers' mathematical limitations). Whatever the reasons, no one at the major centres of international relations in Britain such as Oxford and the London School of Economics ever took mathematical and statistical methods seriously and no

significant work of this sort came out of them.

RICHARDSON, PEACE RESEARCH AND POLICY

Ethical concerns were behind Richardson's work on the issues of war and peace. However, he was not particularly concerned with immediate policy. The most

plausible interpretation is that he did not think that the work as done so far had immediate direct policy implications and the development of a science of war causation was a necessary preliminary to a more effective strategy of reducing and eliminating war. In this he showed modesty. Most scholars are all too ready to advocate policy on the basis of weakly confirmed theories. However, this is

supposition. Richardson does not write directly on this, but, given his ethical

presuppositions, it is not very clear what the point of doing this work would be if he did not think it laid the foundation of more effective policy. However, it is a long way from the peace activist and constitutes an aspect of a long-term programme. Richardson was not involved in politics and did not participate in the peace movements of either the inter-war or the post-war years, as many Quakers did. He was primarily a scholar. He occasionally wrote for The Friend on such things as his visit to Danzig in 1938 in the middle of the Danzig Crisis. This visit, though an interesting sign that he was to some extent concerned in the practicalities of the day, was scarcely a serious political involvement. Nuclear weapons, perhaps surprisingly, rate no mention in his academic work. Ashford reports a letter from him43 which suggests he was dismissive of the

concept of deterrence (which in fact is never mentioned in either nuclear or non-nuclear forms) and thought his equations were adequate to cope with nuclear weapons as an aspect of the arms race. Richardson's first commitment was to the truth and, though he had occasional doubts, he seemed to believe that the assertion of truth is ultimately beneficial. This was the underlying motivation for his work in peace research.

This puts him as a founder of one tradition in peace research. This is the tradition that argues that our knowledge of how people behave in international

systems is still sparse. There is still much to find out about the causes of war

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562 NICHOLSON











43 Ashford, Prophet - or Professor? p. 224. 43 Ashford, Prophet - or Professor? p. 224. 43 Ashford, Prophet - or Professor? p. 224.



Review Article: Lewis Fry Richardson and Causes of War 563

and the conditions of peace. This was even more true in Richardson's time, though we cannot claim to have advanced very far since, despite the research that has been done since then. For many people, peace research consists of finding the answers to such questions. However, it is of value only if it is to be conducted according to high standards of scientific rigour. It will help in producing peace only if its propositions are true. In this respect it is analogous to medical research. Though Richardson does not say anything explicitly about this, both his moral goals and his academic rigour make it fair to impute such a view to him. There is another view that peace research should be an adjunct of an activist peace movement and in this respect it would be more like the work done by the research department of a political party. Its basic role is persuasive. Both in presentation and more particularly the choices of topics for research, its goals are dictated by the need for persuasion rather than the investigation of propositions which might well turn out to be false in ideologically inconvenient ways. Political campaigning, and campaigning for peace in particular, is a perfectly honourable activity. It requires such research but it is very different from the peace research of Richardson's sort. It is the first tradition in which he worked and which, though inadvertently, he can be said to have created.







lewis fry richardson and the study of the causes of war

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