Minha homenagem a ele está sintetizada no título desta postagem: o anti-Kissinger, não no sentido em que ele se opunha ao que Kissinger pensava como intelectual, mas ao Kissinger do poder, uma fascinação que Hoffmann nunca teve, mas que era uma obsessão para seu colega germano-americano.
Uma grande admiração e meu sentimento pela morte dessa grande intelectual.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
BOOKS
Stanley Hoffmann, Who Brought Passion to Foreign Policy Analysis, Dies at 86
His death was confirmed by his wife and only immediate survivor, Inge Schneier Hoffmann, who said he died in his sleep either late Saturday or early Sunday.
Mr. Hoffmann, who taught at Harvard for more than half a century, roamed freely across the disciplines of history, international law, sociology and political science to address pressing issues in international relations and foreign policy, particularly the relations between France and the United States, the nations he knew best.
Writing in French and English, he brought a passionate engagement to questions that grew out of his early experiences in the Europe of the 1930s and ’40s.
“It wasn’t I who chose to study world politics,” he wrote in an autobiographical essay in 1993. “World politics forced themselves on me at a very early age.”
On June 12, 1940, two days before the German Army entered Paris, Mr. Hoffmann, who was Austrian by birth and partly Jewish by heritage, fled with his mother to the south of France from their home in the fashionable suburb Neuilly. Thus ended his idyllic childhood.
On returning to Paris in 1945, he entered the Institut d’Études Politiques in a quest to understand the forces that had shaped the world in the 20th century.
“It wasn’t simply the discovery of the way in which public affairs take over private lives, in which individual fates are blown around like leaves in a storm once history strikes, that had marked me forever,” he wrote. “It was also a purely personal sense of solidarity with the other victims of history and Hitler with whom we had shared this primal experience of free fall.”
In a series of works regarded as models of clarity and analytic sophistication, notably “International Organizations and the Political Power of States” (1954) and “The State of War: Essays on the Theory and Practice of International Politics” (1965), Mr. Hoffmann explored the ways nations and leaders make policy, and the role of international law and organizations in world affairs.
A fervent admirer of Charles de Gaulle, he maintained a rather old-fashioned belief in the power of personality on the political stage and the ability of forceful leaders to determine the course of events. “The conflicts, the compromises, the rules and the institutions of world politics result from the moves of statesmen; and therefore the study of their character, of their ideas and of their style is essential,” he wrote.
Mr. Hoffmann was a frequent contributor to journals like Foreign Policy, The New York Review of Books and The New Republic, in whose pages he articulated his growing concerns about American foreign policy; its ambitions and shortcomings had been a source of concern to him since the days of the Kennedy administration.
In books like “Gulliver’s Troubles: Or, the Setting of American Foreign Policy” (1968) and “Primacy or World Order: American Foreign Policy Since the Cold War” (1978), he took a skeptical look at the ideological imperatives driving America’s foreign policy, a constant theme in his writing that eventually, he admitted, wore him out. “Being a permanent denouncer of recurrent mistakes is, after a while, no fun,” he wrote.
Instead, he turned his attention to Europe and the evolving European Union, whose prospects he regarded askance, in numerous essays collected in “The European Sisyphus: Essays on Europe, 1964-1994” (1995). In “Duties Beyond Borders” (1981), he considered both the limits and the potential of an ethical foreign policy.
Stanley Hoffmann was born on Nov. 27, 1928, in Vienna. He was taken to Nice a year later by his mother after she separated from his father, an American who returned to the United States. They moved to Neuilly in 1936, only to be forced back south by the German invasion.
Mr. Hoffmann graduated at the top of his class at the Institut d’Études Politiques in 1948, but as a foreign citizen he could not take competitive examinations for the Civil Service or for admission to the newly created École Nationale d’Administration, the gateway to a diplomatic career. He studied international law instead, eventually publishing a doctoral thesis on the veto rights of the major powers in the United Nations. He later deemed it “quite unreadable.”
In 1951, he spent a year as a visiting graduate student at Harvard’s government department, where his fellow students included Zbigniew Brzezinski, Judith N. Shklar and Samuel Huntington, and where he became a protégé of McGeorge Bundy, a professor in the department.
After military service in France, Mr. Hoffmann was invited back to Harvard by Mr. Bundy to be an instructor. And there he remained, earning tenure only four years after arriving. He became an American citizen in 1960.
At Harvard, he founded the social studies program and, in 1969, joined with Henry Kissinger, David Landes and Guido Goldman to found the Center for European Studies. He was the center’s chairman until 1995.
In addition to his works in English on international relations, Mr. Hoffmann wrote many books on specifically French subjects, including “Le Mouvement Poujade” (1956), on the populist, anti-tax Poujade movement of the 1950s; “Decline or Renewal? France Since the 1930s” (1974); and “Sur la France” (1976).
The challenges posed by the post-Sept. 11 world and American military involvement in the Middle East motivated him to return to American foreign policy in “America Goes Backward” (2004), “Gulliver Unbound: America’s Imperial Temptation and the War in Iraq” (2004), written with Frédéric Bozo, and “Chaos and Violence: What Globalization, Failed States, and Terrorism Mean for U.S. Foreign Policy” (2006).
Unlike Mr. Kissinger, his Harvard colleague, and Mr. Brzezinski, his former fellow student, Mr. Hoffmann avoided the role of counselor to government leaders. He once wrote that he regarded political influence with dread rather than desire.
“I study power so as to understand the enemy,” he explained, “not so as better to be able to exert it.”
Correction: September 16, 2015
An obituary on Monday about the political scientist and foreign-affairs analyst Stanley Hoffmann referred incorrectly to McGeorge Bundy, of whom Mr. Hoffman became a protégé when he was a visiting graduate student at Harvard’s government department in 1951. Mr. Bundy was a professor in the department, not its chairman. The obituary also misstated part of the name of the graduate school that is considered the gateway to a diplomatic career in France. It is the École Nationale d’Administration, not the École Normale d’Administration. And it misstated Mr. Hoffmann’s birth date. It was Nov. 27, 1928 — not Nov. 28.
Iman Stevenson contributed reporting. A version of this article appears in print on September 14, 2015, on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Stanley Hoffmann, 86; Explored Foreign Policy.
