Quincy Wright

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Philip Quincy Wright (28 December 1890 – 17 October 1970). Born in Medford, Massachusetts, he joined the department of social sciences at the University of Chicago in 1923. At that time, the horrors of the World War I were foremost in thoughts of many social scientists and soon after his arrival, Quincy Wright started to organize an interdisciplinary study of wars. This effort resulted in over 40 theses and dissertations and 10 books. Quincy Wright summarized this research in his magnum opus A Study of War. Karl Deutsch of the Harvard University remembers Quincy Wright as follows:

War, to be abolished, must be understood. To be understood, it must be studied. No one man worked with more sustained care, compassion, and level-headedness on the study of war, its causes, and its possible prevention than Quincy Wright. He did so for nearly half a century, not only as a defender of man's survival, but as a scientist. He valued accuracy, facts, and truth more than any more appealing or preferred conclusions; and in his great book, A Study of War, he gathered, together with his collaborators, a larger body of relevant facts, insights, and far-ranging questions about war than anyone else has done.

Quincy Wright study of warfare inspired many social scientists and his database of wars is an indispensable resource for anyone seriously interested in quantitiative studies of human conflicts.

His brothers were the geneticist Sewall Wright and the aeronautical engineer Theodore Paul Wright.