Karl Deutsch Dies

Karl Wolfgang Deutsch, Stanfield Professor Emeritus of International Peace, died Sunday morning at his home in Cambridge. He was 80.

Deutsch, who taught at Harvard from 1967 to 1985, was a former president of both the American Political Science Association and of the International Political Science Association.

He was heralded as a pioneer in the formulation of mathematical and cybernetic approaches to the study of politics. The academic was one of the first scholars to assemble data on population movements, language asimilation, and the flow of such international transactions as trade and mail.

Born in 1912 in Prague, Czechoslovakia, Deutsch became a leader of the Liberal Democratic section of the German student movement fighting the rise of Nazism at Charles University in Prague.

Deutsch arrived in the United States in 1938. He worked with the OSS during World War II and participated in the 1945 San Francisco Conference that created the United Nations Organization.

After the war, Deutsch returned to Boston and started teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1945. He remained there until 1956, also earning his doctorate from Harvard in 1951. He taught at Yale University from 1957-67 before moving to Harvard.

Deutsch wrote seven textbooks and helped to found institutions for the collection of cross-national data and global modeling, including the International Institute for Comparative Social Research of the Science Center in Berlin.

Known by students and colleagues as an outstanding lecturer to both graduate and undergraduate classes, Deutsch was awarded the William Benton Prize of the Yale Political Union in 1965 for stimulating and maintaining political interest on campus.

Over the years, he received six honorary degrees from American and European universities and was once decorated by the German government with the highest merit it bestows on foreign citizens.

After his retirement from Harvard in 1985, he became a presidential fellow at the Carter Center and served as a visiting professor at Emory University in Atlanta.

Deutsch is survived by his wife, Ruth, daughters Mary Edsall and Margaret Carroll, and three grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at 3 p.m. on November 20, in Memorial Church.