Kenneth W. Thompson

Who was Kenneth W. Thompson?

Kenneth W. Thompson was an American academic and author known for his contributions to normative theory in international relations. In 1978 he became director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. He retired as director in 1998, but continued to head its Forum Program until 2004.

Thompson received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1950 and taught there and at Northwestern University from 1949 to 1955. He resumed teaching at the University of Virginia in 1975. Between 1955 and 1975, he worked in the area of institutional philanthropy, becoming Vice President for International Programs at the Rockefeller Foundation.

He helped to organize eight national commissions on topics ranging from presidential disability to the selection of federal judges.

Thompson's Principles and Problems of International Politics, a volume of readings co-edited with his mentor, Hans Morgenthau, provided the intellectual guidelines for his thinking through the succeeding four decades. Primary among these guidelines is a reliance on history. Thompson has seen himself as part of the influential tradition of political realism, the heir of the thought of Morgenthau and Reinhold Niebuhr, and the sustainer of the subsequent generation of scholars. He organized and coedited the innovative seventh edition of Politics among Nations released by McGraw Hill.