The American political scientist Karl Wolfgang Deutsch (1912-1992) was ranked among the foremost social scientists of the post-World War II era. Few, if any, other thinkers in this field attained his level of intellectual originality, professional importance, and peer-group recognition.

Karl Wolfgang Deutsch was born to German-speaking parents in 1912 in Prague, Czechoslovakia. His father Martin was an optician while his mother Maria (Scharf) was deeply involved in domestic and international political causes, eventually leading her to become one of Czechoslovakia's first woman parliamentarians. Young Deutsch graduated from the German Staatsrealgymnasium in Prague with high honors in 1931, whereupon he entered Prague's German university, completing his first degree there in 1934.

His continued studies at the same university were interrupted due to Deutsch's active opposition to the increasingly dominant Nazi presence which beset this university's faculty and student body by the mid-to-late 1930s. After a sojourn in England where Deutsch studied...