Joseph Nye

Joseph Samuel Nye Jr. (January 19, 1937 – May 6, 2025) was an American political scientist. He and Robert Keohane co-founded the international relations theory of neoliberalism, which they developed in their 1977 book Power and Interdependence. Together with Keohane, he developed the concepts of asymmetrical and complex interdependence. They also explored transnational relations and world politics in an edited volume in the 1970s. More recently, he pioneered the theory of soft power. His notion of "smart power" ("the ability to combine hard and soft power into a successful strategy") became popular with the use of this phrase by members of the Clinton Administration and the Obama Administration.

Nye was the Dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where he later held the position of University Distinguished Service Professor, emeritus. In October 2014, US Secretary of State John Kerry appointed Nye to the Foreign Affairs Policy Board. He was also a member of the Defense Policy Board. He was a Harvard faculty member since 1964. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a foreign fellow of the British Academy, and a member of the American Academy of Diplomacy.

The 2011 Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) survey of over 1,700 international relations scholars ranked Nye as the sixth most influential scholar in the field of international relations in the past 20 years. He was also ranked as one of the most influential figures in American foreign policy. In 2011, Foreign Policy magazine included him on its list of top global thinkers. In September 2014, Foreign Policy reported that international relations scholars and policymakers ranked Nye as one of the field's most influential scholars.

Nye was born in South Orange, New Jersey, the third of four children born to Joseph, a bond trader and equities firm lead; and Else Ashwell Nye. Joseph Sr. did not graduate high school or college, but Else was a college graduate. Joseph Jr. had two older sisters and a younger sister. For most of his youth, the family resided on a 100-acre (40 ha) farm in New Vernon, New Jersey.

He attended Morristown Prep (later the Morristown–Beard School) in Morristown, New Jersey, graduating in 1954. He then attended Princeton University, also in New Jersey, where he was vice president of the Colonial Club, a columnist for The Daily Princetonian, and a member of the American Whig–Cliosophic Society's Debate Panel. He graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in history in 1958. His senior thesis was Death of a Family Firm: An Entrepreneurial History of the American Preserve Company. Nye was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and won the Myron T. Herrick Thesis Prize.^{[citation needed]} He was among 32 students selected as a Rhodes Scholar and chose to attend Oxford University's Exeter College, where he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE).

In 1964, he obtained his PhD in political science from Harvard University, studying under Henry Kissinger and J. K. Galbraith. Nye's doctoral dissertation was on regional integration in East Africa.

In 1964, the same year Nye received his doctorate, he joined the Harvard faculty. He was Director of the Center for Science and International Affairs at John F. Kennedy School of Government from 1985 to 1990 and was Associate Dean for International Affairs at Harvard from 1989 to 1992. In 1968, he became the Carnegie Endowment International Peace Scholar and taught at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Nye also was Director of the Center for International Affairs at Harvard from 1989 to 1993 and Dean of John F. Kennedy School of Government from 1995 to 2004. Nye was a University Distinguished Service Professor, emeritus.

Nye and his colleague Keohane have been characterized as key figures in the development of a discipline of international political economy, largely as a result of their authorship of Power and Interdependence. Nye's influences include Karl Deutsch and Ernst Hass.