George Catlin (political scientist)

Sir George Edward Gordon Catlin (29 July 1896 – 8 February 1979) was an English political scientist and philosopher. A strong proponent of Anglo-America cooperation, he worked for many years as a professor at Cornell University and other universities and colleges in the United States and Canada. He preached the use of a natural science model for political science. McMaster University Libraries hold his correspondence archive and the body of some of his works. His daughter is Shirley Williams.

Catlin was born in Liverpool, the son of an Anglican clergyman. He was educated at St Paul's School, and New College, Oxford. It was here that he converted to Roman Catholicism after his wartime hiatus.

He volunteered for military service in the early months of the First World War, but was rejected, and spent most of the war working for the liquor traffic department of the Central Control Board. However, he became a soldier in the last months of the war, fighting on the Western Front in Belgium.

After the war he received his M.A. at Oxford and won three major prizes, including the Gladstone Prize and the Matthew Arnold prize in 1921 for his essay on the political thought of Thomas Hobbes entitled Thomas Hobbes as Philosopher, Publicist and Man of Letters. He took up the relatively new field of political science. This was better established in the USA and at the invitation of the historian Wallace Notestein he began lecturing at Cornell University where he had the close association of Carl Becker. There he completed his doctoral thesis, published in 1926 entitled The Science and Method of Politics. This was followed in 1929 by A Study of the Principles of Politics. He was an Assistant Professor of Politics at Cornell by the age of 28 and subsequently twice Acting Chairman. In 1926 he was appointed to be the director of the National Commission (Social Research Council) to study the impact of prohibition in the United States. His conclusions were subsequently published as a book.

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