Abstract

The unorthodox German historian Eckart Kehr published in 1931 his study of the politics of the building of the German navy; against the historicist view of the primacy of foreign policy, he argued the primacy of domestic politics. Largely rejected in Germany, Kehr's ideas strongly reinforced Charles Beard's growing belief that the United States should disengage itself from foreign economic and political relations as far as possible; Beard even made his own study of U.S. Navy politics, with conclusions like Kehr's. By the late 1930s, however, both Beard's preoccupation with historical relativism and his political activism led him to abandon the belief that external policies could be explained as resulting from domestic pressures