A fervent admirer of Charles de Gaulle, he maintained a rather old-fashioned belief in the power of personality on the political stage and the ability of forceful leaders to determine the course of events. “The conflicts, the compromises, the rules and the institutions of world politics result from the moves of statesmen; and therefore the study of their character, of their ideas and of their style is essential,” he wrote.

Mr. Hoffmann was a frequent contributor to journals like Foreign Policy, The New York Review of Books and The New Republic, in whose pages he articulated his growing concerns about American foreign policy; its ambitions and shortcomings had been a source of concern to him since the days of the Kennedy administration.

In books like “Gulliver’s Troubles: Or, the Setting of American Foreign Policy” (1968) and “Primacy or World Order: American Foreign Policy Since the Cold War” (1978), he took a skeptical look at the ideological imperatives driving America’s foreign policy, a constant theme in his writing that eventually, he admitted, wore him out. “Being a permanent denouncer of recurrent mistakes is, after a while, no fun,” he wrote.

Instead, he turned his attention to Europe and the evolving European Union, whose prospects he regarded askance, in numerous essays collected in “The European Sisyphus: Essays on Europe, 1964-1994” (1995). In “Duties Beyond Borders” (1981), he considered both the limits and the potential of an ethical foreign policy.

Stanley Hoffmann was born on Nov. 27, 1928, in Vienna. He was taken to Nice a year later by his mother after she separated from his father, an American who returned to the United States. They moved to Neuilly in 1936, only to be forced back south by the German invasion.

Mr. Hoffmann graduated at the top of his class at the Institut d’Études Politiques in 1948, but as a foreign citizen he could not take competitive examinations for the Civil Service or for admission to the newly created École Nationale d’Administration, the gateway to a diplomatic career. He studied international law instead, eventually publishing a doctoral thesis on the veto rights of the major powers in the United Nations. He later deemed it “quite unreadable.”

In 1951, he spent a year as a visiting graduate student at Harvard’s government department, where his fellow students included Zbigniew Brzezinski, Judith N. Shklar and Samuel Huntington, and where he became a protégé of McGeorge Bundy, a professor in the department.