Hans Morgenthau

Hans Morgenthau

Morgenthau in 1963
Born February 17, 1904
Coburg, Germany
Died July 19, 1980(1980-07-19) (aged 76)

Hans Joachim Morgenthau (February 17, 1904 – July 19, 1980) was one of the leading twentieth-century figures in the study of international politics. He made landmark contributions to international-relations theory and the study of international law, and his Politics Among Nations, first published in 1948, went through many editions and was for decades the most-used textbook in its field in U.S. universities. In addition, Morgenthau wrote widely about international politics and U.S. foreign policy for general-circulation journals such as The New Leader, Commentary, Worldview, and The New Republic. He knew and corresponded with many of the leading intellectuals and writers of his era, such as Reinhold Niebuhr, George F. Kennan, and Hannah Arendt. At one point in the early Cold War, Morgenthau was a consultant to the U.S. State Department when Kennan headed its Policy Planning Staff. For most of his career, however, Morgenthau was an academic critic of U.S. foreign policy rather than a formulator of it. Indeed, he publicly opposed American involvement in Vietnam.[1]

Morgenthau was born in a Jewish family in Coburg, Germany, and, after attending Casimirianum, was educated at the universities of Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, and pursued postgraduate work at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. He taught and practiced law in Frankfurt before emigrating to the United States in 1937, after several interim years in Switzerland and Spain. Morgenthau taught for many years at the University of Chicago, and at the end of his career he taught at the New School for Social Research and the City University of New York.

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Morgenthau and political realism

Hans Morgenthau is considered one of the "founding fathers" of the realist school in the 20th century. This school of thought holds that nation-states are the main actors in international relations and that the main concern of the field is the study of power. Morgenthau emphasized the importance of "the national interest," and in Politics Among Nations he wrote that "the main signpost that helps political realism to find its way through the landscape of international politics is the concept of interest defined in terms of power."

However, recent scholarly assessments of Morgenthau show that his intellectual trajectory was more complicated than is often realized.[2] His realism was infused with moral considerations, and during the last part of his life he favored supranational control of nuclear weapons and strongly opposed the U.S. role in the Vietnam War.[3] His book Scientific Man versus Power Politics (1946) argued against an overreliance on science and technology as solutions to political and social problems.

Starting with the second edition of Politics Among Nations, Morgenthau included a section in the opening chapter called "Six Principles of Political Realism."[4]

The principles, paraphrased, are:

1. Political realism believes that politics, like society in general, is governed by objective laws that have their roots in human nature.

2. The main signpost of political realism is the concept of interest defined in terms of power, which infuses rational order into the subject matter of politics, and thus makes the theoretical understanding of politics possible. Political realism avoids concerns with the motives and ideology of statesmen. Political realism avoids reinterpreting reality to fit the policy. A good foreign policy minimizes risks and maximizes benefits.

3. Realism does not give 'interest defined as power' a meaning that is fixed once and for all, but recognizes that the determining kind of interest varies depending on the political and cultural context in which foreign policy is made.

4. Political realism is aware of the moral significance of political action. It is also aware of the tension between the moral command and the requirements of successful political action. Realism maintains that universal moral principles cannot be applied to the actions of states in their abstract universal formulation, but that they must be filtered through the concrete circumstances of time and place.

5. Political realism refuses to identify the moral aspirations of a particular nation with the moral laws that govern the universe.

6. The political realist maintains the autonomy of the political sphere; he asks "How does this policy affect the power and interests of the nation?" Political realism is based on a pluralistic conception of human nature. The political realist must show where the nation's interests differ from the moralistic and legalistic viewpoints.

Morgenthau is sometimes referred to as a classical realist in order to differentiate his approach from the structural realism or neo-realism associated with Kenneth Waltz.[5]

Quotations

Bibliography

See also

References

  1. ^ Zambernardi L., "The Impotence of Power: Morgenthau's Critique of American Intervention in Vietnam," Review of International Studies, 37, 2011, pp. 1335-1356.
  2. ^ William E. Scheuerman, Hans Morgenthau: Realism and Beyond (Polity Press, 2009); Michael C. Williams, ed., Reconsidering Realism: The Legacy of Hans J. Morgenthau (Oxford Univ. Press, 2007); Christoph Frei, Hans J. Morgenthau: An Intellectual Biography (LSU Press, 2001).
  3. ^ E.g.: Hans J. Morgenthau, "We Are Deluding Ourselves in Viet-Nam," New York Times Magazine, April 18, 1965, reprinted in The Viet-Nam Reader, ed. M. Raskin and B. Fall (Vintage Books, 1967), pp. 37-45.
  4. ^ Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, Fifth Edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978, pp. 4-15.
  5. ^ Cf. Jack Donnelly, Realism and International Relations (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), pp. 11-12, though he prefers the label "biological realist" to "classical realist". For an argument that the differences between classical and structural realists have been exaggerated, see Joseph M. Parent and Joshua M. Baron, "Elder Abuse: How the Moderns Mistreat Classical Realism," International Studies Review v.13 n.2 (2011):192-213.
  6. ^ Hans Morgenthau and Kenneth Thompson, Politics Among Nations, 6th edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985), p. 165.

Further reading

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