Morgenthau E-Book

William E. Scheuerman

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Key Contemporary Thinkers
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 495

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The ideas of Hans Morgenthau dominated the study of international politics in the United States for many decades. He was the leading representative of Realist international relations theory in the last century and his work remains hugely influential in the field. In this engaging and accessible new study of his work, William E. Scheuerman provides a comprehensive and illuminating introduction to Morgenthau’s ideas, and assesses their significance for political theory and international politics.

Scheuerman shows Morgenthau to be an uneasy Realist, uncomfortable with conventional notions of Realism and sometimes unsure whether his reflections should be grouped under its rubric. He was a powerful critic of the existing state system and defended the idea of a world state. By highlighting Morgenthau’s engagement with the leading lights of European political and legal theory, Scheuerman argues that he developed a morally demanding political ethics and an astute diagnosis of the unprecedented perils posed by nuclear weaponry. Believing that the irrationalities of US foreign policy were rooted partly in domestic factors, he sympathized with demands for radical political and social change. Scheuerman illustrates that Morgenthau’s thinking has been widely misunderstood by both disciples and critics and that it offers many challenges to contemporary Realists who discount his normative aspirations. With the advent of the cosmopolitan goal of international reform, Morgenthau’s work serves up an unsettling mix of sympathy and hard-headed skepticism which remains crucially important in the development of the field.

Lucidly and persuasively written, this book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars seeking to understand the continued importance of Morgenthau’s thinking.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyrigt page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction: Morgenthau’s uneasy Realism

1 Radical roots of Realism

Roots of Realism in the Weimar left

Morgenthau and Sinzheimer

Morgenthau’s sociological functionalism

The concept of the political and the embrace of philosophical anthropology

2 Morality, power, and tragedy

Against the repudiation of politics

Morgenthau the moralist

Against the nation state

3 Defending the national interest

Stalin’s bomb and the makings of cold war Realism

The national interest

The moral dignity of the national interest

4 Politics among nations and beyond

Six principles of political realism

How to civilize politics among nations

International government: the case of the United Nations

World state

5 Utopian Realism and the bomb

One step forwards, two steps backwards

Dealing with novelty

Towards limited world government?

Buying time

How Realism (after Morgenthau) learned to love the bomb

6 Vietnam and the crisis of American democracy

Vietnam and the national interest

Democracy against the national interest?

The national purpose: equality in freedom

Social reform and international politics

Conclusion: Morgenthau as classical Realist?

Bibliography

Index

Copyright © William E. Scheuerman 2009

The right of William E. Scheuerman to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2009 by Polity Press

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For Lily

Acknowledgments

I was inspired to write this book by a wonderful conference that took place in the autumn of 2004 at Gregynog Hall outside Newton in Wales. Organized by Michael C. Williams, Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth, and devoted to a reconsideration of the intellectual legacy of Hans J. Morgenthau, the meeting brought to my attention the need for an updated survey of Morgenthau’s ideas sufficiently attuned to contemporary intellectual and political trends. My special thanks to Michael for the invitation to participate, as well to the many speakers for their fascinating insights on Morgenthau and his views.

Audiences at Chicago, Cornell, Indiana, McGill, and Vanderbilt Universities have graciously served as guinea pigs as I tried out my sometimes heterodox ideas on Morgenthau. I am also indebted to the journal Review of International Studies for allowing me to integrate some sections of an article originally published there into chapter I, and also Constellations for permitting me to reuse (in chapter II) some materials which originally appeared in its pages. Jeffrey Flannery of the Library of Congress provided easy access to the Morgenthau Archives, and Luke Mergner at Indiana University helped dig up copies of Morgenthau’s harder-to-find writings. Emma Hutchinson at Polity has been an exemplary editor in every respect. Finally, I thank the two anonymous referees at Polity for their astute comments, criticisms, and suggestions on an earlier draft.

My father was briefly a student of Morgenthau’s during the early 1970s. In fact, trying to figure out how my dad – who, like many in his generation, was radicalized by the events of the 1960s – could think so highly of an erstwhile “classical Realist” like Morgenthau undoubtedly played a role in my decision to write this book. I know that my dad – the first in his family to attend college, hailing from an apolitical and somewhat anti-intellectual working-class family – remains grateful for Morgenthau’s support during a crucial juncture in his life. If I have done any justice to Morgenthau’s thinking in these pages, perhaps I can help repay a family debt.

This book is dedicated to my daughter Lily, who has accompanied and – by capably allying herself with her older sister Zoe – frequently interrupted its composition. Lily’s feisty spirit and contagious smile have provided much-needed respite from working on the volume and thinking about the many frightening historical conjunctures (e.g. Nazism, the cold war, the Vietnam War, and the specter of nuclear war) to which my research necessarily drew me. Lily has also helped remind me of how much remains at stake in a political universe still haunted by many of the same problems – just to mention two: democratic decay and nuclear proliferation – which rightly preoccupied Morgenthau in the final decades of his long career.

Abbreviations

For the key or main texts authored by Morgenthau, the following abbreviations have been used. To facilitate transparency, the relevant abbreviation and page number(s) appear in the main body of the text. So “(IDNI, 114),” for example, refers to p. 114 of In Defense of the National Interest. For Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (PAN), the edition used is also noted.

IDNIIn Defense of the National Interest (1951)IRWGDie internationale Rechtspflege, ihr Wesen und ihre Grenzen (1929)NFPA New Foreign Policy for the United States (1969)PANPolitics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (1st edn., 1948; 2nd edn., 1954; 3rd edn., 1960)PAPPurpose of American Politics (1960)“PFIL”   “Positivism, Functionalism, and International Law” (1940)SMScientific Man Vs. Power Politics (1946)VUSVietnam and the United States (1965)

For the collections of essays authored by Morgenthau, the following abbreviations have been used.

DDPDecline of Democratic Politics (1962)DPDilemmas of Politics (1958)IAFP   The Impasse of American Foreign Policy (1962)RAPThe Restoration of American Politics (1962)TPTruth and Power: Essays of a Decade, 1960–70 (1970)

Full bibliographical information (including, of course, the title of the relevant essay or book chapter referenced) is provided in the endnotes or bibliography.

Substantial use has been made of archival materials from the Hans J. Morgenthau Papers (HJM) at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (with “B” referring to the box or container number).

Finally, endnotes with full biographical information are provided for all other materials, including publications by Morgenthau infrequently cited or used.

Introduction: Morgenthau’s uneasy Realism

Realist international theory continues to exercise extraordinary influence on policy makers and intellectuals. A complete list of Realist practitioners would read like a Who’s Who? of modern foreign policy.1 Henry Kissinger would surely be positioned atop the list, but it would also encompass many other prominent public figures. Realism’s present theoretical representatives include luminaries as otherwise intellectually diverse as the US political scientist Kenneth Waltz and Italian political philosopher Danilo Zolo. Historians have traced Realism’s impressive intellectual roots to Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Max Weber.2 Realism represented the predominant theoretical orientation among especially postwar US scholars of international politics for decades. Although the end of the cold war and worldwide debates about reforming the UN placed Realism on the defensive in the 1990s, with the 9/11 terrorist attacks, US hostility to international law, China’s ascent, resurgent Russian nationalism, and disorder in the Middle East, Realism appears to have undergone both a political and intellectual comeback. In the United States, some prominent defenders of the Iraq War have alluded vaguely to Realist ideals, whereas leading critics of the invasion of Iraq have appealed even more forcefully to Realist principles.3 In ongoing debates concerning global governance, Realism provides a rich intellectual goldmine for those skeptical of cosmopolitanism and its ambitious blueprints for international reform.

So how then might we define Realism? The question is more complicated than first seems apparent, and scholars have invested substantial energy in trying to come up with a useful summary of its main tenets.4 Matters are complicated by the fact that Realism, like any great intellectual movement, comes in different shapes and sizes. Fortunately, political theorist Michael Joseph Smith has provided a succinct working definition:

the Realist picture of the world begins with a pessimistic view of human nature. Evil is inevitably a part of all of us which no social arrangement can eradicate: men and women are not perfectible. The struggle for power – which defines politics – is a permanent feature of social life and is especially prominent in the relations between states. In the realm of international politics, states are the only major actors, and no structure of power or authority stands above them to mediate their conflicts; nor would they peacefully consent to such a structure, even if it could be shown to be workable. States act according to their power interests, and these interests are bound at times to conflict violently. Therefore, even if progress toward community and justice is possible within states, the relations between them are doomed to a permanent competition that often leads to war. However deplorable, this permanent competition remains an unavoidable reality that no amount of moral exhortation or utopian scheming can undo.5

Of course, what counts as “real” in contrast to “ideal,” like beauty, is always in the eyes of the beholder.6 But the Realist tradition in international political theory typically highlights the imperfectibility of human nature, inevitability of political conflict, indispensable role of states in preserving a modicum of political order and morality, and the competitive and potentially violent nature of interstate relations, as well as the improbability of far-reaching global reform, let alone the achievement of what Immanuel Kant, Realism’s greatest philosophical nemesis, famously described as “perpetual peace,” to be secured by a worldwide or cosmopolitan legal order.

Modern Realist theory has been espoused and sometimes updated by myriad authors. Besides Waltz and Zolo, Raymond Aron, E. H. Carr, John Herz, and Reinhold Niebuhr, as well as contemporary political scientists like Robert Gilpin and John Mearsheimer, immediately come to mind. The provocative “English School” of international relations arguably includes substantial overlap with Realism as well. Yet twentieth-century Realism’s intellectually most impressive and certainly most influential figure remains the German-Jewish émigré Hans Joachim Morgenthau (1904–80), aptly described by Stanley Hoffmann as the “pope of Realism.” When Hoffmann noted that “if our discipline [i.e. US international relations] has any founding father, it is Morgenthau,” he was accurately describing Morgenthau’s huge impact on the study of international politics, especially in postwar America.7 One recent study has employed the latest quantitative methods to prove that Morgenthau’s intellectual agenda effectively dominated the scholarly study of international relations in the United States well into the 1970s.8 Realism remains a multisided movement, and even though contemporary Realists enjoy touting their purported advances vis-à-vis Morgenthau and other so-called “classical” (or human-nature-centered) Realists, by any account Morgenthau belongs among its intellectual giants. Not only did Morgenthau write two of postwar Realism’s most influential books, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (1948) and In Defense of the National Interest (1951), but he penned about a dozen others, as well as hundreds of scholarly articles on an astonishing range of topics. Unlike most academics, Morgenthau also became a much sought-after public intellectual, and his oftentimes pithy commentaries on foreign affairs appeared regularly in popular magazines and journals, as well as newspapers like the New York Times, from the 1950s onwards. When he passed away in 1980, not only was Morgenthau the founding father of the dominant US approach to the study of international politics, but major public figures like Henry Kissinger described him affectionately as a teacher and mentor.9

When I began this study, I did so believing that Morgenthau’s enormous influence called for an intellectually rigorous but accessible survey of his ideas. My original plan was to buttress the conventional view of Morgenthau as a provocative but ultimately conservative Realist thinker, highlighting the ways in which his theory sometimes fruitfully challenged contemporary cosmopolitanism, to which I am broadly sympathetic. To make a long story short, I accepted the conventional view that Morgenthau was an intriguing but institutionally backwards-looking thinker, hostile to global reform and the quest for a novel world order. The fact that a practitioner of traditional Realpolitik like Kissinger could consider Morgenthau his mentor did not seem surprising. The German-born Morgenthau, after all, had been influenced by political icons like Bismarck and right-wing strands in central European thinking about power politics. On this view, Morgenthau had imported this continental tradition into Anglo-American intellectual and political discourse. His theory, I initially believed, encapsulated the rare strengths as well as the abundant weaknesses of classical European power politics and Realpolitik.

Even today, this interpretation remains influential.10 Morgenthau’s ideas are now widely associated with a Realist tradition whose origins are located in Machiavelli, Hobbes, as well as more recent figures like Bismarck and Schmitt.11 Morgenthau, we are regularly reminded, devalued the place of morality and even law in international affairs, and he evinced deep animosity towards the quest for novel modes of political and legal organization beyond the nation state. He disdained “moralism,” “legalism,” and especially “utopianism” in international thought. He merely applied a rather old-fashioned defense of the Westphalian system and traditional power politics to the novel exigencies of the cold war.

As is often the case with conventional wisdom, this view con-tains some valuable insights. Morgenthau was at least partially influenced by conservative central European ideas about foreign affairs, including those of the right-wing authoritarian thinker Carl Schmitt. In many ways, his reflections fit neatly under Michael Smith’s concise definition of Realism. Morgenthau built on a pessimistic philosophical anthropology, underscored the irrepressibility of political conflict in human affairs, and regularly expressed skepticism about many models of global reform. At times, his reflections incorporated an undeniable nostalgia for the traditional state system, whose demise he lamented. For many understandable reasons, Realists have looked to Morgenthau for inspiration. By the same token, cosmopolitan defenders of international reform have occasionally considered him a worthy opponent, but understandably not a fruitful source for constructive thinking about the prospects of global governance.

Despite its strengths, this conventional picture is badly flawed.12 In fairness, Morgenthau was partly to blame for the widespread tendency to simplify and even caricature his ideas. He was a blunt writer who loved rhetorical flourishes. This made his work accessible (as well as popular among university teachers putting together course readings), but it allowed readers to overlook the richness and nuances of his highly idiosyncratic international theory.13 Unfortunately, those with a theoretical or philosophical bent have tended – in my view, incorrectly – to deem Morgenthau a simple thinker, easily pigeonholed as a relatively straightforward Realist and then comfortably removed from closer observation. In addition, the disciplinary divide, especially in the United States, between the empirical study of international relations (i.e., the subfield of IR) and political theory has exacerbated the difficulties of accurately assessing his work. Like his good friend Hannah Arendt, Morgenthau himself bridged or at least ignored the disciplinary divides of postwar political science, whereas most of his successors, especially in North America, have not. As a result, political theorists and philosophers neglect Morgenthau, accepting uncritically the conventional view of him as a “Realist IR theorist,” while international relations scholars interpret him as a forerunner to (purportedly) more scientific versions of recent Realist theory. Not surprisingly, they tend to occlude Morgenthau’s ambitious normative aspirations. The result is not only a badly skewed portrayal of Morgenthau, but also a significant body of literature that reproduces the artificial separation between political theory and international relations he fought energetically to overcome.14

Throughout his long career, Morgenthau engaged deeply and widely with some of the most important voices in political and legal theory. His intellectual socialization as a young lawyer in Weimar Germany, during which he responded powerfully to Hans Kelsen, Schmitt, and especially creative voices in left-wing legal sociology, left deep marks on his thinking. During the 1940s, as he established himself at the University of Chicago as an up-and-coming young scholar of international politics, his writings demonstrated not only a deep affinity for Max Weber and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, but also an impressive familiarity with the mainstream of western political and moral thought. In the final decades of his career, as a renowned public intellectual fearful of the possibility of nuclear annihilation, he turned to the German existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers for guidance. When he anxiously pondered the fate of democracy in his adopted American home, Kelsen, Alexis de Tocqueville and perhaps Arendt served as conversational partners.

Even the conventional “Realist” label proves troublesome when applied to Morgenthau. Until the start of the Second World War, he indeed advocated a “realistic” approach to the study of international law. Yet his proposed method had little in common with Realist international theory as conventionally interpreted after 1945. Instead, it was directly shaped by left-wing legal sociology and the ideas of Morgenthau’s key mentor from the late 1920s and early 1930s, the politically progressive Weimar labor lawyer and legal scholar Hugo Sinzheimer. During the 1940s and especially in major works like Scientific Man Vs. Power Politics (1946), Morgenthau refused to describe his own intellectual endeavors as Realist, instead subjecting Realist and proto-Realist international thinking to a scathing critique. It was really only with the publication of In Defense of the National Interest (1951), and then the second edition of Politics Among Nations (1954), that Morgenthau finally situated his own theoretical project under the Realist rubric. Since this was Morgenthau’s most influential intellectual and professional moment, it is hardly surprising that most of his readers have readily accepted the commonplace view of Morgenthau as a more-or-less conventional Realist. However, by the early 1960s, he was again emphasizing the conceptual limitations of Realism, arguing that the prospects of nuclear war required a fundamental rethinking of international relations theory capable of reintegrating the neglected insights of what Realists too often had dismissively dubbed “utopianism.” Morgenthau, in fact, defended far-reaching reforms to the Westphalian system of states, insisting that ultimately only a world state could save humanity from the perils of nuclear war. To be sure, he always remained hostile to what he considered unduly naïve models of international reform. Yet he also openly endorsed the functionalist model of international reform proposed by another émigré from central Europe, David Mitrany, whose ideas were already playing a decisive role in the emergence of a novel supranational polity in Western Europe. At an early date, Morgenthau greeted the movement towards a unified Europe with enthusiasm.

Morgenthau was always an uneasy Realist, unsatisfied with conventional interpretations of the tradition and its intellectual forerunners and at times unsure whether his work should even be described as a contribution towards it. To his enormous credit, he at least occasionally acknowledged that Realism, as generally conceived, was poorly suited to some of the novel challenges of our times. Although this exegesis will surprise many readers, it offers not only a more accurate, but also a theoretically more fruitful, interpretation of Morgenthau’s far-flung and admittedly sometimes tension-ridden writings. First, it encourages contemporary Realists to reconsider unquestioned assumptions about not only the genesis of their own ideas, but also their generally dismissive views about far-reaching international reform. Their intellectual father, I suspect, would have been justifiably alarmed by many of the morally complacent and institutionally conservative intellectual strands found among his offspring. At many junctures in this study, I defend Morgenthau against his Realist children.

Second, this reinterpretation should lead contemporary cosmopolitan advocates of international reform to reconsider Morgenthau’s legacy. To be sure, some of Morgenthau’s reservations about ambitious proposals for global governance relied on problematic theoretical assumptions. His theory raised at least as many new questions as it successfully answered old ones. Traumatized by the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust, Morgenthau was a deeply skeptical thinker who doubted that human beings capable of the horrors of Auschwitz were destined to produce a pacific global order in the near or even foreseeable future. Yet his own forthright defense of a world state at least points to the possibility of a fruitful dialogue between Morgenthau and contemporary cosmopolitanism. Like the most impressive voices in present-day cosmopolitanism, he underlined the necessity of linking far-reaching social and political reforms to the establishment of new modes of supranational organization.15 A plausible version of cosmopolitanism will have to take Morgenthau’s insights seriously. Of course, the intellectual divide between cosmopolitanism and Realism is likely to remain large. By the early 1960s, however, Morgenthau himself at least suggested the prospect of a novel international theory synthesizing Realist and cosmopolitan ideas. Even if he ultimately failed to achieve that synthesis, a closer look at Morgenthau’s legacy will hopefully invite some readers to undertake it.

The organization of this volume is both thematic and roughly chronological. Biographical details have been woven into the exegesis of Morgenthau’s ideas, but the emphasis remains on his thinking.16 I also take Morgenthau’s contributions as a political commentator and popular pundit seriously, believing that they illuminate many facets of his thought otherwise easily missed by focusing exclusively on a handful of major publications.

Chapter 1 situates Morgenthau in the Weimar context and especially the politically progressive and creative intellectual environment of Frankfurt, Germany, where Morgenthau started his career as a practicing lawyer and aspiring scholar of international law while working intimately with Sinzheimer, Germany’s leading left-wing labor lawyer. Morgenthau’s Realism always drew on diverse intellectual sources. However, I underline the progressive and sometimes even radical roots of his Realism in order to compensate for the overstated tendency in recent secondary literature to emphasize the impact of conservative and indeed reactionary writers on Morgenthau. Without properly understanding Morgenthau’s initial dependence on left-wing German legal sociology, we cannot appreciate either his subsequent theoretical development or the politically progressive impulses which consistently motivated his thinking.

Chapter 2 then turns to Morgenthau’s first decade in the United States, when, particularly in Scientific Man Vs. Power Politics, he formulated a morally demanding political ethics. With some justification, Realism is often accused of downplaying the rightful place of morality and ethics in international politics, and of closing its eyes to the pathologies of the modern nation state. These criticisms may be apt when unleashed against competing variants of Realism. Yet they misrepresent Morgenthau’s ideas and the appealing moral impulses behind them. During the 1940s, Morgenthau angrily decried the contribution of the nation state to the demolition of noble yet ever more fragile universal moral values. Even if skeptical of most proposals for extending global governance, he did not celebrate the Westphalian system or the nation state. He also insisted that political actors deserving of our praise should be expected to grapple with the harsh realities of power relations on the international scene while simultaneously maintaining fidelity to a strict moral code. Morgenthau’s political ethics from the 1940s, in my view, remains surprisingly powerful.

Chapters 3 and 4 examine Morgenthau’s influential 1950s writings in which he unabashedly aligned himself with Realism. Chapter 3 argues that Morgenthau’s widely discussed In Defense of the National Interest represented an attempt to solve internal intellectual and political puzzles generated by his ambitious version of political ethics from the 1940s. Like other commentators, I worry that Morgenthau’s reflections on the national interest were problematic and even contradictory. They overstated its centrality to intelligent foreign policy, in part by generally obscuring the constitutive role of political and cultural identity in the determination of the national interest. The claim that foreign policy makers simply should follow the lodestar of the national interest was misleading. Chapter 4 thematizes Morgenthau’s most widely read work, Politics Among Nations, focusing on how even this unambiguously Realist text nonetheless transcended conventional theoretical categories. Readers have tended to neglect the book’s central argument that the admirable and unfulfilled quest for world peace necessitates the establishment of world government. In contradistinction to Realists who concede the desirability of world government but argue aggressively against its realizability, Morgenthau pointed to a number of steps to be taken in order to move humankind at least somewhat closer to its achievement. A world state could only come about by time-consuming piecemeal reforms focusing on concrete regulatory needs that nation states could not successfully tackle on their own. For good reason, however, he worried that humanity might incinerate itself in a horrific nuclear war before a novel political order could be established.

Chapters 5 and 6 examine neglected but illuminating junctures in Morgenthau’s late career. During the late 1950s and 1960s, Morgenthau joined the ranks of the growing number of intellectuals deeply alarmed about the prospects of atomic warfare. Inspired by insights from existentialist philosophy, he now argued even more forcefully in favor of the desirability of supranational government, regularly insisting that the previously utopian ideal of a cosmopolitan order had become a realistic necessity in the atomic age. Morgenthau’s analysis of the unprecedented threats posed by atomic weapons to human survival encouraged him to rethink, albeit unsuccessfully, core Realist ideas. During this period, Morgenthau also formulated many prescient – and unfairly forgotten – insights about the perils of the nuclear arms race, deterrence, and conventional nuclear strategy. For those who worry that international relations theory has yet to come to grips with the historically unprecedented possibility of humanity’s self-destruction, Morgenthau has much to offer. On these matters in particular, his theory is superior to that of his Realist offspring, who condone and even celebrate nuclear proliferation to a degree that would have terrified him.

During the 1960s, Morgenthau became one of America’s most prominent academic critics of the Vietnam War. His far-reaching criticisms of the Vietnam debacle did not, as some have suggested, represent an abrupt break with his earlier theorizing. On the contrary, his arguments against the war built on the sound intuition, first hinted at in Purpose of American Politics (1960), that an effective US foreign policy required far-reaching political and social reform at home. I interpret Purpose of American Politics as a struggle to circumvent the weaknesses of Morgenthau’s earlier reflections on the national interest, suggesting that he had probably become aware of the limitations of his previous neglect of the role of political and cultural norms and ideals in its formulation. Especially during the 1960s, Morgenthau openly proposed “radical reform” to US democracy, whose deep ills he held responsible for the inanities of US foreign policy in Vietnam and elsewhere. He also formulated a surprisingly robust vision of democratic politics, directly linking – in sharp contradistinction to competing variants of Realism – domestic political and social conditions to the successful pursuit of the national interest.

Some US neoconservatives are now advocating a synthesis of Realism with a renewed appreciation for the distinctive moral identity of the American polity. In this view, Realism is fine as far as it goes, yet it misses the special and indeed universal appeal of American values. As Condoleezza Rice put it with her usual lack of subtlety during the 2000 US presidential campaign, “American values are universal. People want to say what they think, worship as they wish, and elect those who govern them.”17 At least on the surface, some of Morgenthau’s reflections from the 1960s parallel this more recent attempt to combine Realist intuitions with an awareness of America’s special moral and political traits. In stark contrast to the neoconservatives, however, Morgenthau’s open acknowledgment of the core moral components of the national interest simply strengthened his resolve to advance political and social reform at home, as well as new forms of supranational government abroad. As neoconservatives refer selectively and misleadingly to Morgenthau while pursuing domestic and foreign policies inimical to everything for which he stood, we could do worse than to recall Morgenthau’s own more thoughtful discussion of what he similarly described as America’s universal appeal.

Notes

1 According to one major scholar, Realism has been the dominant perspective on foreign relations among Japanese political elites, for example (Kenneth B. Pyle, Japan Rising: The Resurgence of Japanese Power and Purpose [New York: Public Affairs, 2007]).

2 Jonathan Haslam, No Virtue Like Necessity: Realist Thought in International Relations Since Machiavelli (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).

3 John J. Mearsheimer, “Hans Morgenthau and the Iraq War: Realism versus Neoconservatism” (www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-americanpower/morgenthau_2522.jsp), posted May 19, 2005.

4 See, for example, Jack Donnelly, Realism and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 6–42.

5 Michael Joseph Smith, Realist Thought from Weber to Kissinger (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 1.

6 I am grateful to Bill Rasch for this formulation.

7 Stanley Hoffmann, Janus and Minerva: Essays in the Theory and Practice of International Politics (Boulder: Westview Press, 1987), 6. Hoffmann’s attribution to Morgenthau of papal status is quoted in Martin Griffiths, Realism, Idealism & International Politics: A Reinterpretation (London: Routledge, 1995), 35.

8 John A. Vasquez, The Power of Power Politics: From Classical Realism to Neotraditionalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

9 Henry Kissinger, “Hans Morgenthau: A Gentle Analyst of Power,” New Republic (August 2 and 9, 1980), 12–14.

10 See, most recently, Jürgen Habermas, The Divided West (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 166–93.

11 See, for example, Jan Willem Honig, “Totalitarianism and Realism: Hans Morgenthau’s German Years,” in Benjamin Frankel (ed.), Roots of Realism (London: Frank Cass, 1996), 283–313; Alfons Söllner, “German Conservatism in America: Morgenthau’s Political Realism,” Telos, 72 (1987), 161–72.

12 Others have recently challenged conventional readings of Morgenthau. See Murielle Cozette, “Reclaiming the Critical Dimension of Realism: Hans J. Morgenthau on the Ethics of Scholarship,” Review of International Studies, 34 (2008), 5–27; Campbell Craig, Glimmer of a New Leviathan: Total War in the Realism of Niebuhr, Morgenthau, and Waltz (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Richard Ned Lebow, The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests and Orders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Alastair J. H. Murray, Reconstructing Realism: Between Power Politics and Cosmopolitan Ethics (Edinburgh: Keele University Press, 1997); Vibeke Schou Tjalve, Realist Strategies of Republican Peace: Niebuhr, Morgenthau, and the Politics of Patriotic Dissent (New York: Palgrave, 2008); Michael C. Williams, The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Greg G. Russell’s Hans J. Morgenthau and the Ethics of American Statecraft (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1990) remains helpful, as does Christoph Rohde, Hans J. Morgenthau und der weltpolitische Realismus (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2004).

13 Morgenthau always worried about widespread misunderstandings of his work. In the third (1960) edition of Politics Among Nations, for example, he claimed to find “solace in Montesquieu’s similar experience, to bemoan the fate of authors ‘to be criticized for ideas one has never held.’ I am still being so criticized. I am still being told that I believe in the prominence of the international system based upon the nation state, although the obsolescence of the nation state and the need to merge it into supranational organizations of a functional nature was already one of the main points of the first edition of 1948. I am still being told that I am making success the standard of political action … And, of course, I am still being accused of indifference to the moral problem in spite of abundant evidence, in this book and elsewhere, to the contrary” (PAN, 3rd edn., II).

14 Morgenthau’s teaching, it is worth noting, typically included courses on the political philosophies of Aristotle and Abraham Lincoln.

15 See, for example, David Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).

16 Those seeking additional biographical details should consult Christoph Frei’s illuminating Hans J. Morgenthau: An Intellectual Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001).

17 Rice, “Campaign 2000: Promoting the National Interest,” Foreign Affairs (January/February 2000), 45–62.

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Radical roots of Realism

David Held has recently offered a concise summary of Realist international theory:

Realism posits that the system of sovereign states is inescapably anarchic in character; and that this anarchy forces all states, in the inevitable absence of any supreme arbiter to enforce moral behavior and agreed international codes, to pursue power politics in order to attain their vital interests. This Realpolitik view of states has had a significant influence on both the analysis and practice of international relations, as it offers a convincing prima facie explanation of the chaos and disorder of world affairs. In this account, the modern system of nation-states is a “limiting factor” which will always thwart any attempt to conduct international relations in a manner which transcends the politics of the sovereign state.