Hans Joachim Morgenthau

Political Scientist

  • Born: February 17, 1904
  • Birthplace: Coburg, Germany
  • Died: July 19, 1980
  • Place of death: New York, New York

German-born American political theorist

Morgenthau established the study of international relations as a special academic discipline for the analysis of U.S. foreign policy after World War II. Central to his realist political theory was the role of power, diplomatic and military, prudently applied to advance the national interests of the United States. He believed, controversially, that humans were selfish, greedy, and deceitful by nature and were motivated not by reason but by a lust for power and domination. This judgment formed the core principle of Morgenthau’s political theory.

Areas of achievement Political science, scholarship, social sciences, government and politics

Early Life

Hans Joachim Morgenthau (hahnz YOH-ahk-ihm MOHR-gihn-thow) was born to Ludwig and Frieda Morgenthau in the central German town of Coburg. He was an only child who was shy and lacked self-confidence, which he ascribed largely to his physician-father’s authoritarian demeanor. Young Morgenthau also suffered the taunts of classmates because of his Jewish heritage and turned early to books as his preferred company.

When Morgenthau left Coburg in 1923 for the University of Frankfurt, he entered a far more complex world. His political outlook was shaped by the aftermath of Germany’s crushing defeat in World War I. Mass unemployment and rampant inflation had followed, compounded by the stark political failure of Germany’s liberal postwar government, the Weimar Republic.

Morgenthau, pressured by his father to study law, found his studies generally boring but managed to read widely on his own. A favorite was the radical German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. In 1929, Morgenthau received a doctorate of law degree, arguing in his dissertation for greater awareness of the political dimensions of the law. Influenced by controversial political scientist Carl Schmitt, Morgenthau urged that politics be taught as an independent discipline with its own specific principles and methods. Questions of law and morality, for example, should be subordinated to the political. This idea would become a centerpiece of his mature political theory.

During the early 1930’s, Adolf Hitler emerged as a power in Germany, guaranteeing swift solutions for Germany’s ills, including the so-called Jewish problem. Morgenthau, seeing little future for a Jewish intellectual in a dawning Nazi world, departed Germany in 1932, permanently. In 1937, after brief stays in Switzerland and Spain, the recently married young scholar emigrated to the United States, where he hoped for the opportunity to pursue his scholarly interests in peace and security.

Life’s Work

Coming from a Europe in turmoil, Morgenthau was amazed to see in the United States such optimism and faith in human possibilities. He also noted in New Deal America a strong sense, especially in politics, that virtually any problem was solvable through reason, science, and hard work. However, it was U.S. foreign policy that most intrigued Morgenthau. He believed that the late U.S. president Woodrow Wilson had rendered the United States seriously vulnerable by pledging to make the whole world safe for democracy and to end all wars permanently through the collective security of the League of Nations. Morgenthau found two fatal flaws in Wilson’s grand plan: It misunderstood human nature and failed to recognize the limits of American power.

To Morgenthau, the disenchanted European political thinker, this American frame of mind reflected a troubling ignorance of how politics, particularly foreign relations, actually operated. He concluded that if the United States were to survive as a great power in a world in desperate need of security, it required a tougher and more realistic foreign policy. Morgenthau was prepared to provide this plan of action for his adopted homeland because he regarded America’s survival as essential to global security.

To counter the reigning moralistic approach to foreign affairs in the United States, Morgenthau introduced a much more measured set of policy proposals. At the University of Chicago, beginning in 1943 and continuing through the rest of his career, he finally found the time and resources to develop ideas that he had been exploring since his student days. He became a U.S. citizen in 1943 and between 1946 and 1961 published a dozen books that brought him to the forefront of international studies and to the heart of the debate over U.S. foreign policy.

Morgenthau’s 1946 book Scientific Man and Power Politics was a scathing indictment of the still-influential eighteenth century cultural movement better known as the Enlightenment. Its adherents had proclaimed their boundless faith in human perfectibility, reason, science, and steady progress toward a utopian world of perpetual peace. President Wilson believed in many of these values.

Morgenthau found the high idealism of the Enlightenment preposterous, arguing that it was based on a badly mistaken perception of human nature. This idealism was at odds with his own experience. He was convinced that the human species was by nature selfish, greedy, and deceitful. For him, humans were motivated not by reason but by irrational, instinctive urges and especially by an insatiable lust for power and domination. This gloomy judgment formed the core principle of Morgenthau’s political theory. The national state in its relations with other world states most interested Morgenthau because he saw in this interaction a supreme example of the human will to gain and keep power. This tendency to unlimited expansion had to be controlled for the common welfare.

First, Morgenthau contended that the foreign policy of a sovereign state had to be directed foremost and perpetually to promoting its national interest. Domestically, a nation’s security was protected by a combination of legal sanctions and personal moral restraints, but in the international arena of oft-clashing sovereign states, such domestic remedies were much less effective. Because of this ineffectiveness, near anarchy prevailed. International law and solemn treaties were regularly violated or ignored if a nation’s vital interests were at stake. According to Morgenthau, collective security organizations like the League of Nations and the United Nations were at best useless because they lacked the authority to apply serious sanctions equally.

Morgenthau discerned among the sovereign nations of the world a fierce, ceaseless Darwinian struggle for domination and survival. This chaotic reality, he insisted, could be confronted only through a determined commitment to a traditional component of international politics: a robust balance-of-power system based on solid alliances and supplemented by a diplomacy capable of patient negotiation and compromise, always excepting a nation’s vital interests, which were nonnegotiable. Force would be a last resort; the “soft” power of diplomacy was supplemented by the “hard” power of war. In such a setting only power could serve as a countervailing check on power and ensure a modicum of security.

In sum, Morgenthau designed a system of checks and balances to contain and mitigate the drive for power. This policy also involved a much diminished role for traditional ethical and religious influences by subordinating these norms to the autonomous political imperatives of national interest against which all else must be measured. Moral principles had to be linked to the national interest.

Morgenthau here invoked a kind of situation ethics in which political officials had in a given case to choose between not right and wrong but the lesser of evils. No traditional moral considerations could override the highest priority of the national interest, which involved the survival of the state. Morgenthau called this predicament the tragic dilemma of human history in that it produced a permanent tension between morality and power. He nonetheless stressed that the security provided by a stable national state reflected a kind of practical morality in which civilized values like freedom and democracy could flourish.

Significance

Morgenthau is ranked among the most distinguished and influential foreign policy scholars of the twentieth century. U.S. secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice acknowledged his personal influence. Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (1948) defined the field of international studies and provided a fresh paradigm to help guide America’s emergence as a superpower.

Morgenthau’s ideas were most popular during the Cold War era, and he worked as a consultant to the U.S. State and Defense Departments into the 1960’s. His public break with the Johnson administration over the Vietnam War ended these contacts, however. Morgenthau condemned the war as an intervention directly contrary to American vital interests. He said also that the lack of a clear strategy for withdrawal further damaged America’s credibility as a great power.

Exiled émigré scholar Morgenthau brought a sober European understanding of power politics to the United States and challenged the exuberant optimism and sometimes excessive moralism of U.S. foreign policy. Although his theory of a depraved human nature has been frequently criticized, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which began in 2001 and 2003, respectively, have revived interest in his views, especially regarding his insistence on restraint and limits in U.S. foreign policy.

From a broader perspective there are those who place Morgenthau among the classic realist political thinkers in a tradition that goes back to Thucydides, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Thomas Hobbes. In any event, Morgenthau’s theory of power politics based on a benighted human nature has retained its relevance.

Bibliography

Bucklin, Steven J. Realism and American Foreign Policy: Wilsonians and the Kennan-Morgenthau Thesis. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2001. Monograph on the opposed realist and idealistic approaches to foreign policy of Woodrow Wilson and the post-World War II political realists. Bibliographic references and index.

Frei, Christoph. Hans J. Morgenthau: An Intellectual Biography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001. The best account of Morgenthau’s career, and especially on his formation as a major political thinker. Based on Morgenthau’s unpublished notes and diary entries, as well as his voluminous publications. Original German edition published in 1992.

Lang, Anthony F., ed. Political Theory and International Affairs: Hans J. Morgenthau on Aristotle’s “The Politics.” Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004. Allows the reader to gain a fuller understanding of Morgenthau’s political theory, as taken from lectures on the application of Aristotle’s ideas, which he gave over a three-year period.

Morgenthau, Hans J. Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace. 1948. 5th ed. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1973. The first edition firmly established Morgenthau as the leading advocate of the “realist” approach to foreign relations. This fifth edition was the last published during Morgenthau’s lifetime.

Russell, Greg. Hans J. Morgenthau and the Ethics of American Statecraft. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990. Discusses the often misunderstood role of ethics and morality in Morgenthau’s realist political philosophy.

Williams, C. Michael. The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Examines the reasons for the revival of interest in Morgenthau’s political realism.

1941-1970: 1948: Morgenthau Advances Realist School of Power Politics.