(Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought) Felix Rösch (Auth.) - Power, Knowledge, and Dissent in Morgenthau's Worldview (2015, Palgrave Macmillan US)

Power, Knowledge, and Dissent in
Morgenthau’s Worldview
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Discussion Power, Knowledge, and Dissent in
By Michael Donelan Morgenthau’s Worldview
By Felix Rösch
Power, Knowledge, and Dissent
in Morgenthau’s Worldview
Felix Rösch
POWER, KNOWLEDGE, AND DISSENT IN MORGENTHAU’S WORLDVIEW
Copyright © Felix Rösch, 2015.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-40109-0
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Rösch, Felix.
Power, knowledge, and dissent in Morgenthau’s worldview /
Felix Rösch.
pages cm.—(The Palgrave Macmillan history of international thought)
Summary: “This book provides a comprehensive investigation into
Hans Morgenthau’s life and work. Identifying power, knowledge, and
dissent as the fundamental principles that have informed his worldview,
this book argues that Morgenthau’s lasting contribution to the discipline of
International Relations is the human condition of politics”-- Provided by
publisher.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Morgenthau, Hans J. (Hans Joachim), 1904–1980—Political and

social views. 2. Political science. 3. International relations. I. Title.
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First edition: August 2015
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Für Christa und Heinz Rösch
Angst ist keine Weltanschauung (Kurt von Hammerstein)

Contents
Preface ix
Prolegomena: Morgenthau, Realism, and Worldview 1
1 Hans Morgenthau and Weimar 21

Fin de Siècle and Kulturkrise: The German Bildungsbürgertum
during the First Half of the Twentieth Century 23
Ideologies, Alienation, and the Conscious Pariah 30
2 Power: Hans Morgenthau and Ontology 49
Hunger and Love: Morgenthau’s Search for the Origins of
Power and Politics in Human Nature 50
Pouvoir and Puissance: Hans Morgenthau’s Dualistic
Concept of Power 54
The Concept of the Political 63
3 Knowledge: Hans Morgenthau and Epistemology 75
The Deficiency of Positivism 77
The Spatial and Temporal Conditionality of Knowledge 87
Conceptual History as a Method 96
4 Dissent: Hans Morgenthau and Political Agency 107
The Scientification and Technologization of Life 109
Hubris in Western Democracies 116
Totalitarianism, the National Interest, and World Community 127
Epilogue: The Human Condition of Politics 143
Notes 161
Bibliography 173
Index 207
Preface
When I was a child, a family friend told me that one of his ancestors
always sat down for a few moments before embarking on a new jour-
ney. This took place more than 20 years ago, and my memory faded
about which of his ancestors it was. I cannot even recall the exact rea-
sons for his doing it. I like to think, however, that it happened for
reflecting about the reasons for the journey, what might lie ahead, and
what you might have to leave behind. Ever since I was told about it, I
take such a moment of reflection whenever I embark on a new journey.
With the publication of Power, Knowledge, and Dissent in
Morgenthau’s Worldview, my journey with Morgenthau’s thought comes
to an end and I embark on something new.
Over the past few years, this journey has brought me to places I
would have never dreamed to be and, it opened new horizons for me that
would have otherwise remained closed. And now, it is time to thank all
these people who have accompanied me throughout or in part, who
conversed with me, helping to sharpen my arguments, or who simply
showed support for and interest in my work.
First and foremost, I want to thank Hartmut Behr and Ian O’Flynn.
No doubt, without their generous, sympathetic support, I would have not
been able to bring this journey to an end. I am still humbled and thankful
when I think back to the countless meetings we had and to their
challenging questions that encouraged me to formulate and to transcend
my own thoughts. They helped me in laying an intellectual foundation
from which I will benefit for the rest of my life. In a recently televised
interview, Georg Ringsgwandl, a well-known Bavarian folk musician,
argued that you need mentors to grow intellectually and as a person, as
they can introduce you to artistic and intellectual worlds that otherwise
1
might have remained closed to you. Hartmut and Ian are such mentors.
Their supervision is for me a role model that I hope to achieve one day
with my own students. I am also thankful to the Politics Department at
Newcastle University, United Kingdom, and its faculty
x ● Preface
members, as this intellectually diverse and stimulating department pro-

vided me with a base to work on my project. This applies equally to my
colleagues at Coventry University.
In addition, I particularly want to thank Michael C. Williams and
William Outhwaite for taking the time to read an earlier version of this
book, for their generous support ever since, and for welcoming me to the
academic world. Chieko Kitagawa Otsuru also deserves my heartfelt
gratitude, as she hosted me at Kansai University in Osaka. During my
sojourn at Kandai, I was able to work on the final part of this book, and I
think back to my time in Osaka very fondly. Equally, I am thank-ful to
Daniel Hamilton for hosting me at the Center for Transatlantic Relations
at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns
Hopkins University in Washington. This stay enabled me to thoroughly
work through the entire Morgenthau Archive at the Library of Congress.
The entire project, however, would not have been possible without the
financial and ideational support of the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS),
the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD, German
Academic Exchange Service), and the Japan Society for the Promotion
of Science (JSPS). I am indebted to these organizations, and it is reas-
suring to know that even now there are philanthropic institutions that
support the unearthing of knowledge that is not limited to an immedi-ate,
monetary impact. At the KAS, I want to particularly thank Renate
Kremer and Rita Thiele. At the DAAD and JSPS, I am thankful to
Holger Finken and Sabine Yokoyama, respectively.
In addition, I am thankful to numerous people who supported me one
way or another throughout this journey: Richard Beardsworth, Marco
Cesa, Christoph Frei, Jan Gadow, Kyle Grayson, Amelia Heath, Knud
Erik Jørgensen, Oliver Jütersonke, Bettina Koch, Douglas Klusmeyer,
Richard Ned Lebow, Daniel Levine, Antonius Liedhegener, Timothy W.
Luke, Hartmut Mayer, Yutaka Miyashita, Seán Molloy, Cornelia Navari,
Thorsten Oppelland, Vassilios Paipais, Simon Philpott, Alexander
Reichwein, Florian Rösch, Sarah Rösch, Christoph Rohde, Kai M.
Schellhorn, William E. Scheuerman, Kosuke Shimizu, Stefan Skupien,
Yannis A. Stivacthis, Kamila Stullerova, Benedikt Stuchtey, Thomas
Thurnell-Read, Vibeke Schou Tjalve, Jodok Troy, Wilhelm Vosse, Peter
Wadey, Atsuko Watanabe, and Anthony Zito. I thank you all.
At Palgrave Macmillan, I am grateful to Brian O’Connor and Elaine
Fan for guiding me through the publication process, to the anonymous
reviewer for advising me on how to make my arguments more con-cise,
as well as to Brian C. Schmidt and to David Long, the editors of
Preface ● xi
The Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought series. When I

began this project, it was my hope and ambition to see Power, Knowledge,
and Dissent in Morgenthau’s Worldview published in this series.
I dedicate this book to two people for never losing faith and for showing
humanitas on so many occasions: my parents.
Some of the chapters have been published earlier in different formats:
● The section titled “Pouvoir and Puissance” in chapter II: Hans

Morgenthau’s Dualistic Concept of Power was published as
“Pouvoir, Puissance, and Politics: Hans Morgenthau’s Dualistic
Concept of Power?” Review of International Studies 40 (2014), 2:
349–365 (published by Cambridge University Press).
● The section titled “The Scientification and Technologization of
Life” in chapter IV has been published in an extended version as
“Realism as Social Criticism: The Thinking Partnership of Hannah
Arendt and Hans Morgenthau.” International Politics 50 (2013), 6:
815–829 (published by Palgrave Macmillan).
● “Epilogue: The Human Condition of Politics” appeared as “The
Human Condition of Politics: Considering the Legacy of Hans J.
Morgenthau for International Relations.” Journal of International
Political Theory 9 (2013), 1: 1–21 (published by Edinburgh
University Press).
Coventry, January 2015
Prolegomena: Morgenthau,
Realism, and Worldview
Hans Morgenthau: The Scholar as Émigré

On January 18, 1935, Irma Thormann wrote a desperate letter to Carl
Landauer, her former professor at the Handelshochschule (Trade
College) in Berlin. Due to his long-standing support for the German
Social-Democratic Party (SPD), Landauer was forced to leave Germany
right after the Nazis had gained power and, eventually, he found employ-
ment at the University of California in Berkeley in 1934. In this letter,
Thormann (1935: 1) sounded out potential academic employment in the
United States for her fiancé, who at that time was a Privatdozent for
“legal and political philosophy, sociology . . . and international law at the
1
University of Geneva.” Landauer’s (1935: 1) reply reached her two
months later, and it was discouraging: “You [Irma Thormann] know, of
course, that for lawyers it is more difficult to find positions [in the
United States] than for other scholars.” In March 1935, at the time
Landauer’s letter reached Thormann, her fiancé Hans Morgenthau
(1904–1980) was hoping to finally solve his problems, as he was on his
way to take up a position at the newly founded Instituto de Estudios
Internacionales y Económicos in Madrid. Soon after, however, the out-
break of the Spanish Civil War once again shattered his hopes. At that
time, little portended that Morgenthau would become one of the most
well-known International Relations scholars of the twentieth century.
Morgenthau was born 31 years earlier in Coburg, a small town situ-
ated close to the southern edge of the Thuringian Forest and then still
part of the Ernestine duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. He grew up in a
well-off, secular Jewish middle-class family, remaining the only child of
his parents. His father, Ludwig Morgenthau, was the son of a rabbi and
practiced as a physician in Coburg. His mother, Frieda Bachmann, was
the daughter of a wealthy merchant from nearby Bamberg (Frei 2001:
12-13). At first glance, it would seem that Morgenthau had a happy and
●
2 Power, Knowledge, and Dissent in Morgenthau’s Worldview
carefree childhood; he grew up in a family without financial concerns

and, in his own words, Coburg was “a very beautiful town, beautifully
located, with charming hills and valleys around it” (Morgenthau 1984b:
341). Throughout his secondary education, Morgenthau was also one of
the best students in his class and, as report cards, retained in the Leo
Baeck Institute Archive (Container 1, Folder 1a), show, by the end of his
education, he was indeed the best student.
However, Morgenthau’s childhood was far from happy and carefree.
Indeed, his biographer Christoph Frei (2001: 23) even detects a latent
depression in the young Morgenthau; in an interview with Bernard
Johnson, conducted in the 1960s, Morgenthau (1984b: 337) confessed
that he “was a very lonely and unhappy child.” This loneliness origi-
nated in a difficult relationship with his father, who repeatedly criti-cized
Morgenthau for his lifestyle, work ethos, and even for his choice of
academic major (Frei 2005: 39). The resulting “inferiority complex”
(Morgenthau 1984b: 338; also Thompson 1978: 2) was enhanced by the
rising anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic. Coburg was one of the
early centers of National Socialism (Albrecht 2005) and, beginning in his
youth, Morgenthau was frequently ostracized because of his faith. One
incident that even made it into the local news was recounted later by
Morgenthau (1984b: 340–1; also Fromm 1990: 289) during the interview
with Johnson. It was the custom in his grammar school (Gymnasium),
the Casimirianum, for the best student (primus hominum) at the sixth
form (Unterprima) to give a speech and to crown the statue of the name-
2
giving duke with a laurel wreath afterward. In 1922, Morgenthau was
the best student, and he was invited to deliver the speech. However,
throughout the ceremony, the audience swore at Morgenthau and some
3
even held their noses because of this “stinking Jew.”
In 1923, after graduating from school, Morgenthau was finally able to
leave the oppressive environment of Coburg behind. Having had an inter-est
in philosophical questions since his school years, it seemed an obvi-ous
choice to study philosophy at the University of Frankfurt. Library tickets
4
from this time (HJM Archive 151) indicate that Morgenthau read widely,
borrowing works from Max Weber, Hans Kelsen, Sigmund Freud, and
Robert Michels. However, after just one semester he left the univer-sity, as
he was deeply disappointed by the academic curriculum, which did not
satisfy his quest for a deeper understanding about human nature
(Morgenthau 1984a: 4). After this disappointing experience with phi-
losophy, he intended to study German philology, but as Frei (2001: 30–1)
notes this idea was rejected by his father, as it did not promise financially
sustainable career trajectories. As a compromise, law was chosen and
Prolegomena ● 3
Morgenthau enrolled at the University of Munich. Later, he also stud-ied at

the University of Berlin for one year (1925–1926). Nonetheless, Morgenthau
did not pursue his studies “purposefully” (zweckmäßig) (Radbruch 1929).
Rather, he immersed himself in wide ranging further studies in the sense of a
studium generale. Morgenthau took classes in his-tory with Hermann
Oncken and in art history with Heinrich Wölfflin. He also studied the
political thought of Max Weber in a seminar conducted by Karl
Rothenbücher (Morgenthau 1984a: 5–7; also Honig 1996: 309; Thompson
1978: 4). Morgenthau did not finish his law studies in Munich and he
transferred back to Frankfurt in 1928, after having recovered from
tuberculosis (Frei 2001; Feldheim 1928). In Frankfurt, he finalized his
doctoral thesis on tensions in international law (Morgenthau 1929a) and
finished his referendary (Referendariat) as a legal clerk in the offices of
5
Hugo Sinzheimer. Sinzheimer was one of the most well-known labor
lawyers within the Weimar Republic and because of his former political
career as a member of the national assembly for the SPD from 1919 to 1920
(Neacsu 2010: 44–5), Morgenthau sought employment with him. While
working for Sinzheimer, Morgenthau became acquainted with Franz
Neumann, Otto Kahn-Freund, and Ernst Fraenkel, who also spent part of
their referendary there. Furthermore, Sinzheimer introduced him to Frankfurt
School members like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer and to other
scholars working in Frankfurt, such as Karl Mannheim and Paul Tillich. As
demonstrated throughout this book, the intellectual experiences Morgenthau
made in Frankfurt from 1928 to 1932 proved to be a decisive stimulus for his
own thought, albeit he never fully endorsed socialism, as he criticized it for
its ideological rigidity that obstructed socialists from achieving practical
relevance (Morgenthau 1984a: 13–14; Scheuerman 2009a: 12–18; also
Levine 2012).
After finishing his doctoral thesis in 1928, Morgenthau’s academic
6
career, however, stagnated. He began working on his Habilitation with
Arthur Baumgarten, but he did not succeed in finding permanent
employment in German academia because this had already become
difficult for Jews. Consequently, he had to rely on financial support from
his family and from his fiancé. In 1932, the opportunity arose to take up
a position teaching German law at the University of Geneva (Honig
1996: 284). Relocating to Switzerland initially seemed to be a way out of
his academic malaise, but it quickly turned into an impasse. Many
German students refused to be taught by a Jew and attendance at his
classes dwindled. This was problematic for Morgenthau, as his income
relied on student fees (Frei 2001: 50; Jütersonke 2010: 76). What is
more, Morgenthau’s Habilitation was excoriated by some of his
●
colleagues; both reports of his work, written by Walther Burckhardt and

Paul Guggenheim, were negative. Although it seems that Guggenheim’s
report was influenced by personal animosities, as indicated in
7
Thormann’s (1935: 1) aforementioned letter, Morgenthau’s work was
deemed insuffi-cient by the university. However, since the French
publisher Félix Alcan had accepted Morgenthau’s work for publication, a
new committee had to be selected (Frei 2001: 46–8). One committee
member was Hans Kelsen, who had taken up a position in Geneva
shortly before. Despite the fact that Morgenthau (1934a) critically
examined Kelsen’s pure the-ory of law in his Habilitation, Kelsen wrote
a positive report and, fol-lowing his biographer Rudolf Métall (1969: 64;
also Morgenthau 1984b: 354), Morgenthau owed the acceptance of his
work to Kelsen. Indeed, Morgenthau (1970a) remained grateful for this
support throughout his life and even dedicated his anthology Truth and
Power to Kelsen. Still, with the Nazis in power in Germany and the
situation hostile in Geneva, Morgenthau desperately sought employment
elsewhere. At this point, the United States was already the preferred
choice, but all of his efforts were initially in vain; neither the Rockefeller
Foundation nor the Academic Assistance Council and the International
Jewish Committee (Morgenthau n.d.-b) provided any help, which is why
Thormann con-tacted her former professor from Berlin.
By 1935, the situation seemed to have improved because Morgenthau
was offered a position at the Instituto de Estudios Internacionales y
Económicos. As he later recalled in the interview with Johnson, the time
in Madrid proved to be one of the happiest moments of his life.
Morgenthau (1984b: 358) summarized it as follows:
I did very little work there. Nobody did much work. There was an enor-
mous amount of talk and little work . . . After lunch, which lasted a couple
of hours, you would go to a café where professors, politicians, writers,
actors, and so forth sat around a big table and talked forever . . .
Then at nine you had dinner which lasted generally until maybe two in the
morning.
The outbreak of the civil war, however, vitiated this option and turned
him into a “double exile” (Frankfurter 1937). Morgenthau was taken by
surprise by the developments in Spain, while holidaying with his newly
married wife in Northern Italy and they could not return. Only after years
were some of the couple’s possessions returned, including Morgenthau’s
manuscripts (Thormann n.d.-a). What followed was an odyssey through
Europe before the Morgenthaus finally could board the SS Königstein in
Prolegomena ● 5
Antwerp on July 17, 1937, leaving Europe for good and heading to their
first home in the United States—New York—where they arrived on July
8
28, 1937 (Morgenthau 1984b: 364; Frei 2001: 61).
At first glance, it seems that once he gained a foothold in American academia with his first
position at Brooklyn College, Morgenthau quickly left his European life behind. Never again
would he write professionally or privately in German, and he returned scarcely to his former
home for visits.9 Still, growing up in Central Europe deeply influenced Morgenthau and, like
other émigré scholars (cf. Arendt 1975; Pachter 1969–1970; Herz 1984), losing his home led to
feelings of uprooting and alienation. As his wife noted in a private conversation, “I have retreated
like a hedgehog into myself and, unlike before I have little interest in others. I have lost the
ability to act . . . because I cannot put experiences into context anymore . . . This ability is rooted
in the Fatherland (Vaterland ), the country of our youth, the country that gave us culture”
(Thormann n.d.-b).10 Consequently, they were delighted when they were reacquainted with their
belongings from Madrid because “a piece of home” (ein Stück daheim) (Thormann n.d.-a) was
returned to them. Morgenthau (1951d) even asked doctoral students to bring delicacies with them
upon their return from Europe. In the case of Gerald Stourzh, it was Hungarian salami and two
bottles of green Ettaler Klosterlikör (an herbal liqueur from the Ettal Abbey). It was, however,
not only in his culinary preferences that Morgenthau remained attached to Central Europe; as
some of his American colleagues noted pejoratively (Thompson 1978: 7) his thought also
remained Central European. Indeed, Morgenthau “never went much beyond, what he had
basically said and formulated” (Herz 2006: 25) during his time in Central Europe. Gradually,
however, Morgenthau became perceived as an American scholar, partly because he did little to
dissolve this conun-drum. Early accounts that focused on Morgenthau’s European life and work
(cf. Link 1965; Amstrup 1978; Ashley 1981; Thompson and Myers 1984; Gellman 1988; Frei
1994; Honig 1996) remained largely unno-ticed in the discipline and it was not until the early
years of the new millennium that a realist revival began to take shape in Anglophone IR that
critically investigated the importance of Morgenthau’s socializa-tion in the discourses of Weimar
Republic humanities. As this book demonstrates, a reading of Morgenthau’s work that does not
thoroughly contextualize his work into these discourses, the events of the Weimar Republic and
World War II, as well as the Shoah run the risk of pro-ducing a misreading, conflating his Central
European human-focused realism with the scientific version of his American peers.
11
●
Humanitas and Morgenthau’s Critique of Modernity

Since this recent revival of classical realism begun with the English
translation of Frei’s biography in 2001, several different readings of
realism and Morgenthau’s work in particular have been published. All of
them provided insightful contributions to the recovery of realism’s
ontological and epistemological tenets by carefully contextualizing the
work not only of Morgenthau, but also of other realist scholars, such as
E. H. Carr, Reinhold Niebuhr, and John Herz. Richard Ned Lebow’s
(2003) tragic, Michael Williams’s (2005a) willful, Brent Steele’s (2007;
also Hom and Steele 2010) reflexive, Vibeke Schou Tjalve’s (2008; also
Tjalve and Williams 2015) republican, Seán Molloy’s (2010) rhizomatic,
William Scheuerman’s (2011) progressive, Matt Sleat’s (2013) liberal,
Jodok Troy (2013) and Vassilios Paipais’s (2013) religious (also
Rengger 2013; critical Craig 2007a), and most recently Alexander
Reichwein’s (2014; also Barkin 2005) constructivist readings are
testament to the intellectual diversity that realist thought offers to
International Relations, providing a stimulus to take their interpretations
further. This stimulus is nurtured by the fact that despite the diversity of
these readings, a common theme is detectable among them. Realist
schol-arship, as we find it in the work of Morgenthau, aspires for a world
postulate (Weltwollung) in Karl Mannheim’s sense, which radically
argues for democratic citizenship in a global public sphere. In other
words, inspired by the readings mentioned earlier, it is the ambition of
this book to further elaborate on this realist theme by discussing the life
and work of the most well-known twentieth-century realist, Hans
Morgenthau. In doing so, it is demonstrated that the potential of
Morgenthauian realism for contemporary International Relations lies in
its critique of modernity and in supporting its ambitions to transcend the
dehumanizing tendencies of modernity.
Morgenthau’s realism as a critique of modernity does not imply that he
would have criticized every aspect of modernity. On the contrary, many
sociopolitical and technological developments, like telephones or airplanes,
have been hailed by Morgenthau (1973), as they help to transcend cultural
boundaries. However, Morgenthau (n.d.-a: 2) was concerned that modernity
sustains an “illusion of being perfect” that eventually leads to
dehumanization. For Morgenthau, intellectual and artisanal perfection can
only be achieved in solitude. Human beings, however, cannot live as
solitaires, but it is in their nature to establish, engage in, and commit
themselves to various sociopolitical and cultural communities. Knowing that
life does not allow for perfection—according
Prolegomena ● 7
to Morgenthau (n.d.-a: 4; similar 1963c: 422)—people arrange their lives

“as one great enterprise to escape from being alone, to make com-plete
the incompleteness of . . . existence, to fill the void in . . . being.” In
modern societies, these illusions of perfection are being intensified by
the belief in rationalism and empiricism (Sigwart 2013: 413).
Combining these elements, modern societies, therefore, are charac-terized
by widespread ambitions for social planning (Morgenthau 1964: 1391–8;
also 1975: 78). Highly specialized bureaucracies evolve, through which
political questions are turned into rational decision-making pro-cesses that
reinforce this illusion of perfection because they claim that their decisions
would be based on absolute, empirically verifiable knowl-edge. As a
consequence, the sociopolitical status quo is retained in modern societies, as
they gradually depoliticize social lifeworlds in which legiti-mate, though
contradicting political viewpoints are treated as heresy.
It might be surprising, maybe even impudent, to argue that a
Morgenthauian realism encourages the formulation of dissent against
modernity, considering that Morgenthau was repeatedly character-ized as
12
the “founding father” (e.g., Hoffmann 1977: 44; Kindermann 2004: 85;
Art 2005: 77) of a discipline that Stanley Hoffmann (1977; also Tickner
2011: 610–1) famously referred to being close to govern-mental
“kitchens of power.” However, there exists a “remarkably nar-row
account [of Morgenthau] that has come to dominate discussions of his
realism in IR today,” as Williams (2007b: 230) put it, because we should
not forget that, like many other realists, Morgenthau shared the fate of
being an émigré scholar, as has was also forced to leave Central Europe
after the Nazis gained power in Germany in 1933 (Lebow 2011; Rösch
2014c). Even though many émigré scholars found refuge and finally a
new home in the United States, particularly after the American entry
into the war in 1941, the situation was tense, as many of them had a
Germanophone background. After all, thousands of American citizens
with a Japanese background were detained in camps through-out the
Western United States during World War II, and a similar fate for the
German-speaking community did not seem altogether unlikely.
Particularly, an early-career scholar, like Morgenthau, who lacked the
transcontinental networks of some of the more established émigré
schol-ars, like Emil Lederer or Albert Salomon, initially found it difficult
to make a mark in American academia, since anti-Semitism was also not
uncommon in American colleges and universities (Lamberti 2006: 159).
Some universities even introduced quota-systems to minimize the
number of Jews in their student body and faculty (Bessner 2012: 108).
Consequently, some émigré scholars, like Herz, Ossip Flechtheim,
●
Gustav Ichheiser, or Hilda Weiss, secured their first full-time academic

posts at African American universities and colleges (Simon Edgcomb
13
1993; Puglierin 2011: 129–33).
Being at the margins, however, means that these émigré scholars
inhibited interculturally overlapping spaces (Massey 1999: 286–7),
whose fragility incited them to further reflect on their existence. An
émigré scholar like Morgenthau experienced every day that being is a
form of becoming, as their lives were a shared mode of existence. This
demonstrated to them that knowledge is created in relationality. For this
reason, Morgenthau and other early realists developed a greater
sensibility, since they experienced their spaces as disruptive and, there-
fore, active, but also generative. Hence, they were dependent on others
due to their marginal existence, but, as “traveller[s] between all worlds”
(Puglierin 2008: 419; similar Greenberg 1992: 69), they were also more
susceptive toward the intellectual potential of difference.
Morgenthau’s realism, therefore, did not stop in criticizing the dehu-
manization in modernity, but is an exemplar of the kind of normative
scholarship promoted by Central European émigré scholars at large.
Their experiences politicized them and turned them into what the late
Ralf Dahrendorf (2006: 7) called “Erasmians” (Erasmier). They were
scholars and activists who advocated a “politics of cultural rejuvenation”
(184) after World War II by supporting liberal, civic values (cf. Tjalve
and Williams 2015), making them important interlocutors in rejuvenat-
ing political discourses in American academia during the mid-twentieth
century (Loewenberg 2006: 597). Émigré scholars had firsthand experi-
ence of the downfall of a democracy and, therefore, understood only too
well that a sustainable democracy requires a political sphere in which
people can congregate and express their emotions, interests, and beliefs
in an antagonistic manner without resorting to violence. Called “arena of
contestation” by William Galston (2010: 391), this is an essential ele-
ment of democracies because it is within this space that people develop a
sense of belonging. Not only can they contribute to their own life-worlds
but people also engage constructively with their fellow society members,
and this helps them to develop empathy for others and their interests
(Rüsen 2009: 19). Having experienced the devastation ideolo-gies can
cause, Morgenthau and other realists were deeply suspicious of them,
which is why they did not turn into revolutionaries. Rather, they aimed to
show different potential realities to people, and they criticized their
democratic societies from within, as Leigh Jenco (2007: 741) put it for a
different context, to alert their compatriots to the hubris Western
democracies were descending into.
Prolegomena ● 9
This ambition to repoliticize the public leads us to the essence of

Morgenthau’s thought: humanitas. Morgenthau’s realism is cer-tainly
not the only contribution to International Relations promoting humanity.
Indeed, Morgenthau belonged to a group of mid-twentieth-century
political thinkers, such as Arendt, Niebuhr, or Karl Polanyi, who aimed
“to discover the source of desolation and probe the charac-ter of the
modern state,” as Ira Katznelson (2003: 3) puts it. However,
Morgenthau’s explicit thematization of the human condition of poli-tics
(which will be further discussed in the epilogue) and the deliber-ate
choice to put it at the core of his scholarly ambitions makes an
investigation of his life and thought a useful contribution to twenty-first-
century International Relations. This is because it offers a way to
construct what Véronique Pin-Fat (2013: 242) recently termed a “weak
ontology” of humanism, as Morgenthau conceptualized humanism in a
way that supports “sustained interrogation of the contestability and
radical underdetermination of subjectivity.” This antifoundational
understanding of humanitas was most forcefully expressed by Arendt in
her laudation for her former mentor Karl Jaspers upon receiving the
Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 1958; in her view, humanity
expresses itself in the “venture into the public” (Arendt 1958b: 2). This
venture is necessary because it is only in the public sphere where people
can experience themselves as human beings by becoming aware of their
personalities (das Personenhafte). In this context, Arendt (1958b: 3) dis-
tinguishes between this experience and human subjectivity, as the lat-ter
is objectively tangible for the person themselves, whereas the former is
not. Therefore, experiencing oneself as a human being can happen only
in intersubjectivity because only in communicating with others can
people fully experience their own unique characteristics. This pro-cess,
however, entails the risk that more than just the subjective ele-ments are
being uncovered. This is why she took up the words of the then German
president Theodor Heuss that humanitas needs to stand the test of an
“active and suffered (erlittenen) life” (Arendt 1958b: 2) because through
public engagement people will experience different perspectives and will
have to deal with different interests, potentially challenging their own
positions. This in turn requires people to be will-ing to skeptically and
(self)critically reflect on their positions within their own lifeworlds, and
it is only at this moment when humanitas evolves. However, following
Arendt (6) and echoing what Jenco (2007) identified for an East Asian,
Buddhist context, this turns humanitas into a state of mind that can be
approached by everyone through hard work and dedication. It is this
possibility that made Morgenthau seek
●
to venture into the public: assisting others in achieving their personal

humanitas.
Arguing that realism, as we find it in the work of Morgenthau, is a
critique of modernity and a normative commitment to humanitas has
implications for International Relations at large. Since the mid-twentieth
century, International Relations has established itself globally as an
academic discipline and today it thrives more than ever. This success,
however, came with a price. International Relations is a thematically,
methodologically, and epistemologically segregated discipline whose dif-
ferent camps have difficulties in speaking to each other, let alone reaching
out to other disciplines (Baron 2014). Highly specialized spaces like jour-
nals, conferences, and even academic departments aggravate this situation by
creating boundaries, excluding different and potentially critical voices. As
put by former president of the International Studies Association (ISA)
Margaret Hermann (1998: 606) nearly two decades ago:
The field of international studies has become a little like the Tower of
Babel, filled with a cacophony of different voices—or, as some have
implied, a set of tribes that are very territorial sniping at those who come
too close and preferring to be with those like them. As a result, the field of
international relations has become an administrative holding com-pany
rather than an intellectually coherent area of inquiry or a com-munity of
scholars.
I am not claiming that a Morgenthauian realism necessarily has or even

should have the potential to transcend these interdisciplinary and trans-
disciplinary boundaries, but it can help the discipline to rethink its cur-
rent institutionalization and its ambitions. Hence, the following study is a
contribution to fulfill Molloy’s (2014: 486) recent pledge:
As Realism emerges from the shadow of Neorealism to reclaim its sta-tus

as a normative theory of International Relations it should embrace
opportunities for dialogue within the camp of Realism, as well as seek-ing
to engage other theoretical approaches . . . and thereby add depth and
nuance to its understandings of the relationship between politics and
ethics. Such internal dialogue has the advantage of opening up new
debates and avenues of inquiry that will otherwise remain unexplored to
the impoverishment not only of Realism, but of IR’s discourse as a whole.
With Morgenthau’s critique of modernity and focus on humanitas, his

scholarship encourages the discipline to reflect on its purpose and,
Prolegomena ● 11
thereby, it can also accommodate Daniel Levine’s (2012) ambition to

enhance communication within and across the discipline. International
Relations needs to be a discipline of dissent that does not stop at criti-
cizing the current sociopolitical status quo and is actively engaged in
raising awareness among people for and helping them to formulate their
emotions, beliefs, and interests (cf. Cozette 2008; Kalyvas 2009; Ross
2013). In other words, International Relations has to help people to self-
critically reflect on themselves and on their lifeworlds. In addition, the
discipline needs to encourage and provide fora, where people can
congregate, facilitating their contribution to the construction of their
lifeworlds in temporary collectivity in which a suasive and therefore
antagonistic process administers toward a common good. International
Relations is, therefore, a discipline that has to have as its ultimate goal
the provision and sustainment of the political sphere within and across
societies. Ultimately, International Relations is the discipline of and for
global democratic citizenship.
Morgenthau’s Realism as a Worldview

To add to and to shore up the recent readings of Morgenthau’s real-ism,
this study externalizes Morgenthau’s humanitas by employing the
concept of a Weltanschauung (see Smith 1986: 226). To enhance the
readability of the following study, however, its English translation—
worldview—is applied, although it does not capture the meaning of the
German term appropriately. Anschauen (to regard) is an activity that
requires the entire range of cognitive abilities, whereas to view some-
thing can happen unconsciously. To regard, therefore, is better suited to
capturing what Mannheim (1964, 1985) implied with this concept. It is a
conscious creation of a lifeworld and not the result of a pas-sive
knowledge imposition, as it captures how people see the world, desire
the world, construct the world, and engage with it. Discussing
Morgenthau’s realism through the comprehensive lenses of a worldview,
therefore, offers several benefits.
Echoing Duncan Bell’s (2001: 116; also Devetak 2014: 444) point
that “a patient examination of the period and of the set of original texts
that relate to the same topic, and which serve as the ideological context
for the work” (emphasis in the original) is required, a worldview analysis
allows for a focus on the natural and social actualities that each person
faces in his/her common lifeworld. The wider and more nuanced the
lifeworld and the more experiences a person has, the wider and more
sig-nificant the impact of spatial and temporal aspects in the
construction
●
of a worldview are and the more pronounced they become. This means
that studying a worldview has to focus on its relational development
(Agnew 2007: 144). Equally, static conclusions have to be avoided, as a
worldview develops through physical and intellectual experiences made
with others in the materiality of a specific sociopolitical and cultural
space. In the case of Morgenthau, this requires a consideration of his vita
as an émigré scholar by analyzing the European and American
sociopolitical, cultural, and historical constellations that were sub-
merged into his life in order to capture the facets of his humanitas. Like
many other early realists, he was educated in the German humanistic
tradition, and this intellectual background constitutes Ariadne’s thread
that can be found throughout his work. In addition, Morgenthau was also
informed by his Jewish upbringing (Mollov 2002), and the experi-ence of
the Shoah turned him into an eager activist for a global liberal,
democratic citizenship that went beyond the nation-state (Scheuerman
2011). Finally, making his career in the United States also had an effect
on Morgenthau, as he turned to questions that he would not, and maybe
could not, have considered in Europe. Having experienced the down-fall
of the Weimar Republic, he was well aware of the precariousness of
democracies, which allowed him to sense even subtle threats to the
American democracy and to write ferociously and often polemically
14
against it. In considering these points, a worldview analysis enables
synchronic rather than diachronic conclusions to be drawn because, to
use George Lawson’s (2006: 415) words, continuities, discontinuities,
changes, and even ruptures in Morgenthau’s thought can be mapped.
However, stressing the relationality of a worldview does not mean
that it is a collective process. Rather, a worldview is individualistic, even
though it is formed within a particular group and produced by a
distinctive cultural setting. As Mannheim (1982: 91) noted:
Fundamental experiences and attitudes do not emerge in the substratum of

individuals’ lives in isolation, but that individuals who are together in the
same group share a basic stock of experiential contents. A further
presupposition is that individual segments of experience are not to be
found in isolation alongside one another within these basic forms, but
rather that they possess an internal coherence and thereby constitute what
might be called a “life-system.”
In constructing such a life-system, people refer to their collective mem-

ory. This concept, made popular by the Egyptologist Jan Assmann, char-
acterizes a memory that is different from everyday life. The members
Prolegomena ● 13
of a society share the same artefacts, like texts, rituals, ceremonies, or

monuments, on which they draw while making sense of their expe-
riences in everyday life. These “figures of memory” (Assmann 1995:
129) create a stable though gradually changing intellectual horizon,
meaning that in order to create a worldview and eventually an identity,
people make use of their collective memory, as it allows them to gain an
awareness of communalities and creates a sense of belonging. Hence,
one’s current situation influences the way the past is understood and the
future imagined (Assmann and Assmann 1994: 114–40; Assmann 1995:
126–33). Yet, even though this is the case, a worldview is distinc-tively
individualistic. Although there are similarities, the correlation between
the factors of a worldview makes it an individual undertaking because
the way they are invoked and their associations with each other in each
individual worldview is unique.
There are, however, also caveats that need addressing. A worldview
analysis is a form of historical writing and, like any historical writing, “it
is bound up with present political purposes and projects” (McCourt
2012: 28; similar Kratochwil 2006: 16; Lawson 2006: 416). Stressing
Morgenthau’s critique of modernity and focus on humanitas is informed
by the changing global political constellations of the twenty-first cen-
tury in which the influence of the nation-state is diminishing and prob-
lems have arisen that require the combined efforts of people beyond the
nation-state, as is the case with environmental pollution or the crisis of
democracy and capitalism. Returning purposefully to the past, how-ever,
enables scholarship to gain a critical distance from the present, which
helps some of the seemingly self-evident assumptions that still influence
International Relations and that have a dividing effect on the discipline
to be reconsidered (Lawson 2006: 416; Devetak 2014:
446). This reconsideration is supported by reflecting upon the world
postulate (Mannheim 1952: 184–5; also Kettler, Meja, and Stehr 1989:
78). This means that a worldview entails a utopian element because a
different sociopolitical reality is aspired to that is claimed to transcend
the inequalities of the current status quo. Thus, a worldview contains an
unuttered perception-presetting of how reality should be (Danziger 1963:
64) and these utopian elements can inspire the imagination of different
sociopolitical realities.
In addition, since a worldview is a mental visualization of the floating
world, it bears resemblance to Mannheim’s (1985: 55–9; also Woldring
1986: 191–3) particular form of ideology. This concept remains on the
psychological level and embarks from an individual standpoint, which
means that one considers the ideas of another person not necessarily as
●
wrong but as misleading. A particular ideology is, therefore, at least on

the political level, commonly used in a polemical way to disqualify the
opinions of others. Furthermore, Morgenthau made reference to this
particular concept of ideology; in Politics among Nations, Morgenthau
(1985: 101) remarked that “the element of power as the immediate goal
of the policy pursued is explained and justified in ethical, legal, or bio-
logical terms. That is to say: the true nature of the policy is concealed by
ideological justifications and rationalizations.” However, one still shares
a common set of criteria, which provides validity in the sense of general
acceptance. This last aspect is how a worldview is understood here
because it stresses the positive aspects, rather than its potential
negativity.
However, a worldview is not to be conflated with ideology, as is often
the case. Even realists like Arendt (1953: 317–18) are no exception in
this regard. Following the classic Marxist reading, ideology is charac-
terized as a closed, generalized, and self-referential intellectual forma-
tion promoting a “false consciousness” (Kennedy 1979: 353; Geoghegan
2004: 129). Hence, an ideology is defined as “clusters of ideas, beliefs,
opinions, values, and attitudes usually held by identifiable groups, that
provide directives, even plans, of action for public-policy making in an
endeavor to uphold, justify, change or criticize the social and political
arrangements of a state or other political community” (Freeden 2004: 6;
similar 2003: 32). This definition accentuates that an ideology is
differentiated from a worldview through its statism that exploits human
metaphysical desires, whereas a worldview is concerned with transcend-
ing the realities that have led to the formation of these desires in the first
place (Geuss 2011: 63–4). An ideology prevents people from reflecting
on the floating of the world by promoting statism in two ways:
First, following Mannheim’s concept of total ideology, ideologies
claim to be based on teleological laws and promote an essentialism that
enables thoughts to be monopolized. Mannheim (1985: 87) noted that
it is not primarily the man of action who seeks the absolute and immu-
table, but rather it is he who wishes to induce others to hold on to the
status quo because he feels comfortable and smug under conditions as
they are . . . This cannot be done, however, without resorting to all sorts of
romantic notions and myths. (Emphasis in the original)
Equally, Michael Freeden (2004: 12) notes that “all ideologies delight in
surrounding their arguments in the opaque and non-transparent aura of
terms . . . precisely because this captures the high ground that
Prolegomena ● 15
is immune from challenge.” Mannheim’s notion in particular follows that

through such laws, which act as a priori ontological parameters, humans
are turned into mere “executers” of these laws because individ-ual life-
experiences are mistaken as “permanent constituents of reality”
(Lichtheim 1965: 194) rather than temporal and spatial objectifications
of human interactions.
From this follows a second element that characterizes ideological
statism. Claiming total cognitive mastery of reality, ideologies prohibit a
critical view of reality because their specific ideological rationales
meticulously control knowledge construction. This is the case because
ideologies are cognitive and intellectual distortions. The beliefs and
aspirations of people in power are instilled into the wider public as
general interests, rather than the particular interests they are (Geuss
2011: 78). Accordingly, Arendt (1953: 317) argues that ideologies treat
the course of events as an unfolding of the particular logic they have
derived from, which means history appears to be “something which can
be calculated ” (emphasis in the original).
To demonstrate humanitas as the core of Morgenthau’s worldview,
his life and thought are comprehensively approached. This means that all
of his private and professional writings in German, French, and English
are being considered, and they are set into the specific context in which
they originated. To achieve this comprehensive elaboration of
Morgenthau’s life and thought, archival material from the Library of
Congress in Washington DC, the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in
Paris, the Archive of the Society for the Protection of Science and
Learning at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the Archive for Christian-
Democratic Policy of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAS) in St.
Augustin, the Leo Baeck Institute Archive in New York, and Keele
University’s Karl Mannheim Archive has been used extensively.
Archival research is necessary because in these “repositories of memory”
(Jimerson 2003: 89) many unpublished materials are to be found that
allow the life and thought of Morgenthau to be reconstructed and rein-
terpreted in a more comprehensive manner. This is the case, despite the
fact that archives are also the result of a threefold process of “sedimen-
tation” (Hill 1993: 8–19). This means that an archive is a collection of
material of a person or institution put together by personally involved
people. First, the creator of the archive might have removed material
for various reasons (Harrison and Martin 2001: 124). Second, the
persons putting together the material for archiving might have
intentionally not included material, and finally, archivists might have
removed some material due to financial or spatial restrictions (Wingen
and Bass 2008:
●
578). Certainly, this took place in the archives mentioned earlier, but the
amount of material and at times the very private, intimate content
suggests that this only happened to a limited degree. In addition, using
material from a variety of archives helps to soften the effects of sedi-
mentation; while, for example, personal material is relatively scarce in
the Library of Congress, the material in the archives of the Leo Baeck
Institute consists predominantly of private correspondence and diaries
from Morgenthau and his wife. Combining these different materials
enables to trace the thought-process of Morgenthau and to contextual-ize
it into the specific time and space in which his worldview evolved. This
is difficult to achieve if only the published end-products of his thought
process would be considered.
Outline of the Book

An aim to make a contribution to the growing elaborations of
Morgenthau’s life and thought as well as classical realism and the his-
tory of international political thought in general is reflected in the out-
line of this book. Williams (2007a: 5) recently identified three potential
explanations for this renewed interest because “[t]he interpretation and
use of ‘classical’ thinkers in intellectual and political debate is never a
wholly innocent process. It always reflects its historical genesis and
context of current concerns.” All of these explanations are spurred by
sociopolitical and intradisciplinary developments.
First, there is an increased interest in the history of International
Relations. Despite being a relatively young discipline (in the sense of an
institutionalized academic field), it has gained maturity result-ing in a
rising interest in its historical and intellectual development, which goes
beyond canonical classifications of great debates, such as the dichotomy
between idealism and realism (cf. Wæver 1998; Wilson 1998; Ashworth
2002; Schmidt 2002, 2012). Recent examples, for instance, can be found
in the works of Harald Kleinschmidt (2000), Hartmut Behr (2010), John
Hobson (2012), Lucian Ashworth (2014), and most recently Barry Buzan
and George Lawson (2015). Second, the renewed interest in Morgenthau
is also the result of a reconsid-eration between the relationship of
International Relations and politi-cal theory. There are widespread
aspirations to reunite both strands of political science into international
political theory, as they have been separated due to a “forty years’
detour” (Smith 1992). Finally, Williams identified increasing discontent
regarding positivism within the disci-pline since these approaches do not
uphold their promise to produce a
Prolegomena ● 17
theory that enables scholars to understand and explain international

affairs. The mounting complexities in International Relations have led to
a variety of approaches, such as social constructivism, critical the-ory,
postcolonialism, and feminism, attempting to capture reality in a more
differentiated and more appropriate way. However, this has also caused a
reconsideration of classical scholars in the search for analytical insights
to capture these raising complexities. Recent contributions in this regard
can be found in Christoph Rohde (2004) and in the works of Kenneth
Booth (2005), Williams (2007b), Marco Cesa (2009), Behr (2013a), and
Christian Hacke (2014) where Morgenthau’s realism has been applied to
gain insights about the end of the Cold War, neoconser-vatism, the
transatlantic relationship, security studies, the crisis in the Ukraine, or
tensions on the Korean peninsula.
To speak to these discourses in International Relations theory and to
explore the earlier mentioned desiderata on Morgenthau’s worldview,
the outline reflects Pierre Bourdieu’s (1992: 54) concept of habitus, as it
serves as a matrix of three interrelated aspects. The habitus “ensures the
presence of experiences which [are] deposited in each organism in the
form of schemes of perception, thought and action.” First, schemes of
perception—or ontology—deal with how people perceive the struc-tures
of sociopolitical reality. Second, schemes of thought—or episte-mology
—examine the ways in which people construct knowledge and use it to
interpret social reality. Third, schemes of action—or political agency—
demonstrate specific actions, hence the practical conversion of the first
two schemes. These three aspects—ontology, epistemology, and political
agency—form the constitutive elements through which Morgenthau’s
worldview is examined. Before discussing these three elements in depth,
however, the first part examines fundamental ele-ments identified by
Morgenthau that shaped the field he was socialized in. During the
Weimar Republic, the German Bildungsbürgertum, the educated middle-
class, experienced a cultural crisis. This distinctively German elite
perceived itself to be in a cultural crisis, which influenced its thoughts,
discussions, and actions. It is argued that due to this cri-sis, the
Bildungsbürgertum was influenced by three aspects that made a lasting
conceptual contribution to the formation of Morgenthau’s worldview by
maturing his perceptions, thoughts, and actions. These concepts are the
disenchantment of the world as a counterideology, alienation as an
epistemological source, and the power of dissent. The German Empire
and the Weimar Republic were the heyday for ideologies. People were
yearning for an explanation of life, and ide-ologies offered a meaning to
their existence. Morgenthau recognized
●
the distortion ideologies provided, and thus he argued for a realistic

approach. Like ideologies, the feeling of alienation also grew out of this
crisis. Since society in its pluralism offered no epistemological reference
point anymore, many intellectuals focused on the human being. This
individualism gave way to making epistemological use of alienation. The
final concept implies that the Weimar Republic provided oppor-tunities
for a small group of intellectuals, previously segregated from the
majority of society. Only a few of them, however, were engaged in
politics and, therefore, the Weimar Republic lacked support not only
from the masses, but also from the people who profited most from its
existence. Morgenthau had recognized these circumstances and subse-
quently he had already shifted his interest toward the political at the
beginning of his academic career.
The second part primarily discusses Morgenthau’s concept of power,
which is widely debated among International Relations schol-ars.
Superficial accounts present Morgenthau’s concept of power in the
Hobbesian tradition as a means of self-preservation; however, more thor-
ough investigations demonstrate Morgenthau’s psychogenic and praxeo-
logical understanding. By referring to Freud and Weber, such accounts
identify Morgenthauian power as the ability to dominate others. This part
contributes to this discourse by demonstrating that Morgenthau separated
power into two dualistic conceptualizations. Although ana-lytically
Morgenthau worked with a concept of power understood as domination,
normatively, in reference to Nietzsche and Arendt, he pro-moted a
concept of power that focused on the will and ability to act together.
Elaborating this dualistic concept has wider implications for modern
International Relations because it reminds scholars to be (self) reflexive.
In addition, it is argued that a Morgenthauian scholarship helps scholars
to gain a more profound understanding of depoliticizing tendencies in
Western democracies.
The intention of the third part is to demonstrate that Morgenthau
aimed to establish a feasible and intelligible (international) political the-
ory based upon epistemological directions that stood in stark contrast to
positivism. Morgenthau’s intention is already visible in his doctoral
thesis in which he argued for the political as the determining factor of
society. Only after his emigration to the United States did he overcome
his rather gloomy outlook on the possibility of scholarship, as laid down
in several unpublished manuscripts. It was there that Morgenthau had
realized the necessity to establish a theory for International Relations
when positivism became the ruling dogma. The elaboration of his
epistemological foundations, furthermore, elucidates that they firmly
Prolegomena ● 19
rested on alienation as a source of phenomenological self-reflection and

reveal that Morgenthau’s epistemology was formed within the concerns
that German humanities were troubled with at that time. The epis-
temology that Morgenthau exercised allowed him to critically reflect on
his own and on the position of others. Besides, it enabled him to
critically question and uncover what could be consciously discernible
and which processes and forces would shape social relations. Such an
epistemology, geared by alienation, enabled Morgenthau to develop a
conceptual history approach as it allowed him to transcend trivial
everyday occurrences and instead to identify general political concepts.
In order to elaborate on these arguments, it is first necessary to ana-lyze
Morgenthau’s attitude toward positivism. This contains a critical
assessment of the major forms of positivistic sciences he encountered
during his lifetime: legal positivism in Europe and positivism in the
United States. This leaves the task of elucidating the epistemological
foundations Morgenthau rested his approach on. It is argued that the
concepts of intersubjectivity, temporality, and spatiality were crucial
aspects Morgenthau considered during the construction of knowledge.
Finally, this is followed by the elaboration of his analytical framework to
approach and understand politics—a framework that rested on “peren-
nial problems.” It also contains a correlation of his conceptual history
with intellectual forerunners of this approach, primarily to be found in
Swiss representatives of art history.
The final part of Power, Knowledge, and Dissent focuses on the politi-cal
agency of Morgenthau by elaborating on his political and socio-economic
concerns. These concerns were informed by Morgenthau’s normativity,
which served as a guideline for explaining or criticizing contemporary
political and social affairs, while the experiences he had also allowed him to
test, solidify, or rectify his normative world pos-tulate. Morgenthau’s world
postulate was informed by the European values he discussed in several
unpublished German manuscripts. Recent scholarship has identified these
European values in the Judeo-Christian heritage, in Aristotle and his claims
for a telos in life and phronesis as the most important virtue, and even
comparing them to the American founding fathers. All of these explanations
bear truth in them as they all represent aspects of Morgenthau’s humanist
consciousness. To detect Morgenthau’s humanism, this part first
scrutinizes the major dehuman-izing concerns he had with liberalism if
the dangerous potential of ide-ologies is to be confined. The first
concern Morgenthau had was of a political nature and deals with his
repudiation of idealism, while the second criticism Morgenthau brought
forward against modern liberal
●
societies had a socioeconomic character. He argued against the accel-

eration and commodification of life in which he detected a threat for
humans in their quest to become self-determined citizens as well as
threats for the environment and humanity in general. Both criticisms are
elaborated, first, by asking what Morgenthau specifically under-stood by
these kinds of concepts. Second, this is followed by an analy-sis of the
consequences these societal developments would have had. Finally, the
last section of this part discusses the national interest and world
community as solutions Morgenthau had in mind to alter these
developments.
The epilogue discusses the recent revival of classical realism and
Morgenthau in particular. This evolving debate has helped to contextu-
alize and reconstruct Morgenthau’s thought, which until now had been
misrepresented in interpretations of structural realism and early critical
International Relations. However, despite all of its achievements, more
attention has yet to be drawn to Morgenthau’s contribution to contem-
porary International Relations theory. To contribute to reducing this
research gap, the conclusion of Power, Knowledge, and Dissent
considers a set of questions that Morgenthau himself asked at the
beginning of his career (in La notion du politique). It is argued that
Morgenthau was particularly concerned with the dehumanization of
sociopolitical life in modern democracies evoked through processes of
ideologization, tech-nologization, and scientification, which he countered
by focusing on a reintroduction of the human factor to politics.
CHAPTER 1
Hans Morgenthau and Weimar
Introduction
This part discloses the context in which Morgenthau’s worldview
matured. The necessity to contextualize was pointed out by Morgenthau
(1947a: 165) himself because he acknowledged in Scientific Man vs.
Power Politics that the individual “concerns itself not with . . . survival
but with his position among his fellows once his survival has been
secured.” Given Morgenthau’s forced migrations, one might wonder
about the location of this context, but, as this part demonstrates,
Morgenthau’s worldview was distinctively Central European, despite the
1
fact that he spent most of his life in the United States. Indeed,
Morgenthau was condemned by “American political theorists . . . [for
his] ‘Germanic way of looking at things’” (Thompson 1978: 7). In a
letter from April 18, 1961, to his former student and later professor in
Munich, Gottfried-Karl Kindermann, Morgenthau disclosed the origins
of his worldview further:
As concerns your question about the ultimate source of my values, we are

here, of course, in the realm of philosophy and religion. Men assure
certain values as self-evident and justify theory in terms either of these
religions or philosophic conditions. I would assume that mine stem from
the Judeo-Christian tradition, fortified by Greek and German philoso-phy.
(HJM Archive 33)2
Despite the caesura of World War I, this investigation into the context of
Morgenthau’s worldview considers the German Empire and the Weimar
Republic lasting from 1871 until 1933 because Morgenthau was not
only a citizen of both states, but the sociopolitical and cultural condi-
tions that shaped the Weimar Republic originated already during the
●
time of the Wilhelmine Empire (Wehler 2003; Büttner 2008: 21–32).

Peter Gay (2001: 91–2) remarks in this regard that
the Weimar spirit . . . was born before the Weimar Republic; so was its
nemesis. As in the Empire, so now, too, there were exceptions [pro-
gressive intellectuals] and thanks to Weimar, there were more excep-tions
than before, but the bulk of the historical profession trafficked in
nostalgia, hero worship, and the uncritical acceptance—indeed, open
advocacy—of apologetic distortions and sheer lies. 3
However, this part cannot provide a discussion of the entire kaleidoscope

of life in the Wilhelmine Empire and the Weimar Republic. Rather, it
focuses in the first section on the stratum in which Morgenthau was
socialized: the Bildungsbürgertum. This distinctively German social
stratum with their emphasis on Bildung (education) perceived itself to be
in a Kulturkrise (cultural crisis) (Kocka 2008: 7–8). Regardless if this
crisis was merely an imaginary or not, the cultural crisis guided the
thoughts, discussions, and actions of the German Bildungsbürgertum and
reactions ranged from reactionary outbursts, like Oswald Spengler’s The
Decline of the West (1918), to radical socialist criticism, as pro-moted by
members of the Frankfurt-based Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for
Social Research). Also Morgenthau was affected in his intellectual
socialization by these two extreme reactions to the cultural crisis.
Oscillating between them, Morgenthau’s worldview matured in
perception, thought, and action by developing three guiding concepts,
which are further discussed in the second section: the disenchantment of
the world as a counterideology, alienation as an epistemological source,
and the power of dissent as epitomized in Arendt’s (1978) “con-scious
pariah.” The German Empire and the Weimar Republic were the heyday
of ideologies. People were yearning for an explanation of life, and
ideologies offered them a meaning to their existence. Morgenthau
recognized the distortion ideologies provided to life and hence argued
for a realistic approach. Like ideologies, the feeling of alienation also
grew out of this crisis. Since society in its pluralism lacked not only an
ontological reference point, but also an epistemological one, many
intellectuals focused on the human being. This individualism gave way
to make epistemological use of alienation. The final concept implies
that the Weimar Republic provided opportunities for a small group of
intellectuals, previously segregated from the majority of society. Only a
few of them, however, were engaged in politics, and, therefore, the
Weimar Republic lacked support not only from the masses, but also
from the people who profited most from its existence. Morgenthau
●
Hans Morgenthau and Weimar 23
had recognized this circumstance and subsequently shifted his interest

toward the political from his early academic stages onward.
Fin de Siècle and Kulturkrise: The German Bildungsbürgertum

during the First Half of the Twentieth Century
The Significance of Bildung
At the time of Morgenthau’s birth, the German Bürgertum was a small
group, made up of not only civil servants with an academic educa-tion,
but also judges, physicians, lawyers, priests, and tenured fac-ulty
members at universities. Fritz Ringer (1969: 5–6) defined them “simply
as a social and cultural elite which owes its status primarily to
educational qualifications, rather than hereditary rights or wealth.”
Following Hans-Ulrich Wehler (2003: 294), it merely constituted 0.8
percent of the German population (approximately 540,000–680,000
4
persons) at the beginning of the Weimar Republic. Morgenthau, the
5
only child of a physician from the Ernestine town of Coburg, who had
married the daughter of a wealthy merchant from nearby Bamberg, was
in Europe throughout his life—from his birth in 1904 until his forced
emigration in 1937—part of this Bürgertum (Fromm 1990: 285; Frei
2001: 12–13; also Rösch 2008). The defining factor of the German
Bürgertum was Bildung, as Ringer’s definition indicates, which is why it
6
is commonly called “Bildungsbürgertum.” This focus on Bildung is tied
to its particular historical development. Unlike in the United Kingdom
and France with its noblesse de robe, wealth and birth mattered less in
Germany. Until the foundation of the German Empire in 1871, Germany
was merely a loose federation of states and this “system of mini-states”
(Hobsbawm 1990: 31) led to a considerably larger demand for higher
government officials than anywhere else in Europe because the
Deutscher Bund (German Confederation) consisted of 39 states. All
these states required their own administration in order to coordinate the
various tasks of absolutist states and mercantilism as their economic
policy. The development of standing armies and the bacchanal lifestyle
of many of its rulers required a basic form of administrative coordination
in order to create a positive trade balance to ensure a constant source of
revenue. The administration was further modernized and profession-
alized in the Stein-Hardenberg-Reforms after Prussia was defeated by
Napoleon’s army in 1806. This intensified throughout the nineteenth
century because the “Great Transformation” (Polanyi 2001) with the
development of market economies, accompanied by industrialization,
●
required even more synchronization of the various policy fields (Giesen

1993: 105–14; Wehler 1996: 712–72).
This increased bureaucratization meant that government officials
were often assigned to positions far away from their hometown. Due to
their different educational and linguistic backgrounds, these bureau-crats
were often unable to communicate with the local population on common
grounds. Also Morgenthau experienced the diversity of life-worlds and
the problem of speaking across boundaries during his legal clerkship in
Wolfratshausen, a village at the foothills of the Alps, in 1927. Even
decades later, Morgenthau (1984b: 345–7) was taken aback by the
primitiveness and brutality of its inhabitants. This manifests that the
Bürgertum was exclusive because Bildung did not serve to increase the
permeability between the social stratas, but it was used as an institu-
tionalized tool to create intrasocietal boundaries (Daum 2002: 111–16).
The main institution that observed this centrality of Bildung was the
university. In 1770, already 40 universities existed at the Holy Roman
Empire (Sacrum Imperium Romanum), whereas in France there were 23,
and in the United Kingdom there were only 2 (Giesen 1993: 113). Since
then, Prussia, the biggest German state, centralized higher education and
further controlled its entrance requirements. In 1791, for example,
Prussia standardized entry examinations for the regular civil service and
introduced the Abitur (A-level) as the general requirement to enter uni-
7
versities in 1812 (Ringer 1969: 16–32). This not only allowed Prussia to
control the abilities of future government officials and to ensure that its
subjects became obedient patriots, but it also created the social bar-riers
reified in university degrees, separating its new elite from the rest of the
8
population (Vierhaus 1972: 523–5).
Furthermore, in the course of the Prussian Reforms after the defeat to
France, Wilhelm von Humboldt, the head of the Prussian Department of
Religion, Public Institution, and Health of the Ministry of the Interior,
and older brother of the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, developed
the modern university as we know it today. In Germany, this type of
university is exemplified in the foundation of the Friedrich-Wilhelm-
Universität (today the Humboldt-University) in Berlin in 1810. Its
fundamental principles were academic freedom as well as the unity of
research and teaching, aspects soon to be found at all German
universities and, indeed, globally (Reill 1994: 345–66; Kehm 2004: 6–
9
7). This freedom provided universities with the right of self-government
(though under the legal auspices of the state), the right to train their own
academic successors with the venia legendi (permis-sion to lecture)
through a Habilitation, and the right to do research.
●
Yet, scholarship at the Humboldtian University was less concerned with

the immediate applicability and economic utilization of research results.
Rather, it was committed to the ideal of pure scholarly work, whose task
it was to increase knowledge for its own sake (Sheehan 1968: 366–7;
Schnädelbach 1984: 20–30; Szöllösi-Janze 2005: 343–6). Research was
conducted as an individual act, liberally executed, segregated from the
practical world, and committed to the freely chosen interests of its pur-
suers (Vierhaus 1972: 529). This relative independence was one of the
reasons for the high social status of its faculty members, as it provided
them with such a high self-esteem that it enabled them to become moral
and intellectual role models for the rest of the population.
This special status allowed professors and Privatdozenten to set the
rules and standards for membership to the Bildungsbürgertum.
Consequently, Ringer (1969: 6) called them “mandarin intellectuals” to
characterize their status. The mandarin intellectuals were the core of the
Bildungsbürgertum and Morgenthau aspired to become part of them,
when he came to Frankfurt to finish his doctoral thesis in 1928. Uhu
(eagle owl), as Morgenthau was called in Frankfurt (HJM Archive 54),
not only made friends with other clerks of Hugo Sinzheimer’s law office,
such as Ernst Fraenkel, Franz Neumann, and Otto-Karl Freund, but he
also became acquainted with Martin Buber, Paul Tillich, Mannheim,
Franz Oppenheimer, and members of the Institute for Social Research,
such as Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and
Erich Fromm (Morgenthau 1984b: 348–9; Frei 2001: 37–40; Lebow
2003: 253). This ambition to become part of the mandarin intellectu-als
is evidenced in Morgenthau’s (1932) inaugural lecture in Geneva in
which he critically engaged with the Weimar Republic luminaries of
10
German Staatslehre : Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen, and Georg Jellinek.
The Cultural Crisis

At the turn of the twentieth century, Germany, like many other European
countries, suffered from socioeconomic and cultural develop-ments
revolving around urbanization and an increasing industrializa-tion
(Marchand and Lindenfeld 2004: 1; Osterhammel 2009: 102–3). These
developments left people in a state of increasing fatigue and help-
lessness, as they sensed and experienced them regularly, but they were
left with the assumption that they did not have the possibility to engage
with them constructively. As a consequence, many people felt over-
whelmed by the growing complexities of everyday life, leaving them in a
state of “vertigo,” to use Philipp Blom’s (2009) term. As self-acclaimed
●
guardians of culture, the mandarin intellectuals, in particular, were

affected by the cultural crisis and critically engaged with these society-
transforming changes for three reasons.
The first reason concerns the structure of knowledge production. The
unique societal position universities and their faculty members had since
Humboldt’s reforms were questioned by the foundation of numerous
research facilities outside traditional academia. Government-funded
11
bodies, like the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, private research
institutes, like the Institute for Social Research, and research depart-
ments in large companies appeared as new actors of knowledge produc-
tion. Also within academia, changes occurred with the establishment of
the first technical universities (Markl 2003: 49–55; Szöllösi-Janze 2005:
339–60). Furthermore, the composition of the university itself was
subject to change, as larger number of students entered the univer-sities
to satisfy economic demands. Many scholars feared the decline of
academic standards, as evidenced in the concerns by the classicist
Werner Jaeger from 1924: “Higher education has become an article of
mass consumption, cheap and bad . . . The mass as such is uncritical and
fanatic” (quoted after Ringer 1969: 256). This structural change of
higher education was a result of the rapid German industrialization
during the latter half of the nineteenth century. It required university
education to focus more on immediate applicability of the learning
outcome and, hence, it affected the Humboldtian ideal. Natural and
applied sciences became more important and received more funding, as
the economy needed well-trained engineers. Particularly, after the
accession to the throne of Wilhelm II in 1888, the Dreikaiserjahr (Year
of the Three Emperors), this need intensified, as the military entered a
cataclysmic alliance with the economic and educational sector to satisfy
imperialistic ambitions to occupy a “place near the sun (Platz an der
12
Sonne)” (Bernhard von Bülow). This is epitomized in the 29 institutes
of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, as only three of them conducted
research in social sciences and humanities.
This structural change, however, was only the result of a deeper,
second development. Philosophy was losing the primacy it had upheld
among the classic faculties (medicine, law, and theology), and
Geisteswissenschaften (humanities) lost its popularity due to rapid and
spectacular technological developments, which captured the masses.
Knowledge production in the universities shifted from the ideal of pure
scholarship trying to enhance knowledge for its own sake to a knowl-
edge more engineered for its applicability. This led to the formation of
different intellectual camps within the humanities. Rationalism and
●
empiricism were identified as the primary reasons that had deprived

humanities of their intellectual dominance. However, despite this
deprivation, some scholars aimed to transform humanities into posi-
tivistic sciences by applying these means to epistemological and onto-
logical questions in order to secure a place for humanities in the higher
education curriculum (Lichtblau 1996: 77–101). The Vienna Circle is
properly the most well-known group of scholars during the interwar
years that followed this ambition. However, most other scholars aimed to
distinguish themselves from the exact sciences to which Morgenthau was
particularly drawn. Indeed, the very term “Geisteswissenschaften”
received its contour in the 1880s from Wilhelm Dilthey in order to dis-
tinguish them from natural sciences (Thielen 1999: 91–2). Discussions
about the future outlook and self-image of the humanities were led
fiercely, as manifested in an early account:
All our political theories and state constitutions . . . are derivatives, nec-
essary consequences, of decline; the unconscious effect of décadence has
mastered even the ideals of specific sciences. My objection to the whole of
English and French sociology remains the fact that it knows by expe-
rience only the structures of decay in society and, in all innocence, takes
its own instincts for decay as the norm for sociological value judgements
. . . Our socialists are décadents, but Mr Herbert Spencer is also a déca-
dent—he sees the triumph of altruism as desirable! (Nietzsche 1998: 64;
emphasis in the original)
This demonstrates that the mandarin intellectuals particularly were con-

13
cerned about the banalization of Wissenschaft. Jaeger again sums this
up vividly. He argued that “since both are two fundamentally different
things, and wissenschaft [sic] has no place where Empirie is required, for
theory kills the instinct” (quoted after Ringer 1969: 110).
Finally, however, the biggest concern of mandarin intellectuals was
that this strife for applicability significantly alters German culture, as
they feared that it disqualifies different forms of life, denying the
importance of space and time, and eventually leads to an intellectual
mediocrity. The original liberating and empowering impact of the
Enlightenment’s legacy that was further increased through economic,
technical, and social acceleration changed into its converse around the
turn of the twentieth century. The perception of time and meaning of
history were altered from a perspective of teleological, ever-increasing
optimism toward the perception of an incoherent, self-preserving, mean-
ingless, and vertiginous accelerating cycle (Ringer 1969: 253–304; Rosa
2005: 161–240). This “directionless, frantic change” (Rosa 2009: 102)
●
shattered the identities and sense of belonging of many Germans by

14
depriving them of the possibility to give meaning to their lifeworlds.
The mandarin intellectuals feared that this meaninglessness would lead
to a profanity and vulgarity of life, as they saw it exemplified in
a fetishization of mass-produced objects. No longer was workmanship
guided by the strife for perfection, but the “shop-window quality of
things” (Simmel 1997a: 257). Meaning was sought in the very objects
that were the products of a process that deprived people of their identity
in their first place. Yet, it is misleading to speak of a Kulturpessimismus
15
(Gismondi 2004), but the mandarin intellectuals perceived these
developments as a Kulturkrise (Mannheim 1953: 218). They were not
pessimistic about culture per se, but believed that German culture was
under threat and required protection. Two ways to cope with the cul-tural
crisis can be distinguished. Ringer chose the terms “orthodoxy” and
“modernists” to emphasize this dichotomy, but due to modernity’s
numerous, conflicting meanings (Gumbrecht 1978: 93–131), Bourdieu’s
(1969) term “heterodoxy” is considered here, as he employed the term to
16
classify similar aspects.
Representatives of the orthodox position experienced the cultural
crisis as a threat because they feared losing the significant position that
they had upheld since the establishment of Humboldtian University, and
the materialism just reinforced their fear that culture slips into banality.
Unwilling to cope with it, they reacted by protecting their vested
interests. Often their work reproduced the scholarly mainstream and little
was produced that furthered knowledge significantly. New tendencies in
the social sciences and humanities, such as sociological research, were
dismissed, as they considered sociology as a scholarly field solely
concerned with the promotion of positivism (Ringer 1969: 233). This
protection of vested interests also determined their position toward
politics. During the German Empire, many scholars supported
reactionary thought and followed Germany’s imperialistic ambitions.
After the downfall of the monarchy, they were still arguing for a con-
servative revolution, supported undemocratic and nationalistic move-
ments to perpetuate the old ideals, and rejected the Weimar Republic
(Laqueur 1972: 226; Hardtwig 2004: 337; also Dahrendorf 2006).
Ludwig Fulda, the first German PEN-president, and Thomas Mann, who
published his Reflections of an Unpolitical Man in 1918, are two of the
few examples who made the transformation from supporters of the
Empire, to Vernunftrepublikaner (republican by reason), and, finally, to
supporters of the democracy. The antidemocratic nationalism of the
orthodox intellectuals was often accompanied by antisocialism and
●
17
anti-Semitism. As Fritz Stern (1989) has shown, it was this combina-
tion of anti-Semitism, nationalism, and the fear of cultural decline that
not only led to a lack of support for the republic, but eventually fostered
the rise of national-socialism in Germany.
However, there was also a second position toward the cultural crisis
among German intellectuals, but it received significantly less support
than the orthodoxy (Dahrendorf 2006). They were equally critical of
changes caused in an industrialized society, but other than the orthodoxy,
the heterodoxy tried to critically engage with the given circumstances. It
was particularly this group of scholars that affected Morgenthau’s
intellectual socialization. Georg Simmel, for example, not only exten-
sively worked on the impact of urbanization on social relations and pro-
duced a treatise on fashion, but he was also concerned about fetishized
materialism and argued for gender equality (Gassen and Landmann
1958; Coser 1965b; Simmel 1964b: 409–24; 1995: 7–37; 2005: 33–8).
Besides, this group of scholars also aspired to improve the methodologi-
cal toolbox to achieve a more rigid and more creative contribution to
knowledge production (Dahme and Rammstedt 1984: 463–75). Having
been exposed to the orthodoxy as a student, Morgenthau was moving
toward the heterodoxy, as he shifted his interest from pure jurispru-dence
toward sociology of law during the time of his doctoral thesis. He
considered the latter to be better suited to study international law
18
(Scheuerman 2009a: 12–8). This academic shift was not affected by his
forced migration. Morgenthau edited a special issue on sociology of law
for the University of Kansas City Law Review in 1940 for which he had
contacted among others Rafael Altamira, a former colleague from
Madrid, where Morgenthau briefly worked from 1935 to 1936 (HJM
Archive 3).
Heterodox intellectuals, like members of the orthodoxy, were to be
found in all professions of the humanities but especially the new disci-
pline of sociology was their field of activity, since “German sociology is
the product of one of the greatest dissolutions and reorganizations,
accompanied by the highest form of self-consciousness and self-
criticism.” Mannheim (1953: 210) added that “sociology is seen to be not
only the product of this process of dissolution but also a rational attempt
to assist in the reorganization of human society.” Certainly, this is what
schol-ars like Simmel, Weber, Norbert Elias, or Walter Benjamin wanted
to achieve. Since a lot of these scholars tended politically toward social-
ism and/or were Jewish, it was not only their progressive ideas that hin-
dered their career progress in the German Empire. Simmel, to mention
just one example, was only awarded with a professorship in provincial
●
Strasbourg in 1914 (Jung 1990: 14–18) because, as Morgenthau (2004:

43) himself remarked, “[i]f Simmel or Freud had been baptized, they
would have become full professors in no time.” This, however, gradu-
ally changed during the Weimar Republic. Now, they could achieve
senior positions at the university. Indeed, Gay (2001: 9–10; implicitly
Dahrendorf 2006) is convinced that it was this minority of thinkers
(Kulturschaffende) that contributed most to the success of the Weimar
Spirit with its support for democracy in general and intellectual creativ-
ity in particular. Already in 1907, for instance, 12 percent (19 percent
including the converts) of the Privatdozenten and 3 percent (7 percent
including the converts) of the professors were Jewish (Gay 1978: 96,
118). Given the Jewish share of approximately 1 percent of the popula-
tion and the confessional reservations, these figures were high and rose
even more during the Weimar Republic. By April 1936, 1,145 Jewish
professors were forced to retire (Lamberti 2006: 159), and Claus-Dieter
Krohn (1997: 222) reports that more than 2,000 scholars immigrated to
the United States. Morgenthau’s faith might lead to the conclusion that
he felt more inclined to these scholars, but it was their understand-ing of
the social world, commitment to democracy, and their scholarly pursuit
of humanism that convinced Morgenthau of their agenda, and he retained
this tendency in the United States. Consequently, in a let-ter dated June
17, 1941, to the Committee for Selected Social Study, Morgenthau
remarked that he had little contact with the faculty mem-bers in Kansas
City, other than “politically progressive members” (HJM Archive 10).
Ideologies, Alienation, and the Conscious Pariah

Time of Ideologies and the Loss of Simplicity
Due to the cultural crisis, Germans, in particular, were susceptible to the
promises of ideologies. This is the stance Morgenthau (1930a: 171–2)
took early on in his career, as he agreed with his mentor Sinzheimer,
who had recognized in a letter to Morgenthau on March 11, 1932, “eine
absolute Furcht des Deutschen vor der Realität” (an absolute fear of the
Germans of reality) (HJM Archive 197). This rise of ideologies con-
cerned Morgenthau and dominated his thought throughout his life. It was
his aim to disenchant the world, to use Weber’s (2004: 30; also Neacsu
2010) term. Even though Morgenthau (1930a: 42; 1937: 8–11)
acknowledged the urgency to reestablish a metaphysical system
because it enables humans to reconnect, he still remained critical
toward the
●
promises of ideologies. Any metaphysical system has to guarantee

empirical and normative objectivity, but, following Morgenthau (1937:
97–100), ideologies are unable to provide at least the latter, as they are
also conditioned by time and space, despite their intentional obscur-ing
of their own perspectivist outlook on the world. Mannheim (1985: 117–
46), whom Morgenthau got to know in Frankfurt during the late 1920s,
had identified mainly four types of ideologies in his highly influential
study Ideology & Utopia: socialism, conservatism, liber-alism, and
fascism, but particularly the first two were important for Morgenthau’s
intellectual development, as Morgenthau had to oscillate between these
two ideologies in his intellectual socialization during the Weimar
Republic in order to produce a “map of ‘in-betweens,’” as Ira Katznelson
(2003: 167) eloquently put it for a slightly different context. At that time,
the controversies between the leading ideologies were still only
academic disputes and not yet a question of life and death. Schmitt
(2002: 23), for example, later remembered having had interesting dis-
19
cussions with Mannheim, despite their intellectual disagreements.
Particularly, the socialist ideology found adherents within the hetero-
doxy. Morgenthau got into closer contact with its representatives when
he started to work for Sinzheimer, who was one of the most prominent
Weimar experts of labor law and a social-democratic member of the
National Assembly from 1919 to 1920 (Livneh 1975: 272–5; Frei 2001:
35–6). Sinzheimer played an important role in Morgenthau’s turn to the
sociology of law, as it “called for an analysis of the fundamen-tally
dynamic or historical character of the nexus between legal norms and
20
reality” (Scheuerman 2009a: 17). This turn was encouraged by
Sinzheimer, as his work exemplified to Morgenthau that laws can only
be understood if they are being put into the social context in which they
exist. Legal norms do not shape social reality, but social reality in the
first place influences the creation of norms. For Morgenthau, this implied
that depending on the context, equal laws can be interpreted and applied
differently (Scheuerman 2008: 31–8; 2009a: 12–18).
However, this does not mean that Morgenthau embraced all aspects of
socialism. He remained critical and disapproved socialism’s estrange-ment
from reality. This is evidenced in his autobiographical sketch, in which he
recalled that he had attended a lecture given by Mannheim at the Institute for
Social Research the night before he left Germany for Switzerland. In this
lecture, Mannheim proposed the “free-floating intelligentsia” as a key
element to fight Nazism in its rise to power. This instance convinced
Morgenthau (1984a: 14; emphasis in the original) that “[m]oi, je ne suis pas
Marxiste.” Also at later stages of his life, Morgenthau
●
expressed criticism. For instance, on an undated slip he accentuated that

“[t]he idea of scientism is clearly recognizable here [Marxism], the idea
that you only need to use the correct formula to apply to the right
mechanical device, and the political subjugation of man will disappear”
(HJM Archive 30). Equally, Morgenthau remarked in a letter to Sister
Dorothy Jane Van Hoogstrade on December 6, 1951, that
both liberalism and Marxism believe that the evils to which the flesh is heir
can be remedied here and now by man’s unaided efforts. In other words,
liberalism and Marxism are really secular religions which believe that sal-
vation attained [sic] in this world through . . . social reform, economic and
technological development, or political revolution. (HJM Archive 26)
Hence, Morgenthau criticized socialism, liberalism as well as any other

ideology for estranging humans from seeking and taking responsi-bility
for their lifeworlds (Klusmeyer 2011). It is for this reason that recent
scholarship repeatedly identifies an “ethics of responsibility” in
Morgenthau’s thought (cf. Klusmeyer 2011; Sigwart 2013; Rösch
2013a). Having experienced the ultimate effect of ideologies in World
War II and the Shoah, it becomes comprehensible why Morgenthau’s
first monograph in the United States (Scientific Man vs. Power Politics)
was an almost polemical account against the hubris into which American
liberalism had fallen (Behr and Rösch 2013).
The other ideology that affected Morgenthau was conservatism, whose representatives were
composed primarily of the orthodoxy. Morgenthau had encountered this kind of thought in
Schmitt’s work. Like his colleagues from Sinzheimer’s law office, Morgenthau had turned to
Schmitt in his quest to develop an approach capable of depict-ing reality more accurately within
the field of Staatslehre (Morgenthau 1932; Wolin 1992; Scheuerman 2009a: 32). Presumably this
intellectual engagement with Schmitt began while Morgenthau studied in Munich, as library
tickets, which are preserved in the Library of Congress, indi-cate (HJM Archive 151). It might
seem surprising that Morgenthau studied the work of the later “Kronjurist of the Third Reich”
(Waldemar Gurian), but as Morgenthau (1932) himself remarked, Schmitt was one of the doyens
of German Staatslehre and any student had to engage with their contributions to the discipline.21
One should, therefore, not over-estimate his relation to Schmitt (e.g., Pichler 1998; Scheuerman
1999; 2007b; Koskenniemi 2000), as Morgenthau left no doubt about his contempt for Schmitt.
After a personal meeting, Morgenthau (1984a: 16) recalled that he had met “the most evil man
alive.”
22
●
Morgenthau’s position toward conservatism is fully outlined for the

first time in his Geneva lecture Der Kampf der deutschen Staatslehre um
die Wirklichkeit des Staates but was already briefly mentioned in his
piece on Gustav Stresemann (Morgenthau 1930a: 176) and in the
unpublished manuscript Einige logische Bemerkungen zu Carl Schmitt’s
Begriff des Politischen (HJM Archive 110). Following Morgenthau,
Schmitt steps in where scholars like Kelsen have failed in the course of
the cultural crisis, as they not only have denied their own particularity
while claiming to have produced a pure theory of law, but they have also
neglected the ideological standpoints of their fellow citizens. This means
that Staatslehre needs to acknowledge, in Morgenthau’s words, an
“irrational element” caused by the fact that it is impossible to think about
the structure of the state completely rationally since this ques-tion would
affect one’s own environment. Hence, there are always emo-tions, fears,
and nescience involved. Morgenthau was convinced that especially
within a pluralistic society like the Weimar Republic, Kelsen could not
succeed. By contrast, Schmitt was aware of the importance of the
political for a Staatslehre committed to accurately depict reality.
Agreeing with Schmitt, Morgenthau (1932) argued that the political had
to be understood as the “entity of public reality” that was created by the
interaction between its people and the political as an “objectifi-cation of
thought and action” lay within the soul of the human beings. Hence, laws
did not create the state, but the political created and gave meaning to
laws. It is important to note that Morgenthau agreed with Schmitt on the
importance of the political, also supported by his inter-est in sociology of
law, but disagreed with Schmitt’s embodiment of the political (more
Kalyvas 2009: part II). Schmitt (1996) had argued in his “friend-foe-
scheme” that the political was violent, but for Morgenthau (1932, 1933:
47) this could not capture the essence of the political, and he argued that
this reduction to violence was caused by Schmitt’s lack of a “geistig-
seelische Zentrum” (spiritual-moral center). Schmitt’s schol-arly quest
was not guided by a truth-aspiring ethics, but it was biased and openly
promoting a reactionary ideology. Like Kelsen, Schmitt was unable to
reflect on his own spatial and temporal conditionality. Morgenthau
(1932) argued that Schmitt had looked for the solution in the same
ideology that created the problem in the field of Staatslehre in the first
place. Schmitt’s ideological position concerning the politi-cal led him to
the proposition of creating a strong state by arguing for homogeneity
among its population (Morgenthau 1934b: 54–5) through the
institutionalization of education, the reinterpretation of history, and the
standardization of an official language (Snyder 2011: 58). The
●
existing pluralism of thoughts, therefore, endangered the order of the

state.
To transcend the dangers of ideologies, Morgenthau turned to life
philosophy. Early on in his life, Morgenthau was introduced to this
thought, when studying the works of Nietzsche, “the God of my
[Morgenthau] youth” (quoted after Frei 1994: 101), extensively during
his adolescence. Morgenthau returned to Nietzsche throughout his life as
a request to the University of Chicago library to acquire more copies of
23
Nietzsche’s books exemplarily demonstrates (HJM Archive 52). In
Nietzsche, Morgenthau had found an important stimulus to formulate his
critique of ideologies. As it is manifested in Nietzsche’s (2003: 120)
well-known remark that “God is dead,” there was no objective world
order for Nietzsche and certainty could only be found in simplified
ordering principles that distort reality. Rather, Nietzsche argued for an
elucidation of reality, supplementing inquiries into a normative “ought.”
Morgenthau (1936: 5) took this to heart, as demonstrated in an article
written in Madrid, in which he stated that “Je constate simplement ce que
je vois.” This led to another aspect Morgenthau found stimulat-ing in
Nietzsche. By demystifying eternal truth proclaimers, Nietzsche pointed
to the forces that really shape the world: emotions, passions, hopes, and
wishes. This is “human, all too human” (Nietzsche 1996a), and it
confirmed Morgenthau’s conviction that human beings need to be at the
focus of scholarly work (on realism and emotions, see Ross 2013). Late
in his life, Morgenthau (1972: 63) was still convinced that this task was
far from being achieved, since “[t]here is a fog of mystery in which
human existence is embedded.”
The study of Nietzsche, however, marked only the beginning of his
engagement with life philosophy and particularly German historism
(Jung 1990: 152; Frei 2001: 108–9), in which Morgenthau found affir-
mation of the human condition of politics and the relativism of being.
Both are cornerstones of life philosophy (Bochénski 1951: 133). For
Simmel, another important early influence on Morgenthau’s thought
24
(Frei 2001: 100) and whom he recommended to Alfred Hotz in a letter
dated October 11, 1950 (HJM Archive 28), irrationalism was a defining
factor of modern societies. To understand this irrationalism of life,
Simmel argued to focus on the human condition of politics because
science, technology, works of art, and even civil laws only gain meaning
through the reciprocal interrelations of the involved persons. Since all
aspects of life were incorporated and life was in constant flux, also the
context of these relations was dynamic and could take numerous forms.
For Simmel, therefore, truth only existed within and for a specific
●
context (Kaern 1990: 78–83). This was evidenced to Morgenthau while

studying international law. Following Morgenthau (1929b: 623; 1930b:
18), international law was characterized by a tension created by its ana-
lytical statism and the constantly changing actualities. Therefore, inter-
national law was incapable of depicting reality appropriately. But there
was a further conflict within life itself. Life was not only expressed
through a limited ego, but also manifested in an infinite continuity. This
was the case since, on the one hand, there was a “struggle [of life]
against form itself, against the very principle of form” (Simmel 1997b:
77). Life was dynamic and in constant flux, but needed to manifest itself
in forms. Yet, these reflections were static expressions that from the
moment of their creation were inadequate images of life, manifested for
Morgenthau in international law. “[F]rom the first moment of their
existence, they have fixed forms of their own, set apart from the . . .
rhythm of life itself” (76). Hence, according to Simmel and anticipat-ing
Alfred Schuetz’s idea of multiple realities (Šuber 2002: 172), life had to
recreate continuously new forms of manifestation since the old static
ones cannot depict the fluctuations of reality. There was irratio-nalism in
life because the form in itself did not reflect the intentions of its creators
anymore and remained excluded from life, although having been created
out of it. For Simmel, therefore, one cannot speak of a society, but of
sociation. It is not the forms (in other words, the institu-tions) that were
of importance, but the interactions of people (Simmel 1908: 4–10; also
Frisby 1984: 120–3; Scaff 1990: 288; Lichtblau 1997: 83–98).
Studying Simmel encouraged Morgenthau’s claim that scholarship

had to embrace a critical relativism, and he found reassurance in the
work of Mannheim, which he repeatedly recommended to students and
colleagues in the United States (HJM Archive 53). Morgenthau initially
followed Mannheim’s understanding of relativism, which was based on
the argument that there were no objective standards or laws. For
Mannheim (1985: 267), knowledge was existentially determined:
The existential determination of knowledge may be regarded as a

dem-onstrated fact in those realms of thought in which we can
show (a) that the process of knowing does not actually develop
historically in accor-dance with immanent laws . . . On the
contrary, the emergence and the crystallization of actual thought
is influenced in many decisive points by extratheoretical
factors . . . existential factors. This existential determi-nation of
thought will also have to be regarded as a fact (b) if the influ-ence
of these existential factors on the concrete content of knowledge
is more than mere peripheral importance.
●
This means that knowledge was constructed in a specific social real-ity

and that the constellations, which submerged into this reality, were
constitutive for the content and construction of knowledge (Scott 1987:
41–54; Knoblauch 2005: 100–15; Jung 2007: 120–41). This thought was
explicitly supported by Morgenthau (1962a: 72–3): “In other words,
political thinking is . . . ‘standortgebunden,’ that is to say it is tied to a
particular situation” (emphasis in the original). Morgenthau agreed with
Mannheim that knowledge was tied to a particular perspective and only
the totality of these perspectives lead to an objective reflection. Being
aware of one’s own perspective enables people to acknowledge other
perspectives as well. For Morgenthau, this leads to a more sound truth
claim since the scholar is able to incorporate other perspectives into
his/her own (Mannheim 1985: 75–83). This, what Mannheim called
“relationism,” was important for Morgenthau because it encour-aged him
to critically self-reflect on his own work, as relationism mini-mizes the
dangers of intellectual hubris, minimizing and disregarding other
perspectives (for a critique of Morgenthau’s self-reflexivity, see Levine
2013).
The Alienated Mind: Alienation as an Epistemological Source

Having shifted his analytical focus toward the elaboration of the human
condition of politics, Morgenthau found further intellectual stimulus in the
new discipline of psychoanalysis (Gay 1988: 446–69). Morgenthau got
briefly engaged with psychoanalysis during the time of his doc-toral thesis
and Habilitation, resulting in a manuscript called Über die Herkunft des
Politischen aus dem Wesen des Menschen (HJM Archive 199), as he had
hoped to gain further insights about the human psyche and its relevance for
understanding (international) politics (Schuett 2007: 65).
Freud seemed to be well suited to Morgenthau’s quest since he pro-
vided an analytical scheme to explain the human mind. Following Freud,
the mind was divided into three instincts: the id, ego, and super-ego. The
id signifies the realm of unconscious drives that influenced human
actions. This includes hunger, thirst, and sexual desires. It also includes
the conflictive pair of Eros (life drive) and Thanatos (death drive). For
Freud, the latter finds its characterization in aspirations to repeat, to
keep, and the yearning for a standstill, whereas Eros is the exact
opposite. This drive, by contrast, leads humans in their ambitions to be
constructive and productive. The super-ego, however, tries to con-strain
the natural desires of the id. It contains instructions, regulations, and
prohibitions imposed on human beings by societal institutions, such
●
as the family, religion, or government bodies. Perceptions of morality

and values are created and enforced with the intention to restrain the id
within human beings. These two opposing instincts submerge into the
ego, which constitutes the arena, in which humans give meaning to their
lifeworlds by trying to balance the other two instincts. This conscious
process of balancing seemingly produced rational solutions for the
specific contexts each human is encountering (Freud 1961a: 13–59; also
Gay 1988: 403–16). This explains why Morgenthau ini-tially turned to
psychoanalysis, as Freud provided with the id and super-ego submerging
into the ego space to reflect on human conditionality. Indeed, even later,
Morgenthau (1947a: 175) acknowledged that “[i]n our time Sigmund
Freud has rediscovered the autonomy of the dark and evil forces which,
as manifestations of the unconscious, determine the fate of man.”
This belief was put on a firm basis since Freud also tried to apply this
theory on the international level. Freud pointed out that the instincts
intrinsic to people cannot be followed at the national level due to moral,
societal, or legal restraints. Indeed, within a society these instincts had to
be suppressed because the potential aggression that comes along with
human instincts would otherwise threaten to dissolve the society. As
Freud (1953: 37–8) put it:
The existence of this tendency to aggression . . . is the factor that disturbs

our relation with our neighbours and makes it necessary for culture to
institute its high demands. Civilized society is perpetually menaced with
disintegration through this . . . hostility of men towards one another . . .
Culture has to call up every possible reinforcement in order to erect bar-
riers against the aggressive instincts of men.”
However, without legal or social restrictions, and hardly any moral ones,
the international level gave, according to Freud, the possibility to follow
one’s instincts ruthlessly, as World War II showed. Through identifi-
cation with the nation-state especially at times of crisis, by “rallying
around the flag,” to use a more modern term, each citizen could satisfy
their instincts by receiving a share of the power a nation acquires on the
international scene (Schuett 2007: 61–6; Scheuerman 2009a: 37–8).
Yet, despite this initial accordance, Morgenthau eventually moved on
from Freud’s thought. Not that Morgenthau (1937: 82–7) did not gain
useful insights in the human psyche that consolidated his picture of
humankind, but he was dissatisfied with the insights psychoanalysis
provided, which is why he did not even consider his manuscript good
●
enough for publication. In his autobiographical sketch, Morgenthau

(1984a: 14) provided us with the reasons for his dissatisfaction: “what
defeats a psychoanalytical theory of politics is the impossibility of
accounting for complexities and varieties of political experience with the
simplicities of a reductionist theory, economic or psychological.” Hence,
also psychoanalysis was unable for Morgenthau to transcend the statism
of international law. Psychoanalysis did not allow him to incorporate all
aspects of human life and eventually showed him that in order to
effectively fulfill this task a critical self-reflectivity has to guide his
thought, rather than the examination of other people’s egos.
Again, life philosophy provided Morgenthau with a solid basis to
channel his thoughts effectively, as it allowed him to develop his concept
of alienation as an epistemological source. Alienation has not only been
25
exclusively discussed by life philosophy (Behr 1995: 178). However,
during the time of Morgenthau’s intellectual socialization, alienation was
at the core of academic debates within German humanities, as the
cataclysmic experiences of the loss of metaphysics that eventually led to
Weimar’s downfall motivated scholars to reflect upon its epistemologi-
cal benefits (Pachter 1972: 236; also Björk 2005).
The two most prominent attempts at that time to conceptualize
alienation were provided by Simmel and Schuetz. Both understood
alienation as estrangement but followed different paths. While Simmel
(1964a: 402) focused on the stranger within a society, “the person who
comes today and stays tomorrow,” exemplified in the history of
European Jews, Schuetz considered the stranger as an outsider, mani-
fested in the ideal type of the emigrant. Certainly, Schuetz’s (1944: 499)
own experiences as an émigré scholar played a role in his understanding
of the stranger. For Schuetz, the stranger is “an adult individual . . .
who tries to be permanently accepted or at least tolerated by the group
which he approaches.” Regardless of their different conceptualizations,
however, both stressed a heightened epistemological awareness (Endreß
2006: 123). Simmel and Schuetz argued that the stranger is better suited
to rationally analyze their environment. This is the case since, follow-ing
Simmel (1964a: 405), the stranger had more “freedom” because he/ she
is more detached from social conditions and obligations that influ-ences
perception and thought of people living under these conditions. Schuetz
(1944) even emphasized that alienation can increase knowledge since
people well established within society did not have to question everyday
actions and common beliefs because general acceptance can be assumed.
Their knowledge was, therefore, “(1) incoherent, (2) only particularly
clear, and (3) not at all free from contradictions” (500).
●
This leads to a second reason for speaking in favor of alienation as an

epistemological source. Whereas Simmel saw the stranger positively, as
their enhanced mobility was essential to enable the stranger to acquire
more knowledge, Schuetz also acknowledged their physical and mental
constraints. The stranger enters a lifeworld in which nothing remains
unquestioned since it is different from one’s former lifeworld. Although,
following Schuetz, the past of the new society remains hidden from the
stranger, numerous beliefs, manners, and rules have to be understood to
ensure one’s subsistence. Recently, Enzo Traverso (2004; more general
Schale, Thümmler, and Vollmer 2012; Rösch 2014a) provided an exam-
ple that emphasizes this questioning of common assumptions. Émigré
scholars, such as Arendt, Adorno, and Horkheimer, had contributed
significantly to the interpretation of the Shoah since they were free from
the constraints of national contexts. Simmel and Schuetz’s remarks
confirm this view. They accentuated that life philosophy acknowledges
that, although a universal objectivity is impossible, enhanced perspec-
tivist objectivity can be reached because the physical or mental detach-
ment enforces a willful self-critical engagement with the new and old
environments.
Having been forced to emigrate twice in his life, Morgenthau turned
his personal experiences into his epistemological basis (Frei 2001: 23).
Due to his family and religious background, Morgenthau was a stranger
in Simmel’s sense. Following his own accounts, Morgenthau (1984b:
339–41; also Frei 2005: 39) suffered from an authoritarian father dur-ing
his childhood. Although patriarchy was common then, it left scars in
Morgenthau’s psyche in the form of shyness and the fear of being
rejected. The family, however, was not the only source of Morgenthau’s
alienation, as he grew up in an anti-Semitic environment. Already in
1929, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) won the
absolute majority in city council (Stadtrat) elections in his hometown
Coburg. This made Coburg the first German town with a NSDAP
26
majority in the city council (Hayward and Morris 1988: 110–15). Life
as a Jew in a particularly anti-Semitic area was difficult and lonesome.
This was manifested in an incident at the boy scouts, as Morgenthau
(1984b: 339) later recalled: “I remember being spit at when marching in
a group. This treatment aggravated the traumatic experiences I had at
home and led to a kind of retrenchment. I retreated into my own shell in
fear of disappointing human contacts.” Being in the boy scouts, however,
just like entering the Thuringia fraternity (HJM Archive 44), shows that
Morgenthau took efforts to overcome alienation and become an
unquestioned member of society. Transcending the personal
●
hardships and embracing alienation for its epistemological benefits was

certainly difficult for Morgenthau (1984b: 348) during his adolescence,
and it was not before he transferred to Frankfurt to finish his disserta-tion
that he learned to accept it.
As an intellectual, Morgenthau’s forced emigration had three impli-
cations, as Neumann, his former colleague in Sinzheimer’s office, once
remarked (for more on Neumann, see Kettler and Wheatland 2014). He
was not only displaced with his family from his friends and belongings,
but he was also displaced as a scholar from his intellectual field and,
finally, as a political person, who promoted republican and humane con-
ditions (Eisfeld 1991: 116). Unlike other émigré scholars, Morgenthau,
having been expelled from Germany and Spain, was even a “double
exile,” as Felix Frankfurter remarked in a letter to Nathan Greene on
December 9, 1937 (HJM Archive 22). Twice in his life, Morgenthau was
forced to adapt to new lifeworlds, and the second time, in particu-lar, was
difficult for Morgenthau. He had no personal connections in the United
States since his only acquaintance, Richard Gottheil, a pro-fessor at
Columbia, had died shortly before Morgenthau (1984b: 364) arrived in
1937. Having no personal connections aggravated his anxiety to get a
position in American academia. This was different from Madrid since,
like Hermann Heller, he took up a position at the Instituto de Estudios
Internacionales y Económicos (Meyer 1967: 310–1). In the United
States, Morgenthau had to start off as an elevator boy (Lebow 2003:
219), and his first academic position at Brooklyn College conse-quently
required him to teach “just about everything under the sun” (Morgenthau
1984b: 367). A further problem was the different intellec-tual tradition in
which liberalism was the ruling dogma. In accordance with his anti-
ideological stance, Morgenthau early on warned of the dangers an
exaggerated understanding of liberalism causes. This almost intransigent
understanding of philosophical traditions is manifested in his remark to
Rita Neumeyer Herbert on June 2, 1947, in which he lamented that “they
literally don’t know what I am talking about” (HJM Archive 26) after
reading the reviews of Scientific Man vs. Power Politics. Indeed, this
might explain why most of Morgenthau’s friends were also European
emigrants. Among them were Arendt (Rösch 2013a), Gurian (Thümmler
2011; 2014), Richard and Hildegard Mainzer, or Karl Löwenstein. It is to
be assumed that there was a particular bond between German-speaking
émigrés since, as Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (1982: xiv) remarked for the
circle around Arendt, these were people “who could respond to a
quotation from Goethe with a quotation from Heine, who knew German
27
fairy tales.” Besides, Morgenthau used any
●
possibility to return to Europe, be it for official reasons, like the sojourn

to Austria upon the request of the American Department of State (HJM
Archive 59), academic reasons, teaching at the Salzburg Seminar in
American Studies from 1950 to 1976, or the Villa Serbelloni in Italy
(HJM Archive 50; 53), or private reasons, since “man streicht sich [dort]
die Seele glatt” (one can spiritually recover), as Arendt put it shortly
before her death in a letter to Morgenthau in 1975 (HJM Archive 5).
As an emigrant, Morgenthau was also a stranger in Schuetz’s sense.
The hardship Morgenthau suffered throughout his life proved decisive
for the development of his epistemological toolbox. As pointed out, it is
reasonable to believe that early on Morgenthau was aware of the pos-
sibilities alienation could offer, as his choice to work for Sinzheimer and
writing Scientific Man vs. Power Politics put him at odds with the ortho-
doxy of American political science (Amstrup 1978: 173; Scheuerman
2009a: 13). For Morgenthau, alienation was a conscious act of detach-
ment that enabled him to analyze situations with greater rationality due
to his greater capacity for synopsis, as Mannheim also had hoped to
achieve with his “free-floating intelligentsia” (Kögler 1997: 144–8;
Loader 1997: 217–29; Barboza 2006: 232–55). This ability to rational-
ize is confirmed by several people who knew Morgenthau personally.
George Eckstein (1981: 641) noted that Morgenthau had a “very rational
mind, always coolly alert to analyze and understand any given event or
situation.” Likewise, Richard Falk (1984: 77) accentuates Morgenthau’s
28
“unflinching capacity for objectivity.” This rationality stems from
Morgenthau’s ability to contextualize himself and the position of oth-ers.
This ability not only allowed Morgenthau (1965a: 81) to remark and
obviate distortions of his own consciousness, but it also provided him
with the capacity to perceive the nuances in human interrelations, as a
reviewer remarked about Morgenthau’s The Purpose of American
Politics: “Prof. Morgenthau’s great advantage is that, as a scholar and
citizen already mature, when he chose the United States as his country,
he can look at it from within and also with the critical objectivity of an
outsider. So he knows where the foundations, emotional and social, are
weak” (HJM Archive 144).
The Conscious Pariah and the Power of Dissent

During the Weimar Republic, arts and intellectual life flourished, helping
to gradually overcome the rigid social conventions of the Wilhelmine
Empire. Despite this flourishing, the potential downfall of the Weimar
Republic was a looming danger not only politically and
●
economically, but also culturally and intellectually (Büttner 2008: 296).

Neither orthodox nor heterodox intellectuals used their opportunities
responsibly.
For numerous orthodox intellectuals, the Weimar Republic was a
symbol of vulgarity and decadence. The emergence of a commodified
mass-culture threatened traditional family structures and moral con-
ceptions (Büttner 2008: 332–3). This had far-reaching consequences for
their lifeworlds, and it eroded their position as custodians of these
traditional structures, which is why orthodox intellectuals promoted a
conservative revolution throughout the Weimar Republic. One reason for
this threatening prospect was that many Germans and the ortho-dox
mandarin intellectuals, in particular, argued that the same people, whom
they considered to be responsible for the defeat in World War II, were
still in leading government positions. Morgenthau (1984b:
335) later recalled the importance this “stab in the back” legend
(Dolchstoßlegende) had gained in the minds of the people. This ultimate
denial of the Weimar Republic is manifested in the assassination of
several hundred people, often Jews, Catholics, and liberals, that were
associated with this legend. For example, Heinrich Tillessen, one of the
assassins of Matthias Erzberger, a member of the delegation to sign the
Versailles Peace Treaty, grew up in a family with a long tradition in the
military and the Bavarian prime minister Kurt Eisner was assas-sinated
by the law student Anton Graf von Arco auf Valley (Mommsen 1996:
125–7). As these examples demonstrate, many of the assassins were
academics with roots in the nobility and/or military. Both groups suffered
the steepest decline in importance after the empire’s downfall. The
nobility had lost its privileges in the Weimar Republic, and the treaty of
Versailles restricted the military in its size and armament.
Yet, even the heterodox intellectuals, who profited most from the
sociopolitical changes, contributed to the republic’s nemesis. The begin-
ning of the Weimar Republic was marked by a heightened political
engagement of numerous heterodox intellectuals. However, they were
too idealistic and had no possibility of implementing their ideas for a
different society. This pluralism is demonstrated in the formation of the
Novembergruppe (November Group) in December 1918. Artists like
Lyonel Feininger, Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Walter Gropius wanted
to create a new and free Germany. Likewise, the Arbeitsrat für Kunst
(Work Council for Art), formed in 1919, argued that the people needed
to be able to freely pursue their cultural interests and promoted the
establishing of people’s theaters, arenas, and parks. Yet, the
government was supposed to remain in the hands of intellectuals. A
first step toward
●
this platonic noocracy was for the council to nominate authors Gerhard
Hauptmann and later also Heinrich Mann for president (Gay 2004: 138–
57; Büttner 2008: 297–8). These idealistic tendencies, however,
remained unfulfilled and, as a consequence, a shift in the arts and intel-
lectual life can be detected, indicating that the heterodox mandarin
intellectuals had begun to renounce the republic (Peukert 1991: 33–5).
Few of the heterodox intellectuals fully supported Weimar. Typically, its
representatives took one of the following three attitudes toward the Weimar
Republic. The first attitude, although positive toward the Weimar Republic,
was characterized by a political misinterpretation of its problem-solving
capacity and the mind of Germans in general. In particular, Jewish members
of the mandarin intellectuals misinterpreted the granting of civic rights
during the German Empire and the Weimar Republic as further steps to
assimilation and underestimated the latent anti-Semitism. Morgenthau
(1961a: 6–7) noted in a lecture given at the Leo Baeck Institute, New York,
that “it so happens that the philoso-phy and the institutions of liberalism are
not the expression of eternal verities. [They] arose under certain historic
conditions and, hence, were bound to disappear under different historic
conditions.” Morgenthau’s assessment rested on his own family experience.
His father was a patriot, trying to assimilate as best as possible, as his
support for Morgenthau’s fraternity membership demonstrates (Frei 2001:
21–2).29 Despite this positive stance toward Weimar, their support vanished
because this group was not aware of the changing political conditions. Apart
from this mis-interpretation, there was also indifference toward the
republican ideal of the common good. Although the proverbial German
Vereinsmeierei (devotion to associational life) was a distinctive trait of
social life during the early twentieth century, it cannot be considered as a
strengthen-ing feature of the republic per se (Berman 1997: 401–29;
Heilbronner 1998: 443–63). On the contrary, the associations promoted their
own particular interests, some openly antirepublican, nationalistic, and even
racist, like the Thule-Gesellschaft, the Stahlhelm, or the Blücherbund.
Therefore, they had a negative impact on Weimar’s already weak insti-
tutions. But even if they were not antirepublican, heterodox intellectu-als
retreated into associational life after their initial idealistic disillusion and
turned at best into Vernunftrepublikaner. Others, however, could not even
support Weimar’s sustainability. Indeed, they openly opposed it. After this
initial idealism had vanished, numerous mandarin intel-lectuals turned to
communism in their quest for a more equal and free society. As a
consequence, they refused to support Weimar and at times worked against it
(Peukert 1991: 172–4; Wehler 2003: 535–41). Berlin,
●
in particular, remained a hotbed for extreme political positions, and

numerous younger members of the mandarin intellectuals turned to
communism while trying to find their place in life. Both, the literary
critic Hans Mayer (1988) and the historian Eric Hobsbawm (2002), to
mention just two examples, became communists in Berlin. This weak
public support for the Weimar Republic demonstrated to Morgenthau
already before World War II that the political realm has to be sustained
through active civic engagement in order to keep democracies alive.
Morgenthau was an eyewitness of the rise of the totalitarian nation-al-
socialistic state. In the 1920s and 1930s, agitation and propaganda
gradually mantled the political discourse with a total form of ideol-ogy.
Through a discourse of exclusivity, minorities were barred from society
and the individual was attached and subdued in their quest for identity to
the masses. Shortly after Adolf Hitler was appointed chan-cellor
(January 30, 1933), this discourse of uniqueness was further historicized
and visualized through the seizure of the Prussian myth at the “Day of
Potsdam” (March 21, 1933) (Münkler 2009: 275–94), putting Hitler into
direct succession to Fredrick the Great, Otto von Bismarck, and Paul von
Hindenburg. Arendt (1953: 303–6) discussed totalitarianism as a new
form of government because it provided remedy for the modern feeling
of meaninglessness and solitude by recreating identity within a
totalitarian framework. A democratic republic, like Weimar, was
especially endangered by totalitarianism since other than in an absolute
monarchy or theocracy, where the subjects are born into a transcendental
order and did not have to question their identity, it required its citizens to
create their identity by themselves. Particularly, totalitarian regimes
promise salvation, as they do not operate from a lawless and arbitrary
basis, like tyrannies, but claim to be derived from natural law, as it was
the case with national-socialism. Since these laws preceded positive
laws, totalitarian regimes remained within this realm, though gradually
washing it out (306–10).
It was this danger that Morgenthau had in mind when criticizing
Kelsen’s pure theory of law for not taking this possibility into account.
In doing so, Morgenthau stressed that the survival of a republic is
dependent on its ideal of embedded criticism (Tjalve 2008: 5). The
enforcement of constant and common guiding of the political required a
strong political leadership (114–16). Political leaders, Morgenthau
(1957a: 7–11; 1959d: 5–8) hoped, would be able to provide channels of
dissent, while being able to transcend their own conditionality in their
decision-making. Yet, leaders needed not only to monitor public opin-
ion, but also provide visions that could stir up public opinion in the first
●
place. Morgenthau (1962c: 18) argued that this could provide a solution
for the ideological takeover of the political, which made contradicting
interests suspicious and turned its promoters into heretics. Morgenthau’s
yearning for a strong political leadership is also manifested in his skep-
ticism of direct democracy. Public policies should remain in the hands of
political leaders since only they are able to arrive at less biased and more
nuanced decisions. The public opinion, as Morgenthau (1957b: 5)
stressed in the “Radio University” (Funkuniversität) broadcasting pro-
gram of the Rundfunk im amerikanischen Sektor (RIAS; Radio in the
American Sector of Berlin), is endangered to create simplified moral and
legal categories of good and bad, leading to dichotomic, moralistic
policies.
However, this does not mean that Morgenthau was objecting to a
democratic republic. Rather, he defined democracy as a noocracy legiti-
mized by the people, hence, as “the government of an elite with the con-
sent of the people” (HJM Archive 28). Following Morgenthau (1970a:
40), it is the patriotic task of citizens to be aware of the decisions taken
and scrutinize them critically because “[t]he right to dissent derives from
the relativistic philosophy of democracy. That philosophy assumes that
all members of society . . . have equal access to the truth, but none of
them has a monopoly in it.” Citizens show, therefore, tolerance in the
sense that they become aware of their own potential fallibility and that
public opinion evolves out of all the citizens’ interests. Furthermore,
awareness of the temporality of human convictions is required. Policies,
deriving from such convictions, are the result of knowledge power rela-
tions, and they have to be accepted as temporal in the sense that they are
sustained by a majority. However, they can be changed as soon as this
majoritarian support vanishes. This emphasizes that “[a] notion of
patriotism as dissent . . . rests on dedication to the perpetual process of
contestation over the substance of policies, and yet absolute respect for
the immutability of political procedures” (Tjalve 2008: 125–6). Yet, this
kind of patriotism requires well-educated citizens, capable of self-
reflection and empathy, actively engaged in civic life. This enables them
to experience and to contribute to the construction of their political
communities, which is why Morgenthau was a strong supporter of edu-
cation throughout his life.
Morgenthau already formulated this conviction in Europe. Yet, he
became fully aware of the total physical and moral nemesis of totalitari-
anism only after World War II. This is manifested in his autobiographi-
cal sketch in which Morgenthau (1984a: 9) remarked that the work in
Sinzheimer’s office consisted of “interesting and sometimes fascinating
●
intellectual exercises. But they were marginal to the crucial issues with
which society had to come to terms. What was decisive was not the
merits of different legal interpretations but the distribution of political
power.” Still, Morgenthau tried to engage in the political sphere with the
means available to a recently graduated lawyer, as demonstrated in a
series of articles in the Frankfurter Zeitung, a prominent German lib-eral
newspaper at that time (HJM Archive 95). Already then, he antici-pated
that the political sphere of the Weimar Republic was in danger of being
replaced by the racist ideology of national-socialism, while the majority
of the mandarin intellectuals remained indifferent. This was
demonstrated to Morgenthau at a soirée to which he was invited by Karl
Neumeyer while visiting Munich in 1935. All guests were critical of
national-socialism, yet, “[t]hey all argued against the Nazis from their
own personal point of view.” Morgenthau (1984b: 363–4) added that
when he mentioned to them that a befriended Jewish lawyer had been
murdered, they replied: “‘Don’t talk to us about this. We don’t mix in
politics . . . It doesn’t interest us.’”
Due to the enormous success of his textbook Politics among Nations,
Morgenthau became a sought-after commentator in the United States and
he was eager to fulfill this role. Morgenthau wrote op-eds for news-
papers such as the New York Times and Washington Post and for lib-eral
magazines such as Commentary, Worldview, and The New Republic,
commenting on various topics, including the Vietnam War, the rise of
China, and student protests in the late 1960s. Furthermore, he sup-ported
civic education, allowing people to follow and engage in the public-
opinion making processes by instructing people on a local level. He
worked, for example, for the Keneseth Israel Beth Shalom Congregation
in Kansas City, while teaching at the local university from 1939 to 1943,
and for the Adult Education Council of Greater Chicago until the late
1960s (HJM Archive 3; 91). Furthermore, Morgenthau participated in
countless civil rights associations, such as the Academic Committee on
Soviet Jewry from 1969 to 1979 (HJM Archive 2). This interest in
facilitating the emigration of Soviet Jews can be explained by his own
experiences of being an emigrant (Mollov 1997: 561–75). Largely
forgotten today, however, are the enormous efforts he under-took to
criticize and argue against the righteousness of the Vietnam War. At
that time, he was one of its most well-known critics and was engaged in
several anti-Vietnam War associations. Morgenthau consid-ered the
Vietnam War as a civil war, in which the United States took part only
because it feared that Vietnam would fall into the hands of a
communist regime. Morgenthau tried to convince the public of the
●
catastrophic consequences for Vietnamese and American people, but he

remained largely unheard (Rafshoon 2001: 55–72). Still, this did not stop
Morgenthau from engaging in the political realm, as he had already
witnessed how quickly a republic can descend into totalitarian-ism, and
he tried to prevent this from happening again in the future.
Conclusion
This part provided a contextualization of Morgenthau’s thought and
traced his socialization among the German mandarin intellectuals during
the first half of the twentieth century. It was disclosed that Morgenthau’s
worldview rested on “social group formations,” as Mannheim called it;
in Morgenthau’s case, the heterodoxy of the mandarin intellectu-als,
whose debates revolved around questions of ideology, alienation, and
dissidence. Building this intellectual fundament was not a coher-ent,
teleological process, and its development experienced breaks and
inconsistencies, as the temporal occupation with Marxism and psycho-
analysis demonstrate. Yet, by the time Morgenthau was forced to leave
Europe, he had developed a firm basis of his worldview that remained
remarkably stable after his emigration to the United States. Still, life in
the United States also had an effect on his thought. Inventions such as
nuclear weapons; political developments, such as World War II, the Cold
War, and the Vietnam War; and personal experiences, like his
outstanding career in American academia, triggered new directions for
his work. However, they did not call his worldview into question, but
rather reassured it. Therefore, other than recent scholarship claims (e.g.,
Guzzini 2004: 547), this part identified guiding concepts of his social-
ization within the Weimar mandarin intellectuals, and they remained the
basis upon which he founded his academic career in the United States, as
Mihaela Neacsu (2010: 69) also recently noted.
Hence, Morgenthau’s socialization has to be understood as a con-
densate of the discussions that guided German mandarin intellectuals
during the first half of the twentieth century. This means Morgenthau
cannot be pinned down as being indebted to one particular scholar, like
Weber, Schmitt, and Freud, although some scholars were certainly
more influential, like Nietzsche, Simmel, and Mannheim. Morgenthau
began his academic career within the heterodox part of the mandarin
intellec-tuals, remained there throughout his career despite his success,
and its representatives contributed most to the development of his
worldview. Morgenthau, however, did not solely echo their debates,
but developed his own, unique, and critical stance toward them. He
remained, for
●
example, skeptical about the major ideologies and criticized the non-
identification of the importance the political has for the well-being of a
society and in particular for a republic. Indeed, these ramified funda-
ments of Morgenthau’s worldview made it not only difficult for other
scholars to label him, but also Morgenthau had problems answering
questions about which camp he belongs to, as demonstrated in a let-ter to
Sandra Frye on November 25, 1964: “I think as far as method is
concerned, I am a conservative. As for the objectives of politics are con-
cerned, I think I am a liberal” (HJM Archive 20). Indeed, this exempli-
fies that Morgenthau shied away from classifying his thought, as this
would have intellectually straightjacketed his thought. Rather, he was
more concerned about “speak[ing] truth to power,” and, he needed to be
intellectually open-minded to achieve this aim.
CHAPTER 2
Power: Hans Morgenthau and

Ontology
Introduction
This part discusses fundamental concepts that guided Morgenthau’s
ontological outlook on the world. Identifying power and the political as
these concepts does not come as a surprise, as they have attracted
extensive academic interest before (e.g., Tsou 1984; Mollov 2002; Hacke
2005; Scheuerman 2007a; Solomon 2012; Paipais 2014), and
Morgenthau (1955: 434; 1962a: 19) repeatedly characterized them to be
one of the “perennial problems” of politics. In this context, scholars like
Williams (2005a), Hans-Karl Pichler (1998), as well as Stephen Turner
and George Mazur (2009) argued that Morgenthau developed his con-
cept of power in close congruence with Weber. Indeed, empirically,
Morgenthau agreed with Weber’s tripartite division of power. However,
Frei (2001), Ulrik Enemark Petersen (1999), or Neacsu (2010) demon-
strated that Morgenthau did not simply rephrase Weber, but his thought
was also strongly influenced by Nietzsche. Finally, Schuett (2007, 2010)
asserted that the influence of psychoanalysis on Morgenthau should not
be underrated, as his concept of power draws on Sigmund Freud too.
This part discusses a lacuna in these recent debates on Morgenthau’s
conceptualizations of power and the political, as it stresses the normative
profoundness both concepts had for Morgenthau. Just like Mannheim’s
(1952: 185) notion of worldview anticipated, it also contains a specific
world postulate, that is, an intention of how the world should be. It is
argued that this is also the case with Morgenthau. Power and poli-tics are
normative concepts for Morgenthau (HJM Archive 79; 1947a: 178;
1959b: 19; 1971b: 77; 1972: 42), containing elements of how the
interactions among people ought to be. Although the complexity of
Morgenthau’s notion of the political had received a first appropriate
●
elaboration in Frei’s (2001) monograph, it sank back into oblivion and

was primarily related to Schmitt (cf. Koskenniemi 2000, 2004; Brown
2007; Scheuerman 2007b; critical Brown 2004). Only recently was this
complexity reevaluated (Neacsu 2010). Likewise, the distinctive norma-
tive orientation of Morgenthau’s notion of power is commonly under-
stood in a limited manner, as Weber’s definition of power is imposed on
Morgenthau’s notion, reducing it to a fraction of its meaning (cf. Coser
1984; Pichler 1998; Shilliam 2007, 2009; Turner 2009). This limitation
even caused interpretational inconsistencies by establishing erroneous
1
connections, as happened to Turner and Mazur.
The elaboration of Morgenthau’s (1949a: 2) ontology begins with
what he took as his analytical starting point: the individual. This
anthropological focus allowed Morgenthau to recognize the tragic
choices humans are facing in their attempts to create lifeworlds together
(Lebow 2003: 308). Two conflicting drives, one existential and the other
one assertive—to which any person has to succumb—require people to
socially interact, although these drives have the ability to destroy these
interactions. For this reason, these drives need to be constrained. Next,
this leads to Morgenthau’s concept of power, his central ontologi-cal
concept. Its elaboration reveals that he distinguished between two types
of power. First, the animus dominandi served as Morgenthau’s
characterization of the prevalent empirical concept. Second, however,
Morgenthau promoted a different, normative concept of power with the
intention to replace the former in order to reestablish societies based on
humanistic values. Finally, this part deals with the collective level,
societies, and the role of the political for them. This includes
Morgenthau’s thoughts on the development and composition of societ-
ies. Furthermore, Morgenthau considered the political realm as central
since this realm with power as its ultimate component allows reestab-
lishing values in order to prevent the extinction of social beings and
eventually human beings.
Hunger and Love: Morgenthau’s Search for

the Origins of Power and Politics in Human
Nature
To demonstrate that Morgenthau pursued a psychological definition of
power and to reveal its relevance to his concept of the political, his ear-
liest European writings have to be consulted. In an early unpublished
manuscript, Über die Bestimmung des Politischen aus dem Wesen des
2
Menschen, Morgenthau (1930c: 5) noted that human action is deter-
mined by “the impulse of life striving to keep alive, to prove oneself, and
Power ● 51
to interact with others” (author’s translation). Hence, for Morgenthau,

there were two fundamental drives: the drive for self-preservation
(Selbsterhaltungstrieb) and the drive to prove oneself (Bewährungstrieb)
3
(15). It is this latter drive that is central to Morgenthau’s concept of
power.
Morgenthau first encountered this distinction in the works of his
“early love” ( Jugendliebe) (Frei 1994: 102): Nietzsche. In the Birth of
Tragedy, Nietzsche introduced the Dionysian principle as one of the
major human traits. Just like Morgenthau’s drives, the Dionysian sig-
nifies the passionate and creative urges in life that one wants to fol-low
with relish (Kaufmann 1968: 128–9; Nietzsche 2000: 19–23). However,
it was particularly research conducted in the newly estab-lished
discipline of psychology that fostered his thought in this respect. At the
time Morgenthau was writing this early manuscript in Frankfurt, he was
employed as a clerk in Sinzheimer’s law office. Working with
Sinzheimer brought him into close intellectual contact with members of
the Institute for Social Research, in which the discipline of psycho-
analysis was well received (Gay 1988; Scheuerman 2008). Following
Schuett (2007: 59), this engagement explains why Morgenthau drew
upon Freud’s ego and sexual instinct in his elaboration of these two
human drives. Indeed, his almost identical reasoning demonstrates
Morgenthau’s intellectual indebtedness. Freud (1961b: 117) noted that “I
took as my starting-point a saying of . . . Schiller that ‘hunger and love
are what moves the world.’” In Morgenthau’s (1930c: 5–6) manu-script
we find a similar passage:
If the striving for the preservation of one’s life is caused by a deficiency,

he is . . . a child of hunger. If he is striving to balance or avoid a lack of
energy, then this striving to prove oneself is caused by a surplus of energy
seeking release. This finds . . . one of its most characteristic expressions in
love. (Author’s translation)
Morgenthau considered the drive for self-preservation (hunger) to be

more fundamental because the preservation of one’s life is the cen-tral
concern for humans. It signifies one’s yearning for survival and is
manifested in the pursuit of food or in modern times the aspiration of
money as a substitute for acquiring food (5, 15). It also contains other
vital interests, such as shelter and security, and the means to achieve
them, like marriage or a secure work place (Morgenthau 1947a: 165). In
Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, Morgenthau expanded the primarily
self-centered drive for self-preservation to the concept of selfishness.
●
Other than the drive for self-preservation, the latter focused more on
human interrelations. For Morgenthau, selfishness prohibited com-
pletely unselfish behavior because taken to the extreme this means risk-
ing one’s own life (164). Indeed, unselfishness requires a certain amount
of selfishness because otherwise not even the slightest philanthropic
achievement can be realized. This dilemma is summed up in a letter to
John Masek on May 13, 1959. Morgenthau remarked that “frequently in
history men with good intentions . . . have done great harm to their
4
nation” (HJM Archive 38). This requirement to act selfishly indicates
the first human tragedy. Therefore, tragedy was a “quality of existence,
not a creation of art” (Morgenthau 1948c).
Just like Freud, Morgenthau (1929a: 119–30) applied both drives on
the collective level of international affairs, initially referring to them as
questions of honor (Ehrfragen). The term “honor” seems somewhat
outdated today, and Morgenthau (1933: 33–4) dropped this ambiguous
term shortly thereafter for the more technical classification of “ques-
tions politiques de première classe” and “questions politiques de deux-
ième classe.” The drive for self-preservation—political questions of the
first order—was already present in his doctoral thesis, where he intro-
duced them as interests of existence (Lebensinteressen), and it is this
terminology that he eventually settled for. Morgenthau (1985: 5) reused
it in Politics among Nations, stating that “[t]he main signpost . . . to find
its way through the landscape of international politics is the concept of
interest defined in terms of power.” For Morgenthau (1929a: 98), this
interest helped to preserve all constitutive elements of a state, such as
questions of sovereignty, its legal order, and also questions concerning
the position of a state among other states.
Central to Morgenthau’s concepts of power and the political,
however, is the drive to prove oneself (love) (Solomon 2012) because
“[t]he desire for power . . . concerns itself not with the individual’s
survival, but with his position among his fellows once his survival has
been secured” (Morgenthau 1947a: 165). This centrality alludes to the
fact that Morgenthau’s concept of power cannot be reduced to the
Hobbesian tradition as a means of self-preservation, as it is still being
argued in the literature (cf. Tucker 1952; Ringmar 1996: 50; Forndran
1997: 47; Hartmann 2001: 24–5; Hall 2006: 1161), even though a more
careful contextualization demonstrated the converse (cf. Good 1960:
612; Murray 1996: 84; Frei 2001: 127; Williams 2004: 634; Molloy
2009a: 97–101; Miyashita 2012), and Morgenthau publicly repudiated
this connection to Hobbes. In a letter to the editors of International
Affairs, Morgenthau (1959a: 502) criticized Martin Wight for having
Power ● 53
drawn this analogy. Two aspects of the drive to prove oneself deserve to
be further elaborated, as they influenced Morgenthau’s conceptualiza-
tions of power and the political.
First, only when the drive to prove oneself affects other people, it
becomes political. For Morgenthau, the intention of this drive was to
make oneself aware of one’s own life and establish an awareness of
one’s strengths and capabilities. The self manifests itself only through
the other, which is why this drive finds its expression itself in games,
arts, science, and even relationships. “[E]verywhere where the human
being strives to show ‘what he can’” is the drive to prove oneself its
origin (Morgenthau 1930c: 6; author’s translation). It is entirely directed
to gain and increase pleasure; in particular, challenging situations
promise its highest surplus since they require overcoming obstacles by
master-ing nonroutine situations (26–7). Such situations assure one’s
identity because they promise the appraisal of others (31–2). However,
only when, in these interpersonal relationships, the drive to prove oneself
takes an explicit interest in humans, it becomes political, as the follow-
ing quotation from Science: Servant or Master? demonstrates: “Thus the
scholar seeking knowledge seeks power; so does the poet who endea-
vours to express his thoughts and feelings in words . . . They all seek to
assert themselves as individuals against the world by mastering it. It is
only when they choose as their object other men that they enter the
political sphere” (Morgenthau 1972: 31). Second, human exis-tence was
for Morgenthau characterized by tragedy, as Lebow (2003: Chapter 6;
also Chou 2011) vividly elaborated. This tragedy is a result of an
excessiveness of the drive to prove oneself, as the potential gain of
pleasure and the objects to which that gain is directed are with-out limit
(Morgenthau 1930c: 70). In his doctoral thesis, Morgenthau (1929a:
126–7) remarked that all questions are applicable to this drive as they
“are seized at random, irrespective of the actual content.” As a result, an
individual can aspire for absolute satisfaction and pleasure. However,
because of the drive’s limitlessness, such aspirations will never be
achieved. In Morgenthau’s eyes, very few came close to achieving the
pleasure principle. The passion of Don Juan, Icarus’s striving for the sun,
and Faust’s thirst for knowledge are such examples. More than a decade
earlier, Morgenthau also included the imperial aspirations of Alexander
the Great and Napoleon Bonaparte (Morgenthau 1929a: 71; 1945b: 13;
1947a: 166). However, these were exceptions, and all of their aspirations
failed. Vanitas is the leitmotif in the narratives of Don Juan, Icarus, and
Faust, and Alexander and Napoleon also paid the price for their reckless
imperial ambitions. Morgenthau (1929a: 75–7; also
●
Freud 1961b: 117) elucidated a further tragedy in the drive to prove one-
self in that its extreme limitlessness gets into conflict with the drive for
self-preservation. Eventually, this conflict has the potential to endanger
one’s life and the lives of others.
Subsequently, locating power in human nature, by characterizing it as
a constant urge of ideational self-realization within interpersonal
relationships, allowed Morgenthau to conceive a praxeological con-
ceptualization of power, in terms of its sociopolitical utilization. For
Morgenthau, as soon as people interact, power is created, and attempts to
eradicate it are pointless. Rather, attention needs to be paid on what kind
of power is established. Morgenthau argued that power in its empirical
form (pouvoir), that is, the ruthless and egoistic pursuit of the drive to
prove oneself (animus dominandi), allows for the depolitization of social
life, as politics is reduced to an institutionalized understanding (cf. Tellis
1996: 40; Schuett 2007: 61–2), whereas power in its norma-tive form
(puissance) establishes the political, as it enables people to pursue their
interests and work together for a common good.
Pouvoir and Puissance: Hans Morgenthau’s

Dualistic Concept of Power
Pouvoir: Morgenthau’s Empirical Concept of Power
Morgenthau (1947a: 165) argued that in modern democracies, power was
predominantly generated in the form of the animus dominandi: “the
desire for power” and the lust for the domination of people. As
illustrated in Morgenthau’s (1936: 5) statement, “je constate simple-ment
ce que je vois,” he had to deal with this concept analytically, since
sociopolitical developments in modern societies had reduced power to a
tool for domination. Modern societies had voided people of their
metaphysical foundation. Various unpublished manuscripts from the
1930s, in which Morgenthau (1930b, 1937) elaborated on the reasons
and effects of this dehumanizing development, suggest that the dehu-
manizing effects of this void concerned Morgenthau greatly. But also in
later years, Morgenthau (1947a) expressed his disquiet as evidenced in
Science: Servant or Master?.
In an ideologized environment, the drive to prove oneself had to
exhaust itself in the form of the animus dominandi; dehumanization
inhibits the ability for people to realize their potential and actively
hinders them from contributing to the creation of their lifeworlds.
Morgenthau’s terminology reveals that this empirical concept of power
Power ● 55
rested on Weber’s well-known definition of power. Weber (1978: 53)

defined power as “the probability that one actor within a social rela-
tionship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resis-tance,
regardless of the basis on which this probability rests.” Indeed,
Morgenthau (1985: 32) provided a similar definition in Politics among
Nations. He remarked that “[p]olitical power is a psychological relation
between those who exercise it and those over whom it is exercised. It
gives the former control over certain actions of the latter through the
impact which the former exerts on the latter’s minds.” However, reduc-
ing power to a lust for domination meant that interpersonal relationships
were conflict-driven, and the potential for aggression was constantly
looming. To hinder the outbreak of violence domestically, nation-states
had to assertively erect moral, societal, and/or legal restraints, which
Morgenthau (1934a; also Molloy 2003: 83) examined in La réalité des
normes. Without such restraints, the existence of nation-states could be
threatened.
Yet, on the international level, there are at best moral restrictions to
hinder people from seeking to fulfill their lust for domination. But these
restrictions are also eliminated through the ruthless employment of
“cultural blinders” (Morgenthau 2004: 36) by nation-states, which
encouraged people to pursue their lust for domination on the interna-
tional level. By identifying with the nation-state, especially during times
of crisis, people can satisfy their lust by receiving a share of the power
a nation-state acquires on the international scene (Schuett 2007: 61–6;
Scheuerman 2009a: 37–8; 2011: 49–53). For Morgenthau (1930b), one
of these cultural blinders was the fetishization of masculinity, as he
argued that this was one of the causes for the outbreak of World War I.
World War II and the Shoah were additional personal experiences,
further demonstrating the devastation of this cultural blinder.
Morgenthau also borrowed the consequences of this conceptualiza-
tion of power for the international level from Weber. In Politics as a
Vocation, which, according to Robbie Shilliam (2007: 312), Morgenthau
read enthusiastically, Weber (2004: 33) noted that “[w]hen we say that
a question is ‘political’ . . . we always mean the same thing. This is that the
interests involved in the distribution or preservation of power, or a shift in
power, play a decisive role in resolving that question.” Morgenthau’s
biographer Frei (2001: 59) ascertained that he already referred to these
strategies in a footnote in his doctoral thesis, but only in La notion du
politique did he become explicit. Power “can aim to maintain acquired
power, to increase it, or to manifest it” (Morgenthau 2012: 106). Another 15
years later, in his seminal Politics among Nations,
●
Morgenthau (1985: 52) equally noted that “[a]ll politics . . . reveals three
basic patterns . . . either to keep power, to increase power, or to demon-
strate power.” Indeed, Morgenthau devoted a good deal of Politics
among Nations to the meticulous analysis of these different forms of
empirical power. This intellectual congruence of Morgenthau and
Weber, in their understanding of empirical power, led numerous scholars
to comment on Morgenthau as an apologist of power politics (cf.
Barkawi 1998; Pichler 1998; Turner 2009).
However, Politics among Nations cannot be read as a theory of inter-
national politics because Morgenthau (1962a: 65) argued that a the-ory
that aims “to reduce international relations to a system of abstract
propositions with a predictive function” is ahistoric. For this reason,
theories, which neglect the specific contingencies that had led to politi-
cal events, neither improve the theoretical understanding of interna-
tional politics nor are they useful as guidelines for political action.
Morgenthau (1962a: 69; also Molloy 2004: 6–7) did not rule out the
possibility of developing a theory of international politics, but its scope
would be limited because no theory could consider all the potential
historical contingencies. Politics among Nations also does not lend itself
as evidence for the foundation of a Morgenthauian Realpolitik, but recent
scholarship argues that Politics among Nations has to be viewed as
5
“historically and politically contingent” (Behr 2010: 215), in other
words, spatially and temporally conditioned. Indeed, a closer examina-
tion demonstrates Morgenthau’s intention to write a counterideology to
nationalism and fascism, rather than a theory as he acknowledged in the
6
preface. Correspondingly, the concept of power, as Morgenthau under-
stood and presented it in Politics among Nations, was the empirically
dominant version in an ideologized world; normatively speaking, how-
ever, he fundamentally opposed an understanding of power that was
reduced to an unhindered lust for domination. In a much referred letter to
Michael Oakeshott (cf. Lebow 2009: 37; Jütersonke 2010: 139), writ-ten
shortly after the first issue of Politics among Nations was published,
Morgenthau argued that ideologization had reduced the creative abili-ties
of humans and left them intellectually unaware of their actual capa-
bilities to create their lifeworlds, which is why “[m]an is tragic because
he cannot do what he ought to do” (HJM Archive 44). This explains why
Morgenthau was initially reluctant to reissue Politics among Nations as
evidenced in his month-long correspondence with his editor Robert
Shugg at Alfred Knopf’s publishing house. However, the rise of the Cold
War eventually convinced Morgenthau that the age of ideologies was far
from over and Politics among Nations had yet to serve its needs
Power ● 57
as he repeated the assessment he had given to Oakeshott in a different

letter almost 15 years later (HJM Archive 10).
Puissance: Morgenthau’s Normative Concept of Power

Normatively, Morgenthau aspired for a different kind of power. He reasoned
that “[t]o say that a political action has no moral purpose is absurd” because
“political action can be defined as an attempt to realize moral values through
the medium of politics, that is, power” (Morgenthau 1962a: 110). Puissance,
the form of power he argued would be the defining factor in politics, is,
therefore, not characterized by domination. Rather, people are empowered to
act together, through the alignment of their antagonism of interests, in order
to create their life-world through self-determination (Morgenthau 1971b:
75). Therefore, other than Molloy (2014: 482) recently argued, puissance
demonstrates that Morgenthau aimed to strengthen human capabilities, rather
than letting them waste away under pouvoir, and although Ty Solomon
(2012:
211) is right to argue that Morgenthau’s concept of power is more than
the animus dominandi side of the drive for self-preservation, he is mis-
taken to believe that “power can only construct a façade of union.” In
short, whereas pouvoir is ultimately a negative concept, with puissance
Morgenthau achieved a positive concept of power.
Morgenthau found intellectual stimulation in Nietzsche for his posi-
tive concept of power, which is an expression of Morgenthau’s deep-
rooted humanism, or what Arendt would have called amor mundi
(Young-Bruehl 1982: 324). In order to love the world, people had at first
to embrace their destiny, Nietzsche’s (2003: 157) amor fati. For
Nietzsche, this embracement is the initial recognition of the eternal
recurrence—a concept that contradicted any teleological life-stories—
and is epitomized in Nietzsche’s nihilistic concept of time and space. In
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche (1969: 234) noted that “[e]very-thing
goes, everything returns; the wheel of existence rolls forever. Everything
dies, everything blossoms anew; the year of existence runs on forever . . .
Everything departs, everything meets again; the ring of existence is true
to itself forever.” Morgenthau was convinced that if people understood
this initial aimlessness and meaninglessness, they would understand that
modern societies’ ideologization had deprived them of their ability to
construct their own lifeworlds and that they would consequently develop
and use their actual abilities.
Nonetheless, Morgenthau (1947a: 176) was also aware that this
nihil-ism of life can be, at least in the beginning, disappointing to
humans,
●
since it “offers with each answer new questions, with each victory a new
disappointment, and thus seems to lead nowhere. In this labyrinth of
unconnected causal connections man discovers many little answers but
no answer to the great questions of his life, no meaning, no direction.”
Countless combinations of actions and reactions provide a myriad of
eternally recurrent moments, which evolve without preprescribed pur-
pose or aim. However, Nietzsche’s concept does not imply surrendering
to the nihilism of life, but overcoming it. In a later work, Nietzsche
(1968: 336) accentuated that “[t]he unalterable sequence of certain phe-
nomena demonstrates no ‘law’ but a power relationship between two or
more forces.” People do not have to agonize about these returning
moments, but they can choose to affirm and endorse them. This is the
amor fati, the embracing of one’s destiny. Endorsing such recur-rences
means relating the initially meaningless moments to oneself and,
thereby, by altering them ever so slightly, transform them into signifi-
cant situations. Such a positive attribution enables people to overcome
their surrounding nihilism, since, as the literary theorist Lee Spinks
(2003: 131) mentions, they recognize that “life is an eternal movement of
becoming.”
However, accepting the amor fati is not only disappointing at the
beginning, but it also denotes a dolorous affair because it causes, in
György Lukács’s (1963: 41) words, “transcendental homelessness.” As
7
such, people yearn for the transcendental shelter of ontological security,
which ideologies provide with a carefree, clearly structured life through
standardized conceptions of reason, virtue, justice, and even pity and
happiness. But people pay a high price for this ontological security as
their subjectivity is being negated. Only when they accept their fate can
they become an Übermensch. Lately, Neacsu (2010: 99) reasoned that
this Nietzschean concept provided Morgenthau with the ideal for what is
required to arrive at a positive connotation of power. The rec-ognition of
the eternal recurrence, and concurrently the renunciation of an
ideologized life through encyclopedic knowledge, and the ability to
intellectually alienate oneself from one’s lifeworld enable an under-
standing of knowledge power relations, how they are temporally and
spatially conditioned, and consider their influence on society.
The Übermensch epitomizes the ability to recognize and the will to
overcome the surrounding nihilistic world. Through self-restraint, self-
assurance, and self-reflection, one is able to refer the ever-recurrent
moments to oneself. Morgenthau argued, in congruence with Nietzsche,
that this creates meaning and eventually identity. Therefore, Morgenthau
viewed puissance as the ability to create an identity that is
Power ● 59
not achieved through distinction from otherness, but in togetherness

through one’s own will. It is for this reason that Morgenthau (1972: 48–
9) deplored the absence of the qualities of an Übermensch in Science:
Servant or Master?:
This meaningless and aimless activity may convey the superficial appear-
ance of an abundant dynamism trying to transform the empirical world. In
truth, however, it is not the pressure of creative force but flight from his
true task that drives man beyond himself through action. In the
intoxication of incessant activity, man tries to forget the question posed by
the metaphysical shock. Yet, since the noise of the active world can drown
out that question but cannot altogether silence it, complete obliv-ion,
which is coincident with the end of consciousness itself, becomes the
unacknowledged ultimate aim.
Achieving the stage of an Übermensch, through the ability to create

one’s own identity, is total liberation since “[w]illing liberates: that is the
true doctrine of will and freedom” (Nietzsche 1969: 111). It liberates
people from the reactionary forces of ideologies that control the con-
structions of lifeworlds, through enforcing ostensibly eternal dichoto-
mies, in order to affirm the status quo because such dichotomies do not
have universal meaning; rather, they are created to legitimize cultural
habits and policies (84–6). Morgenthau’s refusal of such simplifying
dichotomies is stipulated in a letter from 1968 in which he located the
reason for the student protests of the 1960s within this ideologization
because it obstructed people to participate in the political arena (HJM
Archive 43). Morgenthau saw politics as a social realm, in which people
would (and should) not have to succumb to structural obligations mani-
fested in dichotomies of good and bad, right and wrong, or friend and
enemy, for which Morgenthau (1933; 1934–1935; 2012) had criticized
Schmitt. Rather, puissance enabled people to follow their interests and
participate in the creation of their own lifeworld.
This liberation through meaning-attribution is epitomized in an at first
glance peculiar, yet in its peculiarity very forceful example: death.
Questions of death concerned Morgenthau throughout his career.
References are to be found in his earliest unpublished manuscripts, such
as Selbstmord mit gutem Gewissen (Suicide with a Good Conscience)
and in his last academic contributions, such as Science: Servant or
Master?. In the latter study, Morgenthau (1972) claimed that even death
is a form of liberation. Certainly, death “is the very negation of all men
experiences as specifically human in his existence: the consciousness of
himself and of his world, the remembrance of things past and the
●
ambitions of things to come, a creativeness in thought and action that

aspires to . . . the eternal” (144). Still, Morgenthau argued that, even for
humans who disapproved of religious discourses of eternity or ideo-
logical promises of immortality, death signifies no end of liberation. In
their efforts to actively give meaning to life, they leave pieces of
reminiscence behind, through which people have an influence on their
lifeworlds even after their death. Furthermore, even death itself can
become a liberating experience since—by committing suicide with a
good conscience—people master their biological death by choosing its
place, time, and even its tenor (144–5).
To summarize so far, on his way to establish a positive connotation of
power, Morgenthau relied primarily on Nietzsche (Frei 1994: 102). It
was the study of Nietzsche’s work that enabled Morgenthau to concep-
tualize power as the ability and the will to discern. To understand the
nihilism and to overcome it by attaching value to initially insignificant
moments—hence, by alluding one’s surrounding world to oneself—the
will to power finds its expression. Nietzsche (1969: 85) remarked that
“[m]an first implanted values into things to maintain himself—he cre-
ated the meaning of things, a human meaning . . . Only through evalu-
ation is there value: and without evaluation the nut of existence would be
hollow.” Morgenthau (2012: 106) used this “psychological factor . . .
the will to power” by arguing that, as a homo faber, one embeds “his
bio-logical existence within technological and social artefacts that
survive that existence. His imagination creates new worlds of religion,
art, and reason that live after their creator” (Morgenthau 1972: 146).
However, as his diction in Science: Servant or Master? indicates,
Morgenthau is concordant with Arendt in his final step to elaborate puis-
sance. In his manuscript on metaphysics, he moved on from Nietzsche
because he had realized that Nietzsche’s will to power only accentuated
the individual but ignored social relations and, more importantly, did not
provide answers for what kind of society these relations constructed.
Like Simmel, Morgenthau did not endorse Nietzsche’s view of a preex-
isting reality that considered the will to power and its achievement as the
highest ethical value in itself. Rather, the will to power has to be
implemented for the achievement of the common good, since “there is
nothing more senseless for the human conscience than a morale which is
indifferent to the dissolution of human society” (Morgenthau 1937: 88;
author’s translation).
Contrastingly, the “thinking partnership” with Arendt enabled
Morgenthau to consider the effects of power for a society at large
(Young-Bruehl 1982: xv). Rohde (2004: 98) rightfully contends in his
Power ● 61
monograph on Morgenthau that his concept of power was influenced by

Arendt, but he only comes to this conclusion after giving a lengthy analysis
of Morgenthau’s intellectual indebtedness to Nietzsche and Weber. Patricia
Owens (2009) also recently earned merits for elaborat-ing Arendt’s ethic of
reality and for making her accessible to current realist scholarship, but her
focus on Arendt did not allow her to further elaborate this intellectual
relationship. The most thorough elaboration on Arendt and Morgenthau to
date was provided by Douglas Klusmeyer (2005, 2009, 2011). In his
discussion of Arendt’s, Morgenthau’s, and George Kennan’s stances on the
Shoah, he showed that, despite their sim-ilar life-trajectories (in the case of
Arendt and Morgenthau), the Shoah became only central to Arendt’s
political thought. However, Klusmeyer also tells the reader little about their
strong conceptual congruence.
In order to elaborate their similar conceptualization of normative power,
we have to turn to Arendt’s study On Violence from 1970 (Young-Bruehl
1982: 424–5). As the late publication date of Arendt’s study would indicate,
this is not to argue that Arendt copied Morgenthau’s concept or vice versa,
but the term “thinking partnership” signifies that both were intellectually
rooted in Central European humanities. This intellectual background, in
combination with their academic and per-sonal exchanges, fostered similar
understandings of power.
For Arendt (1970: 44), “[p]ower corresponds to the human ability not
just to act but act in concert. Power is never the property of an indi-
vidual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the
group keeps together.” Power signifies the consent of people to tempo-
rarily come together in collective speech and action, in order to create
institutions, laws, and norms (41). For Arendt (51; 2005: 92–3) and
Morgenthau (1929a: 51; 2012: 106–7), power was not a means, but was
an end in itself, which explains that both scholars distinguished between
power and violence. This distinction is epitomized in Morgenthau’s
stance toward the aforementioned student protests. He argued that vio-
lent outbreaks were a consequence of the disempowerment of students.
In other words, they protested against their inability to contribute to the
creation of their lifeworlds, an inability caused by the ideological
affirmation of the status quo (Morgenthau 1968a: 9). Correspondingly,
as recent scholarship has argued, violence is a potential consequence
when puissance is absent, and it is a characteristic of pouvoir. Power is
only legitimized through collective action as Morgenthau, like Arendt,
clearly distinguished in Politics among Nations between legitimate
power (puissance) and illegitimate power (pouvoir) (Rohde 2004: 98;
also Owens 2005b).
●
For Morgenthau (2004: 30), power was an end since only through its
achievement is it possible to create a good life for humans in a society.
The good life, which is directed to acquire a common good (bonum
commune), “is a life that is led by justice, which is also indi-cated by the
general conception of politics . . . that the philosophy of politics is really
a subdivision of ethics” (56). Admittedly, this defini-tion is murky. In a
letter dated August 22, 1958, Morgenthau was more explicit about the
meaning of a good life, yet it is still a basic and broad definition. It was
now defined as “the preservation of life and freedom in the sense of the
Judeo-Christian tradition and . . . of Kantian phi-losophy” (HJM Archive
17). About 20 years later, Morgenthau (1979:
25) largely repeated this definition in one of his last public lectures.
Certainly, criticism of Morgenthau for not further investigating this kind
of sociation is legitimate. Nevertheless, the absence of a clearer
definition of the good life in Morgenthau’s work demonstrates that it
was, like so many of his concepts, flexible, in which particular content
8
was based on the compromise of the involved peoples’ inter-ests.
Morgenthau (1962a: 72–3) argued, by referring to Mannheim’s
Standortgebundenheit, that, because of the temporal and spatial con-
ditionality of knowledge, concepts do not have a preinscribed abso-lute
meaning and/or scope. As a result, Morgenthau cannot be seen as having
an a priori concept of the good life but acknowledged that people may
have different understandings of it. Merely, the integrity of human life
and dignity were considered by Morgenthau (2012: 123–6) as its basic
elements upon which a “sphere of elasticity” has to be estab-lished. For
Morgenthau, this public sphere enables the development of a common
good. The antagonism of interests can take place freely and peacefully in
this sphere because it allows people aligning these inter-ests. In this
context, the task of political leaders is to have a broad telos in mind,
since they have to support this alignment by considering all these
interests while leading communities toward the achievement of the
common good. Morgenthau (2004: 91) noted in one of his lectures on
Aristotle that “[t]he virtue of a good ruler is identical with a good man.
Because the good ruler, having to preside over a human society of which
all human beings are members, must promote . . . the telos of man as
such.”
From this follows that power was for Morgenthau, like Arendt, a
collective affair that enables people to constantly construct their life-
worlds by forming societies as temporal manifestations of the common
good. People achieve these manifestations through the alignment of their
antagonism of interests. It is people’s willful construction of the
Power ● 63
lifeworld that makes Morgenthau’s concept of power an expression of

his amor mundi.
The Concept of the Political

Sociation and the Concept of the Political
The final section investigates the collective level, as it is the politi-cal
realm in which humans congregate and power is executed. For
Morgenthau, the political offered people the space to contribute to the
construction of societies.
Morgenthau (1947a: 145; 2004: 105) agreed with Aristotle that the
human being was a zoon politikon, that is, a political animal for whom it
is a conditionality to form societies. The drive to prove oneself and to a
certain extent also the drive for self-preservation require people to inter-
act in their search for satisfaction. Morgenthau found a kindred spirit
here in Simmel (1908: 4) who defined a society as a condition “where
several individuals act through reciprocal interactions which always
come into being due to specific drives or for the achievement of particu-
9
lar ends” (author’s translation). This shows that reciprocal interactions
(Wechselwirkungen) were for Simmel the constitutive factors of societ-
ies, which is why he preferred to speak of sociation (Vergesellschaftung)
rather than society. Sociation captures the countless ways of individual
10
desires to live together and interact, depending on their interests (5).
Morgenthau (1985: 5) employed a similar argument when he defined the
political as the social realm where an “interest defined in terms of
power” is at stake. This definition becomes clearer, when we look into
Morgenthau’s contemplation about the study of international relations
for the Foreign Policy Association on December 1, 1976:
It “is not primarily a scientific but a humanistic enterprise. This is so
because it mainly focuses on man’s relations with other men. It is con-
cerned with man as a political animal, opposing or cooperating with other
men similarly defined. The actions and reactions . . . to [be under-stood]
are . . . unique occurrences. They happened in this one way and never
before or since. [Yet], they are similar; for they are manifestations of
social forces. Social forces are the product of human nature in action.
Given the identity of human nature in time and space, social forces, under
similar conditions, will manifest themselves in a similar manner.” (HJM
Archive 21)
Hence, Morgenthau (1930b: 42; 1945b: 10) conceived societies to be

human constructs whose shape was influenced by spatial and temporal
●
aspects. Indeed, he also followed Simmel in the explanation why societies

were human constructs because in his lectures on Aristotle, Morgenthau
(2004: 78–9) paid tribute to him for having elucidated the artificial character
of societies. Simmel (1908: 5) manifested this construction when remarking
that there were different degrees of sociation depend-ing on the involved
interests. This ranges from ephemeral unions, as it is the case while walking
on a promenade or with people congregating in a hotel lobby, to families and
states. This indicates that Morgenthau did not promote the nation-state as the
sole and unitary actor on the international scene, as it is still commonly
argued in various (text)books on International Relations (e.g., Hoffmann
1998; Krell 2000). Rather, Morgenthau considered the nation-state as one,
albeit contemporary form of society, but this does not mean that Morgenthau
(1962a: 61) would have been an advocate of this “blind and potent monster.”
Consequently, Morgenthau was more interested in the space that

establishes political communities, rather than their reified institu-tions.
Already at the beginning of his career, Morgenthau (1930c: 2)
emphasized that this was the case because politics was the realm in
which diverse human interests collide, out of which eventually domi-
11
nant social institutions emerge. Since “carriers of all societal forces are
12
always . . . individuals” (4; author’s translation), politics as the balanc-
ing of individual interests was for Morgenthau a precondition of soci-ety.
This stance seems to coincide with Schmitt’s (1996: 19, 37) 1932 version
of The Concept of the Political. However, as Scheuerman (2007a:
510) remarked, this congruence is due to amendments Schmitt made to
his previous essay with the same title from 1927 after Morgenthau had
sent him a copy of his doctoral thesis. Before, Schmitt pursued a con-
cept of power politics that was unrestricted by normative influence and,
therefore, it can be easily distinguished from other societal realms.
However, this discovery does not provide students of International
Relations further insights about Morgenthau’s concept of the political
and if there truly was such a close correlation to Schmitt, as implied by
recent scholarship. Indeed, in the course of this Morgenthau Schmitt
discourse it was argued that a “hidden dialogue” between Schmitt and
Morgenthau had taken place (Scheuerman 1999). Schmitt (1996: 26)
considered “[t]he specific political distinction to which political actions
and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy [foe].”
However, Morgenthau, having agreed with Schmitt that the politi-cal is
the core of society, repudiated Schmitt’s conceptualization and,
therefore, overemphasizing or interpreting this relationship positively is
misleading. This repudiation is manifested in Morgenthau’s La notion
Power ● 65
du politique from 1933 and in a later unpublished manuscript Einige

13
logische Bemerkungen zu Carl Schmitt’s Begriff des Politischen. In these
works, Morgenthau not only rejected Schmitt for his lack of morality, but he
also criticized his analytical framework because he characterized Schmitt’s
reduction of the political to the dichotomy of friend and foe as tautological.
Although love and hate are human traits that are expressed in personal
beliefs and tastes, they are not sufficient to distinguish the political realm
(Morgenthau 1933: 52–3). This is the case because friends and foes can be
of political value (wertvoll ) as much as both can be polit-ically of no value
at all (wertlos) (Morgenthau 1934–1935: 5). The politi-cal value of human
interactions depends on the specific situation and on the interests of the
involved people, but it particularly depends on a reflection on the ethical
stance one takes toward it. For Morgenthau (1932), Schmitt did not reflect
on the “meta-standard” (Kleinschmidt 2004: 17) of his own values, as he
applied them uncritically to determine friendship and enmity in International
Relations. Hence, Schmitt’s con-cepts are not capable in Morgenthau’s eyes
to distinguish the political from other social realms, as their epistemological
conditionality does not allow establishing a foundational categorization of
the political.
For this reason, Morgenthau proceeded differently. His first attempt
to define the political can be found in his doctoral thesis. There,
Morgenthau (1929a: 67) argued that “[t]he concept of the political has no
once and for all fixed substance. It is rather a feature, a quality, a
coloring which can be attributed to any substance . . . A question which
is of political nature today, may have no political meaning tomorrow”
14
(author’s translation). Hence, Morgenthau (1933: 30) considered the
political not as the sum of individual relations out of which society is
constituted, but as a quality adhering to these relations that, therefore,
was affected by temporal and spatial alterations. In a further manu-script,
Über die Herkunft des Politischen aus dem Wesen des Menschen,
Morgenthau (1930c: 4) argued that politics was a “quality that has to be
15
sought in the minds of involved individuals” (author’s translation).
Politics was not constituted through the societal framework, hence
political institutions, but through the interactions of people pursu-ing
their interests in a common realm. Morgenthau (1985: 37) con-tinuously
referred to this definition of the political when considering, for instance,
“[t]he aspiration for power being the distinguishing ele-ment of
international politics, as of all politics” and also late in his life
Morgenthau (1972: 31) repeated this definition. As the earlier
elaboration of Morgenthau’s concept of power had demonstrated, the
political can potentially be brought into being through both types of
●
power: empirical and normative. However, as Frei (2001: 124) notes,

Morgenthau promoted a “dynamic and critical approach,” stressing that
normative power was an end to reestablish a value-system that has the
potential to confine empirical power. This was necessary because
Morgenthau (1929a: 129) considered the animus dominandi as being
open to a “malicious interpretation” (böswillige Auslegung). As
discussed before, Morgenthau (1930c: 9; 1934b: 33) paid particular
attention to the diction in his German and French writings, distinguishing
between the terms Kraft and Macht as well as pouvoir and puissance to
avoid these misinterpretations (cf. Rösch 2014d).
Meeting under an Empty Sky or the Loss of

Values in Modern Societies
Already in the early 1970s, Roger Shinn (1970: 9) characterized
Morgenthau in a short piece for Worldview as a “Realist and Moralist,”
and indeed he was. Morgenthau (1948a: 99) was a realist, as he had
realized that, due to the loss of values, modernity is characterized by the
unhindered diffusion of human drives and the appearance of an
unrestricted lust for power that has the ability to deteriorate societ-ies. As
Scheuerman (2012: 456) recently put it, for Morgenthau, “[m]odernity . .
. was structurally vulnerable to moral decay.” Hence, Morgenthau was
also a moralist, as he argued for a concept of power that could re-
establish the lost values in the political realm. The final section of this
part further elucidates the values Morgenthau aspired to.
Recent scholarship argued that Morgenthau had a universalistic,
teleological understanding of values (cf. Pin-Fat 2005: 221–6; Cozette
2008: 18–20; Neacsu 2010: 33). However, in a lecture on human rights,
Morgenthau (1979: 4–5) disagreed with such a simple universalism pro-
moting Western human rights as universal goals. Rather, to understand
Morgenthau’s values, it has to be realized that he distinguished between
two levels of values. Although both levels of values refer to value expe-
riences (Werterfahrungen) that find their legitimation in the collective
memory of a society, Morgenthau distinguished between individual and
collective values. Individual values were for Morgenthau the require-
ment to establish values on the collective level. These individual values
are etic in the sense that Morgenthau considered them as intrinsic to
human beings. The latter, by contrast, were emic for Morgenthau, as they
are spatially and temporarily conditioned. Two questions have to be
answered: What were those values for Morgenthau? How did he con-
sider their embodiment and interplay?
Power ● 67
For Morgenthau, values had a vital normative and social function.

Their task was to constrain human drives and secure the survival of any
society, which is why there can be no universal values but only values
that were followed within a specific culture. “[T]he common roof of
shared values and universal standards of action” (Morgenthau 1985:
359) provided society members with certainty, sense of belonging, but
also compassion and the willingness to integrate because “norms [as the
reification of values] became the most reliable weapon of the human
society to protect themselves against the mischief anti-social behavior
16
can cause them” (Morgenthau 1935: 19; author’s translation). It was
for this reason that Morgenthau (1934a: 12) disagreed with Immanuel
Kant in his postdoctoral thesis La réalité des normes, as he argued that
Kant had separated the realm of is and ought and banished them to the
“Elysian fields.” Although there was a difference between these realms,
both had to be set into context. Neither can there be an empirical world
without values, nor is it possible to have values indifferent to reality.
Therefore, Morgenthau (1934a: 12) aimed to bring back values and their
empirical embodiments (norms) to the “réalité terrestre, la réalité de hic
et nunc.” Indeed, this is where Morgenthau’s criticism on the Nuremberg
Trials stemmed from. Not that Morgenthau did not want to bring such
war criminals like Wilhelm Keitel (head of the German High Command
of Armed Forces), Karl Dönitz (grand admiral and last head of the
German Reich), and Hans Frank (governor general of the occupied
Polish territories) to trial, but Morgenthau (1962a: 377–9) questioned the
validity of turning a punitive trial into one of divine justice.
As mentioned, Morgenthau distinguished between emic collective values

and etic individual values. In an early manuscript, Morgenthau (1937: 114)
noted that due to the destruction of objective moral order, the soul of the
individual had to be looked at in order to find the essence of these lost
values. Referring to the essence of values, Morgenthau argued for the
universality of individual values that enable the creation and sustenance of
collective values in order to constrain human drives. As Benjamin Mollov
(2002) demonstrated, these values partly origi-nated out of Morgenthau’s
Jewish faith in the sense of lived spirituality. Morgenthau found them
embodied in the German Jewish symbiosis, 17 which Arendt (1978)
considered to be partly rescued in the United States by referring to its
representatives as “conscious pariahs.” German Jewish émigré scholars
offered personal values such as humanity, humor, pursuit of freedom, open-
mindedness, and sensitivity to injustice (65–6). From an obituary of Arthur
Schlesinger (1980) we know that Morgenthau’s
●
personality comprised these values, as they provided Morgenthau (1932:

27) with a “firm standpoint” ( festen Standpunkt) to make value judg-
ments. Morgenthau was convinced that these individual values allow
people to establish a set of collective values each society has to create by
themselves and critically, yet open-mindedly, reflect on the values of
other societies.
Situating the individual values in the German Jewish symbiosis dem-
onstrates that Morgenthau (1930b: 41–52) argued for “European values”
in Western societies, but he refrained from a clear definition. This is the
case because, following Frei (2001: 167), an elaboration was not neces-
sary then because Morgenthau’s (1985: 269) contemporaries were aware
of what was meant by European values and their “Christian, cosmopoli-
tan, and humanitarian elements.” To illustrate these European values, the
work of the sociologist Helmuth Plessner, a coeval of Morgenthau, is
illuminating. In Die verspätete Nation (The Belated Nation) from 1935,
Plessner (1959: 29–31) depicted European values as the fundamental
human rights, rationality and progress through education, the inter-play
of intellectual skepticism and tolerance, as well as democracy (also
Murray 1996: 92–3). These values refer to the humanist liberal tra-dition
of the German Jewish Bildungsbürgertum. Indeed, Morgenthau (1961a)
was as a humanist, which is manifested in his analysis of the lost German
Jewish symbiosis before World War II at the Leo Baeck Institute. This
lecture also demonstrates that it was Morgenthau’s ambi-tion to
reestablish these values in the Western world after World War II had led
to their near extinction.
Morgenthau experienced the loss of these values in his own aca-
demic environment. During the 1930s, he published a series of articles
on the reform of juridical education in the Frankfurter Zeitung (HJM
Archive 95). Most revealing, however, is his analysis of the problem of
the American university system, published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
In the issue of January 10, 1938, he argued “that the technological prog-
ress is bought with the loss of cultural substance” (HJM Archive 96;
18
author’s translation). To counter this development toward an educa-
tion that aimed at immediate usefulness, he spoke in favor of a gen-eral
humanistic education, focusing on fundamental ideas and cultural goods
inherent to humankind. Only people with such an education are
intellectually and morally capable of fulfilling their later societal roles
and tasks and contributing to the reestablishment of a humanistic meta-
physics. Morgenthau (1952a, 1959c, 1974b) later returned to this argu-
ment, when he expressed concern about the growing development of
political science into a positivistic science. It is, therefore, not surprising
Power ● 69
that Morgenthau perceived the Humboldtian University as the ideal place

to promote humanistic education, as it is evidenced in a letter to the
editors of the New York Times, published in the issue dated August 23,
1966 (HJM Archive 43).
In his postdoctoral thesis, Morgenthau also elaborated on the
embodiment of values in the form of norms. Any kind of norm con-
sisted for Morgenthau (1934a: 25) of two elements: the “disposition
normative” and the “élément validité [sic].” The former element signi-
fies the content of the norm and refers to the aspired attitude or behav-
ior. However, the content of a norm is not sufficient to claim validity,
and it does not ensure that people follow it, allowing the norm-setter to
influence human behavior (32). Therefore, a second element is neces-
sary as a means to achieve validity. Morgenthau argued that sanctions
force people into following a norm. Being convinced of its righteous-
ness, people can also follow a norm voluntarily, but usually individual
interests clash with the norm. Therefore, the potentiality of physical or
mental sanctions has to be present.
For Morgenthau (1934a), norms find their expression in three forms
of sanctions. First, people get sanctioned through the use of morality. He
considered morality to be the most fundamental form because the
individual’s conscience acted as the “tribunal intérieur dans l’homme”
(59). The second form, mores, acts as a sanction on the collective level
through spontaneous and arbitrary societal reactions. This, what is often
linked to public opinion, however, bears a risk. Due to its arbi-trariness,
the effectiveness of sanctions is not guaranteed, as the public opinion can
never be fully controlled and it is never just in an absolute sense
(Morgenthau 1973: 54–5). The final form is embodied in laws, which,
according to Morgenthau (1934a: 69–88), fulfill what mores cannot
achieve. They offer controlled and just forms of sanctions, as they
succumb to a normative regulation (law) if norms are being infringed.
The justification for considering sanctions as sufficient means to enforce

norms brought Morgenthau back to his elaboration of the human drives. In
La réalité des normes, Morgenthau (1934a: 46; author’s transla-tion) noted
that “it is particularly the fear of a displeasure which makes a norm the most
appropriate means to provoke the desired reaction.” 19 Hence, Morgenthau
returned to the principle of lust he had found in Nietzsche and Freud to
theorize about the significance of norms to allow for values collectively.
Morgenthau alluded here to a paradox: peo-ple in fear of losing
possibilities to increase pleasure or being exposed to displeasure follow
norms and thereby restrict their lust, resulting in
●
giving away the possibility to achieve even more. In other words, the
fear of losing the possibility to increase lust altogether is stronger than
the incentive to increase lust even more. Only sanctions have the ability
to force people to succumb to norms because otherwise, as Morgenthau
(1940: 276) noted in one of his first American publications, it remains “a
mere idea, a wish, a suggestion, but not a valid rule.”
Conclusion
This part elaborated on Morgenthau’s ontology, identifying a unique
transcendentalism, to which recent scholarship has alluded (cf. Rengger
2005, 2007; Tjalve 2008; Neacsu 2010; Paipais 2014). This tran-
scendentalism in Morgenthau’s ontology was perceived, by American
scholars in particular, as “something almost continental’ (Good 1960:
615), demonstrating the difficulties American academia had to follow
Morgenthau’s perspective on politics.
It was pointed out that the fundament of this transcendental ontol-ogy
is the human being and its tragic existence. Religious and political
certainties had vanished, leaving people behind that were bereft of their
beliefs and identities, making them susceptible to the distorting views
ideologies promised. This development destroyed the values Morgenthau
considered as vital for the viability of societies. Since these values are
missing as regulatory bodies, the human drives of self-preservation and
to prove oneself break through unhindered. The existence of these drives
convinced Morgenthau that humans are in a tragic position for several
reasons: not only are these two drives conflicting and hinder-ing each
other in their fulfillment, but they also cause selfishness and its
limitlessness ends in the impossibility of their complete realization.
Finally—and this is the greatest tragedy—these unhindered drives
prohibit humans to engage in what they (individually and collectively)
ought to do and potentially lead to a society’s downfall.
This final tragedy highlights that Morgenthau had two kinds of power
in mind. The first kind, the animus dominandi, was for Morgenthau an
empirical concept that he considered as prevalent and, therefore, had to
be taken into consideration analytically to grasp real-ity. Yet, he argued
for a second, the normative kind of power. With this kind of power,
Morgenthau aimed to reestablish the values he per-ceived to have been
lost in modern societies. The disenchantment of the world elucidated the
nihilism of life. Still, Morgenthau argued that this had to be accepted and
positively transformed to get engaged into and create a good, value-
based life. However, Morgenthau was aware that
Power ● 71
“transcendental homelessness,” to use Lukács’s term, was the price to be

paid for its achievement. Hence, power was for Morgenthau both the
destroyer and creator of social life. From this discussion of
Morgenthau’s dualistic concept of power, we can draw two conclusions
that are of sig-nificance for International Relations.
First, it has implications for the sociology of the knowledge of the
discipline. It was demonstrated that Morgenthau did not measure power
in terms of material or technological capacity as it was common among
his American academic coevals (Guilhot 2008). He also did not fol-low
exclusively Weber or Freud by promoting a concept of power that
fostered sociopolitical domination, although he analytically dealt with
this animus dominandi as evidenced most famously in Politics among
Nations. Rather, by building upon Nietzsche and in agreement with
Arendt, power was for Morgenthau a temporally and spatially condi-
tioned collective affair whose intention it is to transcend the natural lim-
itations of humans if they act on their own. Second, envisioning power as
puissance, Morgenthau, like many other European émigré scholars,
stands in the tradition of stressing the human condition of politics (cf.
Brown 2012; Solomon 2012; Rösch 2013a, 2014c). Of course, this refers
to Arendt’s The Human Condition, but Marcuse, Voegelin, Horkheimer,
Adorno, and Gurian (cf. Thümmler 2011, 2014) were also critical of the
rising influence of rationalism, empiricism, and idealism in Western
democracies and consequently turned against any effort to socially plan
the world through measuring and controlling human behavior.
Puissance, therefore, helps to face postdemocratic tendencies in Western
societies.
Postdemocracies are characterized by Colin Crouch as states with
governments that removed the political from more and more aspects of
social life, succumbing them to rationalization measures. This depoli-
tization rests on the assumption that the common good is an objective
quantity and the antagonism of interests is not to be carried out in
democratic processes, but resolved through administrative acts (Crouch
2004, 2011). Chantal Mouffe also argues in this vein by criticizing the
presumption that conflicts can be resolved through finding a consen-sus.
For Mouffe (2005: 12), following Schmitt, this is presumptuous because
“[t]he political cannot be grasped by . . . rationalism for the simple
reason that every consistent rationalism requires negating the
irreducibility of antagonism.” This is the case because “what antago-
nism reveals is the very limit of any rational consensus [by bringing to
the fore the inescapable moment of decision].” Rather, democracies
have to ensure that the potentially violent antagonisms are reduced to
an
●
“agonism” in which there still exists a dichotomy of otherness, but the

conflicting parties accept at least each other’s legitimacy.
However, according to a recent study by Frank-Olaf Radtke, the
depolitization not only hinders the establishment of agonistic con-flicts,
but even creates antagonism. In the aftermath of the 9/11 terror-ist
attacks, White Papers were issued and programs were set up under the
catchphrase of a “dialogue of cultures.” The purpose of these dia-logues
was to establish a cultural consensus within a national context. However,
despite good intentions, these institutionalized dialogues failed to
establish consensus because they were not conceived as an open process
with equal rights. Rather, they were set up with the inten-tion to affirm
the status quo, in which the immigrating minority has to adopt the
regulations of the majority. What is more, these dialogues reduced
culture to ethnic-religious otherness and thereby created an irrevocable
we-they dichotomy that had not existed before (Radtke 2011: 12–25).
A Morgenthauian-inspired scholarship critically reflects on this

depolitization in Western democracies by analytically exploring the
empirical concept of power (pouvoir) and equally asks for a normative
invigoration of the political realm. Puissance aims to reestablish the
political so that people can interact in debates, experience the antago-
nism of interests, and discuss ways to ensure a common good. These
debates, or “discussion[s],” as Morgenthau (2012: 126) called them, can
reempower people because they allow them to willfully create their life-
world together. Therefore, puissance goes beyond contemporary discus-
sions of depolitization. Morgenthau did not conceive the antagonism of
interests as a Schmittian-inspired dichotomy of friend and enemy, but
acknowledges each interest in its own right and positively embraces the
creative potential of these antagonisms. Hence, the elaboration of
Morgenthau’s concept of the political stressed that he considered it as the
quality of interpersonal relations that are subject to changing inter-ests.
From this follows that Morgenthau, in agreement with Simmel and in
anticipation of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, per-ceived
societies as being constructed out of these interest-guided rela-tions. Due
to spatial and temporal changes, they are in constant flux, as societies are
the construct of human interrelations. Morgenthau aimed to change them
by re-enchanting the world (Neacsu 2010). Applying his normative
concept of power that enables the recreation of the lost val-ues, which
were primarily the ones he had experienced in the German Jewish
humanist, liberal tradition of the Bildungsbürgertum. Values such as
freedom, tolerance, humor, respect for oneself and others,
Power ● 73
and prudence were qualities he considered essential to save societies

from extinction through the aspiration to fulfill human drives. Hence,
throughout his life, Morgenthau (1967a: 17) aimed “to speak truth to the
power” by revealing the devastating effects a misguided concept of
power can have, by pointing out that humanistic values are vital for the
survival of any society and by promoting a concept of power that
enabled people to constructively and positively act together.
CHAPTER 3
Knowledge: Hans Morgenthau and

Epistemology
Introduction
Other than the ontological element of Morgenthau’s worldview, episte-
mological aspects in his vast oeuvre have only since recently attracted
more academic interest (cf. Williams 2005a; Hamati-Ataya 2010; Behr
and Rösch 2012; Rösch 2013a; Molloy 2013; Behr 2013b; Levine 2013).
This relative neglect explains why Morgenthau was for a long time dis-
regarded as a positivist by the majority of the discipline (cf. Wasserman
1959; Smith 1997). Even today, contributions to International Relations
demonstrate unease to acknowledge that Morgenthau’s work is in stark
contrast to the positivistic traditions, by arguing that Morgenthau was
neither a coherent positivist, nor a clear antipositivist, as exemplified in
the works of Rohde (2004) and Stefano Guzzini (1998, 2004).
It is, therefore, the intention of this part to demonstrate that such
readings rest on a dogmatic understanding of the development of
International Relations. There are no traces in Morgenthau’s oeuvre in
which he speaks in favor of positivism. Rather, this part shows that, like
Dilthey in the century before him for the entire Geisteswissenschaften
(humanities), Morgenthau aimed to establish a feasible and intelligible
approach to international politics based on an antipositivist episte-
mology. This intention already shines through in his early European
works, like Über den Sinn der Wissenschaft in dieser Zeit und über die
1
Bestimmung des Menschen (Morgenthau 1934b), but it was particularly
in the United States that Morgenthau concerned himself more with the
construction of such an approach in order to provide an alternative to
the ruling dogma of behavioralism. Morgenthau was not alone in this
quest, as many other like-minded émigré scholars pursued similar inter-
ests (cf. Barboza and Henning 2006; Guilhot 2011; Rösch 2014a).
●
Elaborating his epistemological foundations, furthermore, elucidates

that they firmly rested on the earlier elaborated concept of alienation as a
source of self-reflection. It also reveals that Morgenthau’s epistemology
was formed within the discussions of Weimar Republic humanities, as
Morgenthau developed them along the line of the controversy between
historicism and historism. This debate focused on the question whether
to accept the relativism of knowledge or if absolute truth claims can be
established, as emphasized in Stefan Berger’s (2001: 28) definition:
I deliberately use the term “historism” . . . rather than “historicism” . . .

Whereas “historism” ( . . . Historismus) . . . can be seen as an
evolutionary, reformist concept which understands all political order as
historically developed and grown, “historicism” (Historizismus), as
defined and rejected by Karl Popper, is based on the notion that history
develops according to predetermined laws towards a particular end.
(Emphasis in the original)2
Hence, this debate dealt with the question whether historically deter-
mined knowledge is absolute or if it has to be relativized in terms of the
particular historical contexts in which knowledge was constructed. The
epistemology that Morgenthau exercised allowed him to critically reflect
on his own position and the position of others. It enabled him to critically
question and uncover elements of reality that are con-sciously
discernible and the processes and forces that shape social rela-tions.
Morgenthau’s epistemology enabled him to develop a method best called
conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte), as it allowed him to transcend
trivial everyday occurrences by identifying general politi-cal concepts.
Certainly, Morgenthau is to be criticized for not having pointed out the
centrality of alienation for his epistemology, as it would have allowed
later scholars to more easily distinguish his core epistemo-logical
concepts. However, as with the previously mentioned European values,
Morgenthau considered them to be widely known. The wide acceptance
of alienation as an epistemological source, for instance, is to be remarked
in Schuetz’s (1967: 140–1) seminal The Phenomenology of the Social
World, originally published in 1932, in which he argued that alienation is
the very essence of any social science.
To elaborate these arguments, this part proceeds in three steps. First,
Morgenthau’s attitude toward positivism is analyzed. This contains a
critical assessment of major forms of positivism that Morgenthau
encountered during his lifetime: legal positivism in Europe and behav-
ioralism in the United States. This section continues with an analysis
Knowledge ● 77
of Morgenthau’s main objections to positivism: rationalism and empiri-

cism. This leaves the task to elucidate the epistemological foundations
Morgenthau rested his approach on. It is argued that concepts of inter-
subjectivity, temporality, and spatiality were crucial aspects for him in
constructing knowledge. Finally, Morgenthau’s analytical framework to
approach and understand politics is elaborated. It is emphasized that this
framework rested on “principles of politics” (Morgenthau and Thompson
1950) or “perennial problems” (Morgenthau 1955: 434; 1962a: 19). It
also contains a correlation of his conceptual history with intellectual
forerunners of this approach, which are primarily to be found in Swiss
representatives of art history. This gives further evidence that
Morgenthau’s worldview had found an important intellectual stim-ulus
in Central European humanities.
The Deficiency of Positivism

Morgenthau’s Dispute with Legal Positivism and Behavioralism
This section argues that Morgenthau remained critical toward any
positivistic thought throughout his career, as recently noted by Behr
(2010: 213–14). In characterizing positivism similar to what Hoffmann
(1977: 45) called “applied Enlightenment” in reference to Dahrendorf,
Morgenthau criticized positivism for three reasons: first, positivism was
for Morgenthau (1936: 1; 1940: 201) tautological, as he envisaged it a
set of epistemological perspectives that present empirical triviali-ties
concealed in scientific language (Tsou 1984: 47). Furthermore,
positivism was for Morgenthau a hypocritical undertaking because, by
concentrating on empirically verifiable objects and disapproving of
metaphysics, it claimed to have deprived itself from the traditions of
Western philosophical thought. However, as Morgenthau (1940: 246;
1944: 174) pointed out, this was only a sign of self-denial because
knowledge constructions are influenced by their specific spatiotem-poral
contexts. Hence, Morgenthau remained skeptical to positivistic claims of
being able to achieve law-like generalizations and absolute truth
statements. Finally, Morgenthau (1970c: 69) experienced positiv-istic
scholarship as promoting the sociopolitical status quo “since it sub-
stitutes what is desirable for what is possible” due to being indifferent
normative concerns. Therefore, a worst case scenario for Morgenthau
was that positivism runs the risk of supporting ideologies because the
aspiration of a “value-free science” is not concerned with value-based
judgments. The resulting unqualified relativism leads to a situation in
●
which any behavior can be endorsed as long as it is in agreement with

what is perceived to be of factual evidence. To elaborate Morgenthau’s
criticism on positivism further, his stance toward two major forms that
he encountered during his lifetime is examined: first, legal positivism;
second, American behavioralism.
At the time Morgenthau earned his first merits in academia, legal pos-
itivism was the dominant paradigm in German Staatslehre (Jütersonke
2007: 103). Jellinek was one of its most distinguished representatives,
but legal positivism is mainly associated today with Kelsen and the
3
Vienna School. Kelsen played an important role for Morgenthau in
developing his epistemology, but Kelsen was also personally of impor-
tance for him. Morgenthau owed the successful start of his academic
career to Kelsen, which resulted not only in great gratitude, but also in
4
a friendship-like relationship with Kelsen. Without the interference of
Kelsen, Morgenthau would have failed his Habilitation in Geneva (Frei
2001). Indeed, Morgenthau had sympathies for Kelsen’s work. While
being a law clerk in Sinzheimer’s chambers, Morgenthau endorsed
Kelsen’s critique of modern capitalism (Scheuerman 2008: 32). He even
acknowledged that Kelsen’s legal positivism is an attempt to save pub-lic
law from the crisis of European culture. In one of the first articles
Morgenthau (1940: 262) published in the United States, he noted that
positivism accepted the breakdown of the great metaphysical systems of

the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries and the resulting deca-
dence of metaphysical jurisprudence as an established fact. It endeavored
to save the scientific character of jurisprudence by eliminating from it all
metaphysical elements, thus separating it from the discredited doctrines of
natural law.
Further evidence that Morgenthau had sympathies for Kelsen’s approach

is given in his inaugural lecture at Geneva from 1932 and in an article on
positivism from 1936. In these papers, Morgenthau considered Kelsen’s
legal positivism as a temporarily feasible solution to rescue Staatslehre.
The breakdown of all metaphysical beliefs and the subsequent cultural
crisis made it necessary for Kelsen to withdraw from reality and the
moral, political, social, and economic issues that influenced the state.
Morgenthau (1932: 11–3) was convinced that otherwise Kelsen could
not have succeeded in reclaiming universality for Staatslehre. Kelsen’s
pure theory of law, therefore, was accepted by Morgenthau as an attempt
to partition Staatslehre from the turmoil of the ever-challenging social
developments of his time. Thereby, Morgenthau hoped that scholarly
Knowledge ● 79
standards can be rescued and Staatslehre prevented from providing

uncritical support to ideologies until a new metaphysical basis can be
laid. Eventually, he regarded legal positivism as being more prudent than
other types of positivism (Morgenthau 1936: 10–14).
This initial acceptance of Kelsen’s legal positivism, however, does
not mean that Morgenthau endorsed Kelsen’s views. On the contrary, he
only conceded to legal positivism a temporary right to exist until the
cultural crisis was resolved. According to Morgenthau, Kelsen’s pure
theory of law provided no answers to the traditional questions of German
Staatslehre. Neither was Kelsen concerned with questions regarding the
existence or value of governmental institutions and legal orders as well
as their development and demise, nor was he investigating justifications
for authority. Hence, Kelsen’s positivism remained silent to the
questions that Morgenthau considered to be most fundamental. Yet,
Morgenthau was convinced that people yearn for meaningful expla-
nations and justifications about the society they live in. They aspire to
make sense of the concrete circumstances of their lifeworlds, but legal
positivism only provided abstract explanations of the legal framework
(Sollordnung) to which the state had been reduced. For Morgenthau,
however, this was the cardinal error of Kelsen’s legal positivism, for it
omitted the human element in public law. But, such a human element
was inevitable “as long as the formation of the public reality remains the
subject of emotional contentions. Until then it is impossible to think
about the state, whose existence is tied to one’s own destiny, with-out
making judgments about and ascribing meaning to public affairs”
5
(Morgenthau 1932: 17; author’s translation). Therefore, Morgenthau
eventually renounced Kelsen’s positivistic epistemology as being unable
to depict the scope of human affairs. Behavioralism, the kind of positiv-
ism Morgenthau encountered after his emigration to the United States,
was in this sense even more problematic.
At the time Morgenthau started to leave a mark in American
International Relations, behavioralism increased its influence on the
discipline by promoting a unified method for all social sciences, focus-
ing on directly observable reality, applying deductive reasoning, and
believing in unlimited scientific progress (Waldo 1956; Dahl 1961). In
contrast to European legal positivists before World War II, however,
behavioralists argued against the value relativism of pure positivism, and
they aimed to achieve the “realization of a science of liberal politics”
(Gunnell 1988: 80; emphasis in the original), giving political science and
International Relations a practical purpose. For this uncritical, practical
strife, not only did Morgenthau criticize behavioralism, but
●
even Kelsen disagreed with it (Guilhot 2008: 286). Spending most of his
academic career at the University of Chicago is ironic, given that
Morgenthau criticized it as the center of American behavioralism in a
newspaper article for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, which he wrote before
joining the University of Chicago (HJM Archive 96). Already prior to
World War II, Charles Merriam and Harold Laswell had established the
politics department in Chicago as the foremost promoter of behavioral-
ism in the United States and, after the war, scholars, such as Gabriel
Almond, pursued this tradition (Heaney and Hansen 2006: 589). Soon
after his arrival in Chicago, tensions arose between Morgenthau (1984b:
370–1) and these scholars, whom he called the “Merriam fraction.”
Partly, these tensions were caused by Morgenthau’s critical assessment
of the relations among liberalism, science, and politics in Scientific Man
vs. Power Politics. Even years later, Morgenthau expressed relief that he
had received tenure a few weeks before Scientific Man vs. Power
Politics was published.
However, behavioralism not only strived in Chicago, but it also grad-
ually became the leading paradigm in the entirety of American politi-cal
science (Guilhot 2008: 297), which helps to explain Morgenthau’s
increasing intellectual alienation from mainstream American political
science. Three reasons can be distinguished for this behavioral turn: first,
Morgenthau repeatedly noted a practical reason. Being a relatively new
discipline, any topic for which no other discipline seemed apt had been
added to political science and International Relations, in particu-lar
(Morgenthau 1955, 1959c, 1962a). This diversity and vastness in their
curricula was interpreted as a sign of little acceptance of this new
discipline in the academic world, as was the case with sociology before it
(Mannheim 1964: 614–24). Through the rigorous application of sci-
entific methods, American political science and International Relations
hoped that behavioralism could provide their disciplines enough intel-
lectual credibility to become a respected academic member. A second,
geographical explanation was provided by Hoffmann and Ekkehart
Krippendorff. Until the end of World War I, the United States had little
experience with the typical conflicts and problems that had influ-enced
(international) policymaking in Europe. Scientification seemed,
therefore, an appropriate means to satisfy the liberal, democratic zeal that
influenced American foreign policymaking since its involvement in
World War I (Hoffmann 1977: 42–3; Krippendorff 1989: 31–3). Also
Molloy (2003: 72) came to a similar conclusion, arguing that “[w]ithout
a tradition of international involvement, the Americans were forced to
rely on the Enlightenment ideology of reason and its 19th century
Knowledge ● 81
successor, positivistic science, as the key to effective, rational practice in

international relations.”
A final reason is to be found in Morgenthau and his fellow émigré
scholars themselves. Following David Kettler and John Gunnell, the
numerous arrivals of émigré scholars to the United States during the
1930s and 1940s led to their increasing influence in political science and
International Relations (also Srubar 1988b; Kettler and Lauer 2005;
Söllner 1996; Rösch 2014a). For example, in the decades after World
War II, émigré scholars contributed to a sizeable increase in articles
concerned with political theory in the American Political Science Review
(Kettler 2006: 533–4), although Söllner (1996: 21, 289) reminds us that
émigré scholars contributed for less than 2 percent to the entire pub-
lished research output at that time. To counter this rise of “traditional
political theory” (Kettler 2006: 531), behavioralism can be interpreted as
the expression of a “conservative rebellion” in order to save the tradi-
tional liberal values of American politics and their pursuit in political
science and International Relations, as many of these émigré scholars
represented a different kind of scholarship that focused on historical
analysis and, due to their experience with Nazi Germany, they could not
share American optimism (Gunnell 1988: 73; 2006: 484–5; specifi-cally
on Morgenthau, see Rosecrance 1981: 749). Indeed, this explana-tion
coincides with the recently proposed argument that International
Relations Theory was a “separationist movement” (Guilhot 2008: 282)
not only for many of these émigré scholars during the 1950s and 1960s,
but also for like-minded American scholars, like Reinhold Niebuhr,
6
Kenneth Thompson, and William T. R. Fox. But it was not only within
International Relations that émigré scholars contributed to the criticism
of behavioralism, as Voegelin’s (2000) The New Science of Politics
exem-plarily demonstrates. This book, which like several other major
con-tributions to twentieth-century political philosophy originated out of
the Walgreen Foundation Lectures Series at the University of Chicago,
encouraged Morgenthau to acknowledge similar research interests in a
letter to Voegelin on June 10, 1953 (HJM Archive 60) and it helps to
explain why Morgenthau (1955: 450) criticized the separation of politi-
cal theory from political science. Although Morgenthau was engaged in
this separationist movement, his aim was not a separation of American
political science and International Relations, but he helped to recali-brate
their research foci on the human condition of politics (for a differ-ent
7
interpretation, see Guilhot 2008; Ashworth 2014). This is the case
because he argued that any scholarship needs to be theoretical because
their task is to systematize events whose analysis goes beyond common
●
sense. For Morgenthau, political theory was essential to political sci-ence

and International Relations, as it was its task to distinguish these political
elements, which were valid regardless of time and space from those
elements that are situationally conditioned (Lebow 2003: 248–9).
Behavioralism, however, had deprived itself from this task by cutting off
its ties not only from Western political thought, but also from con-
temporary political issues.
Morgenthau’s thought coincides here with Louis Hartz’s (1955: 10),
who argued that “[i]t is only when you take your ethics for granted that
8
all problems emerge as problems of technique,” as this belief in uni-
versalism made behavioral approaches sterile and, therefore, they can-
not provide academic contributions. Until the late 1960s, Morgenthau
hoped that his efforts would succeed and the behavioralist movement
would vanish, as noted in a letter to Michael Carder on September 7,
1966: “I am inclined to think that the recently fashionable types of
research such as systems theory, game theory, and behavioralism will
decline because of their sterility which is now increasingly being rec-
ognized. Conversely, I would anticipate a revival of interest in the tra-
ditional types of historical research and intellectual analysis” (HJM
Archive 9). A similar hope was expressed by Morgenthau three years
later in a letter to Rosemary Galli from January 3, 1969 (HJM Archive
24). Ultimately, however, Morgenthau and his fellow colleagues’ aspi-
rations and ambitions failed and behavioralism became the dominant
approach in American political science and International Relations dur-
ing the second half of the twentieth century (Guilhot 2008: 300).
Morgenthau had two further objections to behavioralism. First, he
criticized the trend toward applicability in social sciences, eventually
resulting in attempts of social planning (Morgenthau 1944). This quest
for certainty, which “explains the rage for premature theoretical formu-
lation, the desire to calculate the incalculable . . . the crusade to replace
discussions of motives with such more objective data as word counts and
vote counts, the crowding of strategic research” (Hoffmann 1977: 57),
particularly concerned Morgenthau. Without acknowledging one’s own
intellectual standpoint and promoting value-freeness, political sci-ence
and International Relations risked to uncritically serve the liberal status
quo. Hence, Morgenthau encountered in the United States a simi-lar
danger that had already disturbed him about legal positivism in the
1930s. In the United States, for Morgenthau, the situation was even
worse, as behavioralist scholars did not refrain from foreign policymak-
ing, but actively engaged in what Hoffmann (1977) called “kitchens of
power” in their aspirations to foster liberalism globally. This led to
Knowledge ● 83
9
a “Kissinger-syndrome” (Krippendorff 1989), meaning that academic
faculty members in the United States frequently seek opportunities to
take up governmental positions and vice versa. Finally, the intellectual
sterility and focus on immediate applicability of science further pro-
moted optimism in the United States, which was already strong due to
liberalism (Shimko 1992). Again Hoffmann’s (1977: 45) assessment is
most elusive: “There is . . . the profound conviction . . . that all problems
can be resolved, that the way to resolve them is to apply the scientific
method assumed to be value free, and to combine empirical
investigation, hypothesis formation, and testing and that the resort to
science will yield practical applications that will bring progress.” As a
Jew who had experienced the rise of fascism in Europe, who was forced
to emigrate twice, and who had experienced scientific destructiveness in
the wrong hands, Morgenthau could not endorse this almost naïve
optimism of his American colleagues. This disaffirmation, for example,
underlies Morgenthau’s criticism of American foreign aid. In a lec-ture
given at the Naval War College in 1957 and in an article in the Canadian
newspaper Globe and Mail dated July 27, 1969, Morgenthau disagreed
with an American foreign aid, as it grounds its efforts on the assumption
that the American way of life is superior to others and that foreign aid
increases the standard of living in the recipient countries. Regardless of
the context that caused countries to seek foreign support, its proponents
believed that their efforts lead to the establishment of democracy and
peace (Morgenthau 1958a: 7; HJM Archive 186).
The Perils of Science: Rationalism and Empiricism

In his critique of positivism, Morgenthau particularly challenged two
aspects: rationalism and empiricism. This is not to say that Morgenthau
fundamentally opposed them. Rather, also his epistemology relies on
rationalism and empiricism, but Morgenthau understood their purpose
and scope in opposition to positivistic scholars.
As mentioned, political science and International Relations in the
United States have been dominated by and, indeed, owe their existence
to the urge for practicability. World War II only intensified this urge
through an increasing personal interchange among academic, govern-
mental, and military institutions, as noted by Morgenthau (1962a: 113–
26)—a concern that had reached the wider public in Dwight D.
Eisenhower’s presidential farewell address in 1961 in which he called
this interconnection the “military-industrial complex.” Its aim was, not
least in a state of emergency such as war, to increase the reliability of
●
predictions by removing factors of uncertainty. Indeed, many émigré

scholars, like Herz and Neumann, owe the possibility of pursuing their
academic career in the United States to these circumstances, as they
found employment with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the pre-
decessor of the CIA (Schale 2008; Lebow 2011), and also Morgenthau
reported on the political situation in Austria to the State Department
shortly after World War II had ended. Émigré scholars offered insight
knowledge about Nazi Germany that made their expertise sought-after
by the American government. As Henry Pachter (1969–1970: 18) put it
succinctly: “[i]t is no exaggeration to say that at that time we [the émigré
scholars] needed the Nazis as our raison d’ être” (emphasis in the
original).
In addition, various scientific approaches, characterized by an opti-
mistic outlook due to an uncritical belief in progress, were developed
during this time in order to provide (foreign) policymakers with the abil-
ity to socially plan reality (Morgenthau 1944: 181–5). In Great Britain,
the strife for social planning got so contagious that even Mannheim
occupied himself with this topic after his emigration (Blokland 1984;
Ziffus 1988). For Morgenthau (1947a: 11), rationalism provided the
authorization for this belief in progress because
the world is governed by laws which are accessible to human reason. In

the last analysis, there exists fundamental identity between the human
mind and the laws which govern the world . . . It is this identity which
enables man to understand the causes of events and, by creating causes
through his reasonable action, to make himself master of events.
In Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, Morgenthau (1947a) argued that

rationalism seemingly enabled people to construct an accurate model of
the world and its social forces, which guaranteed its internal coher-ence
as it was believed that humans are capable of acting in full rational
determination, as also recently stressed by Neacsu (2010: 78–9). This
kind of rationalism, Morgenthau (1944: 179) was convinced, led to the
belief in having reached a “mythological level of absolute certainty and
predictability.”
Seeing Morgenthau (1947a: 10) in the wider academic context of
American political science and International Relations during the mid-
twentieth century, his critical position toward the promises of rational-
ism to effectively simplify and mechanically analyze the social world
becomes apparent, as he considered them “complicated [and] incongru-
ous.” Hence, power, as the central concept of politics, was introduced by
Knowledge ● 85
Morgenthau and other émigré scholars to distinguish themselves from

the rationalism of American political science and International Relations
(Guilhot 2008). Morgenthau’s article Education and World Politics from
1955 demonstrates this attempt. First, he stressed the failures of ratio-
nalism, before he moved on to discuss the philosophical basis of politi-
cal science and International Relations, and finally he introduced the
10
concept of power as central for the analysis of (international) politics.
Yet, for Morgenthau, this was not a criticism of rationalism per se, but
he disagreed with the way it was perceived and employed. Molloy (2004:
3) turned to this aspect in Morgenthau’s thought: “Where rationalism
pro-vides merely an illusion of control over knowledge . . . rationality is
an effective approach to knowledge, it is what makes knowledge
possible in international relations.” This is possible as the social world
“is not devoid of a measure of rationality if approached with the
expectations of Macbethian cynicism” (Morgenthau 1944: 184). Rather,
Morgenthau (1970a: 242–3) aimed to demonstrate that although in
theory there are uncountable contingencies, it is still possible to detect
perennial politi-cal problems, which decrease the possible number of
these contingen-cies and, thereby, it is possible to anticipate potential
trends. Carefully applying this kind of rationality allows political
practitioners to approx-imate potential solutions in consideration of the
specific configuration of each problem. Therefore, Morgenthau (1947a:
10) argued similarly to Mannheim that “[p]olitics is an art not a science,
and what is required for its mastery is not the rationality of the engineer
11
but the wisdom and the moral strength of the statesman.”
In addition to rationalism, Morgenthau criticized a second aspect about
positivistic approaches: empiricism. As Morgenthau’s former student Lebow
(2003: 248) remarks, this dimension, in particular, concerned Morgenthau.
Like in the case of rationalism, Morgenthau (1970a) did not criticize
empiricism per se, but he disagreed with the kind of empiricism endorsed by
positivists, for which he identified particu-larly by two devices: reductionism
and quantification (243; 1970c: 69). Morgenthau (1944: 174–5; 1947a: 95–
105) saw reductionism evidenced in the application of the “method of the
single cause.” He employed this term to characterize social scientific
efforts to mimic natural sciences by developing an approach based on
deductive-nomological reasoning, implying that in the social world the
development of one particular effect can be explained through one
particular cause, such as factor and regression analysis as well as
correlation (Heaney and Hansen 2006: 589). Hence, Morgenthau
criticized positivistic political science and International Relations for
their inability to predict and their recourse
●
to explanation. This reductionism was particularly disquieting for

Morgenthau (1971b: 77), as, like Voegelin (Henkel 1998: 17–18), he
propagated an encyclopedic scholarship in the sense that political sci-
ence and International Relations have to rest on a large stock of histori-
cal and philosophical knowledge that allow meaningful analogies to be
12
drawn.
The discomfort Morgenthau caused with his rejection of reductionism
among his peers is evident in a contemporary critique on Morgenthau’s
work, arguing that it lacked rigorous scientific standards. “Science is not
a reality. It consists of theories or hypotheses whose truth or real-ity has
to be established by critical experiment or testing” (Wasserman 1959:
67). However, Morgenthau made it clear that any such approach is
bound to fail because the sociopolitical contingencies are so numer-ous
that one cause can lead to numerous effects and the cause itself can have
sprung from numerous effects. Still, the application of the method of the
single cause inspired social scientists to formulate social laws. Following
Morgenthau, these laws had been formulated under hypothetical
assumptions, irrespective of the complex and incongru-ent actual social
relations. Therefore, despite their dogmatic claim for universality and
practicability, these laws can merely “present a series of hypothetical
possibilities, each of which may occur under certain conditions and
which of them will actually occur is anybody’s guess” (Morgenthau
1944: 176; 1949a: 1).
The second device of empiricism Morgenthau criticized is quanti-
fication. This is particularly evident in Morgenthau’s article Power as a
Political Concept. For Morgenthau (1971b: 69–70), even in areas of
political science that allow a certain degree of quantification, like voting
habits, it had led to dissatisfying results. Furthermore, as Molloy (2004:
4) has remarked, Morgenthau criticized quantification for its fragmen-tary
character. Approaches relying on quantification only depict the factual
appearance of the social world because they do not ask for the development,
reasons, and implications of this factual reality. Yet, for Morgenthau (1944:
244–5; 1970c: 67–71) these kinds of questions con-stituted the essence of
any social science. In Science: Servant or Master?, Morgenthau (1972: 62)
excoriated positivism for having “lost sight of the very existence of the
unknowable.” The reflexive character of the human being cannot be depicted
through quantification, and, subsequently, positivistic claims to accurately
depict social reality are in vain:
Facts have no social meaning in themselves. It is the significance we

attribute to certain facts of our sensual experience, in terms of our hopes
Knowledge ● 87
and fears, our memories, intentions, and expectations, that create them as
social facts. The social world itself, then, is but an artefact of man’s mind
as the reflection of his thoughts and the creation of his actions.
(Morgenthau 1962b: 110)
To counter this uncritical confidence in quantification, Morgenthau

(1955: 455; 1959c: 131–2) proposed the concept of “higher practicabil-
ity.” With higher practicability, Morgenthau aimed to reintroduce ele-
ments of sociopolitical lifeworlds that quantification could not depict by
shedding on the development, reasons, intentions, and implications of
factual reality. This surplus of knowledge leads to an enhanced under-
standing of the world and it saves political scientists from becoming
mere chronologists of the sociopolitical status quo. Rather, Morgenthau
wanted to help them to engage in critical assessments of the existing
sociopolitical lifeworld and encourage them to point toward different,
potentially better, sociopolitical realities.
The Spatial and Temporal Conditionality of Knowledge

The Particularity of Being and the Limitations of Knowledge
So far, Morgenthau’s critical view toward positivism has been elabo-
rated, but this does not yet explain his epistemology. To gain insights
about the development of his epistemology, we have to return to Weimar
Republic humanities. At that time, questions of knowledge construction
were at the core of scholarly interest and they crystallized in the
historism-historicism controversy. Morgenthau was influenced by this
controversy during his studies in Munich, as he attended lec-tures by the
historian Hermann Oncken and the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, who
both made contributions to this controversy (Jaeger and Rüsen 1992:
141). Late in his life, Morgenthau (1984a: 5; 1984b: 344) acknowledged
their importance for the development of his thought and he also
emphatically mentioned Oncken in a letter to Thomas W. Robinson
dated November 3, 1969 (HJM Archive 49). Consequently, Morgenthau
13
(1970a: 251) classified his approach as historical. This section
demonstrates that Morgenthau developed an epistemology that took
an intermediary position between historism and historicism. His
foundations were primarily influenced by historist assumptions, while
his epistemological implementation found intellectual stimulation in
historicism, given that he applied general concepts to distinguish poli-
tics from other scholarly fields.
●
By engaging in this controversy, Morgenthau (2004: 105) found

affirmation for Aristotle’s zoon politikon, as he had realized that people
are tied to a particular culture and even specific social groups. This
means that they were in their very existence dependent upon a constant
mutual interplay with other people, and, through this interplay, they
develop their identities and worldviews. Through this common inter-
play, a particular social and political lifeworld that allows humans to
follow their aspirations is created. This institutionalized meaning of the
sociopolitical world in turn influenced their meaning-construction, that
is, the way people perceive and understand the social world. Therefore,
as Morgenthau (1958b: 17) mentioned, they become “both the creature
and the creator of history and politics.” This, what Thomas Luckmann
and Peter Berger (1966: 23) defined as intersubjectivity in the late 1960s,
was in its essence already accessible for Morgenthau in Europe through
14
his knowledge of Simmel and Schuetz’s work.
As mentioned, Simmel employed the term “reciprocal interaction” to
identify the intersubjective character of societies (Abel 1959: 473; Kaern
1990: 83–5). For Simmel (1908: 4), this was even the constitutive factor
because a society comes into being only “where several individuals act
in reciprocal interaction. This reciprocal interaction always evolves out
15
of a peculiar drive or reasons” (author’s translation). Defining society
as the entity of these interactions and stressing their dynamic character,
Simmel (29) argued that a social unity in the empirical sense is only
conceivable because there are different degrees of interactions that make
it possible to distinguish different societies. These different degrees lead
to forms of sociation with varying intensity, ranging from the interac-
16
tions of people in a hotel lobby to members of a nation-state (4–10).
However, whereas Simmel primarily conceived society in spatial
terms, Schuetz also added a temporal aspect to society. For Schuetz,
there existed different social worlds: a first category of social worlds
comprises of the worlds of the predecessor and the world of the suc-
17
cessor. None of these worlds, however, was accessible for the human
being: the former was already in the past and could only be experienced
as a retrospective observation, whereas the latter was still indefinite and
only through participating in the present world could people contribute to
the constitution of a future world of successors. A second category of
social worlds distinguishes between two worlds of the present: the social
world of contemporaries and the one of fellow men. “[L]iving with my
fellow men, I directly experience them and their subjective experiences.
But of my contemporaries we will say that, while living among them, I
do not directly and immediately grasp their subjective experiences but
Knowledge ● 89
instead infer . . . the typical subjective experiences they must be having”

(Schuetz 1967: 142–3). The social world of fellow men is the realm of
temporal and social coexistence. Hence, it marks the realm of everyday
life. The social world of contemporaries only allows indirect experience.
This is because, although their social world is also characterized by tem-
poral coexistence, there is no immediate spatial overlap that hinders its
accessibility due to cultural, social, or political restrictions (Luckmann
1993: 321; Natanson 1998: 10).
Simmel’s and Schuetz’s thoughts were taken further by a student of
the former: Mannheim. In his essay The Problem of Generations,
Mannheim (1952: 276–320) incorporated spatial as well as temporal
aspects by distinguishing three concepts, which enabled him to sub-
divide sociohistoric space. First, he identified “generational locations”
that, like Schuetz’s social world of contemporaries, acknowledged that
the social world consisted of multiple cultural and sociopolitical entities.
This in turn was further divided by Mannheim (303) into “generation[s]
as an actuality.” The members of these “generational asso-ciations”
shared, like Schuetz’s fellow men, “a common fate or sensibil-ity”
(Kettler and Loader 2004: 163) that distinguished them from other
groups. Finally, Mannheim (1952: 306) also introduced the concept of
“generation-units.” Even though actual generations share a common fate
and sense of common problems, people often still respond differently.
Hence, there are different groups of people within each generation, such
as political parties, that pursue different approaches to solve problems
and to focus on different issues. Consequently, Mannheim argued to
analyze them separately (Kettler and Loader 2004: 163–4).
This discussion of Simmel, Schuetz, and Mannheim’s understand-ing
of society emphasizes that scholars, who had a lasting effect on the
intellectual socialization of Morgenthau, argued that societies were not
only human constructs that are subject to change, but the reciprocal
interaction of humans also led in a dialectic process to the establish-ment
of a temporally and spatially divergent nexus of societies. Simmel (1908:
21), for example, claimed that there are several capacities that establish
societies as an “objective form of subjective souls” (author’s
18
translation). For the purpose of this study, however, it suffices to fur-
ther discuss particularly one of these capacities. For Simmel, individuals
were capable of understanding their inner life because they live through
it every day. Yet, complete knowledge of the individuality of others is
impossible because one cannot know their inner life in all detail (24).
However, people approximate and anticipate thoughts and feelings of
others through a typification of their own experiences. This is possible,
●
as these typifications are tested and revised in a dialectic process of

everyday life situations. The more often people have to test their typi-
fications, the more closely they can approximate others’ inner-lives and
the more coherent their relations become. In this regard, Schuetz (1967:
4) agreed with Simmel because his “underlying idea has proven fruitful
and is still utilized. This is the notion that all concrete social phenom-ena
should be traced back to the modes of individual behavior and that the
particular social form of such modes should be understood through
detailed description.” However, he eventually parted from Simmel
because he considered empathy as sufficient enough to constitute par-
ticular societies. Schuetz claimed that empathy also requires a common
expressive basis that allows perceiving, understanding, and transmit-ting
the objectifications of social reality and their meaning context in a
similar way. For Schuetz, this common basis was made up of signs,
which he defined as “art-objects which are interpreted not according to
those interpretive schemes which are adequate to them as objects of the
external world but according to schemes not adequate to them and
belonging rather to other objects” (118). Signs can be verbal, but also
paraverbal, extraverbal, or nonverbal, and they help to structure every-
day life by distinguishing different realms of societies.
Through the reciprocal interactions of human beings, common
intersubjective schemes of experience develop. This, what Assmann
(1995) calls “collective memory,” was shared through Schuetz’s signs,
like texts, rituals, or monuments, and transmitted through a common sign
system, usually language, which in turn permits reciprocal interac-tions.
Collective memory guides the way people perceive, understand, and
structure their social lifeworlds. This was the basis for Morgenthau, like
for other scholars of German humanities at that time, to highlight that
knowledge also, as a mental result of these reciprocal interactions and
expression of the collective memory, was limited in its scope and depth
because there is no absolute super-temporal structure through which
reality can be judged. Hence, Morgenthau was influenced by an
academic environment that held the belief that knowledge was cre-ated
in delimited groups within specific contexts and out of particular
experiences. This made knowledge not only liable to change, but also
significant due to its particular relevance.
Early on, Morgenthau came into contact with this kind of thought in
the works of Jacob Burckhardt and Dilthey. The latter, whose intel-
lectual insights Morgenthau praised in a letter to Samuel B. Magill dated
January 5, 1962 (HJM Archive 39), had a holistic notion of the
constitution of an epoch and spoke in this context of a “life-horizon”
Knowledge ● 91
(Lebenshorizont) (Dilthey 2002: 198; emphasis in the original). Hence,

every epoch revolves in its thought around itself and it cre-ates its own
aspects of knowledge, which establish perspectivist objec-tivity within
and for its specific context (cf. Behr and Rösch 2012). Equally,
Burckhardt, like his successor in Basel and later professor of
Morgenthau in Munich, Wölfflin, spoke of a specific “spirit of the age”
(Zeitgeist), which defines scope, procedure, and content of people’s
thought-processes (Sigurdson 1990: 428; Young 2002: 117). Likewise,
Burckhardt and Wölfflin stressed the temporal aspect of knowledge and
argued for its changeability.
A further source for Morgenthau’s understanding that knowledge
relates to a specific time and space was Weber, as he stressed, next to the
temporality, also the spatial context of knowledge, as Turner and Mazur
(2009: 486–8) recently remarked. In his Methodology of the Social
Sciences, Weber (1949: 81) wrote that “‘[c]ulture’ is a finite seg-ment of
the meaningless infinity of the world process, a segment on which
human beings confer meaning and significance.” This congru-ence
encouraged Turner and Mazur’s argument that for Weber scholar-ship
can refer back to choices of value that are situated in a particular cultural
context. Therefore, social sciences are, unlike natural sciences, subject to
the culture they are created in. If they do not reflect the social reality of
this culture anymore, they get abandoned. Turner and Mazur assume that
Morgenthau’s stance on this subject was intensified through the study of
Weber, but they misinterpret Morgenthau’s reference to a German
19
sociologist (Turner and Mazur 2009: 487–8). Rather, than referring to
Weber, Morgenthau had Mannheim in mind.
Mannheim, who made a first contribution to the historism-historicism
debate in 1924, revived this debate with the publication of Ideology &
Utopia in 1929, the same year that Morgenthau published his doctoral
thesis. Ideology & Utopia, as was the case with Mannheim’s
presentation at the Congress of German Sociologists in Zürich the year
before (Kettler, Meja, and Stehr 1984: 76), was emphatically received by
Weimar Republic humanities, as reviews of Marcuse and Arendt dem-
onstrate (Kettler, Meja, and Stehr 1990: 1445). Equally, Morgenthau
praised Mannheim in a letter to Charles McClelland dated March 16,
1949 (HJM Archive 53). Morgenthau had profited from study-ing
Mannheim’s work, as his insights on the temporality and spatial-ity of
knowledge relied strongly on Mannheim. This is evidenced in the
quotation that Turner and Mazur misread as a reference to Weber.
Morgenthau (1962a: 72–3) wrote that “political thinking is . . . ‘standort-
gebunden,’ that is to say, it is tied to a particular situation” (emphasis in
●
20
the original). Standortgebundenheit des Denkens (situationally condi-
tioned knowledge) is, however, not a term employed by Weber, but was
21
introduced by Mannheim. With situationally conditioned knowledge,
Mannheim (1985: 74–8; also Pels 1996: 39) characterized the produc-
tion of knowledge as being tied to a specific time and space in history
and knowledge can only claim validity then and there. Consequently,
academic freedom relies on the fundamental premise of trying to under-
stand the position of others in their own right, as Mannheim (n.d.) argued
during BBC radio talks in London, which he gave for a German audience
shortly after World War II.
Morgenthau made this Mannheimian notion the centerpiece of his
epistemological framework. More than Burckhardt and Wölfflin’s
Zeitgeist and Dilthey’s Lebenshorizont, the situationally conditioned
knowledge provided Morgenthau with a concept that engaged with the
particularity of knowledge, and it also encouraged Morgenthau to accept
that knowledge is created in a historical process that takes for-mer stages
of knowledge into account. That Morgenthau (2004: 137) reached this
conclusion is evidenced in his lectures on Aristotle, where he remarked
to students in view of his own situationally conditioned knowledge that
“I haven’t come down from heaven to this chair and started to teach . . .
obviously my mind has been formed by certain experiences. And
naturally those experiences are part of my intellectual composition.”
Finally, in Power as a Political Concept, one of his later publications,
Morgenthau (1971b: 74) further demonstrated the signifi-cance of
situationally conditioned knowledge for his epistemology, as he
remarked that “in a particular culture and a particular period of history,
there is likely to be one perspective which for theoretical and practical
reasons takes precedence over the others.”
The Relativism of Truth

Promoting an epistemology that acknowledges the spatiotemporal con-
ditionality of knowledge, scholars often face charges of relativism. This
charge was also brought forward against Mannheim (1985: 254), even
though he criticized relativism as an acceptance that “there are no stan-
dards and no order in the world” and that “everybody and nobody is
right.” Although Harvey Goldman (1994: 269) rightfully observed that
Mannheim laid down in this definition a simplistic understanding of
relativism, it is of importance for this study because even Morgenthau
(1959c: 129) operated with a similar understanding. Both—Mannheim
and Morgenthau—put emphasis on countering claims of relativism,
Knowledge ● 93
while developing their epistemologies. Mannheim’s (1985: 270) answer

to relativism was relationism, claiming that “every assertion can only be
relationally formulated.” For Mannheim, relationism rested on a positive
interpretation of the spatiotemporal conditionality of knowl-edge.
Objective truth can be established, although not in the absolute sense, but
only for the specific moment in time and space out of which knowledge
was created. This is the case because contingent criteria of rightness and
wrongness are employed by people during the process of constructing
knowledge. Truth, therefore, has to be put into relation with its specific
context. In doing so, claims of absoluteness can be brought forward, as
they find acceptance in its particularity (253–4).
Morgenthau (1971b: 77) makes no reference to Mannheim’s rela-
tionism, but he certainly engaged with its implications. One of them is
that scholars have to thoroughly study the context of their research
objects in order to be able to understand it and to draw appropriate
conclusions from it. Certainly, Morgenthau’s sense for alienation helped
him to engage with this implication thoroughly. Due to his ability to
compare, Morgenthau had the possibility of grasping the wider context
while acknowledging different nuances. However, Morgenthau not only
took the wider context of research objects into consideration, but he also
searched for ways to obviate the hermeneutic circle, as Mannheim’s
assistant in Frankfurt, Elias (2006), had demanded it in his study on
22
time.
Recalling contextual particularity, however, was no particular new
insight to Morgenthau, as it was a much debated question in German
humanities. In 1916, for instance, Simmel gave a talk at the Berlin sec-
tion of the German Kant Society on Das Problem der historischen Zeit
(the problem of historic time), discussing this particular issue.
23
Morgenthau was familiar with this talk. In this talk, Simmel (2003:
294) argued that every event is bound to a specific place in time
(Zeitstelle). Indeed, only when an occurrence is related to a particular
context, it turns into a historical fact. Only then, it is allocated a specific
place in the flux of time.
The wider implications of Simmel’s remarks for Morgenthau’s epis-
temology are discussed shortly, but first it has to be asked how such an
understanding of an event’s context is supposed to be achieved.
Morgenthau stood in the Central European hermeneutical tradition,
which he had first encountered in the writings of Dilthey. Dilthey
introduced the triptych of experience, expression, and understanding
(Erleben, Ausdruck, Verstehen) to further unfold in order to disentangle
the process of understanding. For Dilthey, experience was the basis and
●
it is created out of what Simmel later called the reciprocal interactions of

humans. The expression is the manifestation of experience and the basis
of understanding. Without an external symbolization, access to the inner
experience is impossible. Finally, the realization of this inner experience
through the dissection of external expressions is, following Dilthey,
understanding. Academic understanding—and this is the kind of
understanding Morgenthau was particularly interested in—requires
putting oneself into an existing expression, followed by its reconstruc-
tion from the beginning. To achieve this reconstruction, the scholar is
asked to know as much as possible about the context of the expres-sion,
in other words its subjective and objective conditions. The bet-ter the
context is known to the scholar, the greater are the chances to arrange the
fragments in a coherent and meaningful correlation. Absolute
understanding and knowledge, however, can be aspired, but it is never
achievable, due to one’s perspectivity (Tuttle 1969: 8; Linge 1973: 540–
6; Thielen 1999: 91–102).
Although Morgenthau endorsed the implications of Mannheim’s
relationism, it proved insufficient for Morgenthau’s epistemology. If he
had followed Mannheim’s (1985: 75–88; also Loader 1997: 225–9)
concept of the “free-floating intelligentsia,” for which he would have
been “qualified” due to his own vita, Morgenthau would have encoun-
tered the same problems that he had identified with methodological
quantification. The free-floating intelligentsia meant for Mannheim that
unattached intellectuals have the possibility to transcend their own
limitations of knowledge, acquire the different situationally deter-mined
forms of knowledge, and combine it into a coherent ensemble.
Morgenthau (1984a: 14), however, already declined the prospects of this
concept in the 1930s, as he argued that it provides no epistemological
insight and, as he pointed it out for quantification, it produces a “pre-
tentious collection of trivialities” (Morgenthau 1962a: 27). Therefore,
Morgenthau needed to transcend Mannheim and Simmel’s talk from
1916 provided an early incentive for Morgenthau to do so.
Morgenthau fostered an epistemology that was guided by criticality and
cognitive skepticism for which a critical examination based on an awareness
of the spatiality and temporality of knowledge was only part of the process.
In addition, Morgenthau (1955: 451) argued that knowledge becomes only
meaningful if it is theoretically justified as “[s]cience [as the activity of
24
constructing knowledge (Wissenschaft)] is theoretical or it is nothing.”
This means that the research interest of the scholar also rests on a spatial and
temporal conditionality. It affects research questions and the way the
cognitive interests are guided. Morgenthau’s contemporary,
Knowledge ● 95
Schuetz, elaborated this issue further. Considering an action on the level

of the observant, Schuetz argued that this consists of three stages:
project, action, and act. The first stage comprises of the project. This
preliminary stage models the anticipated action based on the intended
outcome and it considers potential disadvantages and advantages. After
laying the reflective basis, the observant is capable of executing the proj-
ect. This process was termed “action” by Schuetz. Finally, after having
completed the action, it turns into the act. Merely at this final stage, the
observer can attach meaning to it, as this is the only accessible part of an
action. The project and even the action remain in their entirety incom-
prehensible to the scholar, as Dilthey had already anticipated (Schuetz
1967: 57–72; also Srubar 1988a: 101–3). For the scholar, this means that
only through the reflection of past experiences and retrospective mean-
ing allocations is it be possible to gain an understanding about actions, as
also stressed by Morgenthau (1970a: 257). Like the observant’s action, a
scholar undertakes an action and, according to Schuetz (1967: 86–96),
he/she is dependent on two general motives in their actions. Disagreeing
with Weber’s understanding of motives and considering it as insuffi-
cient, Schuetz distinguished between the in-order-to and because motive
(Peritore 1975: 137–40; Endreß 2006: 70–1). The former is to arrange
the project in a means-end structure toward an anticipated goal. This
means that the project starts with the intended outcome and from there it
subdivides the intended action toward the beginning. The latter motive
finds its incentive in the past. The because motive is, therefore, a
disposi-tion of action whose origin lies in the past.
This emphasizes that the scholar, aiming to understand a specific
research situation, is in their meaning construction subject to particu-lar
interests because of their spatial and temporal conditionality. The
awareness of one’s own position was for Morgenthau the crucial aspect
of his epistemology. As Morgenthau (1955: 453, 1959c: 130) stated on
several occasions during the 1950s:
The content of theory, then, must be determined by the intellectual interest

of the observer. What is it we want to know about politics? What concerns
us most about it? What questions do we want a theory of poli-tics to
answer? The replies to these three questions determine the content of
political science; and the replies may well differ, not only from one period
of history to another.
It is in this sense that Morgenthau tried to solve the issue with

relativism while aiming to approximate truth. Absolute truth was for
Morgenthau
●
neither possible, nor did he aspire to achieve it. He strived for truth, but,
as the following quotation demonstrates, he argued for an objective truth,
which gains its significance in the relation between the research object
and the scholar. This means that knowledge can only claim legitimacy in
its particular context, but never in an absolute sense tran-scending space
and time. In Education and World Politics, Morgenthau (1959c: 129–30;
similar 1955: 453) further characterized this aspect:
A theory of politics, domestic or international, must search for the truth

about matters political. In that search it is subject to a purely pragmatic
test. Does this theory broaden our knowledge and deepen our under-
standing of what is worth knowing? If it does, it is good; and if it does not,
it is worthless, regardless of its a priori assumptions.
Hence, truth and its founding constituent, knowledge, are spatial and
temporal constructs whose relevance is tied to a specific time and space.
For Morgenthau, therefore, it was satisfying if knowledge is ratio-nally
constructed because then it can have the possibility to enhance
knowledge. From this follows that Morgenthau did not endorse “grand
theories,” which culminated in the neo-neo-debate during the 1980s,
because in their positivistic theorizing they abnegated the conditional-ity
of knowledge.
Finally, this also puts the question of reissuing Politics among Nations
into a new perspective, and it reveals an epistemological implication for his
own work. It was noted earlier that for several months during the early
1950s, Morgenthau refused to issue a second edition of Politics among
Nations because he argued that it had served its needs (HJM Archive 121).
Behr (2010: 215) recently convincingly reasoned that also Morgenthau’s
thought has to be seen as spatially and temporally deter-mined, hence,
“historically and politically contingent.” This means for Politics among
Nations, which he wrote as a counterideology to fascism, that Morgenthau
(1971c; also Mollov 1997) only agreed to republish the book, as the
intensifying Cold War demonstrated to him that commu-nism was on the rise
to develop into a new world-threatening ideology.
Conceptual History as a Method

Historical Patterns and Perennial Problems of Politics
Shortly after Morgenthau’s death, Norman Graebner (1984: 67) noted
that Morgenthau considered the distinction of specific from general
aspects of the social world as the primary concern for social scientists.
Knowledge ● 97
Despite this early insight, Morgenthau’s concern for, as he called it,

“perennial problems” (Morgenthau 1955: 434; 1962a: 19) or “general
principles” (Morgenthau and Thompson 1950; Morgenthau 1962a: 55)
were either neglected or misinterpreted by International Relations schol-
ars as evidence for his positivistic epistemology, as it was only recently
pointed out again by Brian Schmidt (2014: 468). It is not since too long
ago that this interpretation is gradually being called into question by
International Relations scholarship (cf. Pin-Fat 2005; Schuett 2007;
Cozette 2008; Behr 2010; Solomon 2012; Rösch 2014d; Kostagiannis
2014; Paipais 2014). This makes it necessary to carefully elaborate the
importance of concepts for Morgenthau’s epistemology by tracing their
intellectual development and to provide a nuanced discussion in distin-
guishing between the general and specific levels of concepts. This final
section aims to find answers to the following questions: What were those
general principles Morgenthau spoke of? Who or what can be regarded
as intellectually stimulating for the development of Morgenthau’s epis-
temological implementations?
Generally, Morgenthau’s six principles of realism are considered to
be the fundament of his theory of international politics. However, these
principles are prone to be misunderstood if a contextualization of
Morgenthau’s work is missing, as happened numerous times (e.g.,
Tickner 1991). In terms of his general principles, however, much more
enlightening is a series of articles that he devoted to the study of politi-
cal science and International Relations throughout his career. For
Morgenthau, since the time of his doctoral dissertation, power was the
primary concept that shaped politics. Consequently, even late in his life,
Morgenthau (1971b) returned to its conceptualization. As Morgenthau
(1945b: 15) had learned from Burckhardt, politics can be turned into an
absolute evil. Certainly, for most parts of his life, politics evolved as an
absolute evil, which made it even more important for Morgenthau to find
alternative pathways. Yet, power was only the most central of these
principles. Others, which are all related to power in one way or another,
were for Morgenthau (1955: 434; 1962a: 19) “legitimacy, authority,
freedom, forms of government, natural law, sovereignty, revolution,
25
tyranny, [or] majority rule.” These concepts in turn produced a set of
questions with which political science and International Relations had to
engage:
Why is it that all men lust for power; why is it that even their noblest aspi-
rations are tainted by that lust? Why is it that the political act, in its con-
cern with man’s power over man and the concomitant denial of the
other
●
man’s freedom, carries within itself an element of immorality and puts

upon the actor the stigma of guilt? Why is it, finally, that in politics good
intentions do not necessarily produce good results and well-conceived
plans frequently lead to failure in action, and why is it, conversely, that
evil men have sometimes done great good in politics and improvident ones
have frequently been successful? (Morgenthau 1955: 450)
In the same article, Morgenthau remarked that these questions were of a

philosophical nature and had to be addressed if a “scientific under-
standing of politics” is aspired. To achieve such an understanding, how-
ever, an epistemological framework was necessary. This enables scholars
to examine the specific, contextualized answers that have been found to
these questions. Only if this takes place “[b]y detecting in the inter-
national relations of different cultures and historic periods identical
responses to identical challenges, we are able to develop certain theo-
retical propositions about international relations that are true regard-less
26
of time and place” (Morgenthau 1962b: 167). In other words,
Morgenthau proposed an approach that bears resemblance to Reinhart
27
Koselleck’s conceptual history.
Koselleck (2010: 58) accentuated that concepts are essential, as oth-
erwise people cannot make, categorize, let alone understand their expe-
riences. Only concepts allow people to make use of past experiences.
This affects one’s own behavior and thoughts positively or negatively,
depending on the experience. Morgenthau (1955: 456; similar 1959b: 17;
1959c: 132; 1971b: 75) also stressed the importance of concepts for
guiding people’s lives, as he repeatedly argued that it functions like a
map:
A central concept, such as power, then provides a kind of rational outline

of politics, a map of the political scene. Such a map does not provide a
complete description of the political landscape as it is in a particular
period of history. It rather provides the timeless features of its geography
distinct from their ever changing historic setting. Such a map, then, will
tell us what are the rational possibilities for travel from one spot on the
map to another, and which road is most likely to be taken by certain
travelers under certain conditions. Thus it imparts a measure of rational
order to the observing mind and, by doing so, establishes one of the con-
ditions for successful action.
Hence, Morgenthau also argued that concepts are required in order to make
sense of past experiences that allows people to understand the pres-ent and,
therefore, to act rationally under the current conditions as well as
Knowledge ● 99
it even allows them to anticipate future events. In this process, Koselleck

(2002: 24–6) argued that the employed language has a major impact, as the
language predetermines the humans’ possibilities to imagine and construct
realities. However, also language is dependent on changing conflicts, class
interests, friend-and foe-images, and on emotions and interests that drive out
of a specific culture (Koselleck 2010: 56). Even though without concepts
experiences cannot be made because language is the primary factor of
transmitting past experiences, language predeter-mines the creative and
explanatory power of concepts because it restricts the way concepts can be
thought of. Morgenthau, therefore, was carefully calibrating the slightly
different meanings of synonyms and observed the cultural determination of
words, as confirmed by his son Matthew (Morgenthau 2009). Certainly, the
success of Morgenthau’s aspirations is questionable because the terminology
in his English writings, like power, (national) interest, and animus
dominandi, invites misinterpreta-tion, as frequently happened. The reference
to language emphasizes that, although Morgenthau argued for a central
concept in politics, this did not mean that the content of this concept was
universal. On the contrary, power as the central concept differed depending
on the time and culture in which it was used. Therefore, Morgenthau’s six
principles of realism are, in Behr’s words, “political and historical
contingent,” as previously noted. Early reviewers of Politics among Nations,
however, missed this point. For instance, for Barrington Moore (1949: 327),
“the major weak-ness of this study [Politics among Nations] lies in its shaky
psychological underpinning. With no empirical evidence beyond the
questionable par-allel with animal societies, the author assumes that the
drive for power is both strong and universal.” The lack of scientific rigor
was criticized, furthermore, in a review in the New York Times Book Review,
which led Morgenthau to defend his work as “a systematic, analytical
treatise on international politics” in a letter to the editors dated October 23,
1948 (HJM Archive 161). Such misinterpretations might have been the
reason behind Morgenthau’s decision to add the six principles of realism to
the second issue of Politics among Nations. At least in the correspondence
with his publisher, Morgenthau indicated that people in whose verdict he
trusted, suggested for him to do so to accentuate its character as a textbook
(HJM Archive 121). Among them were Thompson and Leo Strauss, as
Morgenthau (1954a: ix; also Rösch 2015) indicated in the preface to the
second edition. Two aspects help to further elucidate this relation of
conceptual universality and particularity.
First, political science and International Relations are like a “spot-

light” (Morgenthau 1959c: 130) because, even though a political
●
scientist tries to illuminate all aspects of politics, the meaning of con-

cepts shifts due to the ever-changing focus of attention or circumstances.
This implies, however, that meaning and reality can never be identi-cal.
Although they are related to each other, both constantly change with
different pace (Koselleck 2010: 67). This different pace is what
Morgenthau criticized about international law in the 1930s when he
argued that Staatslehre and international law were sterile and could not
keep up with the changing aspects of reality. As elaborated by Heiner
Schultz (1979: 43–74), there are four ideal-typical changes. First, it is
possible that no change happens at all. This, however, is unlikely
because this would mean that eternal truth statements can be created.
Rather, it is more likely that either meaning, reality, or both change.
Hence, meaning and reality start to diverge, which always results in a
meaning adjustment process. In this sense, Morgenthau (1972: 59) was
convinced that “[g]enuine political thinking is action.” Using concepts to
understand the social reality is not only leading to changing circum-
stances for the scholar, but it also changes the sociopolitical lifeworlds
because politics is an intersubjective realm and the entire political realm
changes if one person is changed. Yet, despite these constant changes,
there is a certain amount of stability due to its repetitive structure.
Following the historian Fernand Braudel, Koselleck (2002: 124, 2010:
59) referred to it as “longue durée,” and it is necessary because otherwise
change cannot be perceived. Events were in their singularity unique, but
conditions for these events are to a certain extent universal. Only this
universality allows constructing concepts in the first place. This
repetitive, transcendental character of concepts is succinctly summed up
by Morgenthau (1959c: 133; similar 1962a: 65):
Underlying all area research must be the awareness that all the specific
manifestations of a particular culture contain an element of universality,
however undiscoverable or improvable it may be in a particular instance.
Area research, then, must take into account an element that transcends the
limits of any particular area. More than that, it is this transcendent element
that makes area research possible in the first place. For if we could not
assume that, while investigating a foreign area, we should find not only
things that are strange but also things that are familiar, we would not be
able even to try to understand a foreign area and would face it
uncomprehendingly.
Second, all concepts have what Koselleck (2010: 68) called a “tempo-
rale Binnenstruktur” (temporal internal structure). Any concept can in
theory have three functions, and in practice it can be assumed that
Knowledge ● 101
a concept fulfils all three functions; sometimes more, sometimes less

pronounced. Concepts are a means to create expectations. Any con-cept
contains elements of past meanings of this concept and its employ-ment
expresses expectations for the future. For this reason, Morgenthau (1972:
15–16) was not convinced that scholarship can be value-free, but it
always contains a normative element. Academic concepts are pre-
figurative. This pre-figuration in turn is influenced by the past realities
that had shaped the meaning of the specific concepts and by proposing
future realities to whose realization one’s thought is directed.
What does this mean for the application of a conceptual history?
Despite the universal aspects of concepts, which allow certain gen-
eralizations, the actual embodiment of concepts is dependent on the
context and the network of concepts the particular concept is situated in
(Koselleck 2010: 101–2). Hence, concepts contain an etic and emic
element that enables the scholar to identify particular political situa-
tions, while analyzing them in their framework of culture, time, and
language. The scholar has to be aware of the aspects that shaped the
meaning of a concept as well as the intentions and aspirations that were
connected to its usage. This, however, requires, as Kari Palonen (2002:
102) notes, a “Verfremdungseffekt” (emphasis in the original): in other
words, the ability to alienate oneself in order to free oneself from one’s
own understanding of concepts, its meaning, and usage.
Morgenthau and Art History

Turner and Mazur (2009: 484) mention that Morgenthau occasion-ally
refused to engage in methodological discussions, as he considered them
fruitless. This was probably more a sign of intellectual modesty or even
more likely coquetry, as Morgenthau repeatedly got engaged in such
discussions. To mention just one example of this engagement,
Morgenthau participated in a symposium of the Rockefeller Foundation
in 1954 in order to discuss Theoretical Aspects of International
Relations with such interlocutors as, among others, Fox, Reinhold
Niebuhr, Walter Lippmann, and Paul H. Nitze (Thompson 1955; Guilhot
2011). Remarks that Morgenthau made during this symposium and
during other occasions allow International Relations scholars to identify
the intellectual sources that Morgenthau used in developing a method for
the study of international politics.
In Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, Morgenthau (1947a: 10) famously
stated that “politics is an art.” This remark is not only to be understood
figuratively, but Morgenthau referred to art literally. Interestingly, this
●
relation has been so far completely overlooked in International Relations,

although Morgenthau made references to art history in his autobio-
graphical fragment and during the interview with Bernard Johnson. After
leaving the University of Frankfurt in 1923, Morgenthau (1984a:
5) came to Munich to study law, but “instead [took] courses whose
subject matter and . . . whose professors interested me.” One of these
subjects was art history, and his professor was the Swiss art historian
Wölfflin. But it was not only Wölfflin who influenced Morgenthau, but
also Burckhardt, who had taught Wölfflin at the University of Basel.
Morgenthau got acquainted with Burckhardt’s work through the study of
Nietzsche. Nietzsche admired the work of Burckhardt, whom he also got
to know during his stay in Basel, as he also briefly worked at its uni-
versity (West 2007: 40–1). In contrast, the influence of other scholars he
mentioned in his autobiographical sketch and interview, such as Weber,
Schmitt, and Sinzheimer, was extensively researched. This final sec-tion,
therefore, discusses the importance of art history for Morgenthau’s
methodology to the study of international politics.
Burckhardt repudiated the belief that history represented a teleo-
logical process. Rather, he conceptualized history as an unattached
continuum (Große 1999: 538; West 2007: 38). Hence, Burckhardt (1930:
4) argued against the study of history as the analysis of a given set of
28
facts—a “quagmire of facts,” as he called it in his Griechische
Kulturgeschichte—as this leads to the assumption of a teleological, his-
torically deterministic, yet limitless process. Recalling Morgenthau’s
(1962c: 110) famous quote that “facts have no social meaning them-
selves,” this demonstrates that Morgenthau’s insight was derived among
others from the study of Burckhardt. Facts have to be distilled and the
recurrent, constant, and eternal have to be sought. Burckhardt (1943)
exemplarily elaborated this understanding of history in his post-
humously published Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, which was only
partly translated into English as Reflections on History.
In this work, Burckhardt identified three great Potenzen (forces):
state, religion, and culture. According to Burckhardt, these three forces
shape the structure of the world through their interplay. Hence, it was
Burckhardt from whom Morgenthau had learned that there are recur-rent
patterns whose identification helps to provide a meaningful analy-sis of
sociopolitical lifeworlds. From the study of Wölfflin, Morgenthau
acquired a further aspect. Agreeing with Burckhardt, Wölfflin developed
his thoughts further. Like Burckhardt, Wölfflin repudiated the thought
that history constitutes merely a collection of facts (Kultermann 1993:
177). Rather, he wanted to identify the specific characteristics of an
Knowledge ● 103
epoch and even an entire culture. This enables art historians to distin-
guish an epoch or culture from other epochs or cultures. To be able to
identify these characteristics, Wölfflin pursued a formalistic approach. In
Morgenthau’s (1984a: 5) words, this approach can be classified as “the
theory of ‘prefiguration,’ covering not only form but also content. Thus
he [Wölfflin] accounted for changes in style . . . in terms of the
transformation of fundamental forms rather than of mere chronological
29
sequence.” Wölfflin distinguished between several dichotomic pairs
with which it is possible to distinguish different epochs. These dichoto-
mies were: linear–painterly, plane–recession, closed–open, multiplici-ty–
unity, and absolute–relative clarity (Kultermann 1993: 178; Hatt and
Klonk 2006: 77). Morgenthau employed in his characterization of
Wölfflin’s approach the term “prefiguration” for a good reason. He
stressed that Wölfflin considered these dichotomies as central concepts
because he believed that these categories were recurrent in any artwork,
irrespective of time and space (Hatt and Klonk 2006: 72).
Despite their recurrence, Wölfflin did not argue that they remained the
same. The meaning of these conceptual dichotomic pairs is subject to
change, reflecting the changing cultural and sociopolitical realities. This
means that some of them can be disregarded, while other categories can
become more pronounced. This is due to the changing Zeitgeist, as Wölfflin
(1950: 11) pointed out in Principles of Art History: “[I]t remains no problem
to discover the conditions which, as material element—call it, temperament,
Zeitgeist, or racial character—determine the style of individuals, periods,
and peoples.” This view that each period has its particular views on
questions of life, politics, morals, art, and science— summed up in the term
Zeitgeist—was borrowed from Burckhardt (Sigurdson 1990: 428). Hence,
both Wölfflin and Burckhardt argued for central concepts as epistemological
guidelines, and Morgenthau’s own epistemology was formed through the
study of their work.
At the end of his time in Munich, Morgenthau (1984a: 6–7) attended
a seminar on Weber’s political and social philosophy by a close friend of
Weber: Karl Rothenbücher. It was during this seminar that Morgenthau
first got acquainted with Weber, and since then Morgenthau was “influ-
enced by Max Weber,” as he reassured Martin Bodilsen in a letter dated
May 3, 1976 (HJM Archive 7). Weber’s influence on Morgenthau’s
intellectual development has been the topic of numerous studies, but
often the relevance of Weber was either overestimated or one-sidedly
elaborated (cf. Breiner 2002: 14; 2004: 141–2; also Pichler 1998;
Barkawi 1998). The chronology of Morgenthau’s intellectual develop-
ment suggests that Weber was an important source for Morgenthau in
●
confirming his assumptions about the conditionality of knowledge and

political order. The initial source for Morgenthau was, however, the
30
work of Burckhardt and Wölfflin. Still, Weber’s ideal-type must have
convinced the young Morgenthau to have found an appropriate analyti-
cal tool, although Turner and Mazur (2009: 490) rightfully note that
Morgenthau never used the term “ideal-type.”
An ideal type is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more

points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more
or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phe-nomena,
which are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints
into a unified analytical construct [Gedankenbild ]. (Weber 1949: 90;
emphasis in the original)
Hence, the ideal-type is a concept that “selectively present[s] some aspects

of social life, particularly social action, for the purpose of making them more
fully intelligible by re-describing them in terms of clarified con-cepts”
(Turner and Mazur 2009: 490). Like the concepts of his predeces-sors,
Weber’s ideal-type is a device that helps to understand sociopolitical
realities and it allows distinguishing the antagonism of interests within the
social reality by stressing certain recurrent factors. Williams (2004: 641–6)
demonstrated that Morgenthau applied this central concept or ideal-type to
the entire political sphere by making power its distinguish-ing factor. The
following lengthy quotation of Morgenthau reveals that he used the concept
of power to distinguish politics from the rest of the social realms.
Morgenthau (1955: 455–6; similar 1959c: 132; 1971b: 75) acknowledged
that this approach is one-sided, but he considered it a necessary undertaking
in order to be able to rationally analyze politics because a central concept
allows people to make sense of the numerous, disparate elements that make
up sociopolitical lifeworlds:
By making power its central concept, a theory of politics does not pre-
sume that none but power relations control political action. What it must
presume is the need for a central concept which allows the observer to
distinguish the field of politics from other social spheres, to orient himself
in the maze of empirical phenomena which make up the field of politics,
and to establish a measure of rational order within it. A central concept,
such as power, then provides a kind of rational outline of poli-tics, a map
of the political scene. Such a map does not provide a complete description
of the political landscape as it is in a particular period of history. It rather
provides the timeless features of its geography distinct from their ever
changing historic setting. (Emphasis added)
Knowledge ● 105
The image of a map Morgenthau employed here, however, points to the

influence of art history, rather than Weber. This is the case because
Burckhardt also referred to the image of a map in order to charac-terize
his approach (Fernie 1995: 14). Weber might have provided a more
coherent elaboration for Morgenthau, but his “Weberian legacy”
(Williams 2004: 641) goes in fact past and beyond Weber.
Conclusion
This part elucidated Morgenthau’s epistemology by emphasizing that its
development took part during and within the German controversy
between historism and historicism. The major insight that he gained in
this controversy—the spatiotemporal conditionality of knowledge— put
him into contrast to the academic mainstream after his emigration to the
United States, as he disagreed with his colleagues’ zeal to develop a
positivistic grand theory. Calling his approach realistic, even before his
emigration, reflects this ambition. For Morgenthau, acknowledging the
spatiotemporal conditionality of knowledge was realistic.
In order to elaborate Morgenthau’s epistemology, his attitude toward
positivism was analyzed. It has been pointed out that throughout his career
he remained skeptical about the promises such scholarship offered in the
forms of legal positivism and behavioralism. Particularly an ill-informed
rationalism and empiricism fostered Morgenthau’s criticism of positivism.
Indeed, Guilhot (2008) even argues that he became one of the foremost
promoters of International Relations Theory as a countermovement pri-
marily made up of German émigré scholars in the United States.
Furthermore, it has been elaborated that Morgenthau developed his
epistemology in response to German humanities, which were enmeshed
in the controversy between historism and historicism. Most influential in
the development of Morgenthau’s epistemological foundation have been
scholars such as Mannheim, Simmel, Schuetz, and Weber reveal-ing the
wide spectrum in which his intellectual socialization took part.
Morgenthau combined aspects of both, at times conflictive strands in an
original way in his own epistemology, as he argued for the spatial and
temporal determination of knowledge and truth. This is the case for both
observer and observant, and Morgenthau, therefore, argued to
approximate truth through a critical elaboration of the interplay of the
scholar’s focus, language, and circumstances with one of the research
object. This leads to a knowledge construction that is more veridical
than any universalist epistemological claims because the scope of a
truth claim is limited to the particular situation of the scholar.
●
Finally, Morgenthau constructed his central concept in his concep-

tual history approach, power, and the subsequent concepts not as law-
like generalizations and he did not consider these concepts as accurate
pictures of reality. Rather, he utilized them as analytical devices to
locate, first, the political realm within the broader social sphere and,
second, to understand the specific peculiarities of this realm. To typify
the meaning of his approach, Morgenthau (1955: 456; similar 1963b)
once again referred back to the world of art.
The difference between the empirical reality of politics and a theory of

politics is like the difference between a photograph and a painted por-trait.
The photograph shows everything that can be seen by the naked eye. The
painted portrait does not show everything that can be seen by the naked
eye, but it shows one thing that the naked eye cannot see: the human
essence of the person portrayed.
Morgenthau hoped that this approach enables him to grasp the inter-ests
and intentions of political actions and, as a consequence, to be better able
to understand them. Morgenthau deemed the enumeration of empirically
verifiable facts as insufficient to depict the social world accurately. This
last quotation, finally, also reassures the argument that Morgenthau was
primarily influenced in his approach by art historians, Burckhardt and
Wölfflin, and that he found reaffirmation by studying the work of
Weber. Hence, politics and the analysis of politics were for Morgenthau
a complex art, rather than subject to the structural proce-dure of science.
CHAPTER 4
Dissent: Hans Morgenthau and

Political Agency
Introduction
In this final part, I discuss Morgenthau’s political agency. It argues that
engagement in the political realm was very much informed by the public
role Morgenthau assigned to the scholar. Murielle Cozette (2008: 11–12)
contends that Morgenthau argued for a scholarship that agitates as the
“conscience of time,” providing a “corrective” (emphasis in the original)
for (international) politics. In addition, Vibeke Schou Tjalve (2008: xiv)
identified Morgenthau’s quest as an “embedded criticism,” equally dem-
onstrating that Morgenthau understood scholarship as a conscious, (self)
critical, but positive and open-minded civic engagement. This part builds
on their insights and shores them up by identifying Morgenthau as a
conscious pariah. An important aspect of Morgenthau’s pariahness was
his concept of alienation because, as Morgenthau had learned in Europe,
it was the outsider who became the insider (Peter Gay), meaning that
particularly people on the fringes of society can appreciate its achieve-
ments since they are most threatened to lose them. This pariahness
showed Morgenthau that, first, civic engagement implies a continuous,
affirmative process of criticizing the sociopolitical status quo. Second,
being an outsider, Morgenthau was able to gain a deeper understanding
of the political context due to his personal experiences and ability to
draw analogies. It is for this reason that Morgenthau’s realism has been
identified as “critical” (Cozette 2008; Scheuerman 2009b) and “evalu-
ative” (Spegele 1996; Lang 2007). This discussion is not taken up here,
but it suffices to let Morgenthau (1966b: 79) speak for himself to stress
the public engagement he pursued for himself in his role as a scholar:
The intellectual in general, and the political scientist in particular,

to be true to their mission, must be committed in a dual way.
They must
●
be committed to the objective truth, and they must be committed to the

great political issues of the contemporary world. They must descend into
the political arena not on behalf of government or any other political
interest but on behalf of the objective truth as they see it.
In contrast to Cozette and Tjalve, this part focuses on the actual politi-cal
agency of Morgenthau. Hence, his descent into the political arena is
being followed, rather than musing on his philosophical and personal
motivation.
Before elaborating Morgenthau’s political agency, it has to be recalled
that it was informed by his normative world postulate. This normativity
served in Morgenthau’s political agency as a framework to explain and/ or
criticize contemporary sociopolitical affairs, while the experiences he had
also allowed him to test, solidify, and rectify his normative world postulate.
As mentioned, Morgenthau’s (1930b, 1934b) world postulate was informed
by the European values to which he referred to in some of his unpublished
German manuscripts. These values were attributed by recent scholarship to
the Judeo-Christian heritage (Murray 1996; Frei 2001; Mollov 2002), to
Aristotle and his claims for a telos (goal) in life and for phronesis (prudence)
as the most important virtue (Lang 2007; Molloy 2009b), and even the
American founding fathers (Russell 1990) were drawn upon to explain them.
All of these explanations bear truth in them as they all represent aspects of
Morgenthau’s humanism.
To detect Morgenthau’s political agency, this part proceeds as fol-
lows: since Morgenthau was influenced in his political agency by these
traditions, the first section, in particular, traces it by aligning Morgenthau
with Arendt. Both were educated in the same intellectual tradition, which
fostered strong similarities in their thought and action. An elaboration of
their “thinking partnership” (Young-Bruehl 1982) is not only interesting
in terms of International Relations’ sociology of knowledge, but their
thought also has implications for contemporary International Relations
theory. Arendt and Morgenthau were concerned about depoliticizing
tendencies in modern democracies. For both, economy (oikos) and
politics (polis) were constitutive societal spheres. However, the political
broke down in modern democracies because economics underwent
transformations that reduced humans’ ability to cooperate and hindered
the development of a public sphere (Arendt n.d.). Both scholars argued
that ideologies constrain free and reflective thinking and that the
development of consumer societies does not only heighten the inability
of people to act, but the possibility of action is also gradually vanishing
altogether. To confront these developments,
Dissent ● 109
they aimed to reestablish the political sphere. Second, Morgenthau’s

major dehumanizing concerns with liberalism are being discussed, as his
aim was to confine liberalism’s dangerous potential to turn into an
ideology. This concern was of a political nature, and it deals with his
repudiation of idealism. Finally, the last section discusses the national
interest and world community as Morgenthau’s solutions to alter these
developments.
The Scientification and Technologization of Life

In discussing the scientification and technologization of life, we have to
consider first the oikos because, for Arendt and Morgenthau, it was in
this private realm that people received the competence to then act in the
public realm. Modernity’s scientific and technological advancements
changed people’s lives dramatically, and both scholars did not disavow
their benefits. New means of communication and transportation were
welcomed by Morgenthau (1973: 51–3) because it enabled people to
engage with their coevals even over long distances. He hoped that this
would lead to a more sustainable peace because people were given the
possibility to overcome spatiotemporal distances. However, both schol-
ars shared the concern that modernity would not be able to fulfil all
expectations. In fact, Morgenthau (1972: 2) argued that “science . .
. elates man with the promise to transform homo faber, the maker of
tools, into homo deus, the maker of worlds, [but] it also depresses him”
(emphasis in the original). Attempting to create lifeworlds through social
planning leads to a scenario in which human creativeness has no room.
Morgenthau argued that the individualization in modern soci-eties turns
humans into egoists who presume to rule over the world rather than
aspire to construct it in the struggle for a common good. In order to be
able to do so, humans employ science—particularly natu-ral sciences
(Morgenthau 1973: 47)—to follow their quest to master the world.
Morgenthau (1972: 15–16) reasoned that only in societies in which
metaphysical discourses of transcendence had been replaced by an
individually focused immanence, science can be perceived as “value-
free.” Only questions of correctness and error are to be disputed any-
more. Hence, it is not of interest what ought to be known, but only what
can be known (6–11). Anything that promised to increase indi-vidual
freedom was sought after, which is why “[w]e expect everything from
science: transformation of our natural and social environment, control of
human behavior, social planning . . . and the indefinite pro-longation of
human life” (2). Morgenthau’s realism was, therefore, an
●
attempt to contradict arguments of social planning and historic opti-

mism in general. Believing that human nature can be engineered in a
particular way was utopian for Morgenthau because it does not con-sider
the human condition of politics. For this utopianism, Morgenthau
criticized, for instance, Niccolò Machiavelli in an early piece in Ethics.
Machiavelli believed that through the application of rules of political
conduct, as he had articulated it in The Prince—hence through social
planning—it is possible to achieve the unity of the Northern Italian city
states (Morgenthau 1945a: 145). Alfons Söllner (1996: 241) is, therefore,
right to argue that Arendt’s thought (and Morgenthau’s) is characterized
by a history of decline (Verfallsgeschichte). To demonstrate this decline,
both scholars referred to two ideal types: homo faber and animal
laborans. Homo faber is the ideal typification of work, while animal
laborans stands for labor. Both thinkers feared that modernity, in which
homo faber aspired to become homo deus, reduces the former to animal
laborans.
Homo faber experiences him/herself as an autonomous subject
through his/her work. Creating objects enables homo faber to master
physical and artificial tools. The choice of tools, the object’s purpose,
and even the decision to create an object are all within homo faber’s
liberty. In addition, the creation itself happens without outside inter-
ference (Arendt 1958a: 143–4). However, working in solitude does not
mean that homo faber is disconnected to the world (Arendt 1953: 303–
6). Rather, homo faber enters a discussion with his/her coevals through
the produced objects. These objects are reified manifestations of their
creators’ subjectivity that can be cognitively experienced by others.
Homo faber, therefore, has an interest to produce high-quality objects,
not only because this publicly demonstrates his/her mastery, but also
because the objects’ durability will leave traces beyond his/her death
(Arendt 1958a: 118–19). This aspect leads Patrick Hayden (2009:
94) to conclude that this “fabrication of tangible ‘worldliness’ . . .
guarantee[s] the permanence and stability without which the human
world would not be possible.” Morgenthau even argued that death itself
can be an experience in which humans gain awareness of their own self.
By committing “suicide with a good conscience,” people have the ability
to master their biological death by choosing its place, time, and tenor
(Morgenthau 1930b).
Modernity, however, reduces work to labor. Mass production con-
strains people into industrial processes over whose purpose they do not
have control. Regulatory frameworks were created that deny people the
autonomy that they require to become aware of their subjectivity. Life
Dissent ● 111
as animal laborans is not characterized by an aspiration for mastery, but

is reduced to mere self-preservation through the acquisition of financial
means in order to be able to purchase commodities to sustain one’s life
(Arendt 1958a: 90). This concern is likewise to be found in Morgenthau.
He argued that modernity perpetuates mediocrity because humans are
not encouraged to make use of all their abilities. Rather, a mediocre
effort is sufficient to fulfil one’s task within the production process and
any further effort would make no difference. Therefore, the world of
animal laborans “compels its members to live below their capabilities
rather than exhausting them. It misdirects their energies and wastes the
best of their talents” (Morgenthau 1960b: 79).
Unlike homo faber, animal laborans does not have the capacity to con-
tribute to the creation of lifeworlds; instead he/she is characterized by
“worldlessness” (Arendt 1958a: 115). As Cara O’Connor (2013: 110–11)
states, being reduced to physicalness, out of a concern for self-preser-vation,
does not allow animal laborans to experience subjectivity. This prevents
people from engaging in the public sphere because only homo faber has the
capacity to get into contact with his/her coevals through the use and display
of objects. Animal laborans, by contrast, is absorbed by a cycle of
subsistence that denies the possibility of continuity. In this cycle, people
cannot give meaning to their life by mastering their lifeworlds that makes
death “the ultimate shock to human experience” (Morgenthau 1976a: 5).
Karl-Heinz Breier (2011: 35) corroborates this account in saying that even
by giving birth to a new generation, animal laborans does not contribute to
the creation of lifeworlds. This could only happen if his/her thought or action
is of relevance for posterity. Animal laborans, however, can only pass on
physicalness.
This worldlessness leads to loneliness. Being constrained into indus-
trial processes ingrains replaceability to animal laborans, as it does not
allow self-fulfillment or awareness of one’s subjectivity (Arendt 1953:
323). Animal laborans’s loneliness is a sign of his/her inability to engage
with other people (Young-Bruehl 2006: 85). Lacking subjectivity, in the
sense of being aware of individual abilities and interests, hinders him/
her from establishing intersubjectivity by engaging with others in the
political sphere. For both, the reduction of work to labor in the age of
modernity was, therefore, endangering the political.
Loneliness was for both thinkers one reason for the rise of ideologies
and totalitarianism in the twentieth century. Both were deeply con-
cerned about the apoliticism that was abetted by ideologies. Following
Klusmeyer (2009), it was particularly the Shoah experience that
informed Arendt’s thought. Due to the devastation of this experience,
●
she dedicated her scholarship to the elaboration and support of liberty.

As elaborated, Morgenthau’s thought, too, cannot be understood with-out
considering this experience and the advancing ideologization of the
Weimar Republic. Throughout his life, Morgenthau returned to questions
of ideologies and depolitization. In Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt
identified three elements that characterize ideologies.
First, ideologies do not aim to understand spatiotemporal contingent
events, but they purport to be able to explain the entire course of history
by providing “world explanations” (Arendt 1962: 469). Arendt noted that
“[t]he claim to total explanation promises to explain all historical
happenings, the total explanation of the past, the total knowledge of the
present, and the reliable prediction of the future” (470). Ideologies turn
history into world history, and they are not restricted to the past in their
temporal scope. Rather, ideologies also provide policy procedures for
future actions. Arendt argued that this teleological processuality of a
coherent historical fiction deprives people of their ability to act because
they are reduced to mere executors of the ideology.
Ideologies also instill hubris in people. Tjalve (2008) and Scheuerman
(2009a) note that hubris looms large in Morgenthau’s ethics. With the
rise of nationalism in the past century, Morgenthau was exposed to the
consequences of hubris in world politics. As he argued in La réalité des
normes (Morgenthau 1934a), there are moral, societal, and legal restric-
tions that hinder the outbreak of violence. However, morality is the only
restraint on the international scene, and there, seemingly, it had vanished.
Based as they were upon assumptions of divine rights and/ or natural
law, nationalistic ideologies encouraged their followers to pursue their
power ambitions on the international level. For success was embraced
within the coherent historical fiction of the ideology. Furthermore, as
ideologies know no spatial restrictions, nation-states pursue
universalistic ambitions in their attempt for ideological fulfil-ment. The
resulting nationalistic universalism “tries to impose a new order upon a
fragmented and anarchical political world, and it does so by using its
own national order as a universal model” (Morgenthau 1966a: 8). This
turned nation-states into “blind and potent monster[s]” (Morgenthau
1962a: 61) that threaten to descend the world into chaos in the pursuit of
their various ideological ambitions.
Second, Arendt (1962: 470–1) criticized ideologies for emancipating
from experience because ideologies accept human experiences only to a
limited extent. In order not to jeopardize their spatiotemporal pro-
cessuality, only those experiences that are ideologically consistent are
accepted as real. To guarantee that as many experiences as possible
Dissent ● 113
are in line with ideological world explanations, ideologies attempt to

reify lifeworlds to match thought-constructs consistent with the tan-gible
reality. For Arendt and Morgenthau (1977: 127), this reification of
reality happened through the advance of bureaucratization, as it is used
as a means of violence to support authority. This happens through the
creation of norms and rules, which define sociopolitical lifeworlds, and
administration apparatuses, which ensure that they are enforced. In
addition, dichotomies of good and bad and right and wrong are used to
define normality. This dictates life trajectories, as humans can only
develop in clearly defined channels. Deviations from the norm are pun-
ished with social ostracism, financial coercion, or even physical perse-
cution (Morgenthau 1959d: 5; 1974c: 15; Arendt 1970: 6–13). People
accept reifications of their lifeworlds because, as mentioned, ideologies
promise to free from “transcendental homelessness” (Lukács 1963: 41).
They fill the metaphysical void that modernity had left people in by
promising to re-enchant their worlds: allocating them a place among the
masses for the attainment of the ideology’s goal.
Logical-deductive reasoning was for Arendt the final element that
characterized ideologies. From an assumed premise, ideologies deduce
their entire thought-construct with absolute congruity. This allows them
to become a substitute for reality because they offer their followers a life
free of antagonisms. Having been deprived of the ability to think and
reflect freely and critically, people are willing to “be commanded into a
fool’s paradise or fool’s hell in which everything is known, explained,
and characterized by a priori definitions based on supernatural laws”
(Arendt 1973: 159).
Both scholars criticized social sciences for providing the grounds for
ideologies to establish such a substitute for reality, rather than criti-cally
reflecting on it. Morgenthau (1944: 174) saw this evidenced in its efforts
to contribute to social planning by arguing for a “method of the single
cause.” With this method, they aim to mimic natural sciences by
developing approaches based on logical-deductive reason-ing, which
imply that, in the social world, the development of one particular effect
can be explained by one particular cause. However, both scholars argued
that the tangible facts of reality have no mean-ing in themselves because
they can acquire different empirical mean-ings depending on the space
and time in which they are considered. Epistemologically, social
sciences require hermeneutic and context-sensitive methods, although
there are “perennial problems” that affect their study throughout time
and space (Morgenthau 1962b: 110; 1971b: 77; also Arendt 1970: 7).
●
Their final objection to modernity was the rising consumerism it

conditions, which affects humans in several ways. The first threat con-
cerned the environment. Morgenthau (1972: 23) was convinced that the
system of production in modern societies was not oriented toward a
transcendent end—particularly one that considers the satisfaction of
basic human needs—but it represents a “meaningless growth.” For
Morgenthau, this meant that the result of the production process— the
commodity—does not represent an end in itself, but it becomes part of a
process that focuses on quantity. The commodity, therefore, is bereft of
any intrinsic purpose, which enables further amelioration of the humans’
position to actively create their lifeworlds through the satisfaction of one
particular need (Morgenthau 1960a: 215–22; 1960b: 69–74). This
purposelessness required the creation of a consumer soci-ety that
eventually leads to a threat for the environment, as the con-sumer society
turns into a “society of waste” (Morgenthau 1960a: 215; 1960b: 69;
1972: 23).
Second, embedded into labor processes that reduce people to mere
physicalness, people neither achieve nor do they aspire to mastery. They
are not able to experience themselves as subjects, which is why, in their
worldlessness, they consume rather than create lifeworlds. For Arendt
(2005: 198), a dilemma had caused this state of affairs. She admitted that
the rapid increase of productivity was only possible because animal
laborans, whose sole task left is the sustainment of self and family, had
seized the public sphere. This increase in productivity even freed people
from subsistence concerns because, at least in the Western World, pro-
visions became available abundantly. However, this development also
led to the downfall of the public sphere and, indeed, ever-increasing
ideologization further brings forth depoliticized societies in which there
exists only publicly displayed privateness.
To face this worldlessness and to give meaning to their lives, people
began to follow the “assumption of classical political economy that the
ultimate goal of the vita activa is growing wealth, abundance, and the
‘happiness of the greatest number’” (Arendt 1958a: 133). For Arendt,
like Morgenthau, this was evidenced in the replacement of commodi-ties
by the consumption of goods. People consume material objects to
display their wealth and how far they have advanced in the labor pro-
cess. In such societies, the quality of the objects that homo faber creates
are inappropriate because people are not supposed to master their life-
worlds, and their lifespan hinders people in their constant reassurance of
their position in life. Rather, the “shop-window quality of things”
(Simmel 1997a: 257) is sought after because with each purchase people
Dissent ● 115
assure themselves and others of their position. For Morgenthau, one

reason for this consumerism was to be found in human nature. Being
laborers, self-assertion cannot be directed in mastering a trait or accom-
plishing a task, but it also cannot be suppressed (Morgenthau 1930c: 70).
Consumerism is, therefore, a way for humans to satisfy their self-
assertion because, in making purchases, they manifest their abilities
within the channels left by their reduced animal laborans condition. This
“element of prestige” (Morgenthau 1960b: 69) has resulted in
“meaningless growth” (Morgenthau 1972: 23). Consumerism, however,
was criticized by Arendt and Morgenthau for an implication that is even
more far-reaching than the reification of the assumption of growth. It is
not only a channel to exhaust self-assertion, but it is a threat to human
existence itself.
This is the case for Morgenthau because the development of weapons of
mass destruction, especially nuclear weapons, caused a radical change in
foreign politics. A first extensive engagement of Morgenthau with the
question of nuclear weapons was provided at a lecture series in 1961–1962
entitled Reflections on the Nuclear Age. As Scheuerman (2009a: 146–8) has
demonstrated, Morgenthau was influenced in the development of his
thoughts on the consequences of atomic warfare by Karl Jaspers.
Morgenthau had reviewed Jaspers’s The Future of Mankind upon request by
Jaspers’s former student, Arendt, and he incorporated the main argu-ment of
Jaspers in his thought. With nuclear weapons, humans for the first time had
been given the technical means to extinguish humanity altogether. That this
is the case, however, dawned upon him much ear-lier, when the Soviet
Union became the second atomic power in 1949, an “event of the greatest
importance” (Morgenthau 1950c: 24). From this time on, violence had
ceased to be an appropriate means of politics— understood as coercive
diplomacy1—because nuclear weapons cannot serve the causes of attack or
defense, but only deterrence. During the Cold War, employing nuclear
weapons would have led to the extinction of all conflict parties and,
therefore, the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) was applied.
Violence could no longer be employed to create a (new) political order
(Morgenthau 1960c: 5; 1970b: 38; 1973: 51). This in itself would have
caused less a foreign political consequence than an internal political
consequence, as “[t]oday all nations have one interest in common which
transcends almost all others: the avoidance of a general war ” (Morgenthau
1954b: 83). But, as pointed out earlier, peo-ple do not always act
rationally, particular in foreign politics, the realm in which humans can,
due to the nation-state, follow their drives almost unhindered, as
argued by Freud. The threat from nuclear weapons,
●
however, is not only the threat of extinction, but also the kind of death
humans have to face. As Morgenthau elaborated in a striking episode at the
end of Science: Servant or Master?, nuclear weapons cause a collective
death and lead people into meaninglessness. Neither there are people left to
bemoan their death and remember them, nor can the artefacts that humans
have created survive a nuclear strike (Morgenthau 1972: 149). From this
follows that nuclear weapons are the ultimate source of human threat caused
by the modern production and consumption pro-cess. The production of
nuclear weapons does not enable pursuing war to achieve a certain end
because nuclear weapons cannot be employed. Otherwise, even states with
nuclear weapons face complete destruction. Furthermore, nuclear weapons
do not provide increment value to con-ventional arms, as their use provides
no benefit. On the contrary, the use of nuclear weapons hinders any benefit
because of the mutual destruc-tion (Morgenthau 1970a: 32; Scheuerman
2009a: 141).
Hence, both scholars were concerned that unrestricted consumerism
leads to a ruthless enforcement of the human drive for self-assertion,
which, in turn, enters into conflict with the drive for self-preservation. In
a “society of waste” (Morgenthau 1960a: 215) goods are produced and
consumed for no other purpose than producing and consuming ever
greater quantities, thereby squandering limited natural resources. The
worldlessness of the animal laborans, therefore, may turn into world
consumption because animal laborans threatens to destroy the natural
environment upon which social lifeworlds are constructed.
Hubris in Western Democracies

Idealism as Liberal Irrationalism
In International Relations, liberalism and idealism are often used inter-
changeably. For instance, this is evidenced in Ulrich Menzel’s (2001) widely
read history of International Relations. Menzel argues that the hey-day for
idealism has been the interwar period, highlighted by Woodrow Wilson’s
“14 Points,” the establishment of the League of Nations, and British
appeasement politics toward Nazi Germany. Idealism is based on normative
constructs that favor peace, equality, solidarity, and dis-armament. Power,
exploitation, violence, and war, however, are consid-ered as expressions of a
crude power politics to which idealism aims to be a counterweight.
Following Menzel (66–7), idealism can develop this counterweight, as it
operates with an ontological a priori that treats humans as naturally good,
peaceful, and particularly rational actors.
Dissent ● 117
In a Kantian tradition, idealists assume that humans are rational actors

who aim not to physically or mentally deplete the liberty of others in
order to avoid similar threats against oneself (Crawford 2000: 5–6).
Treating liberalism and idealism interchangeably, however, only pro-
vides a simplified correlation. Morgenthau’s distinction, by contrast, is
more nuanced. Although Morgenthau saw a correlation between lib-
eralism and idealism, he argued that the latter signifies an extreme, even
2
degenerated liberal position that did not take human nature into account.
In one of his earliest writings, Morgenthau (1930a: 171–2) noted that
“[t]he Germans faithfully salute Wilson’s 14 Points as the dec-laration of
a new era in international politics. This is the case because, in
international questions, Germans are only all too happy to take the most
extreme positions thinkable by considering the influence of an ideal
construct in the creation of reality as sacrosanct or as null and void”
3
(author’s translation). Almost 30 years later at a lecture for the RIAS
“Radio University” broadcasting program in Berlin, Morgenthau took up
this notion again, arguing that liberalism does not consider the human
condition of politics, thus turning into the ideology of ideal-ism. As
before, Morgenthau (1957b: 1–3) elaborated this argument by referring
not only to the example of Wilson, but also to the League of Nations and
its successor, the United Nations. He labeled both as a uto-pian approach
to international politics. For Morgenthau, these attempts were irrational,
as such idealistic institutions did not consider irrational aspects of
humanity. As recent scholarship established, emotions, for example, are
such an important aspect for International Relations theo-ries to be taken
into account. They guide humans in their thoughts, particularly in
situations of stress, as it is often the case in interna-tional politics (cf.
Ross 2013; Jeffery 2014; Hutchison and Bleiker 2014; Linklater 2014).
Referring to a utopia, Morgenthau remained unclear as to whether he
meant a positive eutopia or negative dystopia (Waschkuhn 2003: 1–14).
This might seem paradoxical but is clarified in a lecture that Morgenthau
gave months before he died in 1979. In this lecture, Morgenthau (1979:
4) argued that
there exists of necessity a relativism in the relation between

moral princi-ples and foreign policy that one cannot overlook if
one wants to do justice to the principles of morality in
international politics . . . It is a relativism in time . . . when certain
principles are applicable in one period of his-tory and not
applicable in another period of history, and . . . in terms of
culture . . . in that certain principles are obeyed by certain nations,
by certain political civilizations, and are not obeyed by others.
●
Hence, for Morgenthau, the policies that idealism promoted—which he

did not necessarily oppose as expressions of value and which seemed to
be rational within the idealistic framework of thought—were in fact
irrational. Morgenthau considered them as flawed because idealism did
not take into account that human behavior is geared by the drive for self-
preservation and the drive to prove oneself. These drives create (positive
and negative) emotions, desires, and passions and are in turn influenced
by the situational factors of time and space. Any thought that does not
take these human conditions into account and operates from an ostensible
universal and rational basis turns irrational in the sense of providing an
unrealistic outlook on the world. To illustrate this point, Morgenthau’s
intellectual exchange with another émigré scholar, Gustav Ichheiser,
deserves further elaboration.
The intention to explain parts of Morgenthau’s thought by refer-ence
to a scholar who spent 11 years of his adult life in a mental asylum
(Rudmin 1987: 168) and who, after being released, “had been reduced to
a vegetable” (Morgenthau 2004: 41) may seem questionable. Still,
4
Morgenthau called Ichheiser a friend during the same lecture, and he
even managed to get him a position as a research assistant in his Center
for the Study of American Foreign and Military Policy in Chicago after
Ichheiser had been released from the mental asylum (Bayer and
Strickland 1990: 701). In American foreign policy, idealism is particu-
larly evidenced in what Morgenthau termed “nationalistic universalism.”
“This nationalism tries to impose a new order upon a fragmented and
anarchical political world, and it does so by using its own national order
as a universal model” (Morgenthau 1966a: 8). Morgenthau argued here
in congruence with Ichheiser in whose writings we find a concept called
“unconscious nationalism.” This type of nationalism is characterized by
two major features. First, like Morgenthau, Ichheiser (1951: 312–13)
argued that culture influences feelings and perceptions of people.
If, therefore, members of two groups influenced by two different cultures

meet, both . . . take it for granted that they themselves see the things . . .
“as they really are.” When they find . . . that others see things differently,
both reach the conclusion that it is the other fellow who is unable to see
the things “as they really are” and who has distorted conceptions about
himself as well about others.
Eventually, this leads to the creation of defense mechanisms in order to

protect one’s cultural outlook. Also the second aspect, limits of insight,
is a result of these defense mechanisms. This makes them often a cause
Dissent ● 119
of conflict. In intercultural communication, people have to deal with

symbols and interpret them according to their temporal and cultural
background, which, according to Ichheiser, happens in four ways. The
first two are unproblematic, as they occur consciously: identifying sym-
bols and understanding their meaning or identifying symbols and being
unable to understand their meaning. The second set, however, can be
causes of conflict: not identifying symbols and being, and, therefore,
unable to understand their meaning or identifying symbols, but misin-
terpreting their meaning (Ichheiser 1951: 313). Being unaware of this
selective process of perception, of which time, culture, and intercul-tural
communication are just three influencing factors, Ichheiser (1966: 554–
6) arrived at the conclusion that social perception is either dis-torted, as
relevant information is missing, or at times even inexistent.
Also Morgenthau worked with these schemas to interpret inter-
cultural exchanges. People are often unaware of their own situational
determination of knowledge, in other words of the conditionality of their
thought and action, and, therefore, they arrive at simplified con-clusions
that seem within their own limited outlook rational, but may not do so
from a different outlook. What Morgenthau called idealism is, therefore,
a liberalism that had lost sight of its own particularity and universalized
its once transcendental political ideals into immanent objective truths.
Ichheiser, in agreement with Morgenthau, reminded that “not the
generalizations but the exemplifications are ‘the real thing.’ Even if . . .
all people were to agree with each other . . . that they are ‘against
prejudices,’ they might . . . find out that they refer . . . to entirely
different kinds of prejudices, and would therefore soon start again
denouncing each other as being prejudiced.” This resulted in “‘being
against prejudices’ in general, does not mean actually anything in fact”
(Ichheiser 1966: 557; emphasis in the original). However, as the next
section demonstrates, Morgenthau reasoned this to have taken place in
American foreign politics.
Between Scylla and Charybdis: Political Consequences of Idealism
Turning liberalism into idealism had several political implications for

liberal democracies. For Morgenthau, the first implication was that lib-
eral democracies face the danger of promoting a (foreign) policymaking,
guided by hubris and self-centered moralism (Tjalve 2008: 139–44). The
second implication is that liberal democracies lose their ability to be
self-reflective and, consequently, they face the danger of becoming
resistant to critique. Hence, Morgenthau did not oppose liberalism
●
per se, but his intention was to prevent liberalism from turning into its
ideologized form of idealism and to criticize its “moral and politi-cal
‘illusions’” (Sigwart 2013: 413). As Williams (2005a: 187) puts it:
Morgenthau aimed “not to destroy the liberal political order as a whole,
but to construct mechanism for its defence.”
Throughout his career, Morgenthau expressed concern about the
moral decline of democracies in the Western World. In 1962, for exam-
ple, Morgenthau (1962a) published various articles in the first part of his
trilogy on Politics in the Twentieth Century under the heading of the
Decline of Democratic Politics. Most revealing, however, is a short piece
—the Decline of Democratic Politics—that Morgenthau wrote in the
mid-1970s. In this article for the New Republic, Morgenthau (1974c:
17) argued that all democracies face a similar problem. Fundamental
political issues are not only turned into political ideals and subsequently
often codified, but these fundamental issues are also then withheld from
any further public debate. This political and moral statism was a sign for
Morgenthau that politics in Western liberal democracies is being
deprived of the political, in the sense that human interests cannot evolve
anymore in a political realm. People in democracies only have the choice
to vote about minor issues, but not about those that fundamen-tally affect
their social lifeworlds. Even more so, Morgenthau argued that these
political ideals were reified from a transcendent nominal into an
immanent actual condition. For Morgenthau, this meant that democracies
face the danger of believing that political ideals, once they have been
codified, are considered as eternally valid, rather than being the product
of a continuously ongoing process. As he had put it almost two decades
earlier, “moral principles [upon which political ideals] rest can never be
fully realized, but must at best be approximated through the ever
temporary balancing of interests and the ever precarious settle-ment of
conflicts” (Morgenthau 1957a: 9). Furthermore, such moral principles
are always the product of a particular historical setting. This means that
they are related to a certain time and space and, hence, can change in a
different setting (Morgenthau 1979: 4).
The result of this reification is hubris, in the sense that one soci-ety
claims a political status of inviolability for itself, and in a recipro-cal
process also moralism, understood as claiming a moral status of
inviolability for itself (Behr and Rösch 2013). Although Morgenthau
argued that all democracies are in danger of succumbing to hubris and
moralism, unsurprisingly, it was the United States that he was particu-
larly concerned with. Being the first modern democracy out of which a
foundational myth of uniqueness (in contrast to absolutistic Europe)
Dissent ● 121
developed, the original ideals of the Federalists were gradually turned

into manifestations of eternal truth (Morgenthau 1952b: 3). As Robert
Good (1960: 602) put it: “First, the idealist becomes intoxicated with the
world embracing principles which are too vague and too general to
provide guidance to policy . . . Second, the idealist dresses paro-chial
interests in the garb of universal moral principles.” Hence, seem-ingly
universal moral principles become the main criterion for (foreign)
policymaking in which high moral standards for individual conduct have
to be met, rather than pursuing an interest in the public good
(Morgenthau 1957a: 7–9).
Hubris and moralism was for Morgenthau (1951a: 4; 1952b: 2)
particularly obvious in American foreign politics, in which times of self-
containment (“isolationism”) contrasted with times where their sense of
mission was internationally pursued (“international-ism,”
“Wilsonianism”). Both, however, are “brothers under the skin”
(Morgenthau 1951a: 29) because in both periods abstract moral prin-
ciples were turned into standards of action for American foreign policy-
makers. This meant for Morgenthau that during times of isolationism, the
United States retreated from international affairs even if their own
interests were at stake because other states did not meet their moral
standards. During times of internationalism, by contrast, the United
States engaged heavily in international affairs because they considered
their moral values as universally true and to be aspired by every other
state. Both policies, however, threaten the existence of the United States,
as the former in its retreat leads to the absence of decision-making and
the latter is not able to live up to its standards. This is the case because,
first, the universal enforcement of these standards cannot be ensured.
Similar to arguments that we find in the work of Paul Kennedy (1988),
Morgenthau feared that the United States overstretches their financial,
material, and mental capacities. In contrast to the Founding Fathers, who
aimed through their own existence to convince the world of American
moral superiority by exemplifying what can be achieved if the common
good is aspired, the internationalism of the twentieth century resembled a
coercive hegemon by using force to convince others of their moral
superiority. Second, conflictive interests can also lead to hubris. Since
the United States pursues various interests on the international scene,
there is the possibility that one or more of these interests begin to
outweigh America’s moral principles. This, however, causes other states
to lose trust in the United States because these moral principles,
previously presented as inalienable, have been renounced (Morgenthau
1979: 5–6). Therefore, hubris and moralism not only lead to “political
●
dilettantism” (Morgenthau 1950a: 834), but they even threaten the

existence of the United States altogether (Gottfried 2003: 23).
Two examples further demonstrate this point. First, Morgenthau was
critical about the usefulness of foreign aid. He is reported to have argued
that foreign aid is based upon an “ethnocentric arrogance” (Winsor 1969:
7). For Morgenthau, foreign aid rested upon the assumption that the
economic and technological level of the Western world is the
civilizational pinnacle to which all countries should aspire. However,
there are numerous goals that countries can aim to achieve. Indeed, the
very distinction of advanced and developing countries is reprehen-sible
since it “only makes sense in the absolute values we attribute to Western
industrial and technological society” (7). Rather, Morgenthau perceived
the problems foreign aid recipient countries faced not as pri-marily
economic, but as political. As long as there is an oligarchy profit-ing
from the status quo within foreign aid recipient states, Morgenthau was
convinced that foreign aid based upon universalized moral prin-ciples
fortifies this morally and socioeconomically unjust situation, instead of
changing it, despite the insertion of enormous amounts of money (Schatz
1970: 247–8). Hence, the possibility to alter the political situation in
these countries lies within and not outside of them. Their citizens have to
come to terms with their situation, define a common good, and establish
a political system that aspires to this common good instead of being the
privilege of a small, nepotistic minority.
Second, Morgenthau (1967b: 2) argued in a televised interview with
the late William Buckley that there was a “lack of clarity as to what we
are after in Vietnam.” This was the case, as Michael Cox (2007: 182–3)
and Jennifer See (2001: 424) noted, because Morgenthau considered the
Vietnam War not as a struggle between communism and liberalism, but
as a fight for independence from colonial rule based upon a desire for
political and economic self-determination (also Zambernardi 2011). This
American misperception of the situation in Vietnam was based,
according to Morgenthau (1965a: 82), on an inconsiderate implemen-
tation of the Truman Doctrine from 1947. This doctrine turned the
struggle with the Soviet Union over global hegemony into a “moral cru-
sade,” in which Soviet advancements had to be contained by all means.
Therefore, “a concrete interest of the U.S. in a geographically defined
part of the world [was transformed] into a moral principle of world-wide
validity, to be applied regardless of the limits of American interests
and . . . power” (83). The intervention of the United States was, there-
fore, “the inevitable outcome of a superficial, irresponsible, and inevi-
tably unrealistic universalism” (Del Pero 2010: 55), in whose course
Dissent ● 123
and not for the first time, the United States even went so far as to sup-
port an authoritarian regime. In this case, it was the one of Ngô Đình Di
m with the aim to contain communism and maintain the status quo
(Morgenthau 1965a: 32). In doing so, however, the United States dele-
gitimized its universal, moralistic claim to leadership, it made Vietnam
susceptible to communism as an alternative political and social system
(See 2001: 429), and, eventually, it overstretched their capacities.
A second set of political consequences caused by idealism was a lack
of self-reflection and a refusal of critique. Treating transcendent politi-
cal ideals as immanent standards of action, a society has no interest in
social change, but in the maintenance of the status quo, as it is believed
that a status of perfection has been achieved. Morgenthau stated in the
Basler Nationalzeitung that “politics, which desires stability, leads in the
name of anti-communism to the suppression of all manifesta-tions of
social unrest and to the oppression of reforms” (Kränzle 1976; author’s
5
translation). Hence, these societies have to enforce homoge-neity that,
first, stymies self-reflection and, second, it precludes the possibility of
political criticism. This is the case because the alleged status of
perfection cannot be renounced and, consequently, even one’s political
ideals and self-understanding cannot be questioned anymore.
Morgenthau saw this exemplified in Lyndon B. Johnson’s contempt for
public opinion during the Vietnam War, as he had “declared . . . criticism
to be unhelpful and even damaging” (Morgenthau 1965a: 50).
Morgenthau (1974c: 15) found further evidence for this argument in
Senator Joseph McCarthy and the “Red Scare” during which the pro-
fessional and personal lifes of numerous citizens were destroyed in the
name of anticommunism. At a time when the Cold War had just begun
and its outcome was still uncertain, hence a time when the immanence of
America’s political ideals was threatened, the refusal of critique, that is,
the antipluralism of political interests, had become so pronounced that its
defense had become menacing for people who questioned natu-ral
homogeneity.
Morgenthau was convinced that in societies, there were only two
options for citizens to channel their critique: apathy or violence. The
effects of both consequences, potentially causing the downfall of a
democracy, Morgenthau had already experienced during the Weimar
Republic. For Morgenthau (1972: 104–5), political apathy meant a total
retreat from politics. People boycott elections, decrease their civic
engagement, or they are even unaware of basic political procedures.
Political apathy also meant for Morgenthau (1974c: 16) that people get
engaged in communities outside of the political realm in order to create
●
a counterculture that “makes him [the citizen] at home by giving mean-

ing to his life and a chance for his abilities to prove themselves,” as he
had witnessed in the Weimar Republic. The second consequence was
equally, if not more dangerous for the preservation of democracies
because violence can be directly employed to usurp political power. Yet,
Morgenthau argued that violence is a mere sign of political despair born
out of the conviction that critique is not possible any longer and civic
influence on political decision-making processes is, therefore, incon-
ceivable. Recourse to violence, therefore, is a reification of civic dis-
comfort with the sociopolitical status quo and it intends to reestablish the
political realm (Morgenthau 1957a: 11; 1974c: 16–17). An example of
violence due to political despair are the student protests of 1968 in whose
course Morgenthau became a “national figure,” as Arendt wrote to Mary
McCarthy (1995: 217) on May 28, 1968. Students revolted out of
frustration that there was no viable political alternative to the ruling
government. They believed it makes no difference to vote for one party
or another because people were unable to debate relevant political issues.
For them, a change in government was no viable option to a different
kind of policymaking (Morgenthau 1968a: 9). Indeed, Morgenthau
argued that in the course of history students, in particular, as the young
and educated stratum, often had been forced to direct their critique into
illegal, violent outbreaks if ruling classes prohibited any legal forms of
criticism. This is why Morgenthau expressed surprise in a letter to the
editors of the New York Times dated August 16, 1966, that German
students had so far only shown signs of political apathy rather than
agitation (HJM Archive 43). Less than one year later in 1967, however,
during the visit of the Persian Shāh, Mohammad Rezā Pahlavi, the
student Benno Ohnesorg was shot dead by the police and violent German
student protests broke out. Eventually this marked the beginning of the
formation of the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF), a terror-ist organization
that only dissolved in 1993.
Thus, due to the lack of acknowledgement of the human condition of
politics and the resulting turning of transcendent political ideals into
immanent strategies of action that led to a refusal of critique, hubris, and
moralism, Morgenthau had a specific role for scholars in mind. In order
to safeguard the societal achievements of liberal democracies and in
order to prevent their downfall into totalitarianism, Morgenthau
envisaged scholarship as taking a position of embedded criticism or dis-
sidence. This means that in striving for the common good, Morgenthau
(1970a: 40) considered it as a scholarly task to critically reflect and scru-
tinize government decisions because “[t]he right to dissent derives from
Dissent ● 125
the relativistic philosophy of democracy. That philosophy assumes that

all members of society, being rational, have equal access to the truth, but
none of them has a monopoly of it.” If this critical inspection is missing,
governments are facing the danger of losing sight of the com-mon good
because a monopolization of truth takes place, as happened in the United
States. For Morgenthau, therefore, critical scholarship meant pointing
out shortcomings and encouraging people to construct different
sociopolitical lifeworlds. For this, however, scholars have to be
committed to truth in all conscience, as they have to provide guidelines
for the public to facilitate their opinion-making. In this regard, Hans-Jörg
Sigwart (2013: 429) even identifies a “heroic enterprise” in realism, as
“it demands the ‘intellectual honesty’ to seek truth while truth is
unsettling and disharmonious.” During the 1950s, Morgenthau demon-
strated this attitude, while assessing the “Van Doren scandal.” Charles
Van Doren, then working at the Columbia University, took part in a
fraud during a popular game show (Twenty One), which was uncovered
in 1959 (Cozette 2008: 15). Morgenthau reacted furiously to this fraud
because Van Doren had breached this commitment to intellectual hon-
esty, which is why Morgenthau (1959e: 17; 1960a: 344) believed that a
scholar like Van Doren “is not so much the corruptor of the code by
6
which he is supposed to live as its destroyer.”
However, Morgenthau was aware that this commitment requires a
strenuousness that might exceed human capabilities, which is why he
referred to Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch. Hence, this kind of
critical scholarship demands a high price from its followers, as he elabo-
rated for political science. Morgenthau (1955: 446–7) noted that
[a] political science which is true to its moral commitment ought at the
very least to be an unpopular undertaking. At its very best, it cannot help
being a subversive and revolutionary force with regard to certain vested
interests—intellectual, political, economic, social in general. For it must
sit in continuous judgment upon political man and political soci-ety,
measuring their truth, which is in good part a social convention, by its
own. By doing so, it is not only an embarrassment to society intel-
lectually, but it becomes also a political threat to the defenders or the
opponents of the status quo or to both; for the social conventions about
power, which political science cannot help subjecting to a critical—and
often destructive—examination, are one of the main sources from which
the claims to power, and hence power itself, derive.
This awareness is caused by the fact that Morgenthau had to pay this
price several times during his life. Two examples give evidence to this
●
claim. First, during a lecture Morgenthau gave in Bologna in April 1961,

he spoke in favor of the acceptance of the Oder-Neiße-line as the border
between Germany and Poland. This was nine years before the German
chancellor Willy Brandt officially accepted the border by sign-ing the
Treaty of Warsaw. Morgenthau (1961b: 6) argued for its accep-tance
because it serves the interests of all involved parties best. This led to
strong reactions in Germany, as highlighted in a newspaper clipping of
the Südhessische Post from April 26, 1961. Furthermore, the Göttinger
Arbeitskreis, a group of scholars from the ceded regions of Pomerania,
Silesia, and Eastern Prussia, which had arranged for Morgenthau’s lec-
ture to be translated into German, criticized Morgenthau for being a
scholar who “does not know principles of foreign politics which are
derived of an international morale or from an international law” (Braun
7
1961: iii; author’s translation). He even received critical letters in which
Morgenthau, who was forced into exile twice, had to read that he can-not
imagine the pain of people who were forced to leave one’s homeland
(Heimat) (HJM Archive 34).
A further instance must have been even more difficult for Morgenthau
to endure, as he was one of the first and foremost critics of the Vietnam
War (Myers 1980: 3; See 2001: 419–20). However, soon after public
criticism against the Vietnam War in the United States had increased,
Morgenthau’s criticism was still not appreciated. Not only was he disap-
proved of by other critics, who had become more numerous after the
8
failure of the TET-offensive in 1968 (Cozette 2008: 16) because of their
moralistic reasoning in absolute terms, but he was also criticized by
officials and his career was under jeopardy. In “the week” section of the
National Review from June 15, 1965, his role as an outsider was stressed:
“Professor Hans Morgenthau’s hyperactive role as a protester against our
policy in Vietnam is embarrassing many of his friends, and may even be
embarrassing to himself, who is not used to the kind of self-exposure he
is submitting to or to the company he finds himself keeping” (HJM
Archive 20). However, it did not remain at obloquy from the
conservative press, but Morgenthau even lost his position as consultant
in the Department of Defense (Morgenthau 1967b: 5–6), and it is argued
that, during the Johnson government, there was an “Operation
Morgenthau” in order to discredit him (HJM Archive 27; also Cox 2007:
184; Cozette 2008: 17). Finally, as several letters, public announcements,
and newspaper clippings in the Morgenthau-Archive in the Library of
Congress indicate, even his candidature for the presi-dency of the
American Political Science Association (APSA) during the beginning of
the 1970s was thwarted by people who resented his stance
Dissent ● 127
on Vietnam (HJM Archive 4; also Lebow 2003: 240). Morgenthau,

however, was willing to pay this price. For him, the role of scholarship
was to be as a vital corrective for the perils that democracies may suc-
cumb to.
Totalitarianism, the National Interest, and World Community

The Peril of Totalitarianism
Before finally elaborating on how Morgenthau suggested tackling the
problems of modern democracies, it remains to be demonstrated which
peril incited him to promote a critical public role for the scholar and act
upon it. The political and socioeconomic consequences of a dehuman-
ized, ideologized liberalism, leading to hubris, the refusal of criticism,
and the acceleration and commodification of life, are endangered to
provide the grounds for a political system, which is contradictory to
liberalism: totalitarianism.
This political system was for Morgenthau total in the sense that it
influenced all aspects of life because totalitarianism’s main feature, the
superiority of government, was supported by an interaction of demo-
cratic and despotic elements that hamper its overthrow. In one of the
discussions during the fourth “Salzburg Dialogue on Humanism”
(Salzburger Humanismusgespräch), Morgenthau made a controversial
claim. He remarked that, just as he had experienced it with the rise of
fascism, totalitarianism is democratic because it governed with the
consent of the majority of the people (Schatz 1970: 247). Yet, despite its
public consent, totalitarianism is also despotic, as the government rules
with absolute power, meaning that it is in their often arbitrary ruling not
restricted by any legal or moral norms (Morgenthau 1972: 79–80; 1973:
48). In agreement with Arendt, Morgenthau (1972: 79; 1977: 127)
equally considered totalitarianism to be a “new form of gov-ernment”
because of two characteristics.
First, totalitarianism possesses the material and technical means to
eliminate criticism completely. The former implies that totalitarian rul-
ers have the suzerainty of violence. The possession of privately owned
arms is restricted if not prohibited at all, from which it follows that vio-
lence can legally be used only by the government through armed forces
like the police or military (Morgenthau 1970a: 292–314). This material
aspect, in particular, demonstrates that for Morgenthau there is a thin
line between democracy and totalitarianism because in democracies
also the government possesses the monopoly of violence or at least
punishes
●
its abuse, which helps to explain that Morgenthau occupied a “dissent-

ing position” (Galston 2010: 386). In addition, there is a second mate-rial
aspect. Totalitarian governments have the ability to monopolize key
economic sectors, such as communication and transportation, in order to
exert violence over its subjects. This demonstrates that totalitarian-ism
operates with a “bureaucratization of terror . . . which gives political
power an efficiency it did not have before” (Morgenthau 1977: 127).
Due to this governmental material surplus, people may still be able to
demonstrate or go on strike but they lack the means to overthrow the
government (Morgenthau 1970a: 32–3). The latter aspect, technology,
was particularly important because
[i]t is not by accident that the rise of totalitarianism coincides with the
development of the modern technologies of communication, transporta-
tion, and warfare. These technologies have given modern governments the
tools with which to penetrate and overwhelm the sphere that tra-dition has
reserved for the individual and his freedom . . . Before the advent of the
technological age, no government . . . could have become totalitarian
because of its limited technological resources; thus the free-dom of the
individual was protected by the inability of the government to utterly
destroy it. (Morgenthau 1972: 80)
Furthermore, advancements in the communication sector enable totali-

tarian governments to increase their influence in all parts of society and
suppress criticism, as they now possess the means to create a sur-
veillance society as depicted, for example, by George Orwell in 1984.
That Morgenthau considered the United States at times on their way into
such an Orwellian state becomes obvious when, for example, he
analyzed How Totalitarianism Starts: The Domestic Involvement of the
CIA in 1967 (Morgenthau 1970a: 51–5; also Young-Bruehl 2006: 35). In
light of the recent uncovering of Western intelligence services’ ploys,
Morgenthau interestingly already foresaw the evaporation of the private
sphere that we encounter today, as he argued that in such surveillance
societies the private sphere is abolished and voicing criticism is rendered
impossible, as no one can feel certain anymore of not being spied on.
Second, totalitarianism is also able to technically and contextually
control the public opinion. Technically, totalitarianism has this abil-ity
because totalitarian governments are not only able to police the media,
but they can also employ media and communication devices to spread
their doctrines among their subjects (Morgenthau 1973: 54–5).
Morgenthau experienced these technical possibilities of totalitarianism to
control people’s minds with the introduction of the Volksempfänger,
Dissent ● 129
a radio receiver, in Germany. Since its introduction in 1933, the

Volksempfänger became one of the major propaganda devices for the
9
NSDAP. It was among others this experience that brought Morgenthau
(1970a: 323) to the conclusion that “[w]e must particularly recognize
that the medium through which information policy proceeds is lan-
guage” and that a totalitarian government has an interest in transmit-ting
its statements to its subjects. The indoctrination of totalitarianism,
however, is even more important. Totalitarian rulers are able to control
political discourses through a reciprocal discourse.
On the one hand, technologization has provided totalitarianism with
the means to create a bureaucratic apparatus with which totalitar-ian
governments are able to monopolize political discourses and create
homogeneity in thought and lifestyle among their subjects (Morgenthau
1977: 127; also Scheuerman 2009c: 572–3). On the other hand, totali-
tarianism establishes an ideology to legitimize its rule and to further
homogenize its subjects. In such a system, the purpose of an ideology is
to cloud the total depolitization because totalitarianism removed the
freedom to act (Morgenthau 1977: 128). This happens through the allo-
cation for a place in society for each individual and the establishment of
norms through which it is possible for subjects to give meaning to their
lifeworlds. Morgenthau found this reasoning in Arendt’s Eichmann in
Jerusalem, which she had originally written as a series of articles, while
10
reporting for the New Yorker on the Eichmann Trial in 1961 (129). In
this book, Arendt (2006) conceptualized the actions of Nazis like Adolf
Eichmann as an example for the “banality of evil” because “[t]he
evildoer can be a minor figure in a bureaucratic machine believing in the
presuppositions of the doctrine.” Finally, as soon as an ideology provides
a “mystical role” (Pin-Fat 2005: 234), by universalizing their particular
norms, totalitarianism reaches its ultimate level. Totalitarian foreign
politics is not only being persecuted in dichotomies of good and bad or
friend and foe anymore, but totalitarianism is able “to destroy its citizens
in the process of defending them” (Morgenthau 1970a: 30).
These two aspects—suppression of criticism and the creation of
homogeneity—are Morgenthau’s main concerns of totalitarianism and
they made him stand up against any totalitarian development in liberal
democracies. Still, Pin-Fat arrives at the conclusion that Morgenthau’s
realism can eventually lead into totalitarianism because of Morgenthau’s
universal moral standards, the earlier elaborated European values.
Following Pin-Fat (2005: 234), the only agent on the international scene
Morgenthau was able to imagine to enforce these standards was the
nation-state. However, Pin-Fat fails to distinguish between content
●
and scope of Morgenthau’s values, as the humanism Morgenthau uni-

versally aspired to was not to be acquired through collective enforce-
ment, but as an individual, a willful, and a continuous process. She also
misinterprets Morgenthau’s stance toward the nation-state, as he
remained critical throughout his life to the violent forces nation-states
kept unleashing. In Politics among Nations, Morgenthau (1985: 13)
argued that “[t]he light hearted equation between a particular national-
ism and the counsels of Providence is morally indefensible, for it is that
very sin of pride against which the Greek tragedians and the Biblical
prophets warned rulers and ruled.”
By contrast, as mentioned, Arendt and Morgenthau’s critique was not
only restricted to the socioeconomic effects of modern jobholder
societies (Arendt 1958a: 46; also Owens 2009; Klusmeyer 2011; Sigwart
2013; Rösch 2013c), but they also developed a political ethics of respon-
sibility by reconsidering the political. Particularly three elements char-
acterize the political for Arendt and Morgenthau.
First, as homo faber introduces one’s objects into the public realm,
they are made tangible for others and in this experience, intersubjec-
tivity is constituted (Heuer 2006: 9). In Arendt’s (1958a: 7) words,
“[a]ction . . . corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact
that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world . . . this
plurality is specifically the condition . . . of all political life.” Hence, the
political is a sphere of diverse people who cooperate through speech and
action by bringing in their subjectivity in a mutually reflective process.
This happens through an exchange of interests, which Morgenthau
(2012: 126) termed “discussion.” These discussions constitute political
meaning. Morgenthau’s terminology (“coloring”) indicates that mean-
ing is not given or inherent to the objects in question, but it is created
through human interaction; meaning is characterized by specific histor-
ical contingency and provisionality. For both, social reality is, therefore,
only accessible in the political realm, as it is there where people “form a
world between them” (Arendt 1973: 175).
Second, Morgenthau (2012: 123–6) argued that the political has to be
made up of “spheres of elasticity.” It has to be a flexible realm in which
not only divergent interests have to be accommodated, but also the
expanding knowledge base. For, although politics is an endeavor to settle
“perennial problems,” the knowledge that is created while finding
solutions to these problems and the political orders that are established in
the course of their settlement are conditioned by space and time.
Morgenthau (1962a: 110) referred to Mannheim’s Standortgebundenheit,
according to which each generation and each society will have to find
Dissent ● 131
new answers to these problems. Arendt (1958a: 199) also argued in this
vein. For her, the political was a “space of appearances.” The sociopo-
litical reality people experience as tangible is not given or based upon
absolute facts; Arendt argued instead that this reality is created through
the intangibility of the in-betweens of a specific context. The meaning
people attach to objects or events in this context has meaning only then
and there (Owens 2005b: 51–2). Therefore, the political has to be flex-
ible in which discussions about meaning-allocation can evolve without
restraints.
Third, this process cannot evolve without conflicts and may even
cause violence because of the “plurality of opinions” (Vollrath 1995:
56). What supports this assumption, in Bonnie Honig’s (1993: 93)
words, is that this is “a radically contingent public realm where anything
might happen, where the consequences of actions are boundless,
unpredict-able, unintended, and often unknown to the actors
themselves.” To avoid the looming danger of violence, Arendt and
Morgenthau endorsed the evolution antagonisms of interests in order to
counter depolitiza-tion in modern democracies. Only then is it possible
to allocate politi-cal meaning and contribute to the creation of social
lifeworlds. The political, therefore, stands in contrast to ideologization.
In ideologized societies, conflicts have to be suppressed because they
undermine the claim of world explanation unless these conflicts happen
to support the ideology.
Although Arendt and Morgenthau agreed that antagonisms have to
evolve freely, they took different stances on its requirements. Arendt
argued that through their evolution political liberty is established, in the
sense that the involved people will realize that only in this process of
mutual suasion are all their interests considered. This is why she gave
glowing accounts of American town hall meetings. These meet-ings
epitomized for Arendt (2005: 243–5) an ideal-typical political process
because people managed to find viable solutions by themselves through
expressing and listening to diverse interests. This belief in the self-
preservation of the political process substantiated her affection for
Morgenthau because she considered him a “man of praxis, of action”
(Young-Bruehl 2006: 34). Particularly Morgenthau’s involvement in
teach-ins during the Vietnam War endorsed her perception (Arendt and
McCarthy 1995: 217). Morgenthau, by contrast, was less optimis-tic
about the self-preservation of the political, which is why he repeat-edly
discussed the concept of wise statesmanship. For Morgenthau, it is the
politician’s task to establish fora in which antagonisms can evolve. In
addition, politicians are supposed to help in aligning the diverse
●
interests and in ensuring that all of them are considered in the process of
formulating a common good according to public support.
Their common intellectual background in Central European
humanities and their experiences of ideological atrocities were the foun-
dation for framing political science, in Breier’s (2011: 7) words, as a
Bürgerwissenschaft. Arendt and Morgenthau did not create knowledge
with the claim to provide absolute answers to political questions: they
did not support academic attempts to socially plan the world, and they
were critical of the personal proximity that particularly International
Relations held with public policymakers. Rather, they intended to sup-
port people in being able to live freely in the sense of being able to criti-
cally reflect on the current political status quo and have the opportunity
to create their lifeworlds (Smith 2010: 109–12). In other words, Arendt
and Morgenthau aimed to support a condign human life.
Hence, Arendt and Morgenthau were ardent supporters of American
civic culture (Owens 2005a: 35; Schulz 2006: 144). Even at times, when
the ideological penetration of sociopolitical life seemed irrevocable, they
were surprised about its assimilative capacity (Vollrath 1995: 53–4). The
shared criticism of Arendt and Morgenthau was, therefore, not a criti-
cism of substance, but a criticism voiced in fear that the United States
would lose its culture; a loss that both experienced in the downfall of the
Weimar Republic. Dolf Sternberger’s (1976: 941) claim that Arendt
turned into “a convinced ‘political’ American, a citizen by heart” is a
legitimate description of both Arendt and Morgenthau.
The National Interest and World Community

In trying to avert totalitarian rule and to reestablish a political realm
through a Bürgerwissenschaft, Morgenthau promoted two solutions: the
national interest and world community. These solutions, however,
ranged in their scope. Although Morgenthau considered the national
interest as a feasible epistemological tool to evict totalitarianism from the
system of nation-states, he still stressed that his second option, world
community, was his preferred choice.
The national interest is a concept that in its diversity and quanti-fiable
inconceivability repeatedly led to misunderstandings about its meaning
among practitioners and academics alike because, as Smith (1986: 110;
11
also Scheuerman 2009a: 85) remarked, “[h]ow one defines the national
interest depends on the values he espouses and the way he ranks them.”
The national interest, therefore, has to be understood as a “fluid
concept,” as argued for by Lebow (2003: 245), in which it
Dissent ● 133
is still possible to distinguish two dominant dimensions that reflect

Morgenthau’s earlier elaborated drives. These two dimensions are to be
remarked in a definition of the national interest provided by one of
12
Morgenthau’s former students: Thompson. He notes that the national
interest
postulates that every nation by virtue of its geographic position, historic

objectives, and relationship to other power centers possesses a clustering
of strategic interests each more or less vital to its security. At any point in
time, a rational foreign policy must attend to the safeguarding of these
claims. The national interest stands above and absorbs the limited and
parochial claims of sub-national groups, even though such groups seek to
interpret the national interest in their own terms. (Thompson 1960: 36)
Hence, the dimensions that inform the national interest are the quest for
survival and the aim to collocate the diverging interests within the state.
The first dimension of the national interest is survival. Like an indi-

vidual, a nation-state also always considers it as its primary duty to secure its
survival and the survival of its citizens (Morgenthau 1950a: 841). A nation-
state, therefore, has a vital interest in securing its exis-tence
(Lebensinteresse), as Morgenthau (1929a: 98) termed it in his doctoral
thesis. This demonstrates that for the sake of one’s survival, conflicts may
appear as no state is able to act completely unselfishly. Otherwise, its own
survival might be threatened. This selfish behavior can have threatening
consequences for other nation-states. For this rea-son, Morgenthau, like
Arendt, did not oppose violence per se as a politi-cal means to achieve one’s
interests, but, in a Clausewitzian manner, he considered violence as the last
resort if all other options to secure one’s survival had failed. Scheuerman
(2009a) has recently pointed out that this element not only contains the
territorial integrity of the state and physical preservation of its citizens, but
also normative visions of social life. Referring to an American “way of life”
(83), however, one should not be inclined to follow the common, often
materialistic images, but rather consider Tjalve’s (2008) assessment. The
American way of life signified for Morgenthau the ability to express dissent
in public discourses as necessary for the survival of a democratic nation-
state. It is this element of the national interest that allows the crystallization
and formulation of policies through which a the common good can be
aspired (120–31).
This normative element in the survival of a nation-state leads to the
second dimension. As Morgenthau (1952c: 973) remarked in the
●
early 1950s, a time when much of his academic interest went into the
elaboration of the national interest, “[a]ll the cross currents of personali-
ties, public opinion, sectional interests, partisan politics, and political and
moral folkways” were part of it. This demonstrates the importance
Morgenthau gave to the ability to express criticism in the public realm.
Only if this is secured and citizens can contribute to the national inter-est
widely, it can evolve in a way that no particular interests are being
followed, but a commitment to a common good that serves the various
citizens’ interests best is enjoined.
In order to achieve this public participation, this second dimension
requires a “rational order” (Morgenthau 1952a: 976). As Pin-Fat (2005:
232) notes, this rational order is created through a hierarchization of the
various interests in a society starting from ones that secure sur-vival. The
national interest was, therefore, for Morgenthau an episte-mological tool
to rationally reflect on foreign politics. Similar to the qualities
Morgenthau searched for in the scholar, he was aware that it required
particular persons with strong qualities, like those he had found in
Nietzsche’s Übermensch, to create such a rational order. In his American
writings, Morgenthau (1945b, 1952b) had found the figure of the
statesman to give these qualities a name, but already in his ear-liest
German writings Morgenthau shaped the conviction that strong political
leadership was required in a democracy to lead the diverging interests of
its citizens. Morgenthau (1930a) had found an example of these
leadership qualities in the late German Minister of Foreign Affairs
Stresemann, whom he prized as the “creator” (Schöpfer) of German for-
eign politics, as he had peacefully reintroduced Germany into the com-
munity of states after World War I. Stresemann and other politicians
Morgenthau deemed highly, such as Dean Acheson, the US secretary of
state (1949–1953), offered in Morgenthau’s view a particular quality:
wisdom. As he remarked in some of his latest writings:
Wisdom is the gift of intuition, and political wisdom is the gift to grasp
intuitively the quality of diverse interests and power in the present and
future and the impact of different actions upon them. Political wisdom,
understood as sound political judgment, cannot be learned; it is a gift of
nature . . . As such, it can be deepened and developed by example, experi-
ence, and study. (Morgenthau 1971a: 620; 1972: 45)
Even though wisdom was for Morgenthau an inherent human qual-ity, it

still required particular values. From Anthony Lang (2007: 29), we know
that these values are closely related to Aristotle’s ideal of a
Dissent ● 135
virtuous person who is characterized through prudent demeanor, cour-

age, and sound judgment based upon knowledge and experience. Due to
Morgenthau’s personal experience, a fourth feature can be added here:
alienation (Neacsu 2010: 104). As politics was for Morgenthau (1945b:
18) always a choice among evils and the task of politicians was to
“choose the lesser evil,” the latter enables them to do so because alien-
ation provides politicians with an ability to unbiasedly compare and
weigh the importance of interests. Hence, alienation strengthens the
ability to judge. With the concept of wisdom, Morgenthau intended to
criticize the tendency in political science and International Relations to
constantly accumulate data to provide political guidelines, as he was not
convinced that an increased quantity of data creates more knowledge and
improves political decision-making. On the contrary, a politician merely
needs to have a suitable amount of information after an align-ment with
his/her experiences had taken place. Any further knowledge does not
improve the judgment, but there is a possibility that it makes it even
more difficult, as the amount of information cannot be handled anymore.
Once a judgment had been achieved, politicians, finally, have to have the
courage to implement their decisions. Like Julius Caesar, “[t]he
statesman has to cross the Rubicon not knowing how deep and tur-bulent
the river is, or what he will find on the other side” (Morgenthau 1962c:
103).
The political realm in which Morgenthau deemed wisdom most
important was diplomacy. For this reason, he devoted his research inter-
est again and again to questions of diplomacy, as so far only discussed
by Greg Russell (1991). In his last publication on diplomacy,
Morgenthau (1974a: 14) remarked that one deals with conflicts on the
international scene that are caused by the particular interests of nation-
states. In his doctoral thesis, Morgenthau (1929a: 72–84) already
referred to these conflicts as “tensions” (Spannungen) and in La notion
du politique he spoke of “différends d’intérêts” (Morgenthau 1933: 23).
Given the emo-tional, irrational nature of these tensions, Morgenthau
(1945–1946: 1079) was convinced that these kinds of conflict cannot be
settled by legal means. Tensions are usually not caused by questions of
universal right or wrong, but each interest has a right of its own, as it
evolved out of particular historic trajectories.
In order to minimize the violent settlement of these conflicts,
Morgenthau proposed a two-step strategy on the basis of equal rights.
First, it has to be determined which interests are involved and, second,
terms of condition have to be agreed upon in order to reach a settlement
(Morgenthau 1956: 408; 1957b: 6–7; 1974a: 14). This procedure seems
●
fairly simplistic, but the task “to redefine the seemingly incompatible
vital interests of the nations concerned in order to make them compat-
ible” (Morgenthau 1974a: 15) and to achieve a compromise through
negotiations, proved to be in the history of humankind more often than
not unattainable. Still, for instance, Morgenthau (1950c, 1971c) repeat-
edly argued to enter negotiations with the Soviet Union. Particularly
after the Soviet Union had built the nuclear bomb, violent conflict
settlement would have been devastating for everyone. In order to reach a
compromise in these negotiations, Morgenthau urged to be aware of
one’s own interests, while also being sensitive enough to consider those
of the other side. For Morgenthau, this compromise needs to be based on
the acceptance of two spheres of interest in order to minimize the risk of
13
violence. The example with the Soviet-American relations dem-
onstrates that diplomacy in Morgenthau’s understanding required wise
and willful politicians. In a letter to the editor of the New York Times
dated August 13, 1957, Morgenthau remarked that they need expertise in
the sense of “knowledge . . . of history, of current events, of foreign
countries, of men” and a profound judgment “of men and situations . . .
and transform situations on behalf of the policies of his Government”
(HJM Archive 43; also Morgenthau 1957c: 1), further demonstrat-ing
Morgenthau’s insistence on encyclopedic knowledge. Prudence,
judgment, and courage enable diplomats to find a viable compromise,
while not renouncing one’s own interests. Considering what was earlier
remarked about Morgenthau’s support for civic engagement, it might
come as a surprise that Morgenthau was in favor of a Bismarckian cabi-
net and clandestine diplomacy, disapproving what he called “democratic
diplomacy.” However, in a democratic diplomacy, Morgenthau was con-
vinced that the necessary compromises cannot be reached because of
constant public scrutiny. The public at large does not have the qualities
of wise politicians. Rather, the public follows their own particular inter-
ests or is even manipulated in their thoughts by ideologies. This makes it
difficult to follow political wisdom and achieve a verdict that suits their
national interest best, as one needs to be sensitive enough to have
considered others’ national interest (Morgenthau 1957b).
Over the years, Morgenthau’s national interest was the cause of repeated
academic concern about its feasibility (cf. Good 1960; Herz 1981; Jervis
1998; Meier-Walser 2004; Pin-Fat 2005; Scheuerman 2009a; Humphreys
2014) and also he was aware that the qualities he asked from politicians were
not always attainable, particularly in democracies in which long-term values
are often sacrificed for short-term achievements in order to secure reelection.
What Morgenthau, therefore, aspired to
Dissent ● 137
was nothing less than a paradigm change in international politics. In fact,

one can argue that he wanted to abolish international relations
altogether. In one of his last public appearances, while delivering the
first Council on Religion and International Affairs (CRIA) lecture on
Morality and Foreign Affairs, Morgenthau (1979: 42) argued that “we
are living in a dream world.” Humans still cling to a form of sociation—
the nation-state—although the world had so dramatically changed since
1945 that this form of sociation had become outdated. In the same
lecture, Morgenthau also gave reasons for this obsolescence. Nation-
states “are no longer viable economic, political, or military units” (34)
and thereby they have lost the ability to administrate their sovereignty.
Philip Mirkowski (2011: 212) is, therefore, mistaken in his argument that
Morgenthau, in agreement with the economist Friedrich Hayek, had
promoted a strong state to minimize the perils of democracy. On the
contrary, Morgenthau’s insistence on “living in a dream world”
emphasizes his quest for peace. As a German Jew, he had experienced
the horror of a belligerent nationalism and fascism and, therefore, he
dedicated his thought to create a more peaceful outlook on the world. As
Steven Forde (1995: 155; also Rösch 2014a) notes, Morgenthau was not
alone with this quest, but this was a common trait among realist émigré
scholars.
Morgenthau’s consideration of the nation-state as economically
outdated can be explained by contextualizing the CRIA lecture.
Morgenthau gave this lecture under the impression of the evolving sec-
ond oil crisis, which not only in the United States irretrievably destroyed
the myth of a consistent economic upheaval in which numerous states in
the Western world had lived under the Bretton Woods System since the
late 1940s. States were no longer able to yield enough economic power
to control all the interrelationships of an increasingly global-ized
economy. Morgenthau, furthermore, considered the nation-state as a
politically outdated model of sociation. These “blind and potent
monster[s]” (Morgenthau 1962a: 61) have an interest in securing their
existence through an increase in the possibility of international conflict
in which its citizens can freely follow their drives because, nationally,
various ideologies have in their egalitarianism deprived them of their
ability to act and establish thereupon an identity. Finally, Morgenthau
also argued that in military terms nation-states face threats to their
sovereignty since a nation-state cannot guarantee its territorial integrity
and the security of its citizens anymore. Indeed, the development of
nuclear weapons has made the existence of borders obsolete because
an aggressor does not have to face own considerable losses any longer
in
●
order to overcome them. A border is, therefore, in Morgenthau’s (1966a:

9; 1970b: 61–2) sense, reduced to an artificial line on a map. This final
argument was prominently discussed in International Relations dur-ing
the height of the Cold War because more and more states acquired
nuclear weapons or the possibility to do so. The permeability of borders
was most notably averted by Herz, another émigré scholar and former
colleague of Morgenthau in Geneva. Herz (1959) stressed that although
nuclear weapons provide the state with ultimate might, it also leads to
ultimate impotence. This is the case because no “protection through
distance” is given anymore. In addition, distinctions of “front” and “rear”
during wartime no longer make sense because nuclear weapons can bring
destruction to any place on earth (168–72).
Therefore, Morgenthau argued for the creation of a world state that
has repeatedly confused International Relations scholarship. This part of
Morgenthau’s normative world postulate was either dismissed as a
utopian wish (Söllner 1987a: 264, also 1987b) or in consideration of the
national interest discussed as a source of confusion in Morgenthau’s
thought (Craig 2007b: 210). These assessments are comprehensible, but
what they failed to understand is that the national interest is merely a
concept to avert greater damage. The form of society to which this con-
cept applies is, however, irrevocably antiquated. Therefore, Morgenthau
aspired to a world state and, as David Fromkin expressed in his com-
memoration of Morgenthau, he had also considered political precondi-
tions. Before a world state can be institutionalized, a world community
has to be achieved: if the citizens are not willing to give their loyalty to a
world state and rather leave it with their nation-state, no attempts at
establishing institutions for a world state can be successful (Fromkin
1993: 84; similar Speer 1968: 215). Furthermore, under the impres-sion
of the recently ended World War II, Morgenthau expressed doubt that
the principle of national sovereignty can be circumvented in the near
future because it still provides the state with impenetrability. Morgenthau
(1948b: 344) employed this Kelsenian concept to stress that under the
current system only one organization can claim sovereignty within a
given territory. Therefore, Morgenthau argued first to estab-lish a world
community, a term whose meaning is similar to Raymond Aron’s
transnational society (Hoffmann 1985: 16). Aron (1966: 105) defined the
transnational society as the intercultural exchange of indi-viduals
through
commercial exchange, migration of persons, common beliefs, organiza-

tions that cross frontiers and, lastly, ceremonies or competitions open to
Dissent ● 139
the members of all these units. A transnational society flourishes in pro-

portion to the freedom of exchange, migration or communication, the
strength of common beliefs, the number of non-national organizations, and
the solemnity of collective ceremonies.
These are aspects Morgenthau (1985: 559) had in mind to create a world
community and he further discussed elements necessary for its estab-
lishment in Politics among Nations: “We find that the creation of an
international community presupposes at least the mitigation and mini-
mization of international conflicts so that the interests uniting mem-bers
of different nations may outweigh the interests separating them.”
This means that Morgenthau considered a similar means for a world
community as for the traditional form of diplomacy. Through negotia-
tions on equal terms, Morgenthau hoped to distil a compromise that
proves feasible enough to establish such a community because it creates
common understanding, trust, and loyalty among people. Morgenthau,
however, was cautious that an institution like the United Nations would
be the ideal setting to achieve such a world community. In the 1950s, he
argued that the United Nations is a place where only national interests
are being pursued. At that time, Morgenthau’s skepticism still rested on
the impression of the downfall of the predecessor of the United Nations,
14
the League of Nations, just 20 years before. This concern expressed
itself in two major concerns. On the one hand, Morgenthau criticized the
specialized agencies of the United Nations in which also recipient
countries are represented and more importantly, on the other hand, the
right to veto of the Security Council member-states. With this right, any
member-state has the possibility to frustrate the making of any decisions
that runs counter to one’s own national interest (Morgenthau 1954b: 81–
2). Only in the 1960s, under the impression of the achieve-ments of the
late Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld (Morgenthau 1970a) and in
view of a reconsideration of Daivd Mitrany’s functional-ist approach,
Morgenthau started to renounce from his overly critical position of the
United Nations. Morgenthau (1966a: 11) had realized that it offers,
despite its failures, at least a forum in which the differ-ent nation-states
are able to get together peacefully and exchange their ideas, as
exemplified in his introduction to the reissue of Mitrany’s A Working
15
Peace System :
According to Professor Mitrany, an international community must

grow from the satisfaction of common needs shared by members
of different nations. International agencies, serving all peoples all
over the world
●
regardless of national boundaries, could create by the very fact of their exis-
tence and performance a community of interests, valuations, and actions.
Ultimately, if such international agencies were numerous enough . . .
the loyalties to these institutions and to the international community of
which they would be the agencies would supersede the loyalties to the
sepa-rate national societies.
Morgenthau followed a similar attitude toward the European Coal and

Steel Community, one of the predecessors of the European Union. At the
forty-sixth annual meeting of the American Society of International Law
and still under the impression of the failure of international law in the
interwar period, Morgenthau (1952d: 131) equally expressed doubts
about the prospects of the Schuman Declaration to solve what he per-
ceived to be the main problem in European politics: the relationship
between Germany with its “natural superiority . . . among the nations of
Europe” and “the unwillingness of the other European nations to accept
that fact.” By the 1960s, however, when the European Coal and Steel
Community merged with the European Economic and European Atomic
Energy Communities, Morgenthau changed his opinion about the
prospects of European unification for the same reason he had reversed
his stance toward the United Nations. For Morgenthau, the European
Communities now provided a forum to approximate different national
interests and to find viable compromises.
Hence, Morgenthau (1962a: 75–6) came to the conclusion that as
much as a common agreement to shift loyalties to a world state has to be
achieved by creating a world community, also international forums have
to be established in which such compromises can be facilitated because
through daily contact they allow countries to recognize commonalities,
while being sensitive enough to accept those conditions and experiences
that separate each culture.
Conclusion
This final part analyzed Morgenthau’s political agency. The reason why
this was provided at the end of this thesis was partly owed to the ana-
lytical modus operandi because Morgenthau’s ontology and epistemol-
ogy both set the intellectual framework for his political agency and,
consequently, without knowledge about his ontology and epistemology it
would be difficult to analyze his political agency. However, this is also
due to the fact that Morgenthau devoted a lot of time in this prac-tical
part of his worldview. During the 1950s and 1960s, Morgenthau
Dissent ● 141
became a national figure, as Arendt wrote, because of his many public

appearances. He deemed the public role of scholarship highly because
for him a scholar was a person who is not only committed to create
knowledge, but who is also guided by a normative concern on what
ought to be known. Scholars, therefore, turn in their dissidence into a
public corrective for their particular lifeworlds. It is especially this
insistence on being a critical normative scholar and the kind of criticism
on liberal democracies Morgenthau brought forward that makes him, if
nothing else, worth considering today for contemporary scholarship in
International Relations and social sciences in general, especially at times
when the latest self-induced economic bubble burst that led to a
“privatization of profits and socialization of losses” (Nouriel Roubini).
The point that Morgenthau raised in all of his civic commitments was
that the liberalism of Western democracies was in its degenera-tion, as
idealism runs the risk of imploding and turning into totalitari-anism,
which he had witnessed in the 1930s in Germany and Spain. Liberal
democracies were for Morgenthau transforming their transcen-dent
political ideals in immanent standards of action and, thereby, suc-
cumbing to political hubris and socioeconomic dehumanization. The
former meant for Morgenthau that liberal democracies are threatened
with hubris by considering their way of life as most developed in which
other conceptions of life are either neglected or fought against. But like
Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide came to realize, Morgenthau also
stressed that this transformation does not create the best of all worlds,
but it leads to an artificial homogeneity in which criticism is considered
as a threat to society, despite being its lifeline. If all legal channels of
dissent are closed, liberal democracies are endangered because citizens
can only take recourse in violence or apathy.
Also in the socioeconomic realm Morgenthau expressed great con-
cerns. The scientification and the subsequent technologization of life
created an acceleration and commodification of respective lifeworlds
and, according to Morgenthau, it threatens to destroy the environment,
the human, and humanity altogether. In a fierce critique on modern
consumer societies, which bears resemblance to the kind of criticism we
find in writings of the Frankfurt School and French Marxist philoso-
phers, Morgenthau was particularly disturbed about the transformation of
the human from a homo faber, a person who constructs his/her own
lifeworld through willful acts, into an animal laborans, a person who is
forced to succumb to the industrial production process. He agreed with
Arendt that the resulting faceless loneliness is one of the major causes
for the rise of totalitarianism and their seemingly identity-creating
●
ideologies. He, furthermore, expressed concern about the develop-ment

of weapons of mass destruction because this rules out violence as a
means of politics, and in awareness of human nature, Morgenthau
stressed the uttermost importance of keeping peace.
Therefore, he promoted the national interest as a way of keeping as
much rationalism in politics as possible and a world community as a
feasible alternative to the antiquated form of society: the nation-state.
Morgenthau argued for the national interest as a practical and norma-tive
guideline for politicians to enforce political decisions that serve the
common good and on—the international realm—to consider the interests
of other nation-states in order to ensure peace. This, however, requires
particularly virtuous people in governmental positions who have the
ability to alienate themselves from their own interests and, therefore, are
able—due to their particular political wisdom—to have the knowledge
about the different interests within society, judge them according to the
common good, and the courage to enforce their deci-sion against all odds
if necessary. Yet, Morgenthau was convinced that even if the national
interest as an epistemological tool is employed to balance potentially
divergent societal interests and not considered to be a justification for
power politics, this does not hide from the fact that the nation-state has to
be removed as their existence is too threatening for humanity. Therefore,
he promoted a world community in which people start to shift their
loyalty from the nation-state to larger bod-ies of representation and
consider more the aspects that unite rather than separate them in order to
eventually be able to institutionalize this world community in a world
state.
Epilogue: The Human
Condition of Politics
Introduction
If Morgenthau would not have written Politics among Nations, he would
be largely forgotten today. This is the essence of Oliver Jütersonke’s
(2010: 175) recent monograph. In fact, he even reduces it to the ill-
famous six principles of political realism:
Were it not for those six principles of realism and the success of that
textbook, it is doubtful whether we would be still talking of Morgenthau
today, and even more doubtful that he would be considered a “canonical”
thinker in International Relations. Grumble as he might about being
misunderstood, even Morgenthau would have to accept that fact.
This analysis of Morgenthau’s worldview, however, has challenged this

view. The intensifying discourse in the discipline on Morgenthau in
particular and classical realism in general still cannot be reduced to an
increased interest in the disciplinary history, but also provides an
important contribution to International Relations. Morgenthau, there-
fore, rightly occupies a place among the discipline’s luminaries, as his
thought stimulates new thought for twenty-first-century (interna-tional)
politics. The epilogue to this book traces this importance for
International Relations.
To this end, the epilogue is divided into two parts. First, Morgenthau’s
marginal existence in International Relations is discussed. Being torn
between the American and Central European (intellectual) cultures,
Morgenthau and his thought quickly became marginalized in the dis-cipline.
This marginalization occurred, as his thought remained in essence within the
cosmos of Central European humanities. However, being put at the margins
of academia, Morgenthau was enabled to pro-duce knowledge that
transcended the thought of many of his colleagues. This is the case because
“a [diverse] Weltanschauung is not of necessity a
●
source of error, but often gives access to spheres of knowledge otherwise

closed,” as Mannheim (1985: 168; emphasis in the original) put it.
The second part of this epilogue summarizes the key findings by
discussing the central aspect of Morgenthau’s worldview: the human
condition of politics. This entails an epistemological aspect because for
Morgenthau politics is created through human interaction. Only when
people congregated to pursue their interests in the form of a dialogue did
Morgenthau speak of politics. Consequently, he did not conceptualize
politics as a system, but rather saw it as fluid while its temporality and
spatiality have to be acknowledged. Furthermore, the human condition of
politics entails a normative aspect. For Morgenthau, human tragedy was
caused less by the fact that humans will never be able to control their
lifeworld than the fact that in modern democracies attempts to do so
were made that threatened to abolish such dialogues and eventually
politics altogether.
In examining this central aspect of Morgenthau’s worldview, ques-
tions are paraphrased that have prompted Morgenthau’s 1933 study La
Notion du Politique. The first question revolves around the construc-tion
of society. For Morgenthau (1976c), societies in Western democ-racies
had gained such a momentum that it led to dehumanization through three
1
reifications: ideologization, technologization, and scien-tification. The
second question Morgenthau elaborated upon stresses the consequences
modern democracies face due to dehumanization. It is argued that
Morgenthau was concerned with this ill-balanced socia-tion favoring the
structure and that he believed it had led to a depoliti-zation of the social
realm that could eventually threaten the existence of democracies
altogether. Finally, it is demonstrated that Morgenthau provided with the
human condition of politics not only a normative corrective for modern
democracies, but he also thought about ways to put this normative
corrective into political practice. In order to coun-ter this dehumanization
and subsequent depolitization, Morgenthau proposed the national interest
as an epistemological tool in order to ensure the political and scholarship
as dissidence in order to restore the political.
Morgenthau: A Life on the Margins

Morgenthau’s life and work is an example of a “marginal man” (Park
2 3
1928). Like many other émigré scholars, Morgenthau remained torn
between his new home, the United States, and the cultural life he had
experienced during his adolescence in the Weimar Republic.
Epilogue ● 145
Although recent scholarship has acknowledged his status of “an out-

sider to mainstream political science” (Scheuerman 2009c: 569), it may
seem presumptuous to characterize Morgenthau as being marginalized,
given that he had a remarkable career in the United States. He rose from
being an elevator boy (Lebow 2003: 219) to an eminent political
scientist, who almost overnight became renowned with the publication of
Politics among Nations. In this sense, Jütersonke is right because this
textbook made him a name in the discipline, and he is still remembered
for it today. It was due to this book that several rankings in the 1960s and
1970s listed Morgenthau among the most influential contemporary
thinkers in the United States (Frei 2001: 76–9). Politics among Nations
even found its way into America’s popular culture. In a Mary Worth
4
comic strip from August 14, 1955, reference is made to Morgenthau’s
textbook (HJM Archive 130). This remarkable life story encouraged
interpretations that Morgenthau was all or in part an American in his
thought or that he significantly altered his thought after his emigra-tion
(cf. Honig 1996; Lebow 2003; Guzzini 2004; Scheuerman 2009b).
Indeed, looking into his relationship with Germany, this conclusion
seems not to be unjustified. Lebow (2003: 219), for instance, notes that
“questions about his German past were taboo,” and what is more, the
analysis of Morgenthau’s correspondence in the Library of Congress has
shown that after his emigration, he never replied to letters written in
German in the same language, but he only replied in English. Even
conversations with friends within the émigré scholar circle were held in
English from his side and in German from their side. During one of his
first visits to Germany after his emigration in 1951, Morgenthau
admitted in an interview with the Munich-based Abendzeitung that his
impressions about Germany were “ambivalent” (zwiespältig) (HJM
Archive 178). This ambivalence, however, was less a sign of a critical
stance toward Central Europe shortly after World War II, and more of
his realization that, despite being distinctively Central European in
thought and habitus, the United States had become his new home.
Morgenthau was born into a liberal Jewish family that was part of the
German Bildungsbürgertum and was educated within the heterodox part
of the German humanities. The experiences he made; the insights he
gained through studying works of Nietzsche, Simmel, Mannheim,
Burckhardt, Freud, and Weber; and the education he received by peo-ple
like Wölfflin, Sinzheimer, Mannheim, Rothenbücher, and Oncken were
crucial for his own worldview. This Central European foundation of his
worldview is evidenced not only in Morgenthau’s lifestyle, as most of his
friends were also European émigrés who shared similar cultural
●
and social interests and knowledge, but particularly in his thought. This
Central European fundament of his thought has caused several American
colleagues of Morgenthau to either misinterpret his work, to be doubtful
of its scientific value, or to even suspect “something almost continental”
(Good 1960: 215) in it, as if this signifies a stigma. Hence, major
concepts of Morgenthau can only be understood if comprehen-sively
related to Central European thought during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Morgenthau’s empirical and normative concept of
power, for example, can only be appreciated if contextualized within the
cultural crisis of the Weimar Republic, hence the decline of metaphysics
and the rise of ideologies, and through an analysis of Morgenthau’s
reading of Freud, Nietzsche, and Arendt.
Still, arguing that the foundation of Morgenthau’s worldview was
quintessentially Central European does not mean that he might not have
made amendments or alterations to his worldview. A worldview is a
continuous process and, in the case of Morgenthau, this means that he
made experiences and faced different ways of thinking in the United
States that caused him to rethink elements of his worldview. This can be
seen, for example, in his assessment of the United Nations and European
Communities. In the 1950s, Morgenthau was still under the impression
of the downfall of the League of Nations, which he had experienced
while in Geneva in the 1930s, and, therefore, he was skeptical about the
promises of these institutions. In the 1960s, how-ever, Morgenthau’s
opinion changed when he realized that both offer, despite their
organizational shortcomings, an international forum for innovation and
reordering in which divergent national interests can be approximated and
a viable compromise eventually reached. Similarly, the development of
weapons of mass destructions led Morgenthau to an even firmer belief
that the nation-state as a form of human sociation is outdated and has to
be replaced by a world community. Morgenthau feared that the
deployment of such powerful weapons in the name of nationalism can
lead to the extinction of humankind. None of these experiences,
however, were fundamental enough to completely change his worldview.
Morgenthau was not only on the margins of American society

because, like Herz, he remained a “traveller between all worlds”
(Puglierin 2008: 419), but he was also marginalized in the discipline of
International Relations. During his lifetime, the kind of research he
pursued seemed to be too conservative, as he admitted to Sandra Frye on
November 25, 1964 (HJM Archive 20), and it was at odds with the
5
positivistic outlook of the discipline.
Epilogue ● 147
This marginalization was already the case in Europe. Due to his faith,
education, and research agenda, Morgenthau was part of what Bourdieu
(1969) called the heterodoxy in German Staatslehre. Like many other Jewish
scholars before him, Morgenthau’s career in Germany was constrained
during the Weimar Republic and came to a definite halt shortly after the
national-socialist seizure of power. This led to the dis-missal of Morgenthau
as the acting president of the labor law court in Frankfurt due to the Law for
the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service (Gesetz zur
Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums) from April 7, 1933. The
ostracism Jews faced in Germany contributed to the fact that numerous
Jewish scholars were part of the academic heterodoxy, which in turn,
however, encouraged their intellectual open-mindedness and their ability to
challenge established modes of thought (Coser 1965a: 5). The intellectual
network that Morgenthau had built during his graduate studies was
predominantly, though not exclusively, Jewish with Nietzsche and
Burckhardt as prominent exceptions. Morgenthau studied works of Simmel
and Freud, he was educated by Sinzheimer, and he held close links in
Frankfurt to Mannheim and members of the Institute for Social Research.
Numerous other clerks in Sinzheimer’s chambers were also Jewish, most
notably Fraenkel and Neumann. In fact, the intellectual air in Frankfurt that
Morgenthau praised even half a decade later was predominantly conveyed
by these Jewish schol-ars. However, it would go too far to claim that this
close interrelation with other Jewish academics was always by choice or that
his faith was the general aspect of his thought, as Benjamin Mollov (2002)
implies. Due to his humanism, Morgenthau felt more attached to these kinds
of scholars than to others because Jewish scholars often promoted values that
Arendt (1978) had summed up under the term “conscious pariah.” This is
evidenced, for example, in his critique of Schmitt and Kelsen. Morgenthau
criticized both for their research agendas, but whereas he attempted to
remain rather sympathetic with his criticism on Kelsen, even before Kelsen
rescued his academic career, Morgenthau was always critical of Schmitt.
Morgenthau (1932) not only rebutted Schmitt’s scholarship as ideologically
informed, but he also personally attacked Schmitt as an immoral person in
his inaugural lecture in Geneva.
Even after Morgenthau came to the Institut Universitaire des Hautes

Etudes Internationales in Geneva, the center of international law in Europe
at that time, he experienced marginalization. Pursuing his Habilitation in
Geneva was forced, even though the Academic Assistance Council did
not acknowledge it (Skepper 1934, 1935), but as we know from the
memoir of Herz (1984: 108), at that time a doctoral student of Kelsen,
●
Geneva used to be a haven for numerous Jewish social scientists. There,

Morgenthau’s lectures were boycotted by German students and, due to a
negative judgment of Morgenthau’s colleague Paul Guggenheim, his
Habilitation was initially rejected. It was only through a positive com-
ment of Kelsen, who had arrived in Geneva shortly before Morgenthau
had submitted his Habilitation, that Morgenthau’s (1984b: 353–4) aca-
demic career was saved. Hence, to rephrase Jütersonke’s verdict, without
Kelsen, Morgenthau would probably not have become one of the most
well-known International Relations scholars of the twentieth century.
The marginalization of Morgenthau did not come to an end when he
immigrated to the United States, but aggravated even more. This might
sound paradoxical because Frei (2001: 74) is correct to refer to
Morgenthau’s academic career as “brilliant.” He taught at some of the most
prestigious universities in the country, being a faculty member at the
University of Chicago and the New School for Social Research. Equally,
Morgenthau held visiting professorships in Harvard, Princeton, Yale,
Columbia, and Berkeley to name only the most well known. Morgenthau
received numerous honorary doctorates and, until the American involve-
ment in the Vietnam War, he was also successful outside the academic realm
as a sought-after consultant to the State Department and the Department of
Defense. Certainly, most of this achievement rested on the publication and
subsequent unprecedented success of his textbook Politics among Nations.
Shortly after its publication in 1948, it was already in use at such prestigious
universities like Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Notre Dame. One year later,
more than 90 universities and colleges throughout the United States had
adopted it as its textbook for introductory courses on international politics.
On October 15, 1953, Morgenthau ecstatically reported to John Hawes that it
“had more adoptions than all other text-books taken together and more than
twice as many as its nearest com-petitor” (HJM Archive 126). Until 1968,
more than 160,000 copies of Politics among Nations were sold (Frei 2014:
2).
Still, Morgenthau did not manage to enforce his scholarly and
political agenda that rested on Central European thought. Ironically,
Morgenthau even became remembered, quoted, and criticized for hav-
ing promoted a positivistic scholarship, something that he condemned
throughout his life.
Politically, his efforts have been torpedoed because his understand-
ing of scholarship as dissidence was not well received at the height of the
Cold War, when liberalism in the United States became a political reli-
gion and critical thinking that might have questioned the foundations of
common beliefs were considered a threat to society. Morgenthau saw
Epilogue ● 149
this tendency evidenced during the McCarthy era in the late 1940s and
1950s and, although Morgenthau did not become a victim of this “cru-
cible” (Arthur Miller), he still had to tolerate criticism for his rejection of
American involvement in Indochina. Morgenthau was never again
appointed consultant to any governmental department, and his candi-
dature for the APSA presidency was impeded. As mentioned, there is
even evidence for an “Operation Morgenthau” to collect incriminating
evidence against Morgenthau to publicly expose him. We know from the
Arendt-McCarthy correspondence that Morgenthau was affected by the
disrepute against him. After publishing We are Deluding Ourselves in
Vietnam in the New York Times magazine in 1965, for example,
Morgenthau was criticized by the journalist Joseph Alsop who con-
sidered Morgenthau’s stance as “pompous ignorance” (Arendt and
McCarthy 1995: 181). It must have been even more disheartening for
Morgenthau that other critics of the Vietnam War were skeptical of him,
as they were arguing from a moralistic standpoint and seemed to be
unaware of the Central European cosmos in which Morgenthau’s
worldview was formed. If one, however, is able to consider
Morgenthau’s arguments more thoroughly and go beyond the positivistic
paradigm, one is often left in astonishment as it had happened to
Lippmann, who is recorded to have said in the 1960s: “How curious you
[Morgenthau] are misunderstood. You are the most moral thinker I
know” (quoted after Thompson 1980–1981: 197).
Academically, Morgenthau became outdated and subsequently
marginalized when behavioralism became the discipline’s normal sci-
ence from the late 1950s onward. This is evidenced, for example, in the
circumstances of his retirement from the University of Chicago. A
comment in the student newspaper The Chicago Maroon indicates that
Morgenthau would have liked to stay at the university despite having
reached the official retirement age (HJM Archive 86). This request was
turned down, demonstrating that Morgenthau’s academic position was in
decline, whereas in other cases at the University of Chicago, scholars
were able to stay on beyond retirement age, like Strauss. This gradual
academic marginalization caused Morgenthau resentment, which is why
he turned down the offer of the American University in April 1970 to
become dean of their School of International Service (HJM Archive 5),
pointing out that there were times he would have been honored to accept,
but these times have passed.
The reason for this marginalization is to be found in the abrupt
encounter of two diverging epistemologies. Morgenthau’s work was
informed by a nonpositivistic epistemology. He argued for consideration
●
of the spatiotemporal conditionality of knowledge and political order that

does not allow claiming objectivity in an absolute sense. Therefore,
Morgenthau, who had brought “Old World wisdom to the continent of
Utopia” (Hoffmann 1987: 76), remained skeptical about the promises of
rationalism and empiricism and even attacked the hubris that had
befallen many of his colleagues in an urge to socially plan the world. As
mentioned, Morgenthau (1984b: 371) was relieved that Scientific Man
vs. Power Politics was published shortly after he had received tenure at
the University of Chicago, as the book was a critique on liberal hubris
and positivistic scholarship. Many of his colleagues at the University of
Chicago and in American academia at large were, due to their social-
ization, characterized by an unflinching optimism (Shimko 1992).
Therefore, they could not make sense of the urge for skepticism that was
informing Morgenthau’s epistemology and he was criticized for being
“unscientific” or praised Kenneth Waltz for having made his thought
operationalizable for scientific analysis (cf. Wasserman 1959; Nye 1988;
Keohane 1993).
There is a sense of irony to think that, during the height of behav-
ioralism, Morgenthau was marginalized because his scholarship was
considered to be outdated, un-American, and unsuitable for the pur-pose
of International Relations theorizing. This purpose was, due to its close
interrelation with government institutions and agencies, to pro-vide
foreign policy recommendations to foster American interests on the
international scene (Hoffmann 1977; Krippendorff 1989), rather than
critically question the formation and deployment of these inter-ests.
When behavioralism, however, started to lose influence not only
globally, but also in the United States, Morgenthau did not become
rehabilitated, but he was now also regarded as a positivistic scholar, who
had attempted to establish a “grand theory” (Holsti 1971: 165). Even
critical International Relations scholars put Morgenthau on a level with
Waltz, equally scolding him for having produced a belligerent picture of
international politics. Therefore, scholarship that might have profited
from a serious engagement with Morgenthau’s work as it would have
told them that positivism was not the necessary mode of scholarship, but
merely the representation of a particular phase in history disap-proved of
Morgenthau.
Hence, for a good part of his academic career, he was taken to be
someone who he was not and his academic qualifications were called
into question. On numerous occasions, Morgenthau took action against
these misinterpretations, and there are several personal accounts in the
archives in which Morgenthau lamented against this marginalization.
Epilogue ● 151
To be fair, however, Morgenthau’s terminology lends itself to be mis-

interpreted. We have no concrete evidence why Morgenthau did not
distinguish in his English writings his concepts as sharply as in his
German and French ones. One reason might have been the unfavor-able
climate toward Germany during and shortly after World War II, which is
why Morgenthau certainly attempted to separate himself from his
German past. A second reason was presumably the shift of interest from
purely theoretical studies toward works with a higher interest in
contemporary policy issues (Guzzini 1998: 24), such as The Problem of
German Reunification (Morgenthau and Warburg 1960) or Vietnam and
the United States (Morgenthau 1965a). Still, this does not settle the
question why Morgenthau did not attempt to improve the clarity of his
concepts in the United States, especially since he had realized this prob-
lem early in his career. To Oakeshott Morgenthau wrote in 1948 that
I can now see clearly that my attempts to make clear the distinctions
between rationalism and rational inquiry, scientism and science, were in
vain. I think I was fully aware of the importance and difficulty of these
distinctions when I wrote the book, and it is now obvious to me that I have
failed in the task to make my meaning clear. (HJM Archive 44)
However, it has to be stressed that Morgenthau turned this margin-

alization into a tool for his theorizing. Morgenthau’s thought and his
worldview in general were fundamentally informed by the concept of
alienation as an epistemological source. His understanding of scholar-
ship as a critical corrective of contemporary forms of sociation placed
him outside the academic orthodoxy of his time and, indeed, it required
him to be on the margin. This is the case because, as Morgenthau (cf.
1955, 1964c) emphasized on numerous occasions, being critical of con-
temporary society and challenging vested interests does not only cause
discomfort among contemporaries because their habitual ways of think-
ing will be questioned, but it also means for the political scientist to
place him/herself outside of these interests to avoid being biased.
Therefore, Morgenthau intellectually profited from his personal tragedy.
The Human Condition of Politics

In the second section of the epilogue further emphasis is given on what I
consider to be Morgenthau’s enduring relevance for International
Relations today: the human condition of politics. Morgenthau was not
the only scholar arguing against its lack in (international) politics, as
●
he belonged to a group of European émigré scholars whose contribution to

political science and International Relations is yet to be researched in toto,
who were ahead of their time in the discipline because during their academic
career, International Relations remained dominated by positivism, as the
discipline was deeply enmeshed with governmental institutions and agencies
that did not allow scholars to fundamentally divert from the beaten tracks.
Considering this lack of elaboration, and despite its recent enormous
advancements, International Relations is still not commonly aware of its own
history outside the “great debates”— discourses (cf. Wæver 1998; Jørgensen
6
2000; Thies 2002). Elaborating Morgenthau’s Weltanschauung, therefore,
has not only demonstrated that his research agenda resembles common
accounts of critical International Relations (cf. Wong 2000: 409; Cozette
2008: 16; Rösch 2014b) and that his thought is a useful addition to them, but
also that International Relations’ scholars still apply too broad brush strokes
to paint pictures of the world. Political thought, as condensed in
Morgenthau’s worldview, is far more eclectic than students of International
Relations are made to believe. Only recently analysts have emphasized that
(international) political theorizing in the twentieth century has been deeply
influenced by Central European intellectual traditions (Bell 2009: 7).
In the course of the twentieth century, the human condition had been
removed for Morgenthau from politics because nation-states, as the
major actors in international relations, had an interest in maintain-ing the
status quo. This dehumanization occurred in the course of the twentieth
century because nation-states, as the major actors in inter-national
relations, had an interest in maintaining the status quo. As a result,
structural consolidations transformed the individual’s role from that of
creator of social life to its mere executor because the insight that the
human “cosmos [is] in flux” (Mannheim 1985: 65) had vanished from
his/her mind. To Morgenthau (1950b), dehumanization became so
extensive that it affected international politics as well as the disci-pline.
In Morgenthau’s (1969a: 13) view, the climax of dehumaniza-tion
occurred during the Vietnam War, when its success was measured
through “body counts.” Killing humans became the quantifiable end
through which the implementation of foreign policy strategies could be
scientifically assessed. Three forms of reification in particular led to this
dehumanization: ideologization, technologization, and scientification.
Ideologization. While Morgenthau was particularly concerned about
nationalism, he remained skeptical about the promises of any ideology. At
the beginning of his career, Morgenthau (1930b) pursued psychological
enquiries into the ideological causes of World War I. He concluded that
Epilogue ● 153
the cultural crisis at the fin de siècle had shattered traditional forms of
masculinity and that nationalism had risen due to its promise to resurrect
the male identity. This experience with nationalism fortified his distrust
in ideologies and explains why Morgenthau understood Politics among
Nations “as a temporary and historically caused counter-ideology to the
ideologies of the twentieth century” (Behr 2010: 138), rather than a the-
ory of international politics. Subsequently, Morgenthau returned to the
consequences of ideologies for humans and argued that the ideological
takeover of reality causes two interconnected, dehumanizing problems.
First, Morgenthau (1960b) argued that ideologies promote creative
mediocrity. Humans are not able to fully utilize all of their creative
abilities within ideological frameworks, as they are established to cre-ate
a discourse of legitimacy for the current political order. People yield to
the temptation of ideologies because they furnish them, in their yearning
to give meaning to the social world and establish their iden-tity within it,
with the “ontological security” (Giddens 1984: 375) that allows them to
do so. Therefore, the retention of social structures is a vital expression of
this legitimacy and security. An alteration of these structures through the
creative abilities of humans means that people are threatened with the
loss of their ontological security due to changes in the reification of their
thought, which in turn undermines the ideo-logical legitimacy.
Consequently, the creative abilities of humans are relegated to
supporting the ideologized reality by constraining them into a
bureaucratic order in which alternative realities are suppressed.
Morgenthau’s criticism is similar here to Jenny Edkins’s (1999: 142)
exhortation in her assessment of the poststructuralist movement that
International Relations theorists should render visible “the contingent,
provisional nature” of political order.
Second, Morgenthau also asserted that ideologies promote intellec-
tual mediocrity because conflicting worldviews challenge the political
order and cannot be tolerated. Morgenthau’s criticism of ideologies
indicates the implications of the concepts of inclusion and exclusion
(Nassehi 2004) as discussed in sociological discourses. Paul Hirst (2001:
53) noted that nationalism operates on dichotomous perceptions of
otherness to create homogeneity within a nation-state, allowing a
particular group to uphold the political order by monopolizing narra-
tives of reality. In fact, Hirst’s assessment is an apt one for any ideo-
logical system. Anyone who challenges these narratives through his/her
beliefs, knowledge, or even existence has to be excluded. This exclusion
may range from criminalization to expulsion and even extinction, as was
the case under fascism and communism.
●
Technologization. Morgenthau (1973) also criticized modern democ-

racies for their technological penetration of social life, which he saw as
causing two further dehumanizing effects. First, the technological
interlocking of social life leads to increased complexities. Although
technological advancements accelerate individualization in modern
democracies as people acquire abilities to transcend spatial and tem-
poral restrictions in order to participate in numerous forms of socia-tion,
technologization also requires people to meticulously structure their lives
in a regulatory framework, such as a timetable, as the soci-ologist
Hartmut Rosa (2005: 97–100; also Scheuerman 2009c: 569) recently
emphasized. However, due to the acceleration of social life, the
susceptibility of these regulatory frameworks is high. In cases of
dysfunction, social life not only loses its synchronicity, but also comes to
a standstill altogether. As mentioned, Morgenthau (1960b, 1972) argued
in accordance with Arendt (1953: 323; 1958a) that people are turned
from a homo faber into an animal laborans not only in labor terms, but
their sociopolitical lifeworlds are also constrained by vari-ous
technological requirements. Second, technologization allows for the
mass-production of consumer goods, which in modern democra-cies
compensate for the loss of identity. This is the case because the common
realms of identity-creation—politics and economy—have been
dehumanized. People, albeit being a zoon politikon (Lang 2004), cannot
get involved as critical citizens because their drive to prove themselves is
suppressed.
Scientification. The final aspect Morgenthau repeatedly criticized
about modern democracies is the scientification of politics. Like other
émigré scholars, such as Voegelin (HJM Archive 60), he was skepti-cal
of the promises of the application of natural science methods to politics.
Still, as the common usage of the term “political science” sug-gests, they
unsuccessfully opposed the positivistic dominance. The rising Cold War
solicited ideological reifications and politics was asked to provide the
scientific credentials for this status quo. Contrary to Leonard White and
other members of Chicago’s “Merriam frac-tion” (Morgenthau 1984b:
370), who encouraged this scientification for the advancement of
American liberalism (Jütersonke 2010: 131–5), Morgenthau (1944: 176;
1949a: 1) was suspicious of the epistemological value of such
positivistic-structuralist approaches to politics because they do not
concede a vital role to the human. Rather than focusing on the creative
abilities of humans to act together and create a com-promise through
alignment of interests, as Morgenthau suggested in his work, structuralist
approaches often promote a belligerent outlook
Epilogue ● 155
of the world. In these approaches, the nation-state is considered as an

“organismic” (Waltz 1954: 178) unit that attempts to survive in an
anarchical structure. This unquestioned acceptance of ontological
assumptions causes a reification of politics. Eventually, due to this
scientification, political science in general and International Relations in
particular omitted the distinction between the analytical and the
normative. From the analytical assumption of anarchy, normative con-
clusions and measures were derived in order to secure one’s survival.
However, these conclusions were not phrased in normative terms, but
presented as a logical reasoning from which foreign policy guidelines
were produced (Behr 2010: 206–7).
To understand the empirical effects of this dehumanization on mod-
ern democracies, that is, the depolitization of politics, we have to first
readdress Morgenthau’s concept of the political and the relevance of
power for it.
As Morgenthau encapsulated all that it takes to understand the con-
cept of the political, let us first recall his well-known definition from
Politics among Nations. In it, Morgenthau (1985: 5) defined “interna-
tional politics [as] the concept of interest defined in terms of power.” In
order to disentangle this definition of the political, and it is of no
relevance here if the domestic or international scene is addressed, we
have to turn to his doctoral dissertation in which Morgenthau offered his
first substantial elaboration of this concept. There, he argued that the
political has no fixed substance; rather it is a quality, coloring (Färbung),
or tone (tonalité) as referred to four years later (Morgenthau 1933: 32).
This means that the political occurs when humans pursue their interests
through a dialogue. Any issue or substance can become political if
people take an increased interest in it. This pursuit is part of human
nature because involved parties can assure themselves of their own
strengths and capabilities and thereby derive meaning about their own
self. This, what Morgenthau perceived to be a natural collective pursuit
of interests, eventually provides people with power.
In pursuit of their interests, people come together, exchange their
ideas in a cognitive process, which Morgenthau (1933: 73) termed “dis-
cussion,” and thereby act altogether to create a society that is committed
to the common good. In this sense, Morgenthau’s notion of the political
goes beyond accounts of critical International Relations if we follow
Edkins’s assessment. According to Edkins (1999: 2), the political has “to
do with the establishment of that very social order which sets out a
particular, historically specific account of what counts as politics” and is
therefore the moment when a new political order is created, regardless
●
of what this new order looks like. Hence, there is uncertainty among its
creators about the final objectification of this order, but it is also a
moment of openness characterized by a dispute among them as they all
attempt to reify their social and political ideals (7–9). For Morgenthau,
the political is not a moment, but—evoking Simmel’s notion of soci-
ation—a constant and collective process through which the changing
interests of people find their expression. As a vital outlet, Morgenthau
argued that this process had to be actively preserved.
Having established the centrality of the political for modern democ-
racies, the empirical result of the dehumanization caused by the ideo-
logical, technological, and scientific reification can now be assessed. As
Morgenthau (1933: 87) remarked in the conclusion of La notion du
politique, this dehumanization essentially depoliticizes (dépolitisé) poli-
tics because it disempowers people.
For Morgenthau, depolitization occurred because the political was
eliminated from politics. The pursuit of people’s interests expressed in
scrutiny or criticism became considered as a menace to the institutional-ized
political status quo rather than its constitutive factor (Morgenthau 1952b,
1964a). Its questioning seemed at times threatening, when the dominant
liberal ideology in modern democracies was challenged, as happened during
the McCarthy-Era in the United States during the late 1940s and 1950s, and
at times unqualified as the dehumanization of modern democracies led to a
hubris of thought. Ideologically, the nar-rative of freedom instilled the urge
to maintain the status quo because living in the “Free World” had to be
safeguarded from the atrocities of the “Eastern Bloc,” but also because
political science itself pioneered this hubris. By not distinguishing between
analytical and normative elements in their approaches, normative
assumptions were presented as logical reasoning and their foreign policy
advice veered more toward parameters than guidelines. Therefore, criticism
seemed unqualified if not prepos-terous, and humans could only resort to
apathy or violence to express criticism (Morgenthau 1974c: 16–17).
According to Morgenthau, this is what had happened during the student
protests in the 1960s:
What the students revolt against in the universities is what they are
revolting against in the world at large. That world, thoroughly secular-ized
and dedicated to the production of consumer goods and weapons of mass
destruction, has lost its meaning . . . That world is also thoroughly
mechanized and bureaucratized. Thus it diminishes the individual who
must rely on others rather than himself for the satisfaction of his wants,
from the necessities of life to his spiritual and philosophical longings.
(HJM Archive 43; Morgenthau 1968a: 9)
Epilogue ● 157
Being unable to critically discuss existential questions about the society

students lived in, in particular the definition of a common good, they had
to resort to violence to make themselves heard. Therefore, politics in
modern democracies was reduced to its institutions—it was reified, so to
speak—but the political, hence the quality or coloring of issues, was
eliminated from politics.
In order to confront this elimination of the political in modern
democracies, Morgenthau (1950a, 1951a, 1952b, c) introduced his
understanding of the national interest into American political discourses
beginning in the late 1940s. In essence, he had it already developed in
La notion du politique, in which he distinguished between political
tensions and legal-political disputes (différends). Morgenthau’s national
interest is a concept that in its diversity and quantifiable inconceivability
repeatedly led to misunderstandings among practitioners and academ-ics
alike because, as Smith (1986: 110) remarked, “[h]ow one defines the
national interest depends on the values he espouses and the way he ranks
them” (similar Scheuerman 2009a: 85). Furthermore, despite its
terminology, the national interest is not restricted to the nation-state, but
is applicable to any sociation.
Given Morgenthau’s concept of the political, it becomes clear that
Lebow (2003: 245) is correct in his assessment of the national interest as
a “fluid concept.” Morgenthau considered it to be an epistemological
tool with which to bring the various potentially divergent interests into a
“rational order” (Morgenthau 1952c: 976). As noted by Pin-Fat (2005:
232), this rationality is achieved through a hierarchization of interests in
a society, beginning from the ones that secure survival. Therefore, the
national interest was understood as a flexible concept with which to
7
consider the antagonism of interests, to adapt to changes in these
interests, and to ensure through their classification that all of them are
appreciated in the definition and pursuit of the common good.
Morgenthau was convinced that outbreaks of violence could be mini-
mized through the pursuance of the national interest, as all interests
could be pursued and would be considered according to their puissance,
that is, public support.
This demonstrates that for a concept like the national interest to work
effectively in the sense that the political is ensured, particular people
with strong qualities are required to create a rational order.
Although Morgenthau considered wisdom to be a “gift of nature,” it
was nonetheless based on values that could be acquired. According to
Lang (2007: 29; also Neacsu 2010: 104), these values are closely related
to Aristotle’s ideal of a virtuous person who is characterized through
●
prudent demeanor, courage, sound judgment on the basis of knowledge

and experience, as well as alienation. Since Morgenthau (1945b: 18)
always regarded politics as a choice among evils, he believed that the
task of politicians was to “choose the lesser evil.” Alienation enables
politicians to do so because it provides them in combination with a pro-
found education with the ability to compare and weigh the importance of
interests due to an unbiased political judgment. Wisdom was there-fore a
concept for Morgenthau to bring the human condition back into politics,
as it was directly opposed to positivistic attempts to socially plan the
world.
With the national interest, Morgenthau provided practitioners with a
concept to ensure the political, but it cannot restore it. Instead, Morgenthau
entrusted this task to his own sodality. For Morgenthau, scholarship had an
obligation to counter the tendency toward dehu-manization and guide people
to attempt the restoration of the political. He insisted that scholarship has to
make dissidence its guiding prin-ciple. Cozette (2008: 11–12) contends that
Morgenthau argued for a scholarship that agitates as the “conscience of
time,” providing a “correc-tive” (emphasis in the original) for politics. With
his understanding of the role of scholarship, Morgenthau foreshadowed
current discourses in critical International Relations theory. One of the latest
contributions to this discourse on the role of scholarship was provided by
Steele who referred to Michel Foucault’s parrhesia. A scholar ought to say
“what is true because he knows that it is true, and he knows that it is true
because it is really true” (Foucault, in Steele 2010: 50; emphasis in the
original). Steele informs his readers that truth in this sense is intersubjective
as it is constructed in dialogue and pragmatic as this intersubjectivity occurs
within a specific time and space. Furthermore, parrhesia is for Steele
(51) primarily directed toward the academic field as a critique of the

power-relations that influence the construction and implementation of
knowledge.
Arguing that Morgenthau considered scholarship as dissidence prop-
agates a similar understanding of truth. Morgenthau did not claim uni-
versalism in the sense of being in the possession of absolute knowledge
that only has to be passed on to other people. He did not even consider
scholars to be able to reach the condition of Mannheim’s “free-float-ing
intelligentsia” (Morgenthau 1984a: 14), as nobody could in his/ her
political thinking transcend the limits of one’s own perspective.
However, Morgenthau’s argumentation goes beyond Steele. Scholarship
meant for Morgenthau, and this is evidenced in his countless civic
engagements, not to restrict oneself to the academic field, but to act in
Epilogue ● 159
the public sphere. Steele (2010: 53) expresses the well-considered caveat
that the scholar might lose the ability to “speak truth to power” in the
public realm due to its different knowledge power relations. However,
Morgenthau was well aware of this problem (Lebow 2003: 247–8). In
order to avoid it, he proposed that scholars act in this realm in accor-
dance with Socratic maieutics. He attempted to decipher political
interests of people by establishing a dialogue with them and thereby
creating a forum in which the political could re-evolve, rather than tell-
ing people “the truth.” Scholars have to act as facilitators of the political
through which people can transcend the dehumanization of modern
democracies by succoring them to become critical citizens. This frees
people in their thoughts and actions from ideological, technological, and
scientific constraints, thereby allowing them to contribute again (in an
act of “amor mundi” [Young-Bruehl 1982: 324]) to the creation of their
lifeworld. However, attempting to persuade others of their human
capacities and to challenge vested interests by acting as a criti-cal
corrective of contemporary dehumanizing forms of sociation causes
discomfort among contemporaries by questioning their habitual ways of
thinking. Eventually, the scholar even has to expect negative per-sonal
consequences (Morgenthau 1955: 446–7), as also Steele (2010:
58) highlights. Social sciences in general and International Relations in
particular did not live up to Morgenthau’s expectations. These dis-
ciplines did not act as a critical corrective of the political status quo, but
through its positivization even contributed to modern dehumaniza-tion.
Morgenthau (1966b: 73) believed that particularly International
Relations “retreat[s] into the trivial, the formal, the methodological, the
purely theoretical, the remotely historical—in short the politically
irrelevant,” rather than discussing politically relevant issues that con-
cern the well-being and interests of people. Since it did not consider the
processual character of human existence, Morgenthau believed that
International Relations became sterile and eventually created a systemic
outlook on the world in which the human was no longer considered.
Problems or conflicts in the political realm became issues of structural
constraints in which remedy can be sought through technological mea-
sures and social planning (Morgenthau 1932, 1966b). However, despite
the shattering of his hopes for scholarship as dissidence, Morgenthau did
not argue to retreat to academia, but only insisted more fervently on the
assertion of scholars in the public realm, as it is only then that
International Relations could claim significance.
Notes
Preface
1. Bergheimat. Georg Ringsgwandl—dahoam is net dahoam (televised:
December 28, 2014). The video is available at the website of the
Bayerischer Rundfunk: http://ow.ly/GICL1 (accessed: January 2, 2015).
Prolegomena: Morgenthau, Realism, and Worldview

1. Lengthy passages from German or French original texts are all provided
with English translations in the main text. For the educated reader, the
original excerpts are provided in the endnotes, but without further com-
ments. The German original here reads: „Rechts- und Staatsphilosophie-[sic]
und Soziologie . . . und Völkerrecht an der Universität Genf.“
2. Duke Johann Casimir (1564–1633) founded the school in 1605. The cus-tom
of crowning his statue still exists today.
3. Morgenthau recalled this incident to have taken place in 1923, but a look
into the local newspaper, the Coburger Zeitung from July 4, 1922, shows
that it had happened a year earlier. A picture of this incidence is to be found
in Frei (2001).
4. HJM Archive stands for the Morgenthau Archive at the Library of Congress
in Washington, DC. The number indicates the respective container.
5. A Referendariat is a compulsory two-year training for prospective lawyers
and teachers. For lawyers, the Referendariat comprises of several stages.
Typically, they first work at a local or regional court, before they join the
office of an attorney. During the second stage, they gain experience by
working in the civil service, for example, in a ministry or a city council. The
next stage involves working for a lawyer, before the Referendariat is
typically rounded off by a compulsory optional stage, which can include
positions outside Germany. This includes, for example, the possibility to
work at an embassy. During Morgenthau’s Referendariat, Sinzheimer (1934)
classified him as an “assistant” (Hilfsarbeiter).
6. The Habilitation is a second monograph-length research project after the doctoral
thesis. Until recently, it was a requirement to gain the Venia Legendi (the right to
lecture) and to qualify for a full professorship in Germany.
162 ● Notes
7. What created these animosities cannot be clarified entirely, as Guggenheim

initially considered Morgenthau’s work to be a major contribution to inter-
national law (Greenberg 2014: 224).
8. The SS Königstein was later sold off to a Belgium company as scrap, but it
was brought back into service when World War II started. Now called SS
Gandia, the ship was torpedoed off the coast of Newfoundland on January
22, 1942. For more information, see http://ow.ly/M8X7E (accessed April
26, 2015).
9. It certainly could be that this has pragmatic reasons, as he might have dic-
tated this letter to his secretary, like Landauer (1935). However, his private
correspondence was also written in English.
10. “Ich habe mich zurückgezogen, wie ein Igel, ich habe . . . kaum Interesse an
Menschen. Es fehlt mir die Aktionsfähigkeit, die ich früher hatte, der
Zusammenhang mit dem Sinn ist mir verloren gegangen . . . dieser Sinn
liegt doch zum großen Teil im eigenen Vaterland, in dem Land unserer
Jugend, dem Land das uns Kultur gab. ”
11. Of course, Morgenthau was not the only émigré scholar whose work was
misread or severely distorted. Only recently, Jan Ruzicka (2014: 280) noted
the same for Karl Deutsch.
12. Henry Kissinger once even remarked that “Hans Morgenthau has turned
contemporary study of international relations into a major science. All of us
teaching in this field after him had to start from the ground he had laid”
(quoted after Hacke 2004: 5; author’s translation; also Kissinger 1980).
13. It is estimated that more than 50 émigré scholars worked at African
American universities (Simon Edgcomb 1993).
14. It was this readiness to bridge theory with political activism that made Arendt
recommend Morgenthau’s lectures to her then student Elisabeth Young-Bruehl
(2006: 34) because “‘[i]t will be very practical.’ She [Arendt] viewed her old
friend and fellow émigré as a practical man—that is, a man of praxis, action.”
1 Hans Morgenthau and Weimar

1. Whenever reference is made to Germany, it usually implies Central Europe
(Mitteleuropa). This does not mean that there was or is an intellectual domi-
nance or primacy favoring Germany, but it rather follows Johan Galtung
(1981) and Richard Münch (1990). Both argue that there was an intense
intellectual exchange between Germany and other Central European coun-
tries, such as Poland, Hungary, Austria, and the Czech Republic. Both
schol-ars use the terms “German” and “teutonic” to characterize this
exchange.
2. A similar remark was given by Morgenthau (1984b: 378–9) at the end of his
life in an interview with Johnson. In this interview, Morgenthau stressed that
it was not American pragmatism that shaped his thoughts.
3. In order to capture the atmosphere of this time adequately, the term “fin de
siècle” is applied. Although this term is traditionally reserved for France and
Notes ● 163
Austria and is restricted to the turn of the twentieth century (Marchand and
Lindenfeld 2004: 1–2), much of what Philipp Blom (2009: 1–4) has recently
remarked for the first 14 years of the twentieth century characterized also the
Weimar Republic. Old certainties withered away and numerous ideologies
coexisted next to each other, struggling for the monopoly of interpretation, be it
in arts, literature, or politics, leaving the people with the feelings of alienation,
crisis, and uncertainty. Still, at the same time, the hope for the better, which
dominated much of the nineteenth century, was still in the people’s minds. Stefan
Zweig (1943: 14), the Austrian novelist, remarked in his autobiographi-cal The
World of Yesterday that “[i]n its liberal idealism, the nineteenth century was
honestly convinced that it was on the straight and unfailing path toward being the
best of all worlds. Earlier eras, with their wars, famines, and revolts, were
deprecated as times when mankind was still immature and unenlight-ened. But
now it was merely a matter of decades until the last vestige of evil and violence
would finally be conquered, and this faith in an uninterrupted and irresistible
‘progress’ truly had the force of a religion for that generation.”
4. Altogether there were approximately 28,000 civil servants, 10,200 judges,
26,000 protestant priests, 9,300 teachers at secondary schools, 4,500 pro-
fessors and Privatdozenten, 34,000 physicians, and 12,500 lawyers. The
Bürgertum consisted also of several thousands of journalists, Catholic
priests, artists, and so on. With a family coefficient of four to five, the
number stated earlier is reached.
5. Coburg only became part of Bavaria in 1920 by popular vote. Until then, it
was the capital of the Thuringian duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Hence,
for most of Morgenthau’s childhood and adolescence, Coburg was not part
of Bavaria.
6. This centrality Bildung for Germany at that time is further demonstrated by
Mannheim (1985: 156), who wrote that “[t]he modern bourgeoisie had for
the beginning a twofold social root—on the one hand the owners of capital,
on the other hand those individuals whose only capital consisted in their
education. It was common therefore to speak of the propertied and educated
class, the educated element being, however, by no means ideo-logically in
agreement with the property-owning element.”
7. However, it took until 1834 before the university entrance examinations
were abolished and the Abitur became the only state-controlled require-
ment. From this time on, only persons with an Abitur could enter uni-
versities. Since 1885, administrative privileges became more and more
connected to an academic education. For the right to receive a provincial
administration post or to become a higher official in a postal department, at
least six years of higher education were required (Ringer 1969: 26–32).
8. As Henry Pachter (1972: 228) put it for the Weimar Republic: “As aca-
demic persons or teachers, they enjoyed the security and status of the civil
service. In a society which still measured a man’s value by his title, they
were Herr Direktor, Herr Geheimrat, Herr Advokat, Herr Rechtsanwalt, Herr
Professor.”
164 ● Notes
9. Herbert Schnädelbach (1984: 23) remarks that “[t]he Humboldt-University

sought to achieve a creative compromise in all respects: academic freedom
alongside responsibility for the requirements of state and society; voca-tional
training combined with the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.”
10. (Allgemeine) Staatslehre is a German academic field that deals generally
with questions of sovereignty, but also with questions regarding the devel-
opment, forms, and intentions of state. During the time of Morgenthau,
Staatslehre was primarily dominated by jurisprudence, but it is interdis-
ciplinary because it touches on political, philosophical, sociological,
economic, and even theological aspects. Oliver Jütersonke (2010: 37)
translated it as “general theory of the state” and Ludwig Adamovich (1950:
25) even called it a “science of the state.”
11. The successor of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft are the Max-Planck-
Institutes.
12. Bernhard von Bülow (1849–1929) was a German politician during the times
of the German Empire and among others he was its chancellor from 1900 to
1909.
13. Simmel (2008: 169) noted that “[t]his primacy of technique has infected even
the purely intellectual branches of knowledge: in the historical sciences, as
in that of experimental psychology, investigations, essentially worthless and,
as regards the ultimate end of all research, most unimportant, frequently
enjoy a quite disproportionate degree of recognition, provided only that they
be carried out by means of perfect methodical, technical processes.”
14. In an earlier publication, Rosa (2005: 41) gets even more to the point by
calling this circumstance a “rasender Stillstand” (frenzied deadlock).
15. The term Kulturpessimismus was made popular by Stern (1989) in his The
Politics of Cultural Despair.
16. This is possible since Bourdieu used, similar to the meaning of Ringer’s
dichotomy, the terms “orthodoxy” and “heterodoxy.” Another terminol-ogy,
which points out the same aspect, is provided by Gay (2001). He
distinguishes between insiders and outsiders.
17. Robert Michels, for example, a student of Weber, did not receive his venia
legendi in Germany because he sympathized with socialist ideas. Therefore,
he had to move to Italy, where he eventually became a supporter of Italian
Fascism (Ringer 1969: 143).
18. On the relevance of interwar international law for the development of
International Relations, see, for example, Söllner (1988, 1990).
19. However, it has to be noted that Ex captivitate salus was published after
World War II, a time when Schmitt was desperately trying to restore his
reputation.
20. Sinzheimer was one of the few people who saw Morgenthau off in Antwerp
(Frei 2001: 61).
21. In his autobiographical sketch, Morgenthau (1984a: 15) noted that “[i]t was
inevitable that I would be influenced—however temporarily and negatively
—by Carl Schmitt.”
Notes ● 165
22. Similar evidence is given in a letter to Arendt from January 14, 1965, in
which Morgenthau criticized Schmitt’s work. Arendt had sent him Schmitt’s
Theory of the Partisan, which Morgenthau commented on as “interesting,
but unbe-lievably shoddy, both in thought and exposition” (HJM Archive 5).
23 In a letter to Samuel Magill on January 5, 1962, Morgenthau even remarked:
“As concerns the predominant intellectual influences on me, a most pow-
erful and probably decisive influence has certainly been Nietzsche” (HJM
Archive 39).
24. Morgenthau read several of Simmel’s work during his adolescence. These
were: Philosophie der Mode, Grundfragen der Soziologie, Hauptprobleme
der Philosophie, and Das Problem der historischen Zeit.
25. A contemporary discussion of alienation is provided by Ian Burkitt (1997).
He remarks that “[a]lienation . . . is one of the central aspects
of reflexivity . . . It is as an outsider that we can engage in the work of
codification” (195).
26 Klaus and Erika Mann (1996) beautifully captured this particular life-world
of German-speaking émigré intellectuals in the United States in
their book Escape to Life by portraying the most important personalities who
were forced to leave Germany.
28. Similar appraisals are given by Amstrup (1978), Thompson (1980–1981),
Tsou (1984), and Hacke (2005).
29. Irma Thormann, Morgenthau’s wife, later recalled that Morgenthau’s father
was “a Jew who wanted to be a German and who adored the emperor
Wilhelm II” (quoted after Frei 2001: 13).
2 Power: Hans Morgenthau and Ontology

1. Turner and Mazur (2009: 487–8) interpreted Morgenthau’s mentioning of
Standortgebundenheit to be referring to Weber. However, the concept of
Standortgebundenheit was introduced by Karl Mannheim to German
sociology.
2. This manuscript was Morgenthau’s first attempt to further conceptualize the
political; a study that he had announced in his doctoral thesis the year before
(Morgenthau 1929a: 72). Morgenthau provided a more substantial
elaboration with La notion du “politique” in 1933. The English translation
of this book was recently published (Morgenthau 2012).
3. Robert Schuett (2007: 59) uses the term “the instinct of self-assertion” to
translate Bewährungstrieb. However, translating it as the drive to prove
oneself is closer to the German meaning and Morgenthau (1974c: 16) also
translated it this way. See as well Troy (2015: 31).
4. With this statement, Morgenthau is consistent with Lord Darlington in Oscar
Wilde’s (2003: 423) Lady Windemere’s Fan. Wilde let Lord Darlington
express “that good people do a great deal of harm in this world.”
5. More on Politics among Nations in Molloy (2006: 82–5).
166 ● Notes
6. Politics among Nations was only later transformed into a textbook because
of the lack of textbooks on International Relations at that time, its unprec-
edented success, when numerous American colleges and universities
adopted it as the textbook for their undergraduate courses on International
Politics, and the insistence of Morgenthau’s publisher Knopf. To adjust
Politics among Nations more to the requirements of a textbook the “Six
Principles of Political Realism” were added to the second edition. See the
correspondence in Container 121, Manuscript Division, Library of
Congress, Washington, DC.
7. Ontological security is understood here in Anthony Giddens’s (1984: 375)
sense. Ideologies furnish people in their yearning to give meaning to the
social world and establish their identity within it not only with the onto-
logical framework that allows them to do so and thereby gain security, but
there is also a reification of the ideology through social structures and
institutions.
8. Another example for the flexibility of Morgenthau’s concepts is his under-
standing of the national interest, as remarked in Lebow (2003: 245). This
conceptual flexibility repeatedly caused academic discomfort and particu-
larly Morgenthau’s concept of power was criticized as not being scientific
enough (cf. Keohane 1986: 10).
9. “wo mehrere Individuen in Wechselwirkung treten. Diese Wechselwirkung
entsteht immer aus bestimmten Trieben heraus oder um bestimmter Zwecke
willen.”
10. It is curious to remark that not only scholars like Simmel, but also Max
Scheler, despite their promotion of society as a human construct, praised
World War I and warfare in general as a means to enforce the coherence of
societies as “collective beings” (Kleinschmidt 2000: 179).
11. Social institutions are understood here following the definition of Jonathan
Turner (1997: 6). They are “a complex of positions, roles, norms and values
lodged in particular types of social structures and organizing relatively
stable patterns of human activity with respect to fundamental problems in
producing life-sustaining resources, in reproducing individuals, and in
sustaining viable societal structures within a given environment.”
12. “Träger aller gesellschaftlichen Kräfte aber sind immer nur
Einzelmenschen.”
13. Morgenthau signed this manuscript, which is a translation of parts of La
notion du politique, as Privatdozent, a title that he was only allowed to carry
after having finished his postdoctoral degree. Since Morgenthau finished his
Habilitation in 1934 and left for Madrid in 1935, this paper must have been
written in between these dates.
14. “Der Begriff des Politischen hat keine Substanz, die ein für allemal fest-
stände, er ist vielmehr eine Eigenschaft, eine Qualität, eine Färbung, die
allen Substanzen anhaften kann . . . Eine Frage, die heute politischen
Charakter hat, kann morgen jede politische Bedeutung abgehen.”
Notes ● 167
15. “Seele des Menschen als Trägerin des Politischen.”

16. “Les normes deviennent l’arme la plus redoutable dont la société humaine se
sert se protéger contre les dommages que les comportements asociaux
pourraient lui causer.”
17. A critical appraisal of the term “German Jewish symbiosis” is provided by
Gershom Scholem (1979). The term is used here simply to enhance the
readability. Conceptually, it is, however, dubious, as it implies a distinc-tion
between Germans and Germans of Jewish faith, which I explicitly do not
support.
18. “Der technische Fortschritt wird mit dem Verlust der kulturellen Substanz
erkauft.”
19. “C’est précisément la crainte d’un déplaisir qui est le moyen le plus propre à
provoquer la réaction voulue par la norme.”
3 Knowledge: Hans Morgenthau and Epistemology

1. Morgenthau used this manuscript as the basis for the first part of Science:
Servant or Master?. Indeed, the first part is an almost literal translation of
this manuscript.
2. In the English-speaking academia, historism and historicism are often used
simultaneously. This is, however, misleading since both schools of thought
are conflictive, as the definition of Berger reveals.
3. On the quick disappearance of Kelsen from international law and
International Relations discourses in the United States, see Scheuerman
(2014).
4. Morgenthau not only dedicated a collection of essays Truth and Power to
Kelsen, but, as he pointed out in a letter to Erich Hula dated January 4, 1941,
he was trying to promote Kelsen as a scholar in the United States and to find
employment for Kelsen’s son-in-law (HJM Archive 11).
5. “solange die Gestaltung der staatlichen Wirklichkeit noch Gegenstand
emotionaler Auseinandersetzungen ist . . . sich über den Staat Gedanken zu
machen, in dessen Gestaltung ja zugleich auch ihr eigenes persönliches
Schicksal eingeschlossen ist, ohne sinngebend und wertend zu den öffen-
tlichen Dingen Stellung zu nehmen.”
6. For a discussion of Thompson’s importance for American International
Relations Theory and classical realism, in particular, because of his vari-ous
positions at the Rockefeller Foundation, see Rajaee (2013) and also Guilhot
(2011).
7. Unlike other émigré scholars like Karl Deutsch and Carl J. Friedrich, who
were presidents of the International Political Science Association (IPSA),
Morgenthau never wished to head any International Relations association,
but he ran for the presidency of the APSA.
8. E. H. Carr made a similar remark noting that “the age of innocence, [where]
historians walked in the Garden of Eden, without a scrap of philosophy to
168 ● Notes
cover them, naked and unashamed before the god of history” had come at
least in Europe to an end (quoted after Carlsnaes 1981: 173).
9. Miles Kahler (1997: 22) speaks in this regard of a discipline that is “driven
by demand.”
10. Also Morgenthau’s (1972) last monograph Science: Servant or Master?
bears this connotation.
11. Mannheim (1985: 181) claimed that “[w]hat has been said here about the
teaching of the ‘arts’ applies mutate mutandis, in a very large degree, to
politics” (emphasis in the original).
12. For a similar argument, see Markus Kornprobst (2007).
13. This point was also stressed by Norman Graebner (1984: 66) in his account
on Morgenthau as a historian.
14. The latter was the teacher of Luckmann and Berger at the New School for
Social Research in New York during the 1950s.
15. “wo mehrere Individuen in Wechselwirkung treten. Diese Wechselwirkung
entsteht immer aus bestimmten Trieben heraus oder um bestimmter Zwecke
willen.”
16. See here as well Duncan (1959: 100), Frisby (1984: 120–3), and Jung (1990:
74–85).
17. These terms are taken from Friedrich Schiller’s (1996) inaugural lecture on
the purpose of studying world history at the University of Jena in 1789.
18. “als eine objektive Form subjektiver Seelen.”
19. The study of Weber’s work intensified Morgenthau’s thoughts for chron-
ological reasons, rather than being “a Weberian at heart” (Lebow 2003:
246). Morgenthau (1984a, b) got first into contact with Wölfflin and
Burckhardt and only later he took the seminar on Weber. His biogra-pher
Frei (2001) also notes that Morgenthau never mentioned Weber in his
diaries, unlike other thinkers who influenced him more, like Nietzsche.
20. Similar Morgenthau (1970a: 257).

21. In a later publication on Conservatism, Mannheim also referred to
Seinsverbundenheit, which he, however, used interchangeably. Still, there is
a difference between Seinsverbundenheit and Seinsgebundenheit, whose
elaboration is, however, for the purpose of this book not necessary (for
more, see Kettler, Meja, and Stehr 1984: 78).
22. More on Elias’s concept of time can be found in Tabboni (2001).
23. This was confirmed to me by Christoph Frei in an e-mail dated June 6,
2007.
24. Morgenthau held this view not exclusively, but he is merely an example of
the common belief of his fellow émigré scholars who argued that any dis-
cipline in the social sciences or humanities has to be theoretical or philo-
sophical (Greenberg 1992: 67–79).
25. Later in his life, Morgenthau (2004: 15) repeated these perennial prob-
lems right at the beginning of his lectures on Aristotle: “The problem of
Notes ● 169
authority, the problems of the relations between the individual and the state,
the common good, the issue of law versus naked power, the prob-lem of
violence, the class problem, the distribution of wealth in political terms—all
those problems are perennial in nature.”
26. In an earlier publication, Morgenthau (1985: 23–4) developed this even
more profoundly:
The first lesson the student of international politics must learn and
never forget is that the complexities of international affairs make
simple solutions and trustworthy prophecies impossible. Here the
scholar and the charlatan part company. Knowledge of the forces that
determine politics among nations, and of the ways by which their
political reflection unfold, reveals the ambiguity of the facts of
international politics. In every political situation contradictory ten-
dencies are at play. One of these tendencies is more likely to prevail
under certain conditions. But which tendency actually will prevail is
anybody’s guess. The best the scholar can do, then, is to trace the
different tendencies that, as potentialities, are inherent in a certain
international situation. He can point out the different conditions that
make it more likely for one tendency to prevail than for another and,
finally, assess the probabilities for the different conditions and
tendencies to prevail in actuality.
27. Without a doubt, employing such a heuristic device bears the danger of
drawing an analogy between, in this case, Morgenthau and Koselleck, where
there is none and come to conclusions that at best distort reality (Skinner
1969: 7–9). However, it will not be argued here that Morgenthau informed
Koselleck in the development of his approach, but both scholars were
intellectually nurtured in a similar academic environment and arrived at
similar epistemological conclusions, which is why it is suitable to view
Morgenthau through Koselleck’s lenses.
28. Große’s translation is appropriate since it catches the essence of the original
that reads much more complex: “Abgesehen davon, daß für die griechische
Geschichte allmählich durch treffliche Darstellungen gesorgt ist, würde uns
die Erzählung der Ereignisse und vollends deren kritische Erörterung in
einer Zeit, da eine einzige Untersuchung über Richtigkeit einzelner äußerer
Tatsachen gerne einen Oktavband einnimmt, die beste Zeit vor-
wegnehmen.” An Oktavband is an outdated German term to classify books
through its size by which the Roman parchment was folded three times,
creating eight sheets. The introductory section of Burckhardt’s (1963) book
in which the earlier mentioned quotation is to be found was omitted in the
English translation.
29. Morgenthau’s memory was wrong here. Wölfflin distinguished not between
Romanesque and Gothic art, but the Renaissance from the Baroque.
30. The term itself, however, was, according to Fritz Ringer (2000: 111), first
introduced by Georg Jellinek.
170 ● Notes
4 Dissent: Hans Morgenthau and Political Agency

1. The reference to Carl von Clausewitz is appropriate here, as Morgenthau
had Clausewitz’s dictum in mind when he made this argument. This is
evidenced in a lecture that he gave at Dartmouth College in 1958 (Craig
2007b: 203).
2. Of course, Morgenthau was not the only scholar at that time who was
concerned about liberalism turning into idealism, as Heinrich Rommen’s
(1944) account exemplarily demonstrates (The Review of Politics, in which
his article appeared, identifies the author as Hans Rommen. However, this
must be a misprint because Heinrich Rommen was the author of The
Political Philosophy of Suarez and Natural Law as to be found in the
“Contributors to this Issue”). Morgenthau (1948e, also 1958e) even criti-
cized Carr for promoting a moralistic foreign policy.
3. “Das deutsche Volk, immer nur allzu gerne bereit in geistigen Dingen die
äußersten denk-möglichen Positionen einzunehmen und ein ideelles Gebilde
in seinem Einfluß auf die Gestaltung der Wirklichkeit entweder aus tiefster
Überzeugung für ernst oder leichtfertig für nichts zu neh-men, hatte die 14
Punkte Wilsons gläubig als die Verkündung einer neuen Epoche im Leben
der Völker begrüßt.” Around the same time Morgenthau’s mentor
Sinzheimer arrived at a similar assessment about the Germans in a letter to
Morgenthau dated March 11, 1932 (HJM Archive 197).
4. Prior to his forced emigration, Gustav Ichheiser (1897–1969) had a suc-
cessful academic career in Vienna. Among others, he was in charge of the
psychological department of the Lower Austrian Chamber of Labor (Marie
Jahoda was his assistant there for a while), and he taught at the
Volkshochschule (similar to centers for lifelong learning in a British context)
in Vienna.
5. “führt eine Politik, die der Stabilität verschrieben ist, im Namen des
Antikommunismus zur Unterdrückung aller Manifestationen sozialer
Unruhe und zur Erstickung von Reformen.”
6. On the criticism on Morgenthau for his criticism on Van Doren, see Arendt
and McCarthy (1995: 160).
7. “keine Prinzipien einer Außenpolitik kennt, die von einer internationalen
Moral oder vom geltenden Völkerrecht abgeleitet warden.”
8. The TET-offensive was a military campaign of Northern Vietnam forces
named after the Vietnamese New Year, T t Nguyên Đán. On this holi-day—
January 31, 1968—the campaign began.
9. From Peukert (1991: 174), we know that in comparison to other coun-tries
at that time radio receivers played an important role in Germany as a
medium of mass media. In 1932, there were 66 radio listeners for every
1,000 people in Germany in comparison to a mere 35 in the European
average. With the introduction of the affordable Volksempfänger, the ratio
must have risen significantly.
Notes ● 171
10. In 2012, Margarethe von Trotta made an excellent movie about the life of
Hannah Arendt. The Eichmann Trial served her as the pivot to demon-strate
Arendt’s political thought to a wider public.
11. For a contemporary discussion on the use of the concept of national inter-est,
see Willliams (2005b, 2007b).
12. Although it has to be agreed here, with Scheuerman (2009a: 80–1), that this
is one of the most concise definitions of the national interest, the impli-
cation he makes that the national interest is a concept from Thompson rather
than from Morgenthau cannot be endorsed given that Morgenthau
consequently elaborated on this concept from his doctoral thesis onward.
13. Morgenthau already argued at the beginning of the Cold War to accept the
two spheres of influence because it would be the lesser evil (Morgenthau,
Kuh, and Stevenson 1946: 9).
14. Morgenthau’s (1938a) critical stance toward the League of Nations is, for
example, apparent in his discussion on the noncompliance of Swiss neu-
trality and its admittance to the League of Nations.
15. For more on Mitrany’s functionalism and its relevance for classical realists’
thought, see Ashworth (2014: 221–5).
Epilogue: The Human Condition of Politics

1. This term is borrowed from Hartmut Behr (2010) who argues that scien-
tification signifies the process of firmly grounding positivism as the only
viable framework for International Relations theorizing.
2. For Robert Park (1928: 892), the marginal man is a “cosmopolite and
citizen of the world,” while for David Golovensky (1952: 334) the mar-ginal
man remains “in the twilight zone of two cultures.” If Morgenthau was
tending toward the one or other extreme is a source for speculation.
Probably, he tended at times more to the one, while at other times more to
the other. It is certain, however, that Morgenthau was torn between the two
cultures. Lebow (2003: 219) notes that “questions about his German past
were taboo.” It fits well into this picture that research in the Library of
Congress has shown that Morgenthau never replied to a German letter in
German, but in English, although some of these letters were written to him
by personal friends. Still, Morgenthau remained attached to the German
culture, most of his friends were also émigré scholars, and Morgenthau
frequently visited Continental Europe.).
3. An example of this inner diremption numerous intellectuals faced after their
forced immigration is to be found in the novelist Carl Zuckmayer
(1896–1977):
I absolutely did not want to go to America. I hold it personally against
Mr. Hitler and his Providence, the destiny, God, and the 20th cen-tury
that I was forced to emigrate. It is embarrassing and disgraceful to a
country, where we don’t belong, which does not have to tell us
172 ● Notes
anything, from whom we could not learn anything, and to whom we

did not have anything to say. I was never in the United States and
Werfel [Austrian novelist, 1890–1945] only once for a short time in
New York. But we all knew exactly what we had to expect or better
not to expect: from bad food, up to moral and sexual frigidity . . .
A country of unimaginative standardization, shallow materialism, and
witless mechanics. A country without tradition, culture, urge for
beauty or form, metaphysics, and Heurigen [Austrian tavern with new
wine on tap]. A country of artificial fertilizer and tin openers, without
grace and dung heap, classical music, sloppiness, Melos, Apollo, or
Dionysius. Should we escape the enslavement of European mass
dictatorship in order to proceed ourselves towards the tyranny of the
Dollar, business, advertisement, and forced disposal? And, by the
way, Werfel said, we have to learn English. (quoted after Adams and
Lösche 1998: 519–20; author’s translation; for the original, see
Zuckmayer 1948)
4. Mary Worth is a popular American soap opera style comic strip that first
appeared in 1938. The comic strip tells the story of a widow who moves into
a condominium complex and acts as an adviser for her neighbors on many
issues of everyday life.
5. This was to a certain extent different in Germany, where Morgenthau’s for-
mer student and later professor in Munich, Gottfried-Karl Kindermann,
promoted Morgenthau’s work. In 1963, Morgenthau’s Politics among
Nations was published as Macht und Frieden. Kindermann (1965) equally
published an introductory article to Niebuhr’s and Morgenthau’s thought in
the major German political science journal. Indeed, Morgenthau’s thought
moved into the focus of German political science during the 1960s, as
articles of Krippendorff (1964), Kindermann (1965), and Werner Link
(1965) suggest.
6. There is, however, a growing literature in the history of International
Relations that challenges this kind of thought (cf. Behr 2010; Schmidt 2012;
Ashworth 2014).
7. I owe this expression to Hartmut Behr.
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Index
Acheson, Dean, 134 Buckley, William, 122 Bülow,

Adorno, Theodor W., 3, 25, 39, 71 Bernhard von, 26, 164 Burckhardt,
alienation, 5, 17–19, 22, 30, 36, 38–41, Jacob, 90–2, 97, 102–6,
47, 76, 80, 107, 135, 151, 158, 145, 147, 168–9
163, 165
Almond, Gabriel, 80 Caesar, Gaius Julius, 135
Alsop, Joseph, 149 Carr, Edward Hallet (E. H.), 6,
Altamira, D. Rafael, 29 167, 170
American Political Science Association Clausewitz, Carl von, 133, 170
(APSA), 126, 149, 167 communism, 43–4, 46, 96, 122–3, 153
animal laborans, 110–11, 114–16, cultural crisis (Kulturkrise), 17, 22–3,
141, 154 25–6, 28–30, 33, 78–9, 146,
Arbeitsrat für Kunst, 42 153 Kulturpessimismus, 28, 164
Arendt, Hannah, 5, 9, 14–15, 18, 22,
39–41, 44, 57–62, 67, 71, 91, Dahrendorf, Ralf, 8, 28–30, 77
108–15, 124, 127, 129–33, 141, Deutsch, Karl, 162, 167
146, 148, 154, 162, 165, 170–1 Di m, Ngô Đình, 123
conscious pariah, 22, 30, 41, 67, Dilthey, Wilhelm, 27, 75, 90–5
107, 147 diplomacy, 115, 135–6, 139
and totalitarianism, 44, 111– dissent, 7, 11, 17, 19–20, 22, 41, 44–5,
12, 127–9, 141 107, 124, 128, 133, 141, 170
Aristotle, 19, 62–4, 88, 92, 108, Dix, Otto, 42
134, 157, 168 Dönitz, Karl, 67
Aron, Raymond, 138 Doren, Charles Van
see under Van Doren Scandal
Benjamin, Walter, 29 drive for self-preservation
Bildung, 22–4, 163 (Selbsterhaltungstrieb), 51–2,
Bildungsbürgertum, 17, 22–3, 25, 54, 57, 63, 116, 118
68, 72, 145 see also under power
Bismarck, Otto von, 44, 136 drive to prove oneself
Brandt, Willy, 126 (Bewährungstrieb), 51–4, 63,
Braudel, Fernand, 100 118, 165
Buber, Martin, 25 see also under power
208 ● Index
Eichmann, Adolf, 129, art history, 3, 19, 77, 101–3, 105

171 Eisenhower, Dwight conceptual history, 19, 76–7, 96, 98,
D., 83 Eisner, Kurt, 42
101, 106
Elias, Norbert, 29, 93, 168
historicism, 76, 87, 91, 105,
émigré (scholar), 1, 5, 7–8, 12, 38–40,
167 historism, 34, 76, 87, 105,
67, 71, 75, 81, 84–5, 105, 118,
167 history of decline, 110
137–8, 144–5, 152, 154, 162, Hitler, Adolf, 44, 171
165, 167–8, 171 Hobbes, Thomas, 18, 52
empiricism, 7, 27, 71, 77, 83, 85– Hobsbawm, Eric, 23, 44
6, 105, 150
Hoffmann, Stanley, 7, 64, 77, 80, 82–
European values, 19, 68, 76, 108, 129
3, 138, 150
homo deus, 109–10
fascism, 31, 56, 83, 96, 127, 137,
homo faber, 60, 109–11, 114, 130,
153, 164
141, 154
Feininger, Lyonel, 42 Horkheimer, Max, 3, 25, 39, 71
Fox, William T. R., 81, hubris, 8, 32, 36, 112, 116, 119–21,
101 Fraenkel, Ernst, 3, 25,
124, 127, 141, 150, 156
147 Frank, Hans, 67
see also under idealism;
Frankfurt School, 3, 141
liberalism; and modernity
Institute for Social Research,
humanism, 9, 19, 30, 57, 108, 127,
22, 25–6, 31, 51, 147
130, 147
see also under Adorno, Theodor W.;
and critique of modernity, 19 and
Horkheimer, Max; Marcuse,
dehumanization, 6, 8, 19–20,
Herbert; and Sinzheimer, Otto
54, 109, 127, 141, 144, 152–
Freud, Sigmund, 2, 18, 30, 36–7,
6, 158–9
47, 49, 51–2, 54, 69, 71, 115, 145–7
human condition of politics, 9, 34,
Friedrich, Carl Joachim,
36, 71, 81, 110, 117, 124, 143–
167 Fulda, Ludwig, 28 4, 151, 171
humanitas, 6, 9–13, 15
Göttinger Arbeitskreis, 126
Humboldt, Alexander von, 24
Gropius, Walter, 42 Grosz,
Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 24, 26
George, 42 Guggenheim,
Paul, 4, 148, 162 Gurian, Ichheiser, Georg, 8, 118–19, 170
Waldemar, 32, 40, 71 idealism, 16, 19, 43, 71, 109, 116–20,
123, 141, 163, 170
Hauptmann, Gerhart, 43
isolationism, 121
Hayek, Friedrich, 137
Wilsonianism, 121
Herz, John H., 5–7, 84, 136, 138,
see also under liberalism
146–7
ideology, 13–14, 17, 22, 31–3, 44,
Heuss, Theodor, 9
46–7, 56, 80, 91, 96, 109,
history, 3, 15–16, 19, 27, 33, 38, 52,
112–13, 117, 129, 131, 152–
76–7, 88, 92, 95–6, 98, 101–6,
3, 156, 166
110, 112, 116–17, 124, 136,
ideologization, 20, 56–7, 59,
143, 150, 152, 168, 172
112, 114, 131, 144, 152
Index ● 209
life philosophy, 34, 38–9 life-

see also under fascism; idealism;
liberalism; Marxism; Nazism;
horizon (Lebenshorizont), 90–2
nationalism; socialism; and Lippmann, Walter, 101, 149
totalitarianism Lukács, Georg, 58, 71, 113
International Political Science
Machiavelli, Niccolò, 110
Association (IPSA), 167
Mannheim, Karl, 25, 28–9, 31, 35–6,
International Studies
41, 47, 49, 62, 80, 84–5, 89, 91–4,
Association (ISA), 10
105, 130, 144–5, 147, 152, 158,
163, 165, 168
Jaeger, Werner, 26–7
free-floating intelligentsia, 31,
Jahoda, Marie, 170
41, 94, 158
Jaspers, Karl, 9, 115
map, 31, 98, 104–5, 138
Jellinek, Georg, 25, 79, 169
Marcuse, Herbert, 25, 71,
Johnson, Lyndon B., 123, 126
91 Marxism, 32, 47 Mayer,
see also under Vietnam War
Hans, 44
McCarthy, Joseph, 123, 149, 156
Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, 26,
McCarthy, Mary, 124, 131, 149, 170
164 Kant, Immanuel, 62, 67, 93, 117
Merriam, Charles, 80, 154
Keitel, Wilhelm, 67
Michels, Robert, 2, 164
Kelsen, Hans, 2, 4, 25, 33, 44, 78–80,
modernity, 6–8, 10, 13, 28, 66, 109–
138, 147–8, 167
11, 113–14
Kennan, George, 61
and consumerism, 114–16 and
Kindermann, Gottfried-Karl, 7, 21,
society of waste, 114, 116 and
172 Kissinger, Henry, 83, 162
worldlessness, 111, 114, 116
Knopf, Alfred A., 56, 166
knowledge, 7–8, 11, 15, 17, 19–20,
see also under humanism and
Arendt, Hannah
25–6, 28–9, 35–6, 38–9, 45,
Moore, Barrington Jr., 99
53, 58, 62, 71, 75–7, 84–94,
96, 104–5, 108, 112, 119, 130,
nationalism, 28–9, 56, 112, 118,
132, 135–6, 140–4, 146, 150,
121, 130, 137, 146, 152–3
153, 158–9, 164, 167, 169
national interest, 20, 99, 109,
absolute, 158
127, 132–4, 136, 138–40, 142,
conditionality of knowledge
144, 146, 157–8, 166, 171
(Standortgebundenheit), 36,
nationalistic universalism, 112,
62, 87, 91–3, 96, 104–5, 130,
118 Nazism, 31
150, 165
Neumann, Franz L., 3, 25, 40, 84,
see also under Mannheim, Karl
147
Koselleck, Reinhart, 98–101, 169
Neumeyer, Karl, 46
Niebuhr, Reinhold, 6, 9, 81, 101, 172
Landauer, Carl, 1, 162
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 18, 27, 34, 49,
Laswell, Harold, 80
51, 57–61, 69, 71, 102, 125,
liberalism, 19, 31–2, 40, 43, 80, 82–
134, 145–7, 165, 168
3, 109, 116–17, 119–20, 122,
Nitze, Paul H., 101
127, 141, 148, 154, 170
210 ● Index
noocracy, 43, 45
106, 112, 115–16, 122, 124–5,
Novembergruppe, 42
127–8, 133–4, 137, 142, 146–
7, 150, 155, 158–9, 165–7, 169
Oakeshott, Michael, 56–7, 151
animus dominandi, 50, 54, 57,
objectivity, 31, 39, 41, 91, 150
66, 70–1, 99
perspectivist, 39, 91
Kraft, 66, 166
Ohnesorg, Benno, 124
Macht, 66, 172
Oncken, Hermann, 3, 87, 145 pouvoir (empirical power), 54,
Orwell, George, 128 57, 61, 66, 72
puissance (normative power),
Pahlavi, Mohammad Rezā,
54, 57–61, 66, 71–2, 157
124 Plessner, Helmuth, 68
prudence (phronesis), 19, 73,
politics, 8–10, 14, 18–22, 28, 32, 34,
108, 136
36, 38, 40–1, 46, 48–52, 54–7,
pure theory of law, 4, 33, 44, 78–
59, 61–2, 64–5, 70–1, 75, 77,
9 see also under Kelsen, Hans
79–81, 84–5, 87–8, 95–104,
106–8, 110, 112, 115–17, 119– radio university (RIAS), 45, 117
21, 123–4, 126, 129–30, 134–5, rationalism, 7, 26, 71, 77, 83–5, 105,
137, 139–40, 142–5, 148, 150–8,
142, 150–1
163–6, 168–72
relativism, 34–5, 76–7, 79, 92–3,
antagonism of interest, 57, 62, 71–
95, 117
2, 104, 157
and relationism, 36, 93–4
depolitization, 54, 71–2, 112,
see also under Mannheim,
129, 131, 144, 155–6
Karl Rommen, Heinrich, 170
and perennial problems, 19, 49,
Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF),
77, 96–7, 113, 130, 168
124 Rothenbücher, Karl, 3, 103,
and the political, 3, 11, 18, 23, 33,
145 Roubini, Nouriel, 141
44–50, 52–4, 59, 63–6, 71–2, 98,
104, 106–9, 111, 120, 123–4, 130–
Scheler, Max, 166
1, 135, 144, 151, 155–9, 165
Schiller, Friedrich, 51, 168
sphere of elasticity, 62, 130
Schlesinger, Arthur, 67
see also under humanism and
Schmitt, Carl, 25, 31–3, 47, 50, 59,
modernity
64–5, 71–2, 102, 147, 164–5
Popper, Karl, 76
Scholem, Gershom, 167
positivism, 16, 18–19, 28, 75–9, 82–
Schuetz, Alfred, 35, 38–9, 41, 76,
3, 86–7, 105, 150, 152, 171
88–90, 95, 105
behavioralism, 75–82, 105, 149–50
scientification, 20, 80, 109, 141, 144,
legal positivism, 19, 76–9, 82, 105
152, 154–5, 171
see also under empiricism; Kelsen,
Shoah, 5, 12, 32, 39, 55, 61,
Hans; pure theory of law;
111 Shugg, Robert, 56
rationalism; and Staatslehre
power, 1, 4, 7, 14–15, 17–22, 31–2, 37,
Simmel, Georg, 28–30, 34–5, 38–9,
47, 60, 63–4, 72, 88–90, 93–4,
40–1, 45–6, 48–58, 60–6, 70–3,
105, 114, 145, 147, 156, 164–6
80, 82, 84–6, 92, 97–9, 101, 104,
Index ● 211
Sinzheimer, Otto, 3, 25, 30–2, 40– Van Doren Scandal, 125, 170
1, 45, 51, 78, 102, 145, 147, Vernunftrepublikaner, 28, 43
161, 164, 170 Vienna Circle, 27
social planning, 7, 82, 84, 109–10, Vienna School, 78
113, 159 Vietnam War, 46–7, 122–3, 126, 131,
sociation, 35, 62–4, 88, 137, 144, 148–9, 152
146, 151, 154, 156–7, 159 and teach-ins, 131
see also under Simmel, and TET-offensive, 126, 170
Georg Spengler, Osawld, 22 Voegelin, Eric, 71, 81, 86, 154
Staatslehre, 25, 32–3, 78–9, 100, Voltaire, 141
147, 164
Waltz, Kenneth, 150, 155 Weber,
Sternberger, Dolf,
Max, 2–3, 18, 29–30, 47,
132 Stourzh, Gerald,
5 stranger, 38–9, 41 49–50, 55–6, 61, 71, 91–2,
see also under alienation; Simmel, 95, 102–6, 145, 164–5, 168
Georg; and Schuetz, Alfred Werfel, Franz, 172
Strauss, Leo, 99, 149 White, Leonard, 154
Wight, Martin, 52
Stresemann, Gustav, 33, 134
Wilde, Oscar, 165
technologization, 20, 109, 129, Wilson, Woodrow, 116–17, 170
141, 144, 152, 154 see also under Wilsonianism
telos, 19, 62, 108 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 3, 87, 91–2, 102–
Thompson, Kenneth W., 2–3, 5, 21, 4, 106, 145, 169
77, 81, 97, 99, 101, 133, 149, World War I, 21, 55, 80, 134,
165, 167, 171 152, 165
Thormann, Irma, 1, 4–5, 165 World War II, 5, 7–8, 32, 37, 42,
Tillessen, Heinrich, 42 44–5, 47, 55, 68, 79–81, 83–
Tillich, Paul, 3, 25 4, 92, 138, 145, 151, 162, 164
totalitarianism, 44–5, 47, 111–12, 124,
127–9, 132, 141 worldview, 1, 11–17, 21–2, 46–9,
see also Arendt, Hannah; Friedrich, 66, 75, 77, 88, 140, 143–6,
Carl Joachim; and ideology 149, 151–3, 161
Truman Doctrine, 122 Weltanschauung, 11, 143, 152
and world postulate (Weltwollung),
Übermensch, 58–9, 125, 134 6, 13, 19, 49, 108, 138
see also under Nietzsche, Friedrich
universalism, 66, 82, 112, 118, 122, Zuckmayer, Carl, 171–
158 2 Zweig, Stefan, 163

(Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought) Felix Rösch (Auth.) - Power, Knowledge, and Dissent in Morgenthau's Worldview (2015, Palgrave Macmillan US)

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Power, Knowledge, and Dissent in

Edited by David Long and Brian Schmidt

Published by Palgrave Macmillan:

Internationalism and Nationalism in Realist Strategies of Republican Peace:

All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

1. Morgenthau, Hans J. (Hans Joachim), 1904–1980—Political and

Angst ist keine Weltanschauung (Kurt von Hammerstein)

1 Hans Morgenthau and Weimar 21

members, as this intellectually diverse and stimulating department pro-

The Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought series. When I

Some of the chapters have been published earlier in different formats:

● The section titled “Pouvoir and Puissance” in chapter II: Hans

Hans Morgenthau: The Scholar as Émigré

carefree childhood; he grew up in a family without financial concerns

Morgenthau enrolled at the University of Munich. Later, he also stud-ied at

colleagues; both reports of his work, written by Walther Burckhardt and

critically investigated the importance of Morgenthau’s socializa-tion in the discourses of Weimar

Humanitas and Morgenthau’s Critique of Modernity

to Morgenthau (n.d.-a: 4; similar 1963c: 422)—people arrange their lives

Gustav Ichheiser, or Hilda Weiss, secured their first full-time academic

This ambition to repoliticize the public leads us to the essence of

to venture into the public: assisting others in achieving their personal

I am not claiming that a Morgenthauian realism necessarily has or even

As Realism emerges from the shadow of Neorealism to reclaim its sta-tus

With Morgenthau’s critique of modernity and focus on humanitas, his

thereby, it can also accommodate Daniel Levine’s (2012) ambition to

Morgenthau’s Realism as a Worldview

Fundamental experiences and attitudes do not emerge in the substratum of

In constructing such a life-system, people refer to their collective mem-

of a society share the same artefacts, like texts, rituals, ceremonies, or

wrong but as misleading. A particular ideology is, therefore, at least on

is immune from challenge.” Mannheim’s notion in particular follows that

Outline of the Book

theory that enables scholars to understand and explain international

the distortion ideologies provided, and thus he argued for a realistic

rested on alienation as a source of phenomenological self-reflection and

societies had a socioeconomic character. He argued against the accel-

Hans Morgenthau and Weimar

As concerns your question about the ultimate source of my values, we are

time of the Wilhelmine Empire (Wehler 2003; Büttner 2008: 21–32).

However, this part cannot provide a discussion of the entire kaleidoscope

had recognized this circumstance and subsequently shifted his interest

Fin de Siècle and Kulturkrise: The German Bildungsbürgertum

required even more synchronization of the various policy fields (Giesen

Yet, scholarship at the Humboldtian University was less concerned with

The Cultural Crisis

guardians of culture, the mandarin intellectuals, in particular, were

empiricism were identified as the primary reasons that had deprived

This demonstrates that the mandarin intellectuals particularly were con-

shattered the identities and sense of belonging of many Germans by

Strasbourg in 1914 (Jung 1990: 14–18) because, as Morgenthau (2004:

Ideologies, Alienation, and the Conscious Pariah

promises of ideologies. Any metaphysical system has to guarantee

expressed criticism. For instance, on an undated slip he accentuated that

Hence, Morgenthau criticized socialism, liberalism as well as any other

Morgenthau’s position toward conservatism is fully outlined for the

existing pluralism of thoughts, therefore, endangered the order of the

context (Kaern 1990: 78–83). This was evidenced to Morgenthau while

Studying Simmel encouraged Morgenthau’s claim that scholarship

The existential determination of knowledge may be regarded as a

This means that knowledge was constructed in a specific social real-ity

The Alienated Mind: Alienation as an Epistemological Source