Table Of ContentHans J.
Morgenthau
and the
American
Experience
Edited by
Cornelia Navari
Hans J. Morgenthau and the American Experience
Cornelia Navari
Editor
Hans J. Morgenthau
and the American
Experience
Editor
Cornelia Navari
University of Buckingham
Buckingham, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-67497-1 ISBN 978-3-319-67498-8 (eBook)
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P
reface
Hans J. Morgenthau is generally considered a political realist and the
transmitter of continental Realpolitik into American letters. But he has
also been claimed as an idealist, as a constructivist, and as an ethicist. Some
of these claims make sense if we understand that Morgenthau was trained
as a lawyer in the German historical tradition during the time that German
legal realism was struggling to contain the challenges to the Weimar
Republic’s constitutional structure and the crises that confronted it.
Others can be made sense of if we understand that—self-consciously a
“European”—he was continuously adapting his ideas to an American
audience and, in the process, being socialized into an American experi-
ence. This volume illustrates the “Americanization” of Morgenthau.
The project was inspired by the English translation of Morgenthau’s
1933 La Notion du ‘Politique’ (The Concept of the ‘Political’), undertaken
and edited by Hartmut Behr and Felix Rösch, which appeared in 2012.
That text, somewhat obscure to the Anglo-Saxon reader, requiring exten-
sive editorial annotations and with a truncated concept of the political,
stands in sharp contrast to the bold, articulate, and crystalline presentation
of politics as the quest for power that appeared fifteen years later in Politics
Among Nations. At that point, Morgenthau had been ten years in America,
the most recent four years at the University of Chicago, in the department
dominated by the behavioral approach of Charles Merriam, doyen of
American political science and advisor to presidents. During the same
period, America had thrown off the shackles of isolationism and had com-
mitted itself and its formidable power to the defeat of Nazism and to the
reconstruction of world order. It is difficult to imagine that Morgenthau’s
v
vi PREFACE
experience of these different (but not unrelated) Americas did not affect
his thinking about politics, his theoretical ambitions, and his conceptual
framework.
The effort to explore the relationship between Morgenthau’s America
and his theory of politics was initiated at the 2014 International Studies
Association conference in San Francisco, for which a panel on “Morgenthau
in America” was organized, each presenter addressing one of Morgenthau’s
major works, from Scientific Man to his Viet Nam writings. The initial
findings made it clear that a process of evolution had occurred in
Morgenthau’s thinking and that the major stages had to do with his ambi-
tions as a public intellectual determined to bring the political wisdom of
Europe to an America enthralled (he trusted not permanently) with scien-
tific rationalism. It was also clear, however, that in the process he himself
was forced to take on some American attitudes, not least in order to make
his ideas palatable in a gradually less alien political culture. Those papers,
collected together into a roundtable on “Morgenthau in America” for the
journal Ethics and International Affairs (2013, 30:1), have been revised
and extended here, and a chapter added on Morgenthau’s legacy.
The reader will recognize the method as “ideas in context”. It eschews
influences over long time spans, including intellectual influences, in favor
of close attention to text, intent, and immediate context—in Morgenthau’s
case, political and institutional. Of intellectual influences, there can be no
doubt: Reinhold Niebuhr, Kenneth Thompson, Carl Schmidt, and E. H.
Carr appear, often in their own words, and the presence of others
(Treitschke, Meinecke and Weber; George Kennan and William T. R. Fox)
can be detected in the formulations themselves. Morgenthau’s influences
are evident in the texts, appearing and disappearing as appropriate to the
argument of the time. The method does not elicit an essential Morgenthau
but rather a theorist grappling with a variety of problematics at different
times who returns to the same intellectual roots but from different per-
spectives and with different purposes. The chapters highlight the major
stages in the evolution of Morgenthau’s political ethics and his political
science.
Buckingham, UK Cornelia Navari
c
ontents
Morgenthau in Europe: Searching for the Political 1
Felix Rösch
Scientific Man and the New Science of Politics 27
Hartmut Behr and Hans-Jörg Sigwart
Politics Among Nations: A Book for America 55
Christoph Frei
The National Interest and the ‘Great Debate’ 75
Cornelia Navari
The Purpose of American Politics 95
Richard Ned Lebow
Vietnam Writings and the National Security State 115
Douglas B. Klusmeyer
vii
viii CONTENTS
Morgenthau in America: The Legacy 143
Greg Russell
Index 169
L c
ist of ontributors
Hartmut Behr is Professor of International Politics at Newcastle University
(UK). His work includes studies in political theory, International Relations Theory
and sociology of knowledge of the discipline, difference and “otherness”, and
Critical European Studies. His most recent books include: A History of
International Political Theory (2010), Hans J. Morgenthau, The Concept of the
Political (2012, together with Felix Rösch), and Politics of Difference (2014). He
is Principal Investigator of the Leverhulme-funded research network on “Critical
Theory Meets Classical Realism”.
Christoph Frei is Associate Professor of Political Science and Academic Director
of the International Affairs and Governance Program at the University of St.
Gallen. His professional experience includes multi-year stints in France, Hungary,
and the United States. His research interests focus on political culture (France)
and the history of political thought (Rousseau, Jasay). In the context of
International Relations, Frei is the author of Hans J. Morgenthau: An Intellectual
Biography (2001).
Douglas B. Klusmeyer is an associate professor in the Department of Justice,
Law and Criminology and an affiliate faculty member of the History Department
of American University, Washington, DC. His research interests include immigra-
tion and citizenship policy, international political theory, and legal history. His
most recent book (with Demetrios Papademetriou) is: Immigration Policy of the
Federal Republic of Germany (2013).
Richard Ned Lebow is Professor of International Political Theory in the War
Studies Department of King’s College London, Bye-Fellow of Pembroke College,
University of Cambridge, and the James O. Freedman Presidential Professor
(Emeritus) of Government at Dartmouth College. Among his recent publications
ix
x LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
are Forbidden Fruit: Counterfactuals and International Relations (2010); Why
Nations Fight: The Past and Future of War (2010); and The Politics and Ethics of
Identity (2012), winner of the Alexander L. George Award for the best book of
the year by the International Society of Political Psychology.
Cornelia Navari is Visiting Professor of International Affairs at the University of
Buckingham and Honorary Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham
(UK). With reference to the history of thought, she has written Internationalism
and the State in the 20th Century (2000), Public Intellectuals and International
Affairs (2013), and “Europe’s Public Intellectuals” in the Handbook on European
Foreign Policy (Sage, 2015). She has edited Ethical Reasoning in International
Affairs (2013) and, with Daniel Green, Guide to the English School of International
Relations (Wiley, 2014).
Felix Rösch is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Coventry University.
He works on encounters of difference in transcultural and intercultural contexts at
the intersection of classical realism and critical theories. He has published amongst
others with the Review of International Studies, Politics, European Journal of
International Relations, and International Studies Perspectives. His most recent
books include The Concept of the Political (2012), Émigré Scholars and the Genesis
of International Relations (2014), and Power, Knowledge, and Dissent in
Morgenthau’s Worldview (2015).
Greg Russell holds a PhD (1987) in Political Science from Louisiana State
University and is Professor of Political Science at the University of Oklahoma. He
has published numerous articles and books on the American diplomatic tradition,
including Hans J. Morgenthau and the Ethics of American Statecraft, John Quincy
Adams and the Public Virtues of Diplomacy, and The Statecraft of Theodore Roosevelt:
The Duties of Nations and World Order. He is working on a manuscript entitled
Elihu Root, International Law, and the World Court.
Hans-Jörg Sigwart is a senior lecturer (Akademischer Oberrat) at the Political
Science Institute of Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen- Nuremberg,
Germany. His research focuses on political theory, its relation to social theory, and
the history of political ideas. His publications include The Wandering Thought of
Hannah Arendt (2016), “The Logic of Legitimacy: Ethics in Political Realism”,
in The Review of Politics 75 (2013), Politische Hermeneutik. Verstehen, Politik und
Kritik bei John Dewey und Hannah Arendt (Königshausen & Neumann, 2012),
and Das Politische und die Wissenschaft. Intellektuell-biographische Studien zum
Frühwerk Eric Voegelins (Königshausen & Neumann, 2005).
