Hans Joachim Morgenthau (February 17, 1904 – July 19, 1980) was a German-American jurist and political scientist who was one of the major 20th-century figures in the study of international relations. Morgenthau's works belong to the tradition of realism in international relations theory; he is usually considered among the most influential realists of the post-World War II period. Morgenthau made landmark contributions to international relations theory and the study of international law. His Politics Among Nations, first published in 1948, went through five editions during his lifetime and was widely adopted as a textbook in U.S. universities. While Morgenthau emphasized the centrality of power and "the national interest," the subtitle of Politics Among Nations—"the struggle for power and peace"—indicates his concern not only with the struggle for power but also with the ways in which it is limited by ethical and legal norms.
In addition to his books, Morgenthau wrote widely about international politics and U.S. foreign policy for general-circulation publications such as The New Leader, Commentary, Worldview, The New York Review of Books and The New Republic. He knew and corresponded with many of the leading intellectuals and writers of his era, such as Reinhold Niebuhr, George F. Kennan, Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt. At one point in the early Cold War, Morgenthau was a consultant to the U.S. Department of State when Kennan headed its Policy Planning Staff, as well as a second time during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations until he was dismissed by Johnson when he began to publicly criticize American policy in Vietnam. For most of his career, however, Morgenthau was esteemed as an academic interpreter of U.S. foreign policy.
Education, career, and personal life
Morgenthau was born in an Ashkenazi Jewish family in Coburg, Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Germany in 1904. After attending the Casimirianum, he continued his education at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, the University of Frankfurt am Main, and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. He received his doctorate in 1929 with a thesis entitled International Jurisdiction: Its Nature and Limits, and pursued postdoctoral work at the Geneva Graduate Institute, in Switzerland.
He taught and practiced law in Frankfurt before emigrating to the United States in 1937, after several interim years in Switzerland and Spain. One of his first jobs in the U.S. was teaching night school at Brooklyn College. From 1939 to 1943, Morgenthau taught in Kansas City and taught at Keneseth Israel Shalom Congregation there. Morgenthau then was a professor at the University of Chicago until 1973, when he took a professorial chair at the City College of New York. In the early 1950s, Morgenthau was a visiting professor at Harvard, teaching a graduate seminar; at that time he met Henry Kissinger, who was working on his dissertation.
Morgenthau was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
On moving to New York, Morgenthau separated from his wife, who remained in Chicago partly because of medical issues. He is reported to have tried to initiate plans to start a new relationship while in New York, with Ethel Person (d. 2012), a psychiatrist at Columbia University.
On October 8, 1979, Morgenthau was one of the passengers on board Swissair Flight 316, which crashed while trying to land at Athens-Ellinikon International Airport. The flight had been destined for Bombay and Peking.
Morgenthau died on July 19, 1980, shortly after being admitted to Lenox Hill Hospital in New York with a perforated ulcer. He is buried in the Chabad section of Montefiore Cemetery, in proximity to the Lubavitcher Rebbe, with whom he had a respectful relationship.
European years and functional jurisprudence
Morgenthau completed his doctoral dissertation in Germany in the late 1920s. It was published in 1929 as his first book, The International Administration of Justice, Its Essence and Its Limits. The book was reviewed by Carl Schmitt, who was then a jurist teaching at the University of Berlin. In an autobiographical essay written near the end of his life, Morgenthau related that, although he had looked forward to meeting Schmitt during a visit to Berlin, the meeting went badly and Morgenthau left thinking that he had been in the presence of (in his own words) "the demonic". By the late 1920s Schmitt was becoming the leading jurist of the rising Nazi movement in Germany, and Morgenthau came to see their positions as irreconcilable. (The editors of Morgenthau's The Concept of the Political [see below] state that "the reader of [Morgenthau's] The Concept of the Political ... will easily recognize that Morgenthau deplored Schmitt's understanding of the political on moral grounds and conceptual grounds.")
Following the completion of his doctoral dissertation, Morgenthau left Germany to complete his Habilitation dissertation (license to teach at universities) in Geneva. It was published in French as La Réalité des normes en particulier des normes du droit international: Fondements d'une théorie des normes (The Reality of Norms and in Particular the Norms of International Law: Foundations of a Theory of Norms). It has not been translated into English. The legal scholar Hans Kelsen, who had just arrived in Geneva as a professor, was an adviser to Morgenthau's dissertation. Kelsen was among the strongest critics of Carl Schmitt. Kelsen and Morgenthau became lifelong colleagues even after both emigrated from Europe to take academic positions in the United States.
In 1933, Morgenthau published a second book in French, La notion du "politique", which was translated into English and published in 2012 as The Concept of the Political. In this book Morgenthau seeks to articulate the difference between legal disputes between nations and political disputes between nations or other litigants. The questions driving the inquiry are: (i) Who holds legal power over the objects or concerns being disputed? (ii) In what manner can the holder of this legal power be changed or held accountable? (iii) How can a dispute, the object of which concerns a legal power, be resolved? and (iv) In what manner will the holder of the legal power be protected in the course of exercising that power? For Morgenthau, the end goal of any legal system in this context is to "ensure justice and peace".
In his work in the 1920s and 1930s, Morgenthau sought a "functional jurisprudence," an alternative to mainstream international law. He borrowed ideas from Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, Roscoe Pound, and others. In 1940 Morgenthau set out a research program for legal functionalism in the article "Positivism, Functionalism, and International Law".
Francis Boyle has written that Morgenthau's post-war writings perhaps contributed to a "break between international political science and international legal studies." However, Politics Among Nations contains a chapter on international law, and Morgenthau remained an active contributor to the subject of the relationship between international politics and international law until the end of his career.
American years and political realism
Hans Morgenthau is considered one of the "founding fathers" of the realist school in the 20th century. This school of thought holds that nation-states are the main actors in international relations and that the main concern of the field is the study of power. Morgenthau emphasized the importance of "the national interest," and in Politics Among Nations he wrote that "the main signpost that helps political realism to find its way through the landscape of international politics is the concept of interest defined in terms of power." Morgenthau is sometimes referred to as a classical realist or modern realist in order to differentiate his approach from the structural realism or neo-realism associated with Kenneth Waltz. Recent scholarly assessments of Morgenthau show that his intellectual trajectory was more complicated than originally thought. His realism was infused with moral considerations—though not always acknowledged as such—and during the last part of his life he favored supranational control of nuclear weapons and strongly opposed the U.S. role in the Vietnam War (see below).