Hans Joachim Morgenthau Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Hans Joachim Morgenthau (1904–1980) was a German political scientist best known for his work on international relations theory. Born in Coburg, Germany, he entered the University of Frankfurt in 1923 and later attended the University of Munich, obtaining a doctorate in law. He pursued postgraduate work at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland, and was admitted to the bar.

Between 1928 and 1931, Morgenthau worked as an assistant to Hugo Sinzheimer, a left-wing labor lawyer who was a leading Social Democratic Party member during the Weimar era. From 1932 to 1935, Morgenthau taught public law at the University of Geneva; then he moved to Madrid, Spain, for a year before returning to Germany. In 1937, fleeing Nazi persecution, he left Germany for the United States and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1943. Morgenthau taught at Brooklyn College in New York from 1937 to 1939 and then moved on to the University of Kansas City (1939–1944), the University of Chicago (1944–1971), the City College of the City University of New York (1968–1975), and the New School for Social Research in New York (1975–1980). He served as a visiting professor at Harvard, Columbia, Northwestern, the University of California, and Yale and was an adviser to both the U.S. State Department and the Defense Department.

Morgenthau, considered one of the founders of the “political realism” school of international relations, wrote Politics among Nations (1948), which is considered one of the seminal works in international relations theory. He contended that the power interests of nation-states were the driving force behind relations between them.

Morgenthau was an early critic of American involvement in Vietnam, arguing that the United States had put itself in a position from which it could not retreat without embarrassing itself. In a 1965 New York Times Magazine article, Morgenthau asserted that the U.S. intervention in Vietnam was intended to limit the influence of the Communist Chinese regime in Southeast Asia. However, he argued that “China is largely immune to the specific types of power in which the superiority of the United States consists—that is, nuclear, air and naval power.” He suggested the only way to defeat China would be physical conquest, which he noted that no American president had ever suggested. Therefore, he argued, we in the United States “must learn to accommodate ourselves to the predominance of China on the Asian mainland.”

After President Richard Nixon ordered the invasion of Cambodia in April 1970, Morgenthau was quoted in Robert J. Myers’s 1980 article “Hans Morgenthau: the Quest for Justice” as follows:

What will it avail us to save our face in a war without end if we cannot save our souls, if we cannot save ourselves as a nation worthy to be saved? And what kind of face would we be saving at the price of our souls and our purpose as a nation? I can see that face: ignorant, violent, brutal, lying, and mean—the face of some American Hitler.

Morgenthau provided a framework for understanding foreign policy. He adapted a European understanding of politics and foreign policy to the American experience and tried to explain the interrelationship between abstract moral principles and political necessities in world politics. Henry Kissinger, one of Morgenthau’s students, wrote in his 1980 article “A Gentle Analyst of Power—Hans J. Morgenthau” 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.”

Bibliography:

Frei, Christoph. Hans J. Morgenthau: An Intellectual Biography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001.
Kissinger, Henry. “A Gentle Analyst of Power—Hans J. Morgenthau.” The New Republic 2, no. 9 (August 1980).
Morgenthau, Hans J. Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace. New York: Knopf, 1948.
Vietnam and the United States. Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1965.
“We Are Deluding Ourselves in Vietnam.” New York Times Magazine, April 18, 1965.
Myers, Robert J. “Hans Morgenthau: the Quest for Justice.” http:// worldview.cceia.org/archive/worldview/1980/10/3448.html/_res/ id=sa_File1/v23_i010_a002.pdf.
Williams, Michael C., ed. Realism Reconsidered: The Legacy of Hans Morgenthau in International Relations. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

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