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.H. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, 4th edition (Knopf, 1967), chapter 15.
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,Daniel Rice, Reinhold Niebuhr and His Circle of Influence (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013), chapter on Hans Morgenthau. George F. Kennan,Daniel Rice, Reinhold Niebuhr and His Circle of Influence, chapter on George Kennan. Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt.Douglas Klusmeyer, "Beyond Tragedy: Hannah Arendt and Hans Morgenthau on Responsibility, Evil and Political Ethics," International Studies Review 11, number 2 (2009): pages 332–351. 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.See e.g. Hans Morgenthau, In Defense of the National Interest: A Critical Examination of American Foreign Policy, with a new introduction by Kenneth W. Thompson (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982).
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.Hartmut Behr and Felix Roesch, intro. to Hans Morgenthau, The Concept of the Political, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, page 13. 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.Barry Gewen, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World, W.W. Norton, 2020, page 229.
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.G. O. Mazur, ed. One Hundred Year Commemoration to the Life of Hans Morgenthau. New York: Semenenko, 2004.
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.Small amount of plutonium missing from crashed jet 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."Hans Morgenthau dies; noted political scientist". The Telegraph, July 21, 1980. 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.Morgenthau, Hans. Die internationale Rechtspflege, ihr Wesen und ihre Grenzen, in the Frankfurter Abhandlungen zum Kriegsverhütungsrecht book series (Leipzig: Universitätsverlag Noske, 1929), still untranslated into English. 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"."Fragment of an Intellectual Autobiography: 1904–1932," in Kenneth W. Thompson and Robert J. Myers, eds., Truth and Tragedy: A Tribute to Hans J. Morgenthau (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1984). 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.")Behr and Roesch, Intro. to Hans Morgenthau, The Concept of the Political, trans M. Vidal, page 19. For a different view of the relation between Morgenthau's ideas and Schmitt's, see, e.g., W. Scheuerman, "Carl Schmitt and Hans Morgenthau: Realism and Beyond" (see note 3).
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.Morgenthau, Hans. La Réalité des normes en particulier des normes du droit international: Fondements d'une théorie des normes (Paris: Alcan, 1934). 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.The complete set of the articles published in the debate between Kelsen and Schmitt during the 1930s has been collected by Lars Vinx and published by Cambridge University Press in English translation in 2015. The Guardian of the Constitution: Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt on the Limits of Constitutional Law. Cambridge Studies in Constitutional Law, Series Number 12, ed. Lars Vinx, 2015. 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.Morgenthau, Hans (2012). The Concept of the Political, Palgrave Macmillan. 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,Schuett, Robert. "Freudian Roots of Political Realism: The Importance of Sigmund Freud to Hans J. Morgenthau's Theory of International Power Politics." History of the Human Sciences 20, number 4 (2007): pages 53–78. 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".Morgenthau, Hans J., "Positivism, Functionalism, and International Law," American Journal of International Law, volume 34, 2 (1940): pages 260–284
Francis Boyle has written that Morgenthau's post-war writings perhaps contributed to a "break between international political science and international legal studies."Francis Boyle, World Politics and International Law, page 12 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.Morgenthau, Hans (1974). "International Law and International Politics: An Easy Partnership," Proceedings of the Annual Meetings of the American Society of International Law (1974), pages 331–334.
American years and political realism