Abstract
Most accounts of Hans Morgenthau’s relationship to his adopted country operate under the sign of exile rather than that of pilgrimage. What such accounts often do not capture, however, is the substantive vision of international affairs that scholars like Morgenthau brought to their transactions with interlocutors in the United States, and how radically that vision differed from the one on offer in the bulk of US political science. Morgenthau was not simply trying to make space for himself in his adopted country; he was instead hoping to make a contribution to political thought generally, by articulating a way of worlding that differed significantly from the twin “progressive” pillars of a faith in the perfectability of human society through reason and a brash optimism that all problems were susceptible to technical solution that he found all too common in the United States. Morgenthau’s pilgrimage was thus not to a happy place of perfect contentment but to a place which had as its chief virtue the preservation of politics as an autonomous aspect of human social life.
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Notes
- 1.
As in a peregrine falcon, so-called because it is migratory and caught while on migration instead of being taken from the nest.
- 2.
Note that Kant never actually says that we can know anything for sure about our noumenal, rational selves; rather, as with other noumenal objects, we can transcendentally infer certain basic things about them (such as their existence) from the phenomenal facts that we construct as our a priori intuitions permit. In Kant’s system, the presumptions of rationality and freedom of choice are transcendentally necessary for us, and this is as close to knowledge of our noumenal selves as we can get. But in Kant’s view, this is sufficient to give us positive moral duties.
- 3.
Carl Schmitt is the clear target here, as Morgenthau devotes the better part of a chapter of the book to criticizing Schmitt’s position that the friend-enemy distinction suffices to define “the political.” Indeed, given Morgenthau’s skepticism about any such definition of political matters based on content, I wonder whether “The Concept of ‘Politics’” might not have been a better English title of a book that was titled in French La notion du ‘politique’.
- 4.
Morgenthau suggests that in the international realm, because of the involvement of multiple states with multiple objectives, political issues are even more prevalent and obvious than in domestic life (2012, 119).
- 5.
In vintage neo-Kantian fashion, legal positivists like Kelsen invariably began their analyses with a sharp separation between what is and what should be, and located their own arguments in the sphere of the “is.” Thus, the irony of their legal realist opponents insisting on the determination of what is, as against what they understood to be the prescriptive idealism of the legal positivists, is that both sides of the argument claimed to be “realistic.”
- 6.
I have modified the English translation, which is “a slow, powerful drilling through hard boards, with a mixture of passion and a sense of proportion” (Weber 2004, 93). The use of “powerful” to translate “starkes” seems confusing because what Weber is talking about here is not the politician’s power to persist, but her inner strength. And “slow boring of hard boards” is so much a part of the vernacular now that modifying it without just cause seems unwarranted. I also retained Weber’s original word order, which works as well in German as it does in English.
- 7.
The difference in targets can probably be explained by the circumstances each scholar was writing in. For Weber in 1919, armed prophets were a present danger; for Morgenthau in the 1930s, the problem was making his readers recognize the inescapability of political tensions despite an elaborate technical legal apparatus.
- 8.
Of course, methodologically Morgenthau and Weber also shared quite a bit in common (Turner and Mazur 2009).
- 9.
This discussion draws heavily on Jackson (2014, 274–76).
- 10.
Although Morgenthau does reserve a place for such analyses in his expanded science2 of politics: they can help the decision-maker forecast consequences and anticipate contingencies (Morgenthau 1946, 148–52). What they cannot do is replace politics with calculation.
- 11.
Note that I am glossing over Morgenthau’s pronounced and sustained effort to ground his notion of politics, and the implications of that notion for the question of just what a social science could be other than a species of scientistic rationalism, in a philosophical anthropology centered on inherent selfishness and the will to dominate others (Morgenthau 1946, 191–96). While this is clearly a different “model of man” (Moon 1975, sexism in original) from that common in scientistic liberalism, I do not think that model is fundamental to Morgenthau’s opposition to US progressivism . Indeed, I would suggest that the model itself is co-constituted with Morgenthau’s skepticism about rationality, rather than serving as the source of that skepticism—but this would take a much more elaborate reading to substantiate.
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Jackson, P.T. (2017). Hans Morgenthau’s Pilgrimage Among the Engineers. In: Cochran, M., Navari, C. (eds) Progressivism and US Foreign Policy between the World Wars. The Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58432-8_13
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