Life Experience and Intellectual Encounters

Abstract

In 1976, Hans Morgenthau was asked by a journal to make a list of the ten books that were the most important to him, for an article called ‘Books that Shape Lives’ (see Frei, 2001, p. 113). In an impressive list of authors and titles, among Carr, Arendt and Plato, along with Aristotle’s Politics and Niebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man, we find The Collected Works of Friedrich Nietzsche and The Political Writings of Max Weber (Frei, 2001, p. 113). This list constitutes one of the very few public acknowledgements of the authors whom Morgenthau considered of utmost importance to him, authors whose insights he deemed relevant to his theory, and employed for his own purposes. The present chapter intends to focus on the Nietzschean—Weberian section of Morgenthau’s list, and to emphasise these thinkers’ special role in the articulation of Morgenthau’s scholarly perspective, and of his concern with meaning and disenchantment in particular.