Hans J. Morgenthau and the American Experience

Cornelia Navari

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9783319674971
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319674988
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This edited volume covers the development of the thought of the political realist Hans J. Morgenthau from the time of his arrival in America from Nazi-dominated Europe through to his emphatic denunciation of American policy in the Vietnam War. Critical to the development of thinking about American foreign policy in the post-war period, he laid out the idea of a national interest defined in terms of power, the precarious uncertainty of the international balance of power, the weakness of international morality, the decentralized character of international law, the deceptiveness of ideologies, and the requirements of a peace-preserving diplomacy. This volume is required reading for students of American foreign policy, and for anyone who wishes to understand the single most important source of the ideas underpinning American foreign policy since the end of the Second World War.

© The Author(s) 2018

Cornelia Navari (ed.)Hans J. Morgenthau and the American Experiencehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67498-8_2

Begin Abstract

Scientific Man and the New Science of Politics

Hartmut Behr¹ and Hans-Jörg Sigwart²

(1)

Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

(2)

Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Erlangen, Germany

Hartmut Behr (Corresponding author)

Hans-Jörg Sigwart

End Abstract

In 1946, there appeared Hans Morgenthau’s Scientific Man vs Power Politics and, in 1952, Eric Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics, two classical representative texts of émigré scholarship in the USA. Many of the major questions and problems in Morgenthau’s oeuvre also figure prominently in Voegelin’s writings. The two thinkers seem to share a general “parallel theoretical interest”, as Morgenthau himself noticed in a letter to Voegelin in 1953.¹ Although this casual remark apparently did not lead to a deeper conversation between them or even to a substantial mutual consideration of their major writings, it nonetheless deserves closer scrutiny. While there are obvious differences between Morgenthau and Voegelin in the breadth of their philosophical scope and historical framework, they do share a number of major concerns. Both thinkers were convinced, to begin with, that political science and theory, in order to be able to properly understand its subject matter and to live up to its political and intellectual responsibilities, must assume an uncompromisingly realist perspective.² In line with this realist accent, both strongly argued, furthermore, for a historical and anthropological foundation of political science.³ And both shared a distinctly critical perspective on the positivist epistemological and methodological foundations and the “scientistic” underpinnings of modern social sciences . Besides these common topics and concerns, it is also the similar “transatlantic ” socio-cultural context in which both reflected on their theoretical questions when writing their major studies in the 1940s and the following decades which makes their comparison particularly interesting. Written by two émigré scholars who were trying to locate themselves within, and to make sense of, the cultural environment of post-War American society and academia, both authors’ writings reflect their peculiar situation inhabiting two sometimes crucially different semantic and cultural contexts.

In the following we argue that a parallel consideration of some of the common topics both authors dealt with and of their common intellectual background can help to shed light on their intentions, styles of theorizing, and self-perceptions as political thinkers. When read in comparison as two critical, sometimes deliberately polemical, but also genuinely self-reflective oeuvres, Morgenthau’s and Voegelin’s writings turn out to represent two partly similar, partly different understandings of realist social critique and, in more personal terms, of the social and intellectual role of the émigré as a scholar and a social critic in a time of intellectual and political crisis. To bring out the similarities and differences between their positions, the problem of modern scientism can serve as an exemplary topic, because both authors’ reflections on this subject matter are closely connected with their self-perceptions as critical thinkers and more or less explicitly related to their personal background as émigré scholars. Before we focus on these questions in the second and third sections below, we first discuss this background itself.

The Émigré Experience

Morgenthau’s Scientific Man vs Power Politics was developed from a lecture on “Liberalism and Foreign Policy” that he gave in 1940 at the New School of Social Research in New York as part of a lecture series on Liberalism Today and appeared in 1946, one year after he received tenure at the University of Chicago . The monograph demarcates the beginning of Morgenthau’s career in the United States, to which he had emigrated nine years earlier. The text also reflects Morgenthau’s place between two academic cultures: his language in Scientific Man partly stems from, but also tries to leave behind, his European academic socialization and to adjust to the American cultural environment —a task which was obviously not accomplished easily and posed some difficulties. Although essential parts of the text were written already in Germany before Morgenthau’s emigration, the book clearly reflects his bewilderment about American political and academic culture and, as he perceived it, its cheerful and naïve optimism about the betterment and progress of politics, society, and humanity in general. Due to this background, Scientific Man is in large parts written in the style of a pamphlet; it is an attempt to hammer home certain philosophical positions—positions that were largely unpopular in the US social sciences in the 1940s (and later). More explicitly than his later and more influential books, Scientific Man articulates essential aspects of Morgenthau’s intellectual self-perception, his understanding of his own role not only as a philosophically inspired political scientist, but also as a public critic of his time and “his” societies, both in Europe and America.

Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics ([1952] 2000) goes back to a series of lectures held at the University of Chicago , hence at Morgenthau’s home university, in the summer 1951. It appeared a year later in the prestigious Walgreen Foundation Lecture series, the same series in which Leo Strauss’ Natural Right and History, Robert Dahl’s A Preface to Democratic Theory, and Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition were originally published. In the book Voegelin unfolds a neo-classical and genuinely realist theory of representation which focuses on the crucial role of certain speculative anthropo-ontological cultural narratives and symbolizations within the political self-interpretations of societies and on a determined critique of the peculiar forms which such narratives assume in modern societies.⁴ On the basis of a broad analysis of the Western history of ideas from antiquity to the present, the study for the first time presents Voegelin’s renowned thesis that the essence of modernity consists of an immanentist ideology of worldly self-salvation in which a “gnostic ” undercurrent pervading Western history eventually attains social dominance and fully unfolds its politically destructive potentials.⁵ The book established Voegelin’s reputation as a genuine intellectual voice in political philosophy and as a determined critic of modern progressivism . Similarly to Scientific Man, the New Science in large parts uses the pointed language and style of a polemical pamphlet to bring across its uncompromisingly critical message. And also the New Science, like Scientific Man, conceptually and empirically reflects its author’s two-sided Central European and American background.

In terms of the disciplinary history of political science , both books are part of the phenomenon of European émigré scholarship in the United States in the mid-twentieth century. This peculiar discourse not only substantially shaped the American and international theory debates of the time (see Söllner 1996; Gunnell 1993), but in turn arguably also influenced the perspectives of those scholars participating in it. The position of the émigré posed unusual challenges, pragmatic as well as intellectual ones. It required some kind of intellectual self-localization within the new social and political environment and an idea of how to actively relate to this environment as a scholar, in terms of conceptual language, criteria of relevance, and theoretical self-understanding. What kind of intellectual role was there to play for a European émigré within US society and academia? What kind of theoretical questions did the “American experience” raise, perceived from the perspective of the European émigré? Which contributions, both to the dominant scientific discussions in the US academic community at the time as well as to the major problems occupying the American public in general, could be derived from the émigrés’ European academic background and from their immediate experiences with totalitarian movements and regimes?

The problem of how to reflect upon and answer these questions pervades the discursive field of émigré scholarship . Its margins may be marked out, as John Gunnell suggests, by the opposite exemplary cases of Paul Lazarsfeld on the one hand who, understanding himself as a positivist, ‘had found himself uneasy’ in a European atmosphere ‘dominated by philosophical and speculative minds’ and for whom, as a consequence, “assimilation” to the American social sciences ‘was in many respects relatively easy’, and Theodor W. Adorno on the other hand, whose Marxist theoretical orientation and emphasis on a fundamental “critique of culture” proved to be barely compatible with American society and social science (Gunnell 1993: 183 f.). As Gunnell’s characterization indicates, the attitude toward the academic field in the US, particularly toward the theore...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• Morgenthau in Europe: Searching for the Political
• Scientific Man and the New Science of Politics
• Politics Among Nations: A Book for America
• The National Interest and the ‘Great Debate’
• The Purpose of American Politics
• Vietnam Writings and the National Security State
• Morgenthau in America: The Legacy
• Backmatter