Hans Morgenthau

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Lore & Background

Morgenthau was born into an Ashkenazi Jewish family in Coburg, Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Germany in 1904. After attending the Casimirianum, he studied 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 U.S. jobs was teaching night school at Brooklyn College. From 1939 to 1943, Morgenthau taught in Kansas City and taught at Keneseth Israel Shalom Congregation there. He 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. He was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. In his European years, Morgenthau completed his doctoral dissertation, published in 1929 as his first book, *The International Administration of Justice, Its Essence and Its Limits*. It was reviewed by Carl Schmitt, then a jurist teaching at the University of Berlin. Morgenthau later related that meeting Schmitt went badly and he left thinking he had been in the presence of "the demonic." His Habilitation dissertation, published in French as *La Réalité des normes en particulier des normes du droit international: Fondements d'une théorie des normes*, was advised by Hans Kelsen, who became a lifelong colleague. In 1933, Morgenthau published a second book in French, *La notion du "politique"*, translated into English in 2012 as *The Concept of the Political*. In these early works, Morgenthau sought a "functional jurisprudence," an alternative to mainstream international law, borrowing ideas from Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, Roscoe Pound, and others. In 1940 he set out a research program for legal functionalism in the article "Positivism, Functionalism, and International Law."

During the American years, Morgenthau became a founding father of the realist school. His *Scientific Man versus Power Politics* (1946) argued against an overreliance on science and technology as solutions to political and social problems, presenting a "pessimistic view of human nature" centered on a universal lust for power. *Politics Among Nations* (1948) went through five editions during his lifetime and was widely adopted as a textbook in U.S. universities. Starting with the second edition, Morgenthau included a section called "Six Principles of Political Realism." He wrote widely about international politics and U.S. foreign policy for publications such as *The New Leader*, *Commentary*, *Worldview*, *The New York Review of Books* and *The New Republic*. He knew and corresponded with Reinhold Niebuhr, George F. Kennan, Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt. 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, and 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. On October 8, 1979, he was one of the passengers on board Swissair Flight 316, which crashed while trying to land at Athens-Ellinikon International Airport. He died on July 19, 1980, shortly after being admitted to Lenox Hill Hospital in New York with a perforated ulcer. He is buried in the Chabad section of Montefiore Cemetery, in proximity to the Lubavitcher Rebbe, with whom he had a respectful relationship.

Reader's Guide

Hans Morgenthau's significance lies in his foundational role in shaping 20th-century international relations theory through the realist tradition. His *Politics Among Nations* became a widely adopted textbook in U.S. universities, defining the field's focus on power and national interest. However, his realism was more nuanced than often portrayed: the subtitle "the struggle for power and peace" reflects his concern with ethical and legal norms as limits on power. Recent scholarly assessments show his intellectual trajectory was more complicated than originally thought, with moral considerations infused into his realism—though not always acknowledged as such. Morgenthau's early work in functional jurisprudence sought to bridge international law and politics, though Francis Boyle has written that his post-war writings may have contributed to a "break between international political science and international legal studies." His later opposition to the Vietnam War and advocacy for supranational control of nuclear weapons demonstrate the evolution of his thought. Morgenthau is sometimes referred to as a classical realist or modern realist to differentiate his approach from the structural realism or neo-realism associated with Kenneth Waltz. His legacy endures as a central figure in classical realism, and his writings continue to be studied for their insights into power, ethics, and international order.

Did You Know?

• Morgenthau's doctoral dissertation from 1929 was reviewed by Carl Schmitt, whom Morgenthau later described as 'the demonic' after a bad meeting.
• He was a passenger on Swissair Flight 316, which crashed at Athens-Ellinikon International Airport on October 8, 1979.
• Morgenthau was dismissed as a consultant to the Johnson administration after publicly criticizing American policy in Vietnam.
• He is buried in the Chabad section of Montefiore Cemetery, in proximity to the Lubavitcher Rebbe, with whom he had a respectful relationship.
• In the early 1950s, Morgenthau met Henry Kissinger while teaching a graduate seminar at Harvard, when Kissinger was working on his dissertation.