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Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, Fifth Edition, Revised, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978, pp. 4-15 SIX PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL REALISM 1.Political realism believes that politics, like society in general, is governed by objective laws that have their roots in human nature. In order to improve society it is first necessary to understand the laws by which society lives. The operation of these laws being impervious to our preferences, men will challenge them only at the risk of failure. Realism, believing as it does in the objectivity of the laws of politics, must also believe in the possibility of developing a rational theory that reflects, however imperfectly and one- sidedly, these objective laws. It believes also, then, in the possibility of distinguishing in politics between truth and opinion-between what is true objectively and rationally, supported by evidence and illuminated by reason, and what is only a subjective judgment, divorced from the facts as they are and informed by prejudice and wishful thinking. Human nature, in which the laws of politics have their roots, has not changed since the classical philosophies of China, India, and Greece endeavored to discover these laws. Hence, novelty is not necessarily a virtue in political theory, nor is old age a defect. The fact that a theory of politics, if there be such a theory, has never been heard of before tends to create a presumption against, rather than in favor of, its soundness. Conversely, the fact that a theory of politics was developed hundreds or even thousands of years ag~as was the theory of the balance of power-does not create a presumption that it must be outmoded and obsolete. A theory of politics must be subjected to the dual test of reason and experience. To dismiss such a theory because it had its flowering in centuries past is to present not a rational argument but a modernistic prejudice that takes for granted the superiority of the present over the past. To dispose of the revival of such a theory as a "fashion" or "fad" is tantamount to assuming that in matters political we can have opinions but no truths.
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Hans J. Morgenthau Politics Among Nations- The Struggle for Power and Peace

Sep 14, 2014

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Page 1: Hans J. Morgenthau Politics Among Nations- The Struggle for Power and Peace

Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, Fifth Edition, Revised, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978, pp. 4-15

SIX PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL REALISM

1.Political realism believes that politics, like society in general, is governed by objective laws that have their roots in human nature. In order to improve society it is first necessary to understand the laws by which society lives. The operation of these laws being impervious to our preferences, men will challenge them only at the risk of failure.

Realism, believing as it does in the objectivity of the laws of politics, must also believe in the possibility of developing a rational theory that reflects, however imperfectly and one-sidedly, these objective laws. It believes also, then, in the possibility of distinguishing in politics between truth and opinion-between what is true objectively and rationally, supported by evidence and illuminated by reason, and what is only a subjective judgment, divorced from the facts as they are and informed by prejudice and wishful thinking.

Human nature, in which the laws of politics have their roots, has not changed since the classical philosophies of China, India, and Greece endeavored to discover these laws. Hence, novelty is not necessarily a virtue in political theory, nor is old age a defect. The fact that a theory of politics, if there be such a theory, has never been heard of before tends to create a presumption against, rather than in favor of, its soundness. Conversely, the fact that a theory of politics was developed hundreds or even thousands of years ag~as was the theory of the balance of power-does not create a presumption that it must be outmoded and obsolete. A theory of politics must be subjected to the dual test of reason and experience. To dismiss such a theory because it had its flowering in centuries past is to present not a rational argument but a modernistic prejudice that takes for granted the superiority of the present over the past. To dispose of the revival of such a theory as a "fashion" or "fad" is tantamount to assuming that in matters political we can have opinions but no truths.

For realism, theory consists in ascertaining facts and giving them meaning through reason. It assumes that the character of a foreign policy can be ascertained only through the examination of the political acts performed and of the foreseeable consequences of these acts. Thus we can find out what statesmen have actually done, and from the foreseeable consequences of their acts we can surmise what their objectives might have been.

Yet examination of the facts is not enough. To give meaning to the factual raw material of foreign policy, we must approach political reality with a kind of rational outline, a map that suggests to us the possible meanings of foreign policy. In other words, we put ourselves in the position of a statesman who must meet a certain problem of foreign policy under certain circumstances, and we ask ourselves what the rational alternatives are from which a statesman may choose who must meet this problem under these circumstances (presuming always that he acts in a rational manner), and which of these rational alternatives this particular statesman, acting under these circumstances, is likely to choose. It is the testing of this rational hypothesis against the actual facts and their consequences that gives theoretical meaning to the facts of international politics.

2. The main signpost that helps political realism to find its way through the landscape of international politics is the concept of interest defined in terms of power. This concept provides the link between reason trying to understand international politics and the facts to be understood.

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It sets politics as an autonomous sphere of action and understanding apart from other spheres, such as economics (understood in terms of interest defined as wealth), ethics, aesthetics, or religion. Without such a concept a theory of politics, international or domestic, would be altogether impossible, for without it we could not distinguish between political and nonpolitical facts, nor could we bring at least a measure of systematic order to the political sphere.

We assume that statesmen think and act in terms of interest defined as power, and the evidence of history bears that assumption out. That assumption allows us to retrace and anticipate, as it were, the steps a statesman--past, present, or future--has taken or will take on the political scene. We look over his shoulder when he writes his dispatches; we listen in on his conversation with other statesmen; we read and anticipate his very thoughts. Thinking in terms of interest defined as power, we think as he does, and as disinterested observers we understand his thoughts and actions perhaps better than he, the actor on the political scene, does himself.

The concept of interest defined as power imposes intellectual discipline upon the observer, infuses rational order into the subject matter of politics, and thus makes the theoretical understanding of politics possible. On the side of the actor, it provides for rational discipline in action and creates that astounding continuity in foreign policy which makes American, British, or Russian foreign policy appear as an intelligible, rational continuum, by and large consistent within itself, regardless of the different motives, preferences, and intellectual and moral qualities of successive statesmen. A realist theory of international politics, then, will guard against two popular fallacies: the concern with motives and the concern with ideological preferences.

To search for the clue to foreign policy exclusively in the motives of statesmen is both futile and deceptive. It is futile because motives are the most illusive of psychological data, distorted as they are, frequently beyond recognition, by the interests and emotions of actor and observer alike. Do we really know what our own motives are? And what do we know of the motives of others?

Yet even if we had access to the real motives of statesmen, that knowledge would help us little in understanding foreign policies, and might well lead us astray. It is true that the knowledge of the statesman's motives may give us one among many clues as to what the direction of his foreign policy might be. It cannot give us, however, the one clue by which to predict his foreign policies. History shows no exact and necessary correlation between the quality of motives and the quality of foreign policy. This is true in both moral and political terms.

We cannot conclude from the good intentions of a statesman that his foreign policies will be either morally praiseworthy or politically successful. Judging his motives, we can say that he will not intentionally pursue policies that are morally wrong, but we can say nothing about the probability of their success. If we want to know the moral and political qualities of his actions, we must know them, not his motives. How often have statesmen been motivated by the desire to improve the world, and ended by making it worse? And how often have they sought one goal, and ended by achieving something they neither expected nor desired?

Neville Chamberlain's politics of appeasement were, as far as we can judge, inspired by good motives; he was probably less motivated by considerations of personal power than were many other British prime ministers, and he sought to preserve peace and to assure the happiness of all concerned. Yet his policies helped to make the Second World War inevitable, and to bring untold miseries to millions of men. Sir Winston Churchill's motives, on the other hand, were much less universal in scope and much more narrowly directed toward personal and national power, yet the foreign policies that sprang from these inferior motives were certainly superior in moral and political quality to those pursued by his predecessor. Judged by his motives, Robespierre was one

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of the most virtuous men who ever lived. Yet it was the utopian radicalism of that very virtue that made him kill those less virtuous than himself, brought him to the scaffold, and destroyed the revolution of which he was a leader.

Good motives give assurance against deliberately bad policies; they do not guarantee the moral goodness and political success of the policies they inspire. What is important to know, if one wants to understand foreign policy, is not primarily the motives of a statesman, but his intellectual ability to comprehend the essentials of foreign policy, as well as his political ability to translate what he has comprehended into successful political action. It follows that while ethics in the abstract judges the moral qualities of motives, political theory must judge the political qualities of intellect, will, and action.

A realist theory of international politics will also avoid the other popular fallacy of equating the foreign policies of a statesman with his philosophic or political sympathies, and of deducing the former from the latter. Statesmen, especially under contemporary conditions, may well make a habit of presenting their foreign policies in terms of their philosophic and political sympathies in order to gain popular support for them. Yet they will distinguish with Lincoln between their "official duty," which is to think and act in terms of the national interest, and their "personal wish," which is to see their own moral values and political principles realized throughout the world. Political realism does not require, nor does it condone, indifference to political ideals and moral principles, but it requires indeed a sharp distinction between the desirable and the possible-between what is desirable everywhere and at all times and what is possible under the concrete circumstances of time and place.

It stands to reason that not all foreign policies have always followed so rational, objective, and unemotional a course. The contingent elements of personality, prejudice, and subjective preference, and of all the weaknesses of intellect and will which flesh is heir to, are bound to deflect foreign policies from their rational course. Especially where foreign policy is conducted under the conditions of democratic control, the need to marshal popular emotions to the support of foreign policy cannot fail to impair the rationality of foreign policy itself. Yet a theory of foreign policy which aims at rationality must for the time being, as it were, abstract from these irrational elements and seek to paint a picture of foreign policy which presents the rational essence to be found in experience, without the contingent deviations from rationality which are also found in experience.

Deviations from rationality which are not the result of the personal whim or the personal psychopathology of the policy maker may appear contingent only from the vantage point of rationality, but may themselves be elements in a coherent system of irrationality. The conduct of the Indochina War by the United States suggests that possibility. It is a question worth looking into whether modern psychology and psychiatry have provided us with the conceptual tools which would enable us to construct, as it were, a counter-theory of irrational politics, a kind of pathology of international politics.

The experience of the Indochina War suggests five factors such a theory might encompass: the imposition upon the empirical world of a simplistic and a priori picture of the world derived from folklore and ideological assumption, that is, the replacement of experience with superstition; the refusal to correct this picture of the world in the light of experience; the persistence in a foreign policy derived from the misperception of reality and the use of intelligence for the purpose not of adapting policy to reality but of reinterpreting reality to fit policy; the egotism of the policy makers widening the gap between perception and policy, on the one hand, and reality, on the other; finally, the urge to close the gap at least subjectively by action, any kind of action, that

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creates the illusion of mastery over a recalcitrant reality. According to the Wall Street Journal of April 3, 1970, "the desire to 'do something' pervades top levels of Government and may overpower other 'common sense' advice that insists the U.S. ability to shape events is negligible. The yen for action could lead to bold policy as therapy."

The difference between international politics as it actually is and a rational theory derived from it is like the difference between a photograph and a painted portrait. The photograph shows everything that can be seen by the naked eye; the painted portrait does not show everything that can be seen by the naked eye, but it shows, or at least seeks to show, one thing that the naked eye cannot see: the human essence of the person portrayed.

Political realism contains not only a theoretical but also a normative element. It knows that political reality is replete with contingencies and systemic irrationalities and points to the typical influences they exert upon foreign policy. Yet it shares with all social theory the need, for the sake of theoretical understanding, to stress the rational elements of political reality; for it is these rational elements that make reality intelligible for theory. Political realism presents the theoretical construct of a rational foreign policy which experience can never completely achieve.

At the same time political realism considers a rational foreign policy to be good foreign policy; for only a rational foreign policy minimizes risks and maximizes benefits and, hence, complies both with the moral precept of prudence and the political requirement of success. Political realism wants the photographic picture of the political world to resemble as much as possible its painted portrait. Aware of the inevitable gap between good—that is, rational—foreign policy and foreign policy as it actually is, political realism maintains not only that theory must focus upon the rational elements of political reality, but also that foreign policy ought to be rational in view of its own moral and practical purposes.

Hence, it is no argument against the theory here presented that actual foreign policy does not or cannot live up to it. That argument misunderstands the intention of this book, which is to present not an indiscriminate description of political reality, but a rational theory of international politics. Far from being invalidated by the fact that, for instance, a perfect balance of power policy will scarcely be found in reality, it assumes that reality, being deficient in this respect, must be understood and evaluated as an approximation to an ideal system of balance of power.

3. Realism assumes that its key concept of interest defined as power is an objective category which is universally valid, but it does not endow that concept with a meaning that is fixed once and for all. The idea of interest is indeed of the essence of politics and is unaffected by the circumstances of time and place. Thucydides' statement, born of the experiences of ancient Greece, that "identity of interests is the surest of bonds whether between states or individuals" was taken up in the nineteenth century by Lord Salisbury's remark that "the only bond of union that endures" among nations is "the absence of all clashing interests." It was erected into a general principle of government by George Washington:

A small knowledge of human nature will convince us, that, with far the greatest part of mankind, interest is the governing principle; and that almost every man is more or less, under its influence. Motives of public virtue may for a time, or in particular instances, actuate men to the observance of a conduct purely disinterested; but they are not of themselves sufficient to produce persevering conformity to the refined dictates and obligations of social duty. Few men are capable of making a continual sacrifice of all views of private interest, or advantage, to the common good. It is vain to exclaim against the depravity of human nature on this account; the fact is so, the experience of every age and nation has proved it and we must in a great measure, change the constitution of

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man, before we can make it otherwise. No institution, not built on the presumptive truth of these maxims can succeed.

It was echoed and enlarged upon in our century by Max Weber's observation:

Interests (material and ideal), not ideas, dominate directly the actions of men. Yet the "images of the world" created by these ideas have very often served as switches determining the tracks on which the dynamism of interests kept actions moving.

Yet the kind of interest determining political action in a particular period of history depends upon the political and cultural context within which foreign policy is formulated. The goals that might be pursued by nations in their foreign policy can run the whole gamut of objectives any nation has ever pursued or might possibly pursue.

The same observations apply to the concept of power. Its content and the manner of its use are determined by the political and cultural environment. Power may comprise anything that establishes and maintains the control of man over man. Thus power covers all social relationships which serve that end, from physical violence to the most subtle psychological ties by which one mind controls another. Power covers the domination of man by man, both when it is disciplined by moral ends and controlled by constitutional safeguards, as in Western democracies, and when it is that untamed and barbaric force which finds its laws in nothing but its own strength and its sole justification in its aggrandizement.

Political realism does not assume that the contemporary conditions under which foreign policy operates, with their extreme instability and the ever present threat of large-scale violence, cannot be changed. The balance of power, for instance, is indeed a perennial element of all pluralistic societies, as the authors of The Federalist papers well knew; yet it is capable of operating, as it does in the United States, under the conditions of relative stability and peaceful conflict. If the factors that have given rise to these conditions can be duplicated on the international scene, similar conditions of stability and peace will then prevail there, as they have over long stretches of history among certain nations.

What is true of the general character of international relations is also true of the nation state as the ultimate point of reference of contemporary foreign policy. While the realist indeed believes that interest is the perennial standard by which political action must be judged and directed, the contemporary connection between interest and the nation state is a product of history, and is therefore bound to disappear in the course of history. Nothing in the realist position militates against the assumption that the present division of the political world into nation states will be replaced by larger units of a quite different character, more in keeping with the technical potentialities and the moral requirements of the contemporary world.

The realist parts company with other schools of thought before the all-important question of how the contemporary world is to be transformed. The realist is persuaded that this transformation can be achieved only through the workmanlike manipulation of the perennial forces that have shaped the past as they will the future. The realist cannot be persuaded that we can bring about that transformation by confronting a political reality that has its own laws with an abstract ideal that refuses to take those laws into account.

4. Political realism is aware of the moral significance of political action. It is also aware of the ineluctable tension between the moral command and the requirements of successful political action. And it is unwilling to gloss over and obliterate that tension and thus to obfuscate both the

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moral and the political issue by making it appear as though the stark facts of politics were morally more satisfying than they actually are, and the moral law less exacting than it actually is.

Realism maintains that universal moral principles cannot be applied to the actions of states in their abstract universal formulation, but that they must be filtered through the concrete circumstances of time and place. The individual may say for himself: "Fiat justitia, pereat mundus (Let justice be done, even if the world perish)," but the state has no right to say so in the name of those who are in its care. Both individual and state must judge political action by universal moral principles, such as that of liberty. Yet while the individual has a moral right to sacrifice himself in defense of such a moral principle, the state has no right to let its moral disapprobation of the infringement of liberty get in the way of successful political action, itself inspired by the moral principle of national survival. There can be no political morality without prudence; that is, without consideration of the political consequences of seemingly moral action. Realism, then, considers prudence-the weighing of the consequences of alternative political actions-to be the supreme virtue in politics. Ethics in the abstract judges action by its conformity with the moral law; political ethics judges action by its political consequences. Classical and medieval philosophy knew this, and so did Lincoln when he said:

I do the very best I know how, the very best I can, and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.

5. Political realism refuses to identify the moral aspirations of a particular nation with the moral laws that govern the universe. As it distinguishes between truth and opinion, so it distinguishes between truth and idolatry. All nations are tempted-and few have been able to resist the temptation for long-to clothe their own particular aspirations and actions in the moral purposes of the universe. To know that nations are subject to the moral law is one thing, while to pretend to know with certainty what is good and evil in the relations among nations is quite another. There is a world of difference between the belief that all nations stand under the judgment of God, inscrutable to the human mind, and the blasphemous conviction that God is always on one's side and that what one wills oneself cannot fail to be willed by God also.

The lighthearted equation between a particular nationalism and the counsels of Providence is morally indefensible, for it is that very sin of pride against which the Greek tragedians and the Biblical prophets have warned rulers and ruled. That equation is also politically pernicious, for it is liable to engender the distortion in judgment which, in the blindness of crusading frenzy, destroys nations and civilizations-in the name of moral principle, ideal, or God himself.

On the other hand, it is exactly the concept of interest defined in terms of power that saves us from both that moral excess and that political folly. For if we look at all nations, our own included, as political entities pursuing their respective interests defined in terms of power, we are able to do justice to all of them. And we are able to do justice to all of them in a dual sense: We are able to judge other nations as we judge our own and, having judged them in this fashion, we are then capable of pursuing policies that respect the interests of other nations, while protecting and promoting those of our own. Moderation in policy cannot fail to reflect the moderation of moral judgment.

6. The difference, then, between political realism and other schools of thought is real, and it is profound. However much the theory of political realism may have been misunderstood and misinterpreted, there is no gainsaying its distinctive intellectual and moral attitude to matters political.

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Intellectually, the political realist maintains the autonomy of the political sphere, as the economist, the lawyer, the moralist maintain theirs. He thinks in terms of interest defined as power, as the economist thinks in terms of interest defined as wealth; the lawyer, of the conformity of action with legal rules; the moralist, of the conformity of action with moral principles. The economist asks: "How does this policy affect the wealth of society, or a segment of it?" The lawyer asks: "Is this policy in accord with the rules of law?" The moralist asks: "Is this policy in accord with moral principles?" And the political realist asks: "How does this policy affect the power of the nation?" (Or of the federal government, of Congress, of the party, of agriculture, as the case may be.)

The political realist is not unaware of the existence and relevance of standards of thought other than political ones. As political realist, he cannot but subordinate these other standards to those of politics. And he parts company with other schools when they impose standards of thought appropriate to other spheres upon the political sphere. It is here that political realism takes issue with the "legalistic-moralistic approach" to international politics. That this issue is not, as has been contended, a mere figment of the imagination, but goes to the very core of the controversy, can be shown from many historical examples. Three will suffice to make the point.3

In 1939 the Soviet Union attacked Finland. This action confronted France and Great Britain with two issues, one legal, the other political. Did that action violate the Covenant of the League of Nations and, if it did, what countermeasures should France and Great Britain take? The legal question could easily be answered in the affirmative, for obviously the Soviet Union had done what was prohibited by the Covenant. The answer to the political question depends, first, upon the manner in which the Russian action affected the interests of France and Great Britain; second, upon the existing distribution of power between France and Great Britain, on the one hand, and the Soviet Union and other potentially hostile nations, especially Germany, on the other; and, third, upon the influence that the countermeasures were likely to have upon the interests of France and Great Britain and the future distribution of power. France and Great Britain, as the leading members of the League of Nations, saw to it that the Soviet Union was expelled from the League, and they were prevented from joining Finland in the war against the Soviet Union only by Sweden's refusal to allow their troops to pass through Swedish territory on their way to Finland. If this refusal by Sweden had not saved them, France and Great Britain would shortly have found themselves at war with the Soviet Union and Germany at the same time.

The policy of France and Great Britain was a classic example of legalism in that they allowed the answer to the legal question, legitimate within its sphere, to determine their political actions. Instead of asking both questions, that of law and that of power, they asked only the question of law; and the answer they received could have no bearing on the issue that their very existence might have depended upon.

The second example illustrates the "moralistic approach" to international politics. It concerns the international status of the Communist government of China. The rise of that government confronted the Western world with two issues, one moral, the other political. Were the nature and policies of that government in accord with the moral principles of the Western world? Should the Western world deal with such a government? The answer to the first question could not fail to be in the negative. Yet it did not follow with necessity that the answer to the second question should also be in the negative. The standard of thought applied to the first--the moral question—was simply to test the nature and the policies of the Communist government of China by the principles of Western morality. On the other hand, the second—the political question—had to be subjected to the complicated test of the interests involved and the power available on either side, and of the bearing of one or the other course of action upon these interests and power. The

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application of this test could well have led to the conclusion that it would be wiser not to deal with the Communist government of China. To arrive at this conclusion by neglecting this test altogether and answering the political question in terms of the moral issue was indeed a classic example of the "moralistic approach" to international politics.

The third case illustrates strikingly the contrast between realism and the legalistic-moralistic approach to foreign policy. Great Britain, as one of the guarantors of the neutrality of Belgium, went to war with Germany in August 1914 because Germany had violated the neutrality of Belgium. The British action could be justified either in realistic or legalistic-moralistic terms. That is to say, one could argue realistically that for centuries it had -been axiomatic for British foreign policy to prevent the control of the Low Countries by a hostile power. It was then not so much the violation of Belgium's neutrality per se as the hostile intentions of the violator which provided the rationale for British intervention. If the violator had been another nation but Germany, Great Britain might well have refrained from intervening. This is the position taken by Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary during that period. Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs Hardinge remarked to him in 1908: "If France violated Belgian neutrality in a war against Germany, it is doubtful whether England or Russia would move a finger to maintain Belgian neutrality, while if the neutrality of Belgium was violated by Germany, it is probable that the converse would be the case." Whereupon Sir Edward Grey replied: "This is to the point." Yet one could also take the legalistic and moralistic position that the violation of Belgium's neutrality per se, because of its legal and moral defects and regardless of the interests at stake and of the identity of the violator, justified British and, for that matter, American intervention. This was the position which Theodore Roosevelt took in his letter to Sir Edward Grey of January 22, 1915:

To me the crux of the situation has been Belgium. If England or France had acted toward Belgium as Germany has acted I should have opposed them, exactly as I now oppose Germany. I have emphatically approved your action as a model for what should be done by those who believe that treaties should be observed in good faith and that there is such a thing as international morality. I take this position as an American who is no more an Englishman than he is a German, who endeavors loyally to serve the interests of his own country, but who also endeavors to do what he can for justice and decency as regards mankind at large, and who therefore feels obliged to judge all other nations by their conduct on any given occasion.

This realist defense of the autonomy of the political sphere against its subversion by other modes of thought does not imply disregard for the existence and importance of these other modes of thought. It rather implies that each should be assigned its proper sphere and function. Political realism is based upon a pluralistic conception of human nature. Real man is a composite of "economic man," "political man," "moral man," "religious man," etc. A man who was nothing but "political man" would be a beast, for he would be completely lacking in moral restraints. A man who was nothing but "moral man" would be a fool, for he would be completely lacking in prudence. A man who was nothing but "religious man" would be a saint, for he would be completely lacking in worldly desires.

Recognizing that these different facets of human nature exist, political realism also recognizes that in order to understand one of them one has to deal with it on its own terms. That is to say, if I want to understand "religious man," I must for the time being abstract from the other aspects of human nature and deal with its religious aspect as if it were the only one. Furthermore, I must apply to the religious sphere the standards of thought appropriate to it, always remaining aware of the existence of other standards and their actual influence upon the religious qualities of man. What is true of this facet of human nature is true of all the others. No modern economist, for instance, would conceive of his science and its relations to other sciences of man in any other

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way. It is exactly through such a process of emancipation from other standards of thought, and the development of one appropriate to its subject matter, that economics has developed as an autonomous theory of the economic activities of man. To contribute to a similar development in the field of politics is indeed the purpose of political realism.

It is in the nature of things that a theory of politics which is based upon such principles will not meet with unanimous approval-nor does, for that matter, such a foreign policy. For theory and policy alike run counter to two trends in our culture which are not able to reconcile themselves to the assumptions and results of a rational, objective theory of politics. One of these trends disparages the role of power in society on grounds that stem from the experience and philosophy of the nineteenth century; we shall address ourselves to this tendency later in greater detail.4 The other trend, opposed to the realist theory and practice of politics, stems from the very relationship that exists, and must exist, between the human mind and the political sphere. For reasons that we shall discuss later5 the human mind in its day-by-day operations cannot bear to look the truth of politics straight in the face. It must disguise, distort, belittle, and embellish the truth-the more so, the more the individual is actively involved in the processes of politics, and particularly in those of international politics. For only by deceiving himself about the nature of politics and the role he plays on the political scene is man able to live contentedly as a political animal with himself and his fellow men.

Thus it is inevitable that a theory which tries to understand international politics as it actually is and as it ought to be in view of its intrinsic nature, rather than as people would like to see it, must overcome a psychological resistance that most other branches of learning need not face. A book devoted to the theoretical understanding of international politics therefore requires a special explanation and justification.

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Review of International Studies (2008), 34, 29–51 Copyright 0 British International Studies Association doi:10.1017/S0260210508007894Realism and the Left: the case of Hans J. Morgenthau WILLIAM E. SCHEUERMAN*Abstract. The commonplace view that the intellectual roots of Hans J. Morgenthau’s Realist theory lie in conservative central European political traditions (such as Bismarckian Realpoli- tik) requires modification. The young Morgenthau was a protégé of one of Weimar Germany’s most prominent left-wing legal thinkers and barristers, Hugo Sinzheimer, a committed Social Democrat who influenced many young jurists who hoped to pursue a peaceful, legally-based transition to democratic socialism. Although Morgenthau’s biographers have acknowledged his close personal ties to Sinzheimer, they have ignored the ways in which his early work was directly influenced by Sinzheimer’s left-wing legal sociology. Morgenthau’s initial rendition of Realism took the form of a critical-minded sociology of law, inspired by Sinzheimer, which aimed to bring about fundamental reforms to the international system. Only after the demise of the democratic Left did Morgenthau begin to shed his reformist faith in the possibility of legally based global reform. His mature version of Realism can be interpreted as a response to his disillusionment with the politically progressive and socially reformist vision of law championed by the interwar democratic Left.IntroductionHans J. Morgenthau’s international political theory was always more complex and tension-ridden

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than typically captured by textbook-like attempts to pigeonhole him into the category of ‘classical realist’. In an important recent study, Craig Campbell accents the surprising ways in which the spectre of nuclear war forced Morgenthau during the 1960s to reconsider fundamental realist tents and condone ideas he had discarded earlier as ‘idealistic’.1 Earlier commentators have similarly uncovered subtle ‘idealist’ strands within some of Morgenthau’s supposedly deepest realist arguments.2 Richard Rosecrane, for example, claims that a deep dualism plagues Morgenthau’s theory: he was both a theorist of a static and historically unchanging ‘drive for power’ and an astute historically minded analyst of major changes in the state system. In this account, Morgenthau’s mature theory always rested on a deep* The author is grateful for constructive advice to the anonymous reviewers for this Journal, as well as the participants at the University of Chicago Political Theory Colloquium where it was first presented. Special thanks go to Nuno Peres Monteiro for his excellent critical comments, as well as my Indiana colleague Michael Morgan for words of encouragement.1 Campbell Craig, Glimmer of a New Leviathan: Total War in The Realism of Niebuhr, Morgenthau, and Waltz (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), pp. 54–73.2 See, for example, Marcus Raskin, ‘Morgenthau: The Idealism of a Realist’, in Thompson and Myers (eds.), Truth and Tragedy: A Tribute to Hans J. Morgenthau (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1984), pp. 85–94.2930 William E. Scheuermansensitivity to the role of history as well as a stubborn insistence on the static character of human nature and history.3 Morgenthau was deeply influenced by counter- enlightenment thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Carl Schmitt, and the towering figure of Max Weber made a decisive imprint on his idiosyncratic brand of realist theory.4 This intellectual background undoubtedly helps explain core attributes of Morgenthau’s hard-headed and sometimes conservative brand of realism. Yet how can we explain Morgenthau’s occasional embrace of ideas which sit uneasily with the orthodox version of classical realism with which he became intimately associated by the late 1940s? Whence Morgenthau’s growing anxieties about suicidal tendencies intrinsic to the existing state system, as well as the emphasis we find in his late writings on the necessity of major changes to it?We can only fully grasp the multi-sided contours of Morgenthau’s realism by returning to a neglected moment in his prewar biography. The otherwise rich portrait that emerges from recent scholarship on the genesis of Morgenthau’s thinking neglects a substantial debt which he himself repeatedly underscored. Between 1928 and 1931, Morgenthau worked closely not only with one of the major voices in left-wing Weimar jurisprudence, Hugo Sinzheimer, but he also developed close ties with a number of Sinzheimer’s prote Nge Ns, all of whom were outspoken socialist lawyers who subsequently gained prominence as political and legal scholars. Well after the destruction of the Weimar democratic left and its vision of peaceful legally based reform for which Sinzheimer and his disciples fought, Morgenthau remained close to Sinzheimer, and he always counted him among the central forces in his intellectual development. Although some recent scholarship has acknowledged Morgenthau’s ties to Sinzheimer, it still downplays the extent to which Morgenthau’s activities as a young lawyer played a pivotal role in the emergence of his brand of realism.5Only an accurate account of Morgenthau’s relationship to Sinzheimer can provide a complete picture of the history of mid-century realist theory: Morgenthau’s realism can be interpreted as an attempt to respond to the collapse of the interwar left and its legalistic model of a peaceful transition to democratic socialism. As part of the group of young progressive lawyers associated with Sinzheimer, Morgenthau shared more of that vision than has been recognised. Its destruction at the hands of the Nazis forced him, as it did other members of the Sinzheimer circle, to rethink its3 Richard Rosecrane, ‘The One World of Hans Morgenthau’, Social Research, 48 (1981), pp.

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749–65. 4 On Nietzsche and Morgenthau, see Christoph Frei, Hans J. Morgenthau: An Intellectual Biography (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2001); on Weber, Hans-Karl Pichler, ‘TheGodfathers of ‘‘Truth’’: Max Weber and Carl Schmitt in Morgenthau’s Theory of Power Politics’, Review of International Studies, 24 (1998), pp. 185–200; Michael Joseph Smith, Realist Thought from Weber to Kissinger (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1986); on Schmitt, see Jan Willem Honig, ‘Totalitarianism and Realism: Hans Morgenthau’s German Years’, in Benjamin Frankel (ed.), Roots of Realism (London: Frank Cass, 1996), pp. 283–313; Martti Koskienniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law, 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 412–509; William E. Scheuerman, Carl Schmitt: The End of Law (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), pp. 225–51. More generally on Morgenthau and the German Right, also Alfons So Qllner, ‘German Conservatism in America: Morgenthau’s Political Realism’, Telos, 72 (1987), pp. 161–72.5 In his helpful study, on which I rely for a number of biographical details, Frei discusses Sinzheimer’s influence, but he downplays the impact of Sinzheimer’s ideas on Morgenthau (Hans J. Morgenthau: An Intellectual Biography, esp. pp. 39, 168). Koskienniemi similarly mentions Sinzheimer and the left-wing jurists with whom Morgenthau worked, but claims, without much evidence, that Morgenthau remained a conservative (Gentle Civilizer of Nations, p. 447).Realism and the Left: the case of Morgenthau 31basic assumptions. For Morgenthau, this reconsideration ultimately generated core elements of his mature realist theory.Because Sinzheimer’s intellectual and political contributions are pretty much forgotten today, I begin with a brief retelling of them. Then I show how main features of Morgenthau’s early writings not only bear Sinzheimer’s mark, but that we can also interpret Morgenthau’s theoretical trajectory in the 1930s as an effort to grapple with the shattered dream of social democratic reform. Finally, I examine the significance of Morgenthau’s neglected dialogue with Sinzheimer for his theory as a whole, as well as how it potentially sheds light on the broader question of the relationship between realism and contemporary international relations theory.Hugo Sinzheimer and the tragedy of Weimar labour lawToday Hugo Sinzheimer (1875–1945) is an obscure figure, neglected except by a dwindling band of left-wing labour lawyers. What might students of international political theory possibly gain from re-examining his legacy?In May 1928, the 24-year-old Hans J. Morgenthau joined Sinzheimer in Frankfurt, where he worked as a Referendar in Sinzheimer’s labour and criminal law office as well as his assistant at the University of Frankfurt, where Sinzheimer was a member of the law faculty.6 Morgenthau’s decision to join Sinzheimer provides early evidence of the fierce intellectual and political independence which later so often landed Morgenthau in rocky waters.7 Despite his own relatively conservative familial background, Morgenthau opted to pursue his legal ambitions under the guidance of one of Weimar’s most controversial lawyers, a well-known Social Democrat (in an overwhelmingly right-wing and even authoritarian profession), a former member of the Reichstag who was subjected to vicious anti-semitic attacks for daring publicly to challenge the most retrograde features of German wartime policy,8 and perhaps the key legal mind behind the quest for novel forms of labour and social regulation crucial to German social democracy’s quest for a peaceful transition from capitalism to democratic socialism. Sinzheimer was the main architect of the Weimar Consti- tution’s controversial promulgation of ambitious social rights: Article 151, for6 The Referendariat entailed a legal apprenticeship undertaken under the auspices of a senior lawyer. It was a required component of professional legal training.7 For example, in the Vietnam War, when his vocal opposition made him the object of a vicious smear campaign by the Johnson Administration.8 Sinzheimer was an outspoken critic of traditional German ‘power politics’. In 1917, he

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published an extensive monograph on international law and foreign policy in which he defends unabashedly Kantian reforms of the interstate system, criticises power politics and ‘reason of state’ approaches to foreign affairs, and urges a movement towards a united pacific Europe (Völkerrechtsgeist. Rede zur Einführung in das Programm der Zentralstelle ‘Völkerrecht’ [Leipzig: Verlag Naturwissenschaften, 1917]). His views on such matters seem to have been very close to those which the mature Morgenthau – as a prominent ‘classical realist’ – generally excoriated. For an overview of Sinzheimer’s views on international relations, see Susanne Knorre, Soziale Selbstbestimmung und individuelle Verantwortung.Hugo Sinzheimer (1875–1945). Eine politische Biographie (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1991), pp. 1–69. In his early writings, Morgenthau cautiously cites Sinzheimer’s international law writings (for example, his Die internationale Rechtspflege, ihr Wesen und ihre Grenzen [Leipzig: Universita Qtsverlag von Robert Noske, 1929], p. 166), but he does not,interestingly, openly criticise them, in part because he at least initially identified with some of Sinzheimer’s aspirations for a reformed international order. Other references to Sinzheimer’s works are scattered throughout Morgenthau’s writings.32 William E. Scheuermanexample, called for a new economic order organised in conformity with ‘the principles of justice’, Articles 157 and 159 recognised the rights of labour and labour unions, and Article 165 established worker participation in economic decision- making and pointed the way towards a restructuring of economic life in a socialist direction.In the complicated world of the Weimar Left, Sinzheimer was a major intellectual and legal voice, a forceful defender of what some on the extreme left disdainfully dubbed ‘mere abstract right’ and ‘empty formal democracy’. Like others in the mainstream of the reformist SPD, he hoped to supplement formal political demo- cracy with a ‘social substance’ which, he believed, alone could fulfill the potentially emancipatory impulses of modern democracy.9 In some contrast to many of his SPD colleagues, however, Sinzheimer tended to borrow loosely from classical Marxist theory while underscoring its many limitations. Like the Austro-Marxists, he often drew inspiration from Kant at least as much as from Marx.10 In this respect, his profile seems reminiscent of two other prominent interwar social democratic legal theorists, Hermann Heller and Hans Kelsen, who rejected constitutive components of orthodox Marxism theory while pursuing a socialist critique of modern capitalism.11Although Morgenthau probably at first assumed he would remain with Sinzheimer in Frankfurt for a mere six months, he ultimately stayed on for nearly three eventful years, in which he practiced law alongside Sinzheimer, published his first articles as well as a book on international law, and decided, against the wishes of his rather conservative father, to pursue an academic career as a theoretically-minded legal scholar. All of this occurred in the context of the decay of Weimar democracy. Archival evidence suggests that Sinzheimer quickly served as a confidant on a whole series of intellectual, professional, and personal matters even well after Morgenthau left Frankfurt in 1932, with Morgenthau developing heartfelt admiration for someone he later aptly described as ‘passionately and eloquently devoted to the legally defined interests of the underdog – the worker exploited and abused and the innocent helplessly caught in the spider web of criminal law’.12 When Morgenthau fled Europe for the United States, it was Sinzheimer who saw him off from the docks of Antwerp.13 Nearly forty years later, when German legal scholars were organising a conference to mark the centenary of Sinzheimer’s birth, Ernst Fraenkel – another Referendar of Sinzheimer’s who went on to an illustrious career as a political scientist in postwar Germany – wrote to Sinzheimer’s daughter to tell her that the conference9 For a useful survey of Weimar social democratic legal theory, see Wolfgang Luthardt, Sozialdemokratische Verfassungslehre in der Weimarer Republik (Opladen, Germany: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1986).10 Knorre plausibly underscores the Kantian strands in Sinzheimer’s thought. See Soziale Selbstimmung und individuelle Verantwortung.

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11 For a discussion of Heller and Kelsen, see David L. Dyzenhaus, Legality and Legitimacy: Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen and Hermann Heller in Weimar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).12 Morgenthau, ‘Fragment of an Intellectual Autobiography: 1904–1932’, in Kenneth Thompson and Robert J. Myers (eds.), Truth and Tragedy, p. 10. See also the extensive correspondence between Morgenthau and Sinzheimer as well as various members of Sinzheimer’s family (Hans J. Morgenthau Papers, Containers 54 and 197, Library of Congress, Washington, DC [HJM-B54, B197]). As Frei correctly notes, ‘[t]heir relations must in fact have been very close, as their shared professional life occasionally carried over into private life. At times, Morgenthau stayed entire days in the house of his boss, not infrequently also as a baby sitter’ (Hans J. Morgenthau: An Intellectual Autobiography, p. 168).13 Frei, Hans J. Morgenthau, p. 61.Realism and the Left: the case of Morgenthau 33organisers hoped to attract Morgenthau to participate as one of the most prominent members of what he dubbed the ‘Sinzheimer School’.14Morgenthau’s autobiographical reminiscences suggest that the years in Frankfurt represented an intellectual liberation from the stultifying atmosphere of the German universities he had previously attended. As late as the 1970s, he recounted the lively intellectual climate of Weimar-era Frankfurt, where religious-minded socialists like Paul Tillich argued with Sinzheimer, Marx and Freud were heatedly discussed at the Institute for Social Research (where Sinzheimer occasionally lectured), and Karl Mannheim was busily revolutionising modern sociology. In addition, he became ‘life-long friends’ with ‘a group of distinguished people [who] worked in that [i.e. Sinzheimer’s] office’ – including Fraenkel, as well as Franz L. Neumann and Otto Kahn-Freund – all of whom served as Sinzheimer’s Referendar and later became famous left-wing scholars.15 One can easily imagine Morgenthau amid this group of talented young lawyers heatedly discussing the future of Weimar democracy and its special status as a political and social order transitionally situated, or so Sinzheimer and his left-wing students apparently believed, ‘between capitalism and socialism’.16 A 1934 letter from Morgenthau to Sinzheimer, who as a famous Jewish socialist was immediately forced to flee Germany for Holland, offers a vivid statement of the significance of Sinzheimer’s mentorship. After explaining to Sinzheimer that he had failed to respond to his letters only because they never made it to Geneva, where Morgenthau was in exile, he notes:[h]ad I been so inclined, I could have broken off written relations, but never the inner relations existing between us, which can never be severed. For I was not only your employee. I also breathed the intellectual and moral air that emanated from you. Giving up the ties that such an influence creates would mean giving up my own personality.17Morgenthau’s autobiographical comments also reveal what lessons he subse- quently drew from the tragic figure of Sinzheimer, who spent his best years trying to exploit the new legal possibilities for social reform provided by the Weimar Constitution before being driven into exile. Morgenthau retrospectively observed that the courtroom battles they fought together for the economically and socially disadvantaged ‘were marginal to the crucial issues with which society had to come to terms. What was decisive was not the merits of different legal interpretations but the distribution of political power.’ Notwithstanding Sinzheimer’s lawyerly brilliance and the fact that the relatively progressive structure of the Weimar Constitution meant that left-wing lawyers could often provide effective justifications for their views in court, he and his associates operated in the context of a ‘political system that had14 Ernst Fraenkel to Gertrud Mainzer [Sinzheimer’s daughter], 25 February 1975, HJM-54, Library of Congress. It is not clear that Morgenthau was able to attend, however.15 ‘Bernard Johnson’s Interview with Hans J. Morgenthau’, in Thompson and Myers (eds.), Truth and Tragedy, p. 349. As noted, Ernst Fraenkel (1898–1975) became a prominent political scientist in postwar Germany; Otto Kahn-Freund (1900–53) became a leading figure in labour

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and comparative law in the UK; Franz L. Neumann (1900–1953) was the resident political and legal theorist of the ‘Frankfurt School’ when in New York exile, and then an influential professor of political theory at Columbia University. All, like Morgenthau, were Jews; all seem to have shared a deep admiration for Sinzheimer and described their years under his mentorship as decisive for their intellectual development. See, for example, Fraenkel, ‘Hugo Sinzheimer’, in Falk Esche and Frank Grube (eds.), Reformismus und Pluralismus (Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe, 1973), pp. 131–42.16 Knorrie, Soziale Selbstbestimmung und individuelle Verantwortung, pp. 116–17. 17

Cited in Frei, Hans J. Morgenthau, p. 168.34 William E. Scheuermanstacked the cards against him and his cause’.18 Not surprisingly, these experiences left Morgenthau with a deep scepticism about the transformative possibilities of law in the context of profound social antagonism and deep inequalities in power. That scepticism, of course, later served as a foundation of Morgenthau’s realism.Yet Morgenthau’s intellectual debts to Sinzheimer go deeper. Sinzheimer was not only a practising lawyer and major public figure. He was also a prolific writer and accomplished legal scholar, whose work exerted a profound influence among progressive jurists. Sinzheimer’s work is impossible to pigeonhole, in part because it transcends contemporary disciplinary boundaries.19 Yet its basic starting point is straightforward enough. Like many on the left in Germany and elsewhere, Sinzheimer was struck by the tension between formal legal freedom and equality and the social or empirical reality of dependence and inequality in the capitalist workplace. According to the law, the labourer and entrepreneur face each other on formally free and equal terms. In real-life social and economic terms, however, this relationship is plagued by dependency and inequality. In contrast to those on the orthodox left who took this gap as evidence for the bankruptcy of ‘bourgeois’ formal law, Sinzheimer considered the tension a potentially productive one. To be sure, the starting point for social and legal reform required the open recognition of the ideological and mystifying character of formal legal ideals in the context of a deeply unjust social and economic status quo. Yet this acknowledgement need not lead to a one-sided debunking of formal law. Sinzheimer grasped that the normative promise of liberal ideals of freedom and equality potentially provided immanent possibilities for overcoming this troubling gap. As Otto Kahn-Freund later noted in what remains the best short discussion of Sinzheimer’s thinking, his ‘whole work is dominated by the idea of freedom’.20 Indeed, Sinzheimer’s acknowledgement of the deep but poten- tially fruitful ambiguity of so-called bourgeois legal ideals subsequently became a central theme in the work of his left-wing students. As posited by Franz L. Neumann, later the resident political and legal theorist of the Frankfurt School, for example, formal law not only complemented the workings of classical capitalism, but also harboured a normatively indispensable ‘ethical moment’ transcending its economic functions. For Neumann, as for Sinzheimer before him, the gap between formal law and social reality pointed the way towards the prospect of reforming society so as to better realise the untapped normative potential of classical ideals of freedom and equality.21Despite the failure of most elected parliaments before World War I to recognise the special needs of labour, Sinzheimer observed, decisive steps were already being taken towards developing a distinctive body of what he described as ‘autonomous’ labour regulation. Even though labour lacked a statutory, let alone constitutional, basis for its demands, the union movement was successfully forcing employers to reach novel agreements concerning workplace conditions, wages, and a host of18 Morgenthau, ‘Fragment of an Intellectual Autobiography’, pp. 9–10. 19 Sinzhemier’s writings are unavailable in English. My brief summary is drawn from the usefulcollection available in German: Hugo Sinzheimer, Arbeitsrecht und Rechtssoziologie. GesammelteAufsaetze und Reden, Otto Kahn-Freund and Thilo Ramm (eds.), vols. I–II (Frankfurt: EVA,

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1976). 20 Otto-Kahn-Freund, ‘Hugo Sinzheimer 1975–1945’, in Roy Lewis and Jon Clark (eds.), Labour Lawand Politics in the Weimar Republic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), p. 103. 21 Franz L. Neumann, ‘The Change in the Function of Law in Modern Society’, in William E.Scheuerman (ed.), The Rule of Law Under Siege: Selected Essays of Franz L. Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 101–41.Realism and the Left: the case of Morgenthau 35related matters. Organised social groups, in short, were independently developing a system of self-regulation in response to novel social trends. Moreover, that emerging system of regulation, he astutely observed, challenged traditional ideas about the necessary division between public and private law. The task at hand, Sinzheimer argued, was not only to advance this process to the benefit of labour, but also to make sure that it possessed a sufficiently sturdy legal framework. Any sensible system of labour law would necessarily acknowledge that decision-making between labour and capital should take place in a relatively autonomous and even decentralised manner; many points of conflict between labour and capital are best resolved by highly specialised agreements between particular groups of employers and employees. However, statutory and constitutional legislation could successfully complement this process of autonomous decision-making. If appropriately designed, legal and constitutional guarantees for the rights of labour and unions, as well as new constitutionally-based modes of both decentralised (that is, workplace-centred) and centralised worker representation in economic decision-making, could firmly ground a legally viable as well as socially egalitarian system of labour regulation to a greater extent than autonomous self-regulation between employers and employees had been able to achieve.In this context, Sinzheimer defended an ambitious model of works councils as well as a national ‘economic council’ which would allow for substantial labour partici- pation in overseeing the economy. In contrast to those on the left who sought inspiration from the Soviet experience, Sinzheimer envisioned new institutional sites for worker participation as a complement to the main instruments of liberal democratic decision-making. A political system dominated solely by worker soviets, he prophesised in opposition to the communist left, necessarily contained anti- democratic and authoritarian implications.22 If Germany could move instead in the direction of the model he proposed, Sinzheimer optimistically argued, the factual power advantages typically enjoyed by capital could be effectively checked and labour’s ‘dependent’ status corrected. The gap between formal legal freedom and equality and the harsh realities of capitalism could be substantially overcome without abandoning the lasting achievements of the liberal tradition. Major steps could be undertaken towards achieving democratic socialism. Amid the new ‘class balance between labour and the bourgeoisie’ produced by the German Revolution of 1918, Sinzheimer apparently hoped, the right moment had come for aggressively advancing this reform agenda.23Sinzheimer’s main intellectual achievements are probably threefold. First, he played a central role on the European continent in establishing labour law both as a distinct body of law and as an object of legitimate scholarly interest. Previously, labour relations had been seen as falling under the general sphere of private law and thus, in principle, no different from other arenas of the law regulating ‘private’ relations between legally equal and free subjects. Yet labour was a special commodity because it ‘has no other container than human flesh and blood’ and thus cannot be conflated with a piece of real estate, for example, or other forms of property.2422 For a spirited defence of Sinzheimer’s position in this debate, see Ernst Fraenkel, Deutschland und die westlichen Demokratien (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991), pp. 95–136.23 Knorre, Soziale Selbstbestimmung und individuelle Verantwortung, p. 116. 24 This quote, taken from Marx, appears repeatedly in Sinzheimer’s writings. More generally on thispoint, see Kahn-Freund, ‘Hugo Sinzheimer 1875–1945’, p. 78.36 William E. ScheuermanSecond, labour law was envisioned as the centrepiece of a broader social democratic reform

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project, whose main function was the liberation of wage-labour from the illegitimate tutelage of capital. Because labour was a commodity like no other, labour law possessed a special status within the legal order as a whole.Third, Sinzheimer was an early proponent of the sociology of law, which he sought to shape in a socially critically fashion. Deeply influenced by Marx, Weber, as well as the Austro-Marxist Karl Renner, Sinzheimer insisted that German legal scholarship should broaden its horizons beyond a traditional focus on the positive law: it required a deeper understanding of the role of social factors in its operations.25 Only a rigorous empirical or sociological examination of the law could provide a necessary understanding of its social context and, in particular, the relationship between law and the workplace. As Sinzheimer learned from Renner, legal norms might remain formally unchanged, yet suddenly serve fundamentally novel social functions.26 A gap could easily emerge between a formal rule and the ‘real’ rule of law. Sinzheimer’s own research in labour law suggested that changing social conditions might lead to new ‘autonomous’ forms of legal self-regulation initially ignored by elected legisla- tures and courts. He was fascinated by the question of how social ‘reality influences the conceptual groupings of existing norms’, as well as how norms emerge spon- taneously in response to social change.27 As Kahn-Freund later noted, ‘the dynamic element’ or ‘time factor’ garnered a special status in Sinzheimer’s sociology of law: he worried that ‘the problem of the ‘‘transformation’’ of social changes into new norms’ had been neglected by legal scholarship. For him the sociology of law called for an analysis of the fundamentally dynamic or historical character of the nexus between legal norms and reality.28Here as well, Sinzheimer’s most prominent left-wing disciples closely followed their mentor. Kahn-Freund, Fraenkel, and Neumann each synthesised Weber and Marx, similarly flavouring the recipe with a substantial dose of Renner’s critical sociology of law.29 Like Sinzheimer, their inquiries placed special weight on the historical or dynamic character of the relationship between social reality and law. Neumann and Fraenkel, for example, argued in the 1930s that the changing contours25 A similar movement towards the sociology of law can be identified during the same period in other national settings. It is not clear how familiar Sinzheimer or his young students were with them. It is important to note that Sinzheimer was probably chiefly influenced by Weber’s Sociology of Law, and not, as often appears to be the case in Morgenthau’s mature version of realist theory, Weber’s political ethics or hard-headed normative political theory. This important difference in the reception of Weber, I believe, also sets Morgenthau apart from Sinzheimer’s left-wing followers (such as, Fraenkel, Kahn-Freund, and Neumann). Sinzheimer also does not appear to have shared Morgenthau’s occasional youthful interest in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche.26 Karl Renner, The Institutions of Private Law and Their Social Functions, ed. Otto Kahn Freund (London: Routledge, 1949).27 Kahn-Freund, ‘ Hugo Sinzheimer 1875–1945’,p. 98. 28Ibid., p. 99. 29

On Fraenkel, see Scheuerman, ‘Social Democracy and the Rule of Law: The Legacy of ErnstFraenkel’, in Peter Caldwell and Scheuerman (eds.), From Liberal Democracy to Fascism: Legal and Political Thought in the Weimar Republic (Boston, MA: Humanities Press, 200), pp. 74–105. Kahn Freund translated Renner into English, and the impact of Weber on his work is profound. See the many essays collected in Lewis and Clark (eds.), Labour Law and Politics in the Weimar Republic, as well as the appreciative discussions of Kahn-Freund’s work in Lord Wedderburn of Charlton, Roy Lewis and Jon Clark (eds.), Labour Law and Industrial Relations: Building on Kahn-Freund (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). On Neumann, see William E. Scheuerman, Between the Norm and the Exception: The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law (London: MIT Press, 1994).Realism and the Left: the case of Morgenthau 37of capitalist development transformed the significance of the traditional liberal commitment to general law. In classical capitalism, general law was not only legally desirable but also

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economically rational, since individual legal interventions violated the principle of equal competition. When massive economic concentrations dominate production, however, however, this original elective affinity between general law and economic reality is destroyed:In a monopolistically organized system the general law cannot be supreme. If the state is confronted only by a monopoly, it is pointless to regulate this monopoly by general law. In such a case the individual measure is the only appropriate expression of the sovereign power.30In this view, the demand for general rules – arguably the mainstay of the liberal rule of law – was likely to face significant resistance from privileged economic actors, who increasingly opted for vague and open-ended legal forms more malleable to their manipulation than the clear general legal norms favoured by classical liberal jurisprudence. Only a historically minded sociology of law, in which due attention was paid to economic history and its complex impact on legal reality, would be capable of making sense of this momentous shift in the social underpinnings of the rule of law.For Sinzheimer, law could be seen adapting to changing social reality in an unplanned manner; conscious legislative design might also recalibrate it in accord- ance with contemporary social exigencies. Even more ambitiously, legal instruments could be consciously employed in order to pursue rational political goals which might require modifications of social reality. Not surprisingly, Sinzheimer devoted much of his years in exile in Holland to writing a study of legislation.31 Only on the basis of this faith in the creative possibilities of legislation, of course, does Sinzheimer’s outspoken defence of ambitious statutory and constitutionally-based social reform probably make any sense.His embrace of the sociology of law, however, by no means implied discarding conventional legal methods and ideals altogether. From our present-day perspective, in which social scientific approaches to the law seem tied at the hip to deep scepticism about legal formalism, Sinzheimer always remained surprisingly faithful to an array of traditional legal ideals and approaches. A sociological approach to law should supplement but not replace a fundamentally formalistic view of the proper study and interpretation of the law. By all accounts, Sinzheimer was a skilled and even eloquent ‘lawyer’s lawyer’, who not only was a marvellous courtroom performer, but also insisted that his legal apprentices undergo a rigorous schooling in the intricacies of the black letter of the law and relatively traditional positivistic ideas about legal interpretation, while sharing with them his own anxieties about the dangers of excessive judicial discretion and anti-formal tendencies in the law.32 Sinzheimer accurately observed that in the Weimar context, where right-wing authoritarians possessed extensive influence over the judiciary and state administration, anti-formal30 Neumann, ‘The Change in the Function of Law’, p. 126. For Fraenkel’s version of the argument, see ‘Die Krise des Rechtsstaats und die Justiz’, Die Gesellschaft, 8 (1931), pp. 327–41.31 Hugo Sinzheimer, ‘Theorie der Gesetzgebung’, in Kahn-Feund and Ramm (eds.), Arbeitsrecht und Rechtssoziolgie, vol. II, pp. 245–309.32 Kahn-Freund, ‘Hugo Sinzheimer 1975–1945’, pp. 75–7. On Sinzheimer’s worries about judicial discretion, see Knorre, Soziale Selbstbestimmung und individuelle Verantwortung, pp. 15, 71, 157.38 William E. Scheuermanlegal trends typically served the cause of reaction by increasing the discretionary power of political groups hostile to progressive social legislation.33Here as well, Sinzheimer’s impact on his disciples is undeniable. Many years after the demise of interwar German social democracy, they continued to endorse surprisingly formalistic interpretations of the rule of law and judicial decision- making, while warning of the dangers of anti-formalistic tendencies in both the judiciary and administration as potential threats to social progress. Like their mentor, they always belonged to a relatively small group of radical jurists who idiosyncratically fused the quest for social reform with seemingly old-fashioned ideas about the rule of law and legal interpretation.34

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Sinzheimer and the young MorgenthauIn a short unpublished notice from 1935 written appreciatively in honour of Sinzheimer on his sixtieth birthday, Morgenthau accurately summarised the core intuition underlying his teacher’s theory: ‘at its base is the legal theoretical insight that the abstract concepts of freely and equally contracting persons that dominate German civil law no longer accord with the changed structure of capitalist society’, and, consequently, such legal forms must fail given the real-life ‘dependence of the industrial worker’. As a result, ‘new legal forms’ must be achieved in order realise meaningful freedom and equality for the working classes. Morgenthau noted that Sinzheimer had long been fascinated by the gap between the ‘abstract individualism of bourgeois law’ and the ‘realistic, that is, social relations-oriented’ facts of legal experience. For this reason, he accurately noted, Sinzheimer bridged the fields of labour law and the sociology of law.35Morgenthau’s writings were always influenced by a disparate body of intellectual currents.36 Yet his brief summary of Sinzheimer’s project represents a useful starting point for making sense of Morgenthau’s own Weimar-era writings.In 1929, the 25-year-old Morgenthau published his first book, based on his dissertation, devoted to determining the necessary limits of judicial and arbitral functions in international law.37 Its main theme is the distinction between two varieties of international conflict: ‘disputes’ [Streitigkeiten] can normally be resolved by international legal devices such as courts and arbitration boards, whereas33 Recent scholarship has confirmed this view. See Ingo Mueller, Hitler’s Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).34 See Scheuerman, Between the Norm and the Exception. 35 This untitled piece appears to have been unsuccessfully submitted to a legal journal (HJM-B110,Library of Congress). The translation here, as of other German texts unless otherwise noted, is myown. 36 Two detailed discussions of Morgenthau’s early work stand out:

Niels Amstrup, ‘ The ‘ ‘ Early’’Morgenthau: A Comment on the Intellectual Origins of Realism’, Cooperation and Conflict, 3(1978), pp. 163–75; Koskenniemi, Gentle Civilizer of Nations, pp. 436–73. 37 Morgenthau, Die internationale Rechtspflege. The book garnered strong endorsements from majorfigures in the field. See, for example, the comments by Hersch Lauterpacht, who praised Morgenthau’s first book in a review of Morgenthau’s closely related 1933 La Notion du ‘politique’ et la theorie des differends internationaux (Paris: Libraire du Recueil Sirey, 1933): ‘Dr. Morgenthau has won for himself through his book [from 1929] a prominent place among international lawyers engaged in clarifying the character of disputes among states and in enquiring into the limits of their compulsory settlement’ (Zeitschrift fuer Sozialforschung, 3 [1934], p. 461).Realism and the Left: the case of Morgenthau 39‘tensions’ [Spannungen] typically undermine attempts at legal resolution. By way of an implicit critique of Carl Schmitt, Morgenthau argued that ‘tensions’ express fundamental political divisions, which he categorised as those conflicts taking an especially intense and explosive character. Because of the intense or deeply felt character of such conflicts, it is na Qıve and even counterproductive to expect them to be effectively resolved by judicial or arbitral devices. ‘Tensions’ which are allowed to masquerade as ‘disputes’, Morgenthau suggested, represent a disruptive force in international law. To assert that tensions – for example, the profound and indisput- ably explosive conflict between France and Germany during the 1920s concerning the occupation of the Rheinland – can be easily resolved by judicial or arbitral devices is illusory. When such attempts are undertaken, the intensity of the political conflict at hand may simply undergo augmentation, and judicial or arbitral devices will typically be used to advance alien goals transcending their necessary limits.A close reading of the text reveals Sinzheimer’s indelible impact. First, the volume’s basic

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method was inspired by the view that legal scholarship should pay attention to the gap between law and empirical or social reality, as one of Morgenthau’s main aims was to show that we can only understand the source of international tensions by thematising this gap. For Morgenthau, dogmatic and positivistic legal analysis was incapable of making sense of the phenomenon of international tensions because it cannot properly identify their roots in the misfit between the normative system of international law and the ‘real’ social conditions of international politics. The fundamental dilemma of international law, Morgenthau argued, is its static character. While domestic law rests on an elastic normative framework by means of which law can be readjusted in accordance with changing social realities (for example, by means of new legislation), international law codifies the political status quo without offering reliable norm-based legal instruments by which affected parties could recalibrate legal devices in accordance with changed real-life conditions. ‘The development of international law stopped at precisely that juncture where the most fundamental function of a legal system commences’.38 International law freezes the configuration of social and political relations which obtained in the international arena when the relevant norms were promulgated. Politically explosive tensions emerge as a direct result of the gap between the static (and increasingly anachronistic) structure of international law and changes in ‘real’ social conditions. In this view, non-justiciable political tensions are most likely to appear when changes in social and political relations conflict dramatically with international law.Because international law has yet to develop a flexible framework by which shifts in social relations can be given proper legal form, it remains a primitive and undeveloped normative system which necessarily generates tensions capable of culminating in interstate violence. How else might those states which hope to change the international status quo do so in light of the fact that the path of peaceful legal evolution has been closed to them? Yet demand for change is inevitable given both the manifest inequalities of international politics and the dynamic character of social and political reality. Why should weaker states be expected to abide for all eternity to norms privileging the great powers? In the domestic setting, Morgenthau noted, those legal systems which fail to offer meaningful possibilities for peaceful legal38 Morgenthau, Die internationale Rechtspflege, p. 75.40 William E. Scheuermanadaptation face the spectre of revolution. Rising social groups will overthrow ruling groups by force if necessary. Because static law is ubiquitous in international relations, however, the possibility of violent upheaval is far more pronounced there.The young Morgenthau refused to embrace the conclusion that explosive tensions constitute an irrepressible necessity in international politics, however. He argued instead that international law should be transformed into a dynamic system which, like its domestic corollary, would allow for significant adjustments to power relations by peaceful legal means. Morgenthau admitted that this demand raised a host of difficult questions. Nonetheless, the book concludes with a heated polemic against those who would deem such reforms a priori impossible, dismissing their views as ahistorical and ‘metaphysical’.39Morgenthau’s 1929 study constitutes nothing less than a creative attempt to apply Sinzheimer’s chief programmatic insights to the international field. Not only did its author complement doctrinal legal analysis with a sociological or ‘realistic’ account of law, but the latter ultimately focused on the same attribute of social reality that so fascinated Sinzheimer and his leftist disciples: the fact of inequality – in this case, between and among states–ultimately takes centre stage. The first and most elementary sense in which Morgenthau’s thinking underscored the virtues of ‘realist’ analysis reproduced Sinzheimer’s intuition that legal analysis needs to be comple- mented by an empirical or sociological analysis of the power inequalities in which law operates. Sinzheimer’s theory began with the gap between formal legal ideals of freedom and equality and the harsh social facts of inequality and dependence in the workplace. In a conceptually analogous vein, Morgenthau contrasted the abstract legal ideals of international law

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(including the doctrine that each state is legally sovereign and equal) to the stark power realities of the international arena, where the great powers typically dominate.40The same basic argumentative move is found in a provocative 1932 survey of German legal thought since the nineteenth century, where Morgenthau accused the mainstream of German legal thought of fleeing from the harsh realities of political life. Echoing Sinzheimer’s sympathetic critique of legal positivism, Morgenthau evinced a real appreciation for Hans Kelsen’s jurisprudential achievements, while nonetheless criticising Kelsen’s pure theory of law for closing its eyes to the necessity of a hard-headed realistic or sociological account of international law capable of forthrightly analysing real-life power relations.41 In a short 1933 article for a Zurich newspaper, Morgenthau asserted that the gap between legal concepts and social reality is greatest in the international sphere, arguing that for this reason a sociological or ‘realistic’ approach is likely to prove fruitful there.42 In other words: Sinzheimer’s basic method is especially suited to the study of international law since legal concepts there have even less to do with the actual social relations of power than in the domestic arena.39 Ibid., p. 148. 40 In Völkerrechtsgeist, Sinzheimer similarly drew a parallel between the ‘juridical abstraction’ ofindividual freedom within the context of private law and the ‘juridical abstraction’ of absolute state sovereignty (p. 6). In both cases, law tends to obscure the existence of relations of social dependence and inequality.41 Hans J. Morgenthau, Genfer Antrittssvorlesung (Geneva, unpublished, 1932) (HJM-B110, Library of Congress).42 Hans J. Morgenthau, ‘Die Wirklichkeit des Vo Qlkerbunds’, Neue Zuercher Zeitung (2 April 1933), p. 3.Realism and the Left: the case of Morgenthau 41Echoing Sinzheimer, Morgenthau’s Weimar-era work also highlighted the ideo- logical functions of formal law amid real-life inequality. Yet this by no means forced him to overlook its normative potential, notwithstanding his acknowledgment of the deep pathologies of existing international law. In his 1929 volume, for example, Morgenthau extended Sinzheimer’s legalistic reformism to the international sphere. Just as Sinzheimer had hoped that legal reality might be successfully recalibrated in accordance with the altered social realities of present-day capitalism, Morgenthau hinted at the possibility of a ‘relatively just’ and egalitarian system of international law that better meshed with changing social relations in the international arena.43 One clear implication of this proposal was a reformed international legal system better able to allow ‘rising’ states, against which the great powers have likely stacked the legal deck, to change the international order by peaceful means.44 Law, it seems, could play a constructive role in allowing for peaceful shifts in power relations. Just as Sinzheimer’s legal reformism rendered violent revolution unnecessary on the domestic front, so too might a new international legal order minimise the dangers of interstate violence.Of course, a major conceptual difference nonetheless separated Morgenthau from Sinzheimer and his left-wing pupils: Morgenthau never employed Marxism. Perhaps Morgenthau’s main object of scholarly interest, interstate relations, struck him understandably as less amenable to Marxist analysis than the capitalist workplace, on which his legal colleagues fastened their scholarly attention. In any event, perhaps we can now better understand precisely what Morgenthau meant when many years later he admitted that under Sinzheimer’s guidance he ‘learned a great deal from Marx’, even though he never could ‘abide that particular type of Marxist who considers Marxism to be a closed intellectual system’.45 Although Morgenthau never endorsed Marxist ideas, the fundamental structure of his early thinking owed a great deal to Sinzheimer’s Marxist-inspired analysis of the gap between legal and social reality.Two additional features of Morgenthau’s 1929 study closely follow Sinzheimer. First, it reproduced his mentor’s formalistic legal instincts and anxieties about judicial discretion, suggesting that open-ended legal norms which invite broad discretion in the international arena

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overlap with the phenomenon of ‘tensions’. When tackled by means of inappropriate judicial devices, politically explosive conflicts necessarily undermine the integrity of the law. Fundamental conflicts are covered up by vague legal clauses, and judicial rulings lack the objectivity which they possess during the normal operations of adjudication.46 To the extent that Morgenthau’s argument implied that reform might reduce the likelihood of43 Morgenthau, Die internationale Rechtspflege, p. 150. 44 Even well after the mature Morgenthau subsequently abandoned this dream of a dynamic system ofadaptable international norms, the original egalitarian impulses behind his critique of international law occasionally remained in place. A central criticism of ambitious models of international law remained the claim that they often worked to the advantage of powerful states and undermined the sovereignty of weaker rivals.45 Morgenthau, ‘Fragment of an Intellectual Autobiography’, p. 13. 46 Morgenthau, Die internationale Rechtspflege, esp. pp. 2, 14, 89–90, 98–130.42 William E. Scheuermandangerous international tensions, it held out the possibility of actually strengthening formalistic legal virtues in the international arena.47Second, Morgenthau endorsed Sinzheimer’s view that ‘the dynamic element’ or ‘time factor’ deserves a central role in the realist or sociological analysis of law. A central programmatic attribute not only of his book, but of all Morgenthau’s Weimar-era writings, was his demand for a dynamic or flexible international law better able to adjust to changing social and political conditions. In 1929, he also published his first two articles, an appreciative discussion of the place of Gustav Stresemann in German foreign policy as well as a short critical report on the annual meeting of German international lawyers, both appearing in a left-wing legal journal co-edited by Sinzheimer, Die Justiz.48. In the Stresemann essay, Morgenthau praised the German statesmen for breaking with the widespread hostility among his countrymen to international law, while refusing to succumb to na Nıve ideas about international law blind to the real conditions under which it operates. A key feature of that reality for Morgenthau was the existence of formally sovereign but factually unequal nation-states: Stresemann was admired for advancing German interests against the Versailles Treaty. Morgenthau also enlisted him as an ally in his own defence of an alternative international order: Stresemann’s greatness stemmed from his understanding that international law could only successfully serve pacific purposes if it were to become a dynamic normative system adaptable to political and social change.49 In his report on the meeting of international lawyers, Morgenthau analogously criticised their deliberations by failing to clarify what he self-confidently described as the ‘core issue’ of the entire field of international law, namely the need for a major restructuring so as to heighten its dynamic character.50In light of the mature Morgenthau’s deep scepticism about international law, these early demands for a reformed international legal order inevitably seem surprising. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to dismiss them as nothing more than a sin of youth, or momentary lapse of good judgment, immediately jettisoned for purportedly sounder and more familiar ‘realist’ views. His reform ideas also appear in a lengthy unpublished manuscript from 1931, in which he repeated his argument that the gap between static international law and the changing social conditions of the inter- national arena necessarily generates explosive conflict, and that such conflicts can only be avoided by establishing a dynamic legal system. Because of Morgenthau’s profound debt to Sinzheimer here and elsewhere in his Weimar-era writings, it is47 Morgenthau also occasionally echoes his teacher’s ideas about the autonomous (that is, non-statist) origins of labour law, according to which legal regulation first emerged among non-state actors. At the very least, Morgenthau argues forcefully against those who directly link the concept of international jurisdiction to the sovereign state, noting that international juridical and arbitral bodies operate effectively despite the lack of a shared sovereign (Die internationale Rechtspflege,

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pp. 17–19). This is also a theme in his later work. In a 1940 article, for example, he criticises the mainstream of international lawyers for a ‘monistic statism’ that leads them to limit the scope of international law to the express written law of the state, according to which the only valid rules are those found in court decisions and formally ratified treaties. However, ‘all rules embodied in written documents are not valid international law, and, on the other hand, there are valid rules . . . other than the rules embodied in written documents’ (‘Positivism, Functionalism, and International Law’, American Journal of International Law, 34 (1940), p. 265.48 Sinzheimer’s other disciples published frequently there as well. 49 Hans J. Morgenthau, ‘Stresemann als Scho Qpfer der deutschen Vo Qlkerechtspolitik’, Die Justiz, 5(1929/30), pp. 169–76. 50 Hans J. Morgenthau, ‘Die Vo Qlkerrechtlichen Ergebnisse der Tagung der deutschen Gesellschaft fuerVo Qlkerrecht’, 4 (1929), pp. 621–4.Realism and the Left: the case of Morgenthau 43perhaps appropriate that the manuscript closed by insisting on the necessity of tying major changes in international law to far-reaching alterations to the economic order. A new economic order, Morgenthau argued, could help counteract the self- destructive enthusiasm for warfare which had resulted in so many millions suffering the horrors of the World War. Unless new possibilities for creative and self-affirming activity were provided in everyday life, war would disastrously continue to seem like an attractive escape:In the economic sphere the change in conditions must be total. Because of modern wage slavery; because of the closing of every opportunity for the masses to prove themselves and improve their station according by regular methods; because of the impossibility for the overwhelming majority of men to be able to complete something responsibly and by full employment of their personality about which they might say, here is my achievement, my work; because of the degradation of the human being to an object . . . because of their irrevocable damnation to a depersonalized machine . . . Because of these conditions a leaden and tired hopelessness has emerged, the true sister to an explosive desperation, which sees war as a savior, as a great uplifting force. To change this situation and to bring about a renewal is a task which the best men of our times have taken upon themselves as their fate.51Morgenthau never shared his Frankfurt colleagues’ enthusiasm for Marx. Yet he did sympathise with their call for far-reaching social and economic change.The demise of Weimar and the origins of Morgenthau’s RealismNot surprisingly, the destruction of Weimar provoked anxious second thoughts among Sinzheimer and his followers. Sinzheimer briefly conceded that he had been na Nıve to believe that his ambitious model of labour and social regulation could ever succeed: it had been unrealistic to expect too much from legal reform in the context of contemporary capitalism and its deeply entrenched inequalities.52 Neumann’s classic study of Nazi Germany, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, similarly starts with a devastating self-critique of Weimar reformism, which Neumann now pessimistically described as less congruent with the fundamen- tal operations of contemporary ‘monopoly capitalism’ than fascist dictatorship. He,51 Hans J. Morgenthau, Selbstmord mit gutem Gewisssen. Zur Kritik des Pazifismus und der neuen deutschen Kriegsphilosophie (Frankfurt, unpublished manuscript, 1931) (HJM-B96, Library of Congress). The manuscript – which includes a detailed critique of both prewar German pacifism and the ‘new bellicose philosophy’ of Ernst Ju Qnger – was submitted unsuccessfully for publication to the major German publisher Rowohlt Verlag, whose representative informed Morgenthau that he was unable to publish it because of the bad economic times which had impacted the publishing business. Morgenthau rather diplomatically failed to include Sinzheimer’s prewar pacifistic ideas as part of his critique. At the same time, the critique of pacifism is a sympathetic one: Morgenthau’s general point was that ‘old’ prewar or traditional pacifism had failed miserably, and that it should be jettisoned for a new (more realistic) theory and practice that might prove more successful at warding off the horrors of war. It is also worth

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recalling that many of the mature Morgenthau’s writings suggest an abiding commitment to social and economic reform, though not along the radical lines arguably suggested here. See, for example, the neglected Purpose of American Politics (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1960).52 Knorre, Soziale Selbstbestimmung und individuelle Verantwortung, pp. 125–7. According to Knorre, Sinzheimer soon abandoned this pessimistic interpretation of his own Weimar undertaking, however.44 William E. Scheuermantoo, deduced that it had been na Nıve to believe that legalistic reformism, along the lines embraced by Weimar social democracy, might effectively challenge capitalism.53A parallel tendency characterises Morgenthau’s development. In a 1933 volume expanding on the key arguments of his earlier study of international disputes and tensions, ‘Morgenthau saw much less prospect for a reform towards a ‘‘dynamic’’ law than fours years earlier’.54 In his post-Weimar writings, Morgenthau no longer unambiguously endorsed the view that legal reform might generate an alternative international order better able to adapt to changing social conditions. His writings from the mid-1930s and early 1940s frequently revisited the static character of international law. Yet he increasingly tended to describe this weakness as an unalterable fact of international political reality.55 As in his earlier Weimar-era writings, the young international law scholar still accented the deleterious conse- quences for legal practice stemming from the lack of dynamism in international law. But he no longer intimated the possibility of overcoming the pathologies of international law – for example, the fact that legal interpretation is vastly more politicised and indeterminate there than in the domestic arena.56 Like Sinzheimer and his left-wing disciples, Morgenthau found himself reconsidering his earlier reformist impulses. Just as they now questioned the possibility of developing (peaceful) legal mechanisms capable of creatively responding to changing social and economic conditions in the domestic arena, he surrendered the reform-oriented dream of a system of international law that might bring about peaceful change and a more just international order. In the face of deep power inequality, Sinzheimer and his disciples concluded, such dreams are often illusory – both in the context of capitalism and the deeply unequal international system of states.Revealingly, this theoretical shift arguably occurs amid the destruction of Weimar, and not subsequent to the collapse of the ill-fated League of Nations.57 Morgenthau was undoubtedly traumatised by the collapse of the international legal order in the 1930s. But that collapse merely represented, from an internal theoretical perspective, empirical confirmation for his growing scepticism about the potentially constructive potential of law in the face of deep inequalities in power. His doubts initially appear to have been triggered, not surprisingly, by the demise of Weimar and the legalistic social democratic reform vision for which he had fought alongside Sinzheimer, Fraenkel, Kahn-Freund, and Neumann. When Scientific Man vs. Power Politics later ridiculed the legalistic liberal belief ‘that man is able to legislate at will, that is, to realize through the means of law whatever aims he pursues’, adding that this illusion was ‘shared even by contemporary Marxian practice’, Morgenthau thus was engaging in self-criticism to a greater extent than either openly acknowledged by him or English-speaking readers unfamiliar with his own Weimar past imagined.58 Morgenthau, like his left-wing colleagues in Sinzheimer’s law office, earlier embraced53 Franz L. Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942), pp. 3–39.54 Koskenniemi, Gentle Civilizer of Nations, p. 455. The study in question is La Notion du ‘Politique’ et la Theorie des Differends Internationaux (Paris: Recueil Sirey, 1933).55 See, for example, Hans J. Morgenthau, ‘The Problem of Neutrality’, University of Kansas City Law Review, 7 (1938/39), p. 111.56 Morgenthau, ‘Positivism, Functionalism, and International Law’, pp. 281–2. 57 To be sure, the rise of fascism and collapse of the League were closely related in many ways. 58Hans J. Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,

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1946), pp. 116–17.Realism and the Left: the case of Morgenthau 45a strong faith in the constructive power of legal reform. In contradistinction, a decisive feature of Morgenthau’s subsequent brand of realism was its sceptical view of international law, especially when envisioned as a device for challenging great power political privilege and reorganising the international system.Morgenthau’s lapsed belief in the na Nıve dream that we can ‘legislate at will’ in order to alter unattractive political and social realities ultimately opened the door to a major reorientation in his basic understanding of realist theory. Under Sinzheimer’s tutelage, his Weimar-era realism consisted primarily of the demand that the analyst of international law confront abstract legal norms with the sociological reality of power relations. Social reality was historically changeable; the espousal of a realistic method implied no claims about the unalterable trans-historical character of power or social relations. In contrast, in the spirit of reformist social democracy, priority was occasionally attributed to the quest to alter the unattractive social fact of interstate inequality. As late as 1940, in an article for the American Journal of International Law, Morgenthau still endorsed rudimentary features of this approach:The precepts of international law need not only to be interpreted in the light of the ideals . . . which are at their basis. They need also to be seen within the sociological context of economic interests, social tensions, and aspirations for power, which are the motivating forces in the international field, and which give rise to the factual situations forming the raw material for regulation by international law.59A realistic or sociologically-minded theory of international law, he added, was one in which its operations were situated in social reality, which meant that the analyst needed to pay attention to ‘the psychological, social, political and economic forces which determine the actual content and working of legal rules . . ’.60Morgenthau’s comments here are also revealing because they point to a deep ambiguity at the core of this initial interpretation of realist method: which social facts are most important for understanding power and inequality in the international arena? Morgenthau’s answer to this question was always eclectic and probably imprecise: it included ‘economic interests’ as well as political, social, and even psychological forces. As is well known, Morgenthau–in sharp contrast to his left-wing Weimar friends – typically neglected ‘economic forces’ as a causal factor. But at least in principle, this first version of realist method implied the necessity of a broad range of empirical analyses of power and inequality at the international level. Their shared goal would merely have been to provide a rigorous analysis of those social facts shaping international law with an eye, at least in Morgenthau’s early writings, towards modifying them for the sake of reform.6159 Morgenthau, ‘Positivism, Functionalism, and International Law’, p. 269. In this essay, realism is described as ‘functionalism’ in order, Morgenthau notes, to avoid any possible misunderstanding: his approach shares little with legal realism or what is commonly associated with realism in contemporary legal thought. When addressing political scientists, his primary audience in later years, he reverts to the ‘realist’ label. The term ‘functionalism’ is also revealing, since a primary concern in left-wing Weimar German-speaking sociology of law (for example, in Renner’s sociology of law), where the term was common, was the ‘changing social functions’ of law – a theme in Morgenthau’s theory as well, though he uses different terminology to describe it. An important difference between this essay and Morgenthau’s early work, however, is that he no longer believes that international law can be rendered dynamic.60 Morgenthau, ‘Positivism, Functionalism, and International Law’, p. 273. 61 This analysis, furthermore, would have to be scientific. Morgenthau’s model of social science seemsto have been influenced by Max Weber. See, for example, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, where Weber is a major, albeit inadequately acknowledged, source.46 William E. Scheuerman

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By giving up the dream of a dynamic system of international law, Morgenthau’s realism necessarily underwent a subtle but profound transformation. Realism became associated in Morgenthau’s mind with the effort to identify historically unchanging patterns of human experience interpreted as the ‘real’ (that is, primordial) basis for the pathologies of international politics and law. Yet realism of this second type refers not simply to real (that is, existing but alterable) social and historical facts, but also to fundamental trans-historical characteristics of human nature and psychology which constitute, in a sense, the underlying basis for the ever-changing facticity of social experience. This distinct conceptual strand, which has no immediate parallels in Sinzheimer’s theory or in the ideas of his left-wing disciples, clearly helped prepare the ground for a characteristic attribute of Morgenthau’s mature realism. In his most famous US publications, he highlighted the importance of a sound view of human nature as a starting point for realist theory. One implication of this conceptual shift was that many of the familiar dilemmas of international politics might be seen as rooted in trans-historical attributes of human nature. ‘Political realism believes that politics, like society in general, is governed by objective laws that have their root in human nature’, which ‘has not changed since the classical philosophies of China, India, and Greece’.62 Inevitably perhaps, the resulting tendency in Morgenthau’s mature theory was implicitly if not always explicitly to attribute a sense of unavoidability to many facets of the existing international order, in sharp contrast to the emphasis in his Weimar writings on their historical alterability.63To be sure, even Morgenthau’s first 1929 book implied the necessity of grounding a theory of international politics in human ‘drives’. But that suggestion remained peripheral to the overall argument.64 It was only with the growing fragility of Weimar democracy that Morgenthau’s preference for a universal theory of international politics rooted in psychology and philosophical anthropology flourished. During the early 1930s Morgenthau briefly toyed with Freudian theory, before apparently abandoning it.65 However, his mature theory always tended to rely heavily on purportedly trans-historical and relatively pessimistic claims about human psy- chology and human nature, despite the fact that their original Freudian starting point disappeared from view. Human nature and the basic laws of human psychology, the62 Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 2nd edn. (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1954), p. 4.63 Not surprisingly, many critics of Morgenthau’s postwar work have worried about its purportedly conservative overtones: it tends to reify the most unfortunate features of contemporary international politics and rests on an exaggerated hostility to even modest forms of international reform. Richard Falk, for example, refuses to group Morgenthau among the ‘critical realists’ presumably because of a failure to grasp international relations as ‘a matter of historical evolution arising from the play of social, economic and ideological forces’: ‘The Critical Realist Tradition and the Demystification of State Power: E. H. Carr, Hedley Bull and Robert W. Cox’, in Stephen Gill (ed.), Innovation and Transformation in International Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 39–55.64 See the brief references to this idea in Die internationale Rechtspflege, p. 74. 65

Morgenthau’s early engagement with Freud was undoubtedly another product of the eventful yearsin liberal-minded Frankfurt, where Freud, in contrast to many other German cities and universities, was taken seriously. Morgenthau likely encountered the young Erich Fromm, who lectured at the Institute for Social Research in the late 1920s and 1930s. Fromm, like Morgenthau, was centrally interested in understanding what he also described as a psychologically-rooted ‘lust for power’. See, for example, Escape from Freedom (New York: Henry Holt, 1969 [1941]), p. 4, and at least for a period of time, Morgenthau, like Fromm, hoped to build on Freud to explain the origins of this ‘lust for power’. See especially U}ber die Herkunft des Politischen aus dem Wesen der Menschen (Frankfurt, 1931, unpublished, HJM-B151, Library of Congress), where Morgenthau undertakes to build a Freudian-inspired political theory.

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Realism and the Left: the case of Morgenthau 47postwar Morgenthau delighted in repeating to startled liberal-minded audiences, constitute the fundamental basis for the irrationality of central features of inter- national politics. Consequently, it was na Nıve to expect a radical or revolutionary overhaul of the international system, however desirable such reforms might appear.66In contrast, when Morgenthau first employed arguments about human nature and psychology during the Weimar period, he typically underscored their historical and social malleability. In his unpublished 1931 book on pacifism, for example, he attributed a crude psychologism to the right-wing author Ernst Ju Q nger, accusing him of misleadingly justifying the worst horrors of modern warfare by crudely deducing them from primary human instincts. What Ju Qnger and others ignored, Morgenthau countered in both a Freudian and legal-reformist vein, was the possibility of successfully sublimating our potentially destructive basic instincts so they might find socially constructive outlets. A world without war might be possible, Morgenthau suggested, but only if humankind could figure out how to develop new channels for mobilising our most disturbing instincts and impulses in a pacific direction.67 In accordance with his early faith in the possibility of fundamental legal reform, the young Morgenthau in 1931 still deemed this achievable.As soon as this vision of dynamic international law was abandoned, however, Morgenthau’s own employment of psychology and philosophical anthropology inevitably drew him somewhat closer to the right-wing position he otherwise criticised so forcefully. In this context, Morgenthau’s deep engagement with Schmitt is especially revealing. Their ‘hidden dialogue’ has been extensively documented elsewhere; there is no reason to do so again.68 Yet one facet of it deserves retelling. The young Morgenthau, we now know, was fascinated by Schmitt’s ‘concept of the political’, which he deemed a provocative but ultimately inadequate starting point for understanding political conflict. According to Morgenthau, Schmitt was right to focus on the crucial theoretical question of how we are to define politics in opposition to competing modes of social activity. Yet Schmitt’s own model fails, as Morgenthau astutely demonstrated in a number of early writings.69 Morgenthau’s many percep- tive criticisms of Schmitt might easily lead us to obscure an important point of overlap, however. In the final analysis, both authors opt to ground their rather sober and arguably bleak visions of political life in pessimistic versions of philosophical anthropology, and this ultimately encouraged them, albeit in distinct ways, to describe many familiar features of contemporary international politics as based in human nature and probably immune to reform.70Other former members of the Sinzheimer circle – including Fraenkel and Neumann – also pursued a close examination of Schmitt’s work during the 1930s. Interestingly, Sinzheimer never took this step: his writings include many critical66 Think, for example, of his many comments about the ‘world state’, which he described typically as morally desirable yet politically unrealistic.67 Morgenthau, Der Selbstmord mit gutem Gewissen, pp. 44–6. 68 Scheuerman, Carl Schmitt: The End of Law, pp. 225–51. 69 See especially La Notion du ‘politique’ et la theorie des differends internationaux (Paris: Libraire duRecueil Sirey, 1933). 70 Schmitt uses the ‘concept of the political’ to criticise liberal international law in his The Concept ofthe Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996 [1932]). On the debate between Morgenthau and Schmitt, see Scheuerman, ‘Carl Schmitt and Hans J. Morgenthau: Realism and Beyond’, in Michael Williams (ed.), Realism Reconsidered: The Legacy of Hans J. Morgenthau in International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).48 William E. Scheuermanobservations about Schmitt, yet he never engaged as deeply with Schmitt’s work as did his young disciples. In contrast, Sinzheimer’s students not only followed him in harshly criticising Schmitt’s fascistic political theory, but they also typically acknowl- edged that Schmitt at least

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offered the outlines of a ‘realistic’ power-oriented vision of politics too often missing from mainstream jurisprudence and legal positivism.71 Neumann, for example, creatively integrated some of Schmitt’s theoretical insights in order to develop a provocative interpretation of the relationship between the rule of law and emergency power.72 Yet Morgenthau’s reworking of Schmitt, in the final analysis, is significantly different from both Neumann’s and Fraenkel’s, and this difference reveals the sizeable critical distance Morgenthau travelled in the 1930s away from the original ideas of his teacher and his left-wing legal Frankfurt milieu. For Fraenkel and Neumann, Schmitt’s theory gave expression to a number of disturbing tendencies in contemporary capitalist society–most importantly, the decay of the rule of law and proliferation of emergency and exceptional forms of executive discretion. In this view, the immanent dynamics of capitalist development tended to generate political authoritarianism; Schmitt’s deplorable political and legal theory represented a theoretical embodiment of the decadence of bourgeois society. Fraenkel and Neumann thus not only criticised Schmitt’s heinous normative preferences, but also distanced themselves from Schmitt’s pessimistic view of human nature as well as the dreary agonistic vision of politics based on it. Despite his deep hostility to Schmitt, Morgenthau’s break with him was never as clean: by marrying a pessimistic view of human nature to an agonistic conception of politics, he ultimately endorsed a starting point for analysing international politics at the very least reminiscent of Schmitt’s own.73 In one of the more striking paradoxes of Morgenthau’s complex intellectual development, he responded to the collapse of Weimar democracy and left-wing reformism by implicitly integrating some of the least tenable views of its most prominent rightist critic into his own brand of realism.74Morgenthau and the Weimar Left: contemporary implications?In this essay I have argued that we need to take a careful look at the young Morgenthau’s intellectual and political ties to one of the leading lights of the Weimar democratic left, Hugo Sinzheimer. Only by doing so can we make sense of the genesis of Morgenthau’s influential brand of realism. The collapse of Sinzheimer’s project, I have suggested, constitutes a neglected backdrop not only for Morgenthau’s early71 Morgenthau’s argument on this score (see, for the example, his 1932 Geneva Inaugural Lecture [Genfer Antrittsrede, HJM-B110, Library of Congress]) echoes a similar interpretation of Kelsen found in many writings of Sinzheimer’s former students. During the 1930s, Morgenthau devoted significant energy to criticizing Kelsen. See, most notably, La Realite des Normes. En particulier des norms du droit international (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1934). For his part, Sinzheimer was clearly familiar with Kelsen’s work, yet he does not seem to have engaged its philosophical fundaments as deeply as Morgenthau during the early and mid-1930s.72 Franz L. Neumann, The Rule of Law: Political Theory and Legal System in Modern Society (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1986 [1936]); also, Fraenkel, The Dual State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941).73 See especially Neumann, ‘Types of Natural Law’ in Neumann, The Democratic and Authoritarian State (Glencoe: Free Press, 1957 [1940]), pp. 69–95.74 See Scheuerman, ‘Carl Schmitt and Hans J. Morgenthau: Realism and Beyond’.Realism and the Left: the case of Morgenthau 49theorising, but also the immediate initiative for Morgenthau’s espousal of a number of key realist ideas. Most important, it played a decisive role in generating Morgenthau’s famous squeamishness about ambitious models of international law.What general significance might this historical story have for contemporary international relations theory?First, Morgenthau’s ties to the Weimar Left shed light on the immanent as well as historical sources of many of the widely noted theoretical tensions in Morgenthau’s fully developed realism. As a young reform-minded scholar, Morgenthau’s theory was both receptive to the possibility of large historical alterations to the state system and itself ‘idealistic’ insofar as it sought radical reforms to that system. Following the demise of Weimar, Morgenthau ultimately

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abandoned his early dreams and began to articulate elements of the version of realist theory which made him famous in postwar America. The fact that Morgenthau’s mature theory always included both realist and idealist moments suggests that he never successfully resolved internal conceptual tensions which arose in the context of Weimar’s demise.Although this facet of his intellectual career tends to get neglected by more recent international relations scholars of a realist bent, Morgenthau by the 1960s not only became a vocal critic of the nuclear arms race, but he went so far as to outline an ambitious – and still unrealised – model for the transnational control of nuclear weaponry.75 One of the most surprising elements of his thinking from this period is the argument – repeated in many contexts – that the only ‘realistic’ path to human survival in the nuclear age was the radical reconsideration of the nation-state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. In the context of nuclear arms, Morgenthau asserted, this supposedly necessary facet of modern sovereignty risks generating the annihilation of the human species.76 A central dogma of realist theory, it turns out, no longer proves realistic in the face of the spectre of nuclear war. The historical story I have tried to recount here allows us better to understand the deep theoretical sources of this surprisingly ‘idealistic’ moment in Morgenthau’s postwar theory. His reflections on the special significance of nuclear weapons seem to have generated a return of sorts to some of the earliest conjunctures in his intellectual development, when he similarly advocated fundamental transformations to the state system. By the same token, the fact that Morgenthau in the 1960s ultimately failed to rework realist theory as purportedly required by the nuclear threat also implies that he never managed to overcome the deep tensions which always plagued his theory.Second, the somewhat surprising nexus between left-wing politics and realism – often neglected by historians of international theory77 – deserves closer consider- ation. In fact, Morgenthau was by no means the only early realist to have begun his career as an outspoken ‘man on the left’. Two other leading lights of 1930s and 1940s realism, E. H. Carr and Reinhold Niebuhr, also embraced socialism for lengthy periods of time. What might this tell us about realist theory and especially its deep scepticism concerning the prospects of ambitious legal reform at the global level? Although the story is complicated, the socialist background of early realism probably implies that its scepticism about ambitious models of global governance derives at least in part from the traditional left-wing critique of formal law: in the context of75 76 77Morgenthau, Purpose of American Politics, pp. 172–8. Craig, Glimmer of a New Leviathan. However, Friedrich Hayek early on observed that realism had roots in socialism. See Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1944), pp. 204–5.50 William E. Scheuermanstunning power inequalities, the potentially egalitarian and protective functions of general law tend to take a backseat to its manipulation by the most privileged power blocs. Amidst pervasive inequality, general law too often serves as an instrument for the powerful rather than an effective restraint on them. To be sure, there may be good normative reasons for challenging this argument. Most important, it probably obscures the ways in which international law – despite deep power inequalities – might at times indeed work dynamically to alter political and social injustice at the global level. Nonetheless, realist scepticism is nonetheless placed in a fresh normative light: deeply humanitarian impulses drove socialist-minded thinkers like the young Morgenthau – and probably Carr and Niebuhr as well – to worry about the potential dangers of grandiose visions of global governance. In a global setting plagued by endemic inequality, they understandably worried, some forms of liberal international law risk opening the door to new forms of political and economic control of the weak by the strong. If I am not mistaken, recent examples of what we now describe as ‘humanitarian military intervention’ demonstrate the salience of such concerns.78 Even those of us who tend to support such intervention and disagree fundamentally with Morgenthau’s theory need to take them seriously.Third, my argument provides preliminary support for those scholars who have tried to underscore

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the critical impulses allegedly at work in realist theory. Richard Ashley, for example, has brought Morgenthau into a dialogue with contemporary critical theory while favourably contrasting his version of realist theory to recent neorealism,79 and Ken Booth has toyed with the possibility of what he describes as a critical or ‘utopian realism’.80 More recently, Michael C. Williams has argued that Morgenthau’s realist theory anticipates central concerns of critical and constructivist international relations theory.81 This seemingly counter-intuitive use of Morgenthau should now appear anything but far-fetched: the young Morgenthau himself was deeply engaged with what was considered critical social and legal thought in Weimar Germany, and his own theory borrowed deeply from radical intellectual traditions. It should come as no surprise that recent scholars have discovered subterranean critical tendencies at work in Morgenthau’s thought. To be sure, Morgenthau never succeeded in defending a coherent version of critical or utopian realism. But his complex intellectual legacy offers a rich starting point for thinking about its prospects as well as potential limits.Finally, the origins of Morgenthau’s thinking in left-wing Weimar intellectual currents highlight the potential virtues of a more serious engagement by contempo- rary cosmopolitan theory with classical realism. In recent international political theory, a growing body of cosmopolitan theory builds directly on the ideas of Frankfurt-oriented critical theory.82 Yet far too many of its assertions about realism78 See Danilo Zolo, Cosmopolis: Prospects for World Government (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997). 79 Richard K. Ashley, ‘Political Realism and Human Interests’, International Studies Quarterly, 25(1981), pp. 204–36; ‘The Poverty of Neorealism’, International Organization, 38 (1984), pp. 225–86. 80Ken Booth, ‘Security in Anarchy: Utopian Realism in Theory and Practice’, International Affairs, 15(1989), pp. 527–45. 81 Michael C. Williams, The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2004). 82 David Held is the most important representative of this genre. For a critical survey of recentFrankfurt-inspired critical theory work on globalisation and democracy, see William E. Scheuerman, ‘Critical Theory Beyond Habermas’, in John Dryzek, Bonnie Honig and Anne Phillips (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 85–105.Realism and the Left: the case of Morgenthau 51are misleading and even ignorant, and there is little evidence of a sustained theoretical encounter with realism.83 One typically encounters the half-truth, for example, that a dogmatic defence of the nation-state represents a core realist tenet, notwithstanding the fact that that the arch-realist Morgenthau periodically acknowledged the anachronistic character of the nation-state. Since contemporary Frankfurt-based critical theory and Morgenthau’s realism draw from the same intellectual wellsprings, this situation seems especially disappointing. Cosmopolitans in the critical theory tradition simply make things too easy for themselves by ignoring their shared intellectual roots with Morgenthau in a Frankfurt milieu in which Marx, Weber, and Freud dominated intellectual discourse. At the very least, a serious dialogue with the most challenging elements of Morgenthau’s realism, in contrast to a mere caricatured shadow of the real thing, might allow contemporary critical theorists to refine their own arguments and better demonstrate why their ambitious models for global governance represent more than the latest in a long series of well-meaning but potentially counter-productive visions of global reform.Contemporary left-wing cosmopolitans will also need to show, in light of a striking tendency to shy away from advancing radical social and economic change on the domestic level, while simultaneously endorsing ambitious models of transnational democracy,84 how they can compellingly respond to Morgenthau’s memorable 1946 description of ‘the world-embracing gesture of the international reformer’, who too often:

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is likely to hide an inhibited reformer of domestic affairs. He who signs a petition, makes a speech, writes an article, or simply attends a meeting in support of international understanding experiences the satisfaction of having done something for a worthwhile cause. That the good deed does not entail any sacrifices, incur any risks, or bring about any changes in the actual conditions of the actor’s life makes the action only the more attractive. Conversely, the international reformer, if he is not exceptionally courageous and wise, will stay clear of tackling the conditions, ideas, and policies in his own country, upon whose transformation international understanding at least partially depends. One will find that the urgency of domestic reform in a certain period is to a certain extent proportionate to the quantity of panaceas offered for the ills of the world in general, and to the insistence with which they are offered.85To be sure, the intensification of globalisation within recent decades might have encouraged Morgenthau to modify these criticisms. Indeed, Morgenthau was far more aware than many of his contemporary realist and neorealist offspring that contemporary conditions require us to rethink the fundamentals of realist theory. Yet can we be sure that contemporary left-wing cosmopolitan theory represents more than the latest rendition of what Morgenthau polemically described as a ‘subtle escapism’ from the need for pressing domestic reform for politically unrealistic and morally painless proposals for global democracy?8683 One exception is the work of Andrew Linklater, which builds on the Frankfurt School tradition while engaging deeply with mainstream realist theory. See, for example, his The Transformation of Political Community (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998).84 On Habermas in this context, see Scheuerman, ‘Critical Theory Beyond Habermas’. 85

Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, p. 98. 86 Ibid., p. 98. In a separate essay, I try to address the possibility of a coherent ‘critical realism’ withinMorgenthau’s work. See ‘A Theoretical Missed Opportunity? Hans J. Morgenthau as Critical Realist?’ in Duncan Bell (ed.), Tragedy, Power, and Justice: Variations on a Realist Theme (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.