Hans Morgenthau

Hans Morgenthau (born February 17, 1904, Coburg, Germany—died July 19, 1980, New York, New York, U.S.) was a German-born American political scientist and historian noted as a leading analyst of the role of power in international politics.

Educated first in Germany at the Universities of Berlin, Frankfurt, and Munich, Morgenthau did postgraduate work at the Graduate Institute for International Studies in Geneva. He was admitted to the bar in 1927 and served as acting president of the Labour Law Court in Frankfurt. In 1932 he went to Geneva to teach public law for a year, but because of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in 1933, he stayed on until 1935. In 1935–36 he taught in Madrid, and in 1937 he took up residence in the United States, where he became a naturalized citizen in 1943. He served on the faculties of Brooklyn (New York) College (1937–39), the University of Missouri–Kansas City (1939–43), the University of Chicago (1943–71), the City College of the City University of New York (1968–74), and the New School for Social Research (1974–80).

In 1948 Morgenthau published Politics Among Nations, a highly regarded study that presented what became commonly known as the classical realist approach to international politics. In this work, Morgenthau maintained that politics is governed by distinct immutable laws of nature and that states could deduce rational and objectively correct actions from an understanding of these laws. Central to Morgenthau’s theory was the concept of power as the dominant goal in international politics and the definition of national interest in terms of power. His state-centred approach, which refused to identify the moral aspirations of a state with the objective moral laws that govern the universe, maintained that all state actions seek to keep, demonstrate, or increase power. He called for recognition of the nature and limits of power and for the use of traditional methods of diplomacy, including compromise.

A contributor to numerous scholarly periodicals and journals of opinion, Morgenthau was also the author of Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (1946), In Defense of the National Interest (1951), Dilemmas of Politics (1958), The Purpose of American Politics (1960), Politics in the Twentieth Century (1962), and Truth and Power (1970).