Abstract
This chapter compares Hans Morgenthau’s Scientific Man vs Power Politics and Eric Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics along three aspects which characterize these books and their authors’ position as émigré scholars: first, along their émigré scholarship; second, along their critique of scientism; and third, with regard to their self-localization as intellectuals. This comparison demonstrates, their similar experiences as émigré scholars, but also their very different biographical and social experiences and philosophical positions within an academic field whose mainstream pushed hard for very different forms of political science than Morgenthau and Voegelin pursued in their own work, being socialized and committed to European “Geistes”- and “Erfahrungswissenschaften”.
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Notes
- 1.
Morgenthau, Hans J. (1953), “Letter to Eric Voegelin”, 10th June (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Container 60); see also Rösch (2014a: 6).
- 2.
This is not to ignore that there are, of course, important differences between Morgenthau’s “classical” and Voegelin’s “spiritual realism”. On the latter see Gebhardt (1981).
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
See hereto also the paper by Felix Roesch in this volume, his analysis of Morgenthau’s “Erschütterung der Seele” as well as Morgenthau’s odyssey through Europe to flee the anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in Europe.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
Morgenthau was sometimes ignorant of bibliographical precision in his references as well as sloppy when it came to historical details—a painful experience that I and my co-editor Felix Roesch had to undergo when editing his 1933 book “La notion du politique” and preparing the first English edition (as The Concept of the Political). On the other hand, Morgenthau was a “paper saver” (Frei 2001: 4), and a shell that had hit Morgenthau’s apartment in Madrid in 1936 did not destroy his papers, which he only got back after years to his great relief as he confessed to Rafael Altamira on March 5, 1945 (HJM-Archive 3). His private notes and correspondence are a valuable source to reconstruct his political thought; we also find here no significant reference to Max Weber. This observation stands in stark contrast to Turner and Mazur’s argument of Morgenthau as a Weberian methodologist; see Turner and Mazur (2009).
- 11.
See Morgenthau’s Concept of the Political where this is strongest; also to Fritz Ringer and the problem of the Weimar Mandarins (Ringer 1969); also this anti-positivist argument is similar to, but much earlier than, however, completely ignored by post-structuralist authors, see, for example, Edkins (1999).
- 12.
See here most explicitly in Scientific Man, Chapter One, “The Challenge of Fascism”, p.6 onwards.
- 13.
- 14.
- 15.
- 16.
- 17.
See more elaborately Sigwart (2005: 187 ff).
- 18.
- 19.
See Voegelin’s juxtaposition of his hermeneutic methodological principles with those applied by Sabine in Voegelin ([1944]2000): 162 ff.
- 20.
It is published now in the volumes 19–26 of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin.
- 21.
The quotations are from the Article “Journalism and Joachim’s Children” in Time, March 9, 1953: 57 and 60.
- 22.
Ibid.
- 23.
See especially the final chapter of the New Science (Voegelin [1952] 2000: 220 ff.).
- 24.
- 25.
Scientific Man received wide reviews in important history, law, philosophy, economy, and political science journals, some of which were devastating (such as Nagel 1947) and even those who were in agreement with Morgenthau’s main arguments (such as Frank 1948) dismissed his polemic style, overgeneralizations, and radicalness; see also Graubard (1948), Anderson (1947), Simon (1947), Fainsod (1947), de Visme Williamson (1947), Briggs (1947), Bryson (1947), Desch (1947), and Gooch (1947).
- 26.
- 27.
See especially chapters V and VI in Scientific Man; also Morgenthau On the State of Political Science (1955).
- 28.
See hereto more specific Morgenthau (1944).
- 29.
See, for example, Morgenthau (1946: 19 f., 29, 35 f., 53 ff). Likewise, we find an important reference to the sociology of knowledge of Karl Mannheim and an argument in Morgenthau (in 1955) for a culturally situated form of knowledge analysis and knowledge production; from both it would have been a possible step to conclude the power of knowledge and to a sociology of the power of knowledge.
- 30.
English as The Concept of the Political (2012).
- 31.
- 32.
Correspondence between the author and Morgenthau’s daughter, Susanna, and son, Mathew, in 2010 and 2011 during the preparation of The Concept of the Political.
- 33.
Morgenthau’s reading of Machiavelli can indeed be seen in “The Machiavellian Utopia”, Ethics 55, no. 2 (1945), pp. 145–47; on Machiavelli, see, among others, Behr, A History of International Political Theory, ch. II.2.1.
- 34.
Letter to Michael Oakeshott, May 22, 1948 (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Container 33).
- 35.
We do have, however, some utterances by him in private correspondence that indicate critical awareness of respective institutional dynamics as in the above referenced letter to Michael Oakshott, but also to Karl Gottfried Kindermann, then professor on international relations at the University of Munich.
- 36.
These parallels regard not only the astute focus on the conceptual implications of the modern understanding of “space” (see Foucault 1984) and the close relation between knowledge and power especially in modern science (see, for a summary of Foucault’s perspective on this relation, Rouse 2003), but also the pointed critique of the “scientistic-utilitarian dream” of a prison- or asylum-like organization of modern society which Voegelin, like Foucault, finds most clearly articulated in the work of Jeremy Bentham (Voegelin 1948: 494, Fn 48).
- 37.
The most expressive articulation of this attitude can be found in a letter Voegelin wrote in 1976 to the organizer of a behaviorist conference at the University of Southern California on “the ethics of behavior control” to which he had also invited Voegelin, who at the time was fellow at Stanford University. According to the invitation letter the conference focused ‘on voluntary, reversible, non-addictive methods of producing “artificial” happiness, goodness, and increased human capacity through chemical and electrical stimulation of the brain, biofeedback, sleep and memory enhancement, operant conditioning etc.’ and on the attempt to ‘produce genuinely new insights and ideas regarding the technologies of experience and behavior control and their legitimate use by individuals in a democratic society’. Voegelin’s response a few months later expresses his gratitude for the opportunity to witness “behaviorists in action” and contains a highly ironic, partly even sarcastic eight-page experience report. The report sketches quite the same constellation as his historical analysis of the “Origins of scientism” three decades earlier, including the diagnoses of a fundamental “reductionist fallacy” as the constitutive premise of the scientistic worldview, of the merging of knowledge and power as its epistemological core principle, its protection against critique by discursive ‘tactics of prohibiting the use of philosophical language’, and the inevitable outcome of a ‘more or less abject submission of the representatives of Western intellectual and spiritual culture to the demands of the ideologists’ (Henry Clark to Eric Voegelin, December 3, 1975, in: Voegelin Papers, Hoover Archive at Stanford University, Box 9, Folder 17.). Eric Voegelin to Henry Clark, February 21, 1976 (ibid.).
- 38.
See also Gebhardt (1997).
- 39.
On these regions and Voegelin’s understanding of “substantive science” see Voegelin (2007: 142 ff. and 193 ff).
- 40.
See above footnote 26.
- 41.
Here it appears that Morgenthau got celebrated (as well as critiqued) by many for the wrong reasons; see Behr and Roesch (2012: 29, 30).
- 42.
- 43.
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Behr, H., Sigwart, HJ. (2018). Scientific Man and the New Science of Politics. In: Navari, C. (eds) Hans J. Morgenthau and the American Experience. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67498-8_2
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