Hans Morgenthau and Weimar

Abstract

This part discloses the context in which Morgenthau’s worldview matured. The necessity to contextualize was pointed out by Morgenthau (1947a: 165) himself because he acknowledged in Scientific Man vs. Power Politics that the individual “concerns itself not with … survival but with his position among his fellows once his survival has been secured.” Given Morgenthau’s forced migrations, one might wonder about the location of this context, but, as this part demonstrates, Morgenthau’s worldview was distinctively Central European, despite the fact that he spent most of his life in the United States.¹ Indeed, Morgenthau was condemned by “American political theorists … [for his] ‘Germanic way of looking at things’” (Thompson 1978: 7). In a letter from April 18, 1961, to his former student and later professor in Munich, Gottfried-Karl Kindermann, Morgenthau disclosed the origins of his worldview further:

As concerns your question about the ultimate source of my values, we are here, of course, in the realm of philosophy and religion. Men assure certain values as self-evident and justify theory in terms either of these religions or philosophic conditions. I would assume that mine stem from the Judeo-Christian tradition, fortified by Greek and German philosophy. (HJM Archive 33)²