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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Morgenthau's brilliant political insight on the make,
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This review is from: Hans J. Morgenthau: An Intellectual Biography (Political Traditions in Foreign Policy) (Hardcover)
To read Hans Morgenthau is to meet his sharp and fearless mind seeking `to speak truth to power'. During most of his carrier, his main public cause was to call forth responsibility from North-American policy-makers. His days were the days in which mankind finally found itself face to face with the prospect of the end; here was the setting of a unique era, superior in danger and complexity to all other previous ones; and Morgenthau was one of the few-too-few authors who could see its political problems.
At the end of his life, he wrote the following words: "While I may be best known for my contributions to foreign policy and more particularly to American foreign policy, it is a paradox that my major intellectual interest from the very outset of my academic career has not been foreign policy or even politics in general but philosophy. After WWII, I made a conscious choice in concentrating my efforts on foreign policy because I realized that the existence of the United States and even of mankind depended on a sound foreign policy. What good was it to speculate on philosophic topics if in a couple of years or decades the world would be reduced to a radioactive rubble? So ever since, for more than twenty years, I have been caught in this self-imposed public service which by no means coincides with my real intellectual interests". Morgenthau died in 1980, shortly before the Cold War itself was over. His political thought will outlast not only the competition of superpowers, but also what was then taken as states and nations; as well as Aristotle survived the disappearance of the Greek polis and Machiavelli, the unification of Italy. These are political thinkers who make it through the surface of their objects and share a glimpse of the very essence of politics. In so doing, they expose truths about the human condition which remain, among the problems of the day, recognizable to eyes which may be very distant. Of course, almost every man is a son of his era and expresses reality in terms hopefully understandable by his contemporaries. Thus, to point out the rediscovery of those recognizably human and tragically recurrent facts among one's present configurations is a most fortunate task in a biographical work. This is why Morgenthau's Intellectual Biography, written by Swiss professor Christoph Frei, is a special work for those who wish to understand the process of putting together the pieces of his line of reasoning which, in the early 1930's, started being dubbed 'political realism', but only effectively reached public in the late 1940's. Before the Biography, those who went through Morgenthau's work in English had never had a contact with his early papers, which contain all the seeds of his later intellectual developments. Dr. Frei was the first to study these papers, along with other never seen documents, diaries and letters. Having conducted a trilingual research in English, German and French, he provides us with a reconstruction of the first decades of Morgenthau's life, points out to the first time when theory-relevant thoughts were put to paper and presents a lively account of the difficult context in which these thoughts began to flourish. The book has two parts. The first part deals with Morgenthau's life story, his studies in different cities in Germany, his acquaintance and perceptions of its several ongoing schools of social sciences, and the beginning of his professional career. As the specter of totalitarianism approached the old continent with its somber colors, we watch his difficulties first in Europe as a Jew, as he tried to emigrate to America, and later on in America as a German and a Jew, struggling first for survival and next to retake his intellectual projects. This first part leads up to the success he achieved with the publication of Politics Among Nations in 1948 and deals, in smaller detail, with the second half of his life as a successful political scientist, trying to contribute to the North-American experience during the Cold War. As the second part of the book unfolds, we go back to the early decades of the twentieth century and embark in a philosophical trip side by side with a young man's experience of disillusionment: his meditation of civilized life in a time of decay. Here we see the formation of Morgenthau's Weltanschauung and approach the central core of his view of man and society. Frei lets him speak out some of his frankest thoughts about the limits of science, the political sphere, the place and implications of power among human beings. Frei also strikes us with the clever insight of turning Immanuel Kant's four philosophical questions: "What is man?; What am I allowed to know? What should I expect?; and What should I do??" into the skeleton of his investigation. At its end, the book concludes that Morgenthau's realism is in fact a sober type of idealism; as it puts, "transcendent idealism". The two greatest contributions of this biography are the following: firstly, it unveils Morgenthau's central formative reference in a surprising and unprecedented way: the chapter about his existential dialogue with Friedrich Nietzsche is, without a doubt, the most fascinating of all. Secondly, it swims against the epistemological and quantitative tides of contemporary political science so as to concentrate its work in Morgenthau's philosophical side - which is, when all is said and done, what truly matters for those who are attempting to think politics with their own heads.
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