Hans Morgenthau Quotes

Hans Joachim Morgenthau was one of the major twentieth-century figures in the study of international relations. Morgenthau's works belong to the tradition of realism in international relations theory, and he is usually considered, along with George F. Kennan and Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the three leading American realists of the post-World War II period. Morgenthau made landmark contributions to international relations theory and the study of international law. His Politics Among Nations, first published in 1948, went through five editions during his lifetime.

Morgenthau also wrote widely about international politics and U.S. foreign policy for general-circulation publications such as The New Leader, Commentary, Worldview, The New York Review of Books, and The New Republic. He knew and corresponded with many of the leading intellectuals and writers of his era, such as Reinhold Niebuhr, George F. Kennan, Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt. At one point in the early Cold War, Morgenthau was a consultant to the U.S. Department of State when Kennan headed its Policy Planning Staff, and a second time during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations until he was dismissed by Johnson when he began to publicly criticize American policy in Vietnam. For most of his career, however, Morgenthau was esteemed as an academic interpreter of U.S. foreign policy.



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✵ 17. February 1904 – 19. July 1980
Hans Morgenthau photo

Works

Politics Among Nations
Politics Among Nations
Hans Morgenthau
Hans Morgenthau: 15   quotes 0   likes

Famous Hans Morgenthau Quotes

“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.”

Six Principles of Political Realism, § 4.
Politics Among Nations (1948)
Context: 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 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.

“Political power is a psychological relation between those who exercise it and those over whom it is exercised.”

Source: Politics Among Nations (1948), p. 27 (1954 edition).
Context: We must distinguish between military and political power.
Political power is a psychological relation between those who exercise it and those over whom it is exercised. It gives the former control over certain actions of the latter through the influence which the former exert over the latter's minds. That influence may be exerted through orders, threats, persuasion, or a combination of any of these.

“Political realism believes that politics, like society in general, is governed by objective laws that have their roots in human nature.”

Six Principles of Political Realism http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/morg6.htm, § 1.
Politics Among Nations (1948)
Context: 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.

“Even though anthropologists have shown that certain primitive peoples seem to be free from the desire for power, nobody has yet shown how their state of mind can be re-created on a worldwide scale so as to eliminate the struggle for power from the international scene. … International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power.”

Source: Politics Among Nations (1948), p. 29 (1978 edition).
Context: The struggle for power is universal in time and space and is an undeniable fact of experience. It cannot be denied that throughout historic time, regardless of social, economic and political conditions, states have met each other in contests for power. Even though anthropologists have shown that certain primitive peoples seem to be free from the desire for power, nobody has yet shown how their state of mind can be re-created on a worldwide scale so as to eliminate the struggle for power from the international scene. … International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power. Whatever the ultimate aims of international politics, power is always the immediate aim.

“When we speak of power, we mean man's control over the minds and actions of other men.”

Source: Politics Among Nations (1948), p. 33 (1993 edition).
Context: When we speak of power, we mean man's control over the minds and actions of other men. By political power we refer to the mutual relations of control among the holders of public authority and between the latter and the people at large.

Hans Morgenthau Quotes about space

“Political realism refuses to identify the moral aspirations of a particular nation with the moral laws that govern the universe.”

Six Principles of Political Realism, § 5.
Politics Among Nations (1948)
Context: 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 power for long — to clothe their own aspirations and action 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 struggle for power is universal in time and space and is an undeniable fact of experience.”

Source: Politics Among Nations (1948), p. 29 (1978 edition).
Context: The struggle for power is universal in time and space and is an undeniable fact of experience. It cannot be denied that throughout historic time, regardless of social, economic and political conditions, states have met each other in contests for power. Even though anthropologists have shown that certain primitive peoples seem to be free from the desire for power, nobody has yet shown how their state of mind can be re-created on a worldwide scale so as to eliminate the struggle for power from the international scene. … International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power. Whatever the ultimate aims of international politics, power is always the immediate aim.

“All nations are tempted — and few have been able to resist the power for long — to clothe their own aspirations and action in the moral purposes of the universe.”

Six Principles of Political Realism, § 5.
Politics Among Nations (1948)
Context: 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 power for long — to clothe their own aspirations and action 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.

“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.”

Six Principles of Political Realism, § 4.
Politics Among Nations (1948)
Context: 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.

Hans Morgenthau Quotes

“Influence can persuade, but power can compel.”

This has been cited as being from Politics Among Nations in ¿«Armas de convicción masiva»? American Studies durante la guerra fría: el casa Español (2010) by Francisco Javier Rodríguez Jiménez, p. 1, but has not been located in any English editions of the work and may be a back-translation or paraphrase of a statement within a Spanish edition.
Disputed

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