Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-29T09:08:39.578Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Hans Morgenthau and the World State

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

James P. Speer II
James P. Speer II
Affiliation:
Temple Buell College in Denver
Get access

Extract

Hans Morgenthau's political realism has led him to the conclusion that there can be no permanent peace without a world state. But, he says, there can be no world government until there is world community, and a sense of world community cannot form unless national decision-makers resolve or ameliorate world tensions through a return to a wise diplomacy.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , January 1968 , pp. 207 - 227
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1968

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Peace, Security, and the United Nations (Chicago 1946), 6Google Scholar.

2 P. vii.

3 Ibid., viii.

4 Scientific Man and Power Politics (Chicago 1946), 217Google Scholar.

5 P. 20.

6 See Hoffmann's, Stanley H.“International Relations: The Long Road to Theory,” World Politics, xi (April 1959), 349–54Google Scholar, for a criticism of Morgenthau on this point.

7 Politics Among Nations, 100. This is Morgenthau's version of what would seem to be one of the laws of politics, namely, that in times of stress the political Center gives way to the extremes of Right and Left.

8 Morgenthau's views on the balance of power have been commented upon by John Herz, Inis Claude, and many others. Probably only his catchphrase “the national interest defined in terms of power” has received as much attention.

9 Politics Among Nations, 293.

10 Ibid., 306.

11 Ibid., 308.

12 Ibid., 366.

13 Ibid., 384.

14 Ibid., 414.

15 Be it noted that a “government over governments,” as Madison pointed out in Federalist No. 20, would be very different from the “supranational community of individuals” to which Morgenthau shortly adverts—a further evidence of his weakness in the theory of federalism.

16 Politics Among Nations, 469–70.

17 Ibid., 476–77, italics added. Not only Morgenthau but Inis Claude and Frederick Hartmann, who are among the few scholars who have bothered to comment on world government in recent years, have made much of the risk of civil war in connection with schemes for supranational integration. The American Civil War has been cited as a prime case, as though it invalidated the American experiment rather than recording an important step in its constitutional development. Indeed, a more apposite example of the ultimate power of governmental coercion to unify where the organic factors divide could hardly be imagined.

18 Ibid., 477.

19 This is the triple test, to determine whether a new form of government will work, put by J. S. Mill in his On Representative Government. Mill discusses the mechanical versus the organic view of the state, and it may be doubted whether he would have accepted Morgenthau's negative answers to the test. Mill required a simple answer to his three questions, not a finding that a full-blown society exists.

20 Politics Among Nations, 477.

21 Students may wish to refer to Public Opinion Quarterly, Volumes 10, 13, 15, 17, and 25, for the results of polls that throw some light on public attitudes toward world government in the United States and other Western nations; also to Buchanan, William and Cantril, Hadley, How Nations See Each Other (Urbana 1953)Google Scholar; and to the Minnesota Poll, Minneapolis Sunday Tribune, June 9, 1963. Th e evidence is that somewhere between a large minority and a substantial majority, depending upon how the questions are phrased and upon the images associated with the poll, favors a world government strong enough to keep the peace.

22 Politics Among Nations, 481.

23 Ibid., 485.

24 Haas's, ErnstBeyond the Nation-State (Stanford 1964)Google Scholar reaches conclusions that tend to confirm this estimate of the functional approach to peace.

25 Politics Among Nations, 502.

26 Ibid., 534.

27 Ibid.

28 Claude, Inis L. Jr., in his Swords Into Plowshares (New York 1964)Google Scholar, argues that Wilson was realistic about power but not about the policy unanimity required by the collective-security principle.

29 P. 243.

30 From Morgenthau's essay entitled “Love and Power,” republished in his The Rediscovery of Politics (Chicago 1962), 10–13Google Scholar. Morgenthau's full acceptance of the tragic view of the human venture, together with the cultural pessimism typical of pre-World War I German philosophy, is evidenced also in his Scientific Man and Power Politics (cited above, n. 4), especially in the final chapter.

31 The Decline of Democratic Politics (Chicago 1962), 326Google Scholar.

32 Reprinted in Morgenthau's The Restoration of American Politics (Chicago 1962), 174–75Google Scholar.

33 The Purpose of American Politics (New York 1960), 10–11Google Scholar.

34 Ibid., 34.

35 Ibid., 308–10.

36 This book “grew out of” Morgenthau's Albert Shaw lectures at the Johns Hopkins University in April 1959, so presumably the text was worked over later that year for a publication date in early 1960.

37 Vietnam and the United States (Washington 1965), 82Google Scholar. This passage is consonant with Morgenthau's writings throughout the cold-war period; he has little cause to apologize for imbalances topical to that era.

38 Sec Erich Fromm's discussion of American cold-war attitudes in his May Man Prevail? (Garden City 1961)Google Scholar.

39 It may be objected that what is said here and elsewhere in this article concerning the intellectual sources of Morgenthau's theories is mere speculation. And while it is true that he has not cited, so far as I know, the writers who most influenced him, one may speculate with a high expectation of accuracy upon the writings that a German university student of Morgenthau's generation would have studied. It has also been suggested that Morgenthau has been heavily influenced by the American social philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr, but it is probably enough to say that both have drunk from the same founts of German theology and philosophy and continental sociology. See my article on Niebuhr in the March 15, 1967, issue of The Christian Century.

40 Germany's unhappy experience with confederal arrangements that were too loose, as well as with quasi-federal governments that were too tight (thus mocking the idea of a divided sovereignty), may have clouded Morgenthau's consideration of the more. precisely federal principle; or the fact that, in Germany, federalist theory seems to have grown out of feudal theory (cf. Gierke) may help to explain Morgenthau's attitude toward Western federalism. Certainly the American experience as a whole baffles yet intrigues him.