A Post-Modern Morgenthau?

I

It takes no huge mental leap to jump from the word Morgenthau to realism. Add a third word, conservatism, and then things get tricky. Most of us implicitly think realism and conservatism overlap, and they frequently do, but often imperfectly and sometimes even uncomfortably. Hans J. Morgenthau, the immigrant intellectual and godfather of mid-century American realism, is a classic example of the imperfect and uncomfortable overlap. A transplant from Weimar Germany and an international lawyer turned theorist, Morgenthau was also a committed anti-Wilsonian and a realist, but that does necessarily make for a self-identified conservative.

Professional and amateur Morgenthau watchers usually have a choice. The unsympathetic among them can argue Morgenthau mixed judicious elements of opportunism with an unfortunate strain of intellectual confusion. The more sympathetic observer could acknowledge tensions and the inevitable compromises while admitting that this made Hans Morgenthau a keen social critic armed, as the cliché goes, to "speak truth to power."

Indiana University Political Science Professor William E. Scheuerman is of the latter camp. Scheuerman's complex, challenging, evolving Morgenthau first emerged from the Weimar intellectual left and then joined the realist critique. Indeed, Scheuerman meticulously portrays Morgenthau as nuanced and enigmatic and, in some instances, puzzling—all virtues of an intellectual pushing against the boundaries of restrictive categories. The book's premise is that Morgenthau, on the surface a realist's realist, had nonetheless transcended the intellectual limitations of realism. As such, retracing the critical chapters of the early and late Morgenthau helps us to construct something infinitely more nuanced and perhaps more humane than the tired incantations of power politics so often associated with realism. This is the premise of Morgenthau.

II

Scheuerman's "Introduction," the first of his eight chapters, tells us from the start that Morgenthau's realism was an "uneasy" one. This is obligatory. It is what the author tells us in the first three pages that prove more significant: Morgenthau offers a positive challenge to contemporary cosmopolitanism—a position that seems to inform Scheuerman's own politics. That said, it was not always clear what Scheuerman's "international reform" meant; it could mean many things and, as these things go, mean very little. This might have been a minor point, but the author generously repeated the phrase "international reform" or "global reform" in the book's two hundred pages.¹ Far from being the uncritical realist, the Morgenthau of Scheuerman's book was really a lifelong social critic who valiantly endeavored to begin a fusion of realist and cosmopolitan ideas, perhaps even the very kind of ideas we need today.

Scheuerman quickens the pace in the book's first two chapters, firmly fixing Morgenthau in Weimar Germany's left wing debates on politics and law. A specialist of the critical Frankfurt School, Scheuerman clearly knows the Weimar era; his discussion is a must-read for Morgenthau watchers. As such, it is an exciting companion to Christoph Frei's captivating and highly readable 2001 intellectual biography of Hans Morgenthau. Scheuerman takes up the challenge and fills in the nagging details. He does not disappoint in what are perhaps the most satisfying chapters of the book and ones that show how the "encounter" with (and perhaps unacknowledged imitation of?) political theorist Carl Schmitt helped color Morgenthau's work, particularly the dazzling Scientific Man vs. Power Politics.

Scheuerman is clearly an expert on this period. I do not wish to challenge his scholarship on Morgenthau or Schmitt, a conservative jurist and prominent political theorist but, like Martin Heidegger, a man with an uneasy and perhaps opportunistic relationship with the Nazi regime. Nonetheless, I was puzzled about a few things in the Schmitt-Morgenthau relationship as described in the book. Scheuerman describes Schmitt as a right-wing authoritarian who nonetheless allegedly plagiarized from Morgenthau, even as the "encounter" with Schmitt helped Morgenthau clarify his "agonistic" (a favorite phrase of Scheuerman) vision of politics. Schmitt steals whereas Morgenthau learns—not exactly a reciprocal relationship. I wondered if Schmitt influenced Morgenthau more than Morgenthau (and Scheuerman...