Shortly after finishing his Habilitation at the University of Geneva in 1934, Hans Morgenthau typed a lengthy manuscript entitled Über den Sinn der Wissenschaft in dieser Zeit und über die Bestimmung des Menschen (On the Purpose of Science in These Times and on Human Destiny). Underappreciated and little known in the ever-growing literature on Morgenthau and classical realism at large, this manuscript provided the foundation for a series of publications throughout his life in which he ferociously and even polemically defended a normative role for “science” (Wissenschaft)Footnote 1 in modern societies against the backdrop of the rise of behavioralism.Footnote 2 Most famous among them is certainly Morgenthau's first book in the United States, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (see Hartmut Behr in this forum). Indeed, forty years after Morgenthau had penned this manuscript in Geneva, he based the first part of Science: Servant or Master on it,Footnote 3 indicating that he “never went much beyond what he had basically said and formulated” during his time in Europe.Footnote 4
Morgenthau wrote this work during a time of great personal turmoil. His Habilitation was only deemed satisfactory by the university after a positive intervention by Hans Kelsen; and his income had dwindled as anti-Semitic German students refused to attend his lectures.Footnote 5 Since the situation in Geneva had become unbearable, he sought employment in the United States, but neither the Academic Assistance Council nor the Rockefeller Foundation, to which he appealed, offered help. His fiancée, Irma Thormann, even wrote a desperate letter to her former professor in Berlin, Carl Landauer, asking him to help Morgenthau in securing a position in the United States. At the beginning of 1935, when Thormann wrote the letter, Landauer was lecturing at Berkeley.Footnote 6 His discouraging reply reached her two months later,Footnote 7 when Morgenthau was on his way to take up a position at the recently established Instituto de Estudios Internacionales y Económicos in Madrid. Shortly thereafter, however, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War vitiated this option as well, forcing the Morgenthaus into an odyssey through Europe before finally emigrating to the United States in 1937.
Morgenthau's restless life in Europe presages the larger developments that were about to shatter the entire world. As he wrote in 1943, “The air in which we dance has changed and the ground is shaking. What used to be accepted by everyone turns into a matter of dispute and therefore into a matter of scholarly concern.”Footnote 8 The rise of fascism throughout Europe was the tangible political effect of fundamental metaphysical deficiencies that made Morgenthau question the role and scope of science.
These two concerns of Morgenthau, the crisis of modern societies and the purpose of science, would bring him to formulate an ethics of responsibility in later years and to support a reflective, democratic dimension in foreign policymaking. They remained the core concerns of his work, and the political events that led to them formed the backdrop of his worldview. Morgenthau, like many other émigré scholars, was a “traveler between all worlds,” meaning that Morgenthau in America cannot be understood without having knowledge about Morgenthau in Europe.
The Crisis of Modern Societies and the Loss of Values
By the mid-1930s, with the rise of fascism, the conceptualization of the political had become one of Morgenthau's main intellectual concerns. While in previous publications he had settled for relatively vague and ambiguous terms, like “coloring” and “tone,”Footnote 9 to characterize the political, in this later manuscript he provided a more concise definition. He argued that the political was “a universal force that is inherent in every human and that necessarily focuses on others, while at the same time it only comes into being in interpersonal relationships.”Footnote 10 These interpersonal relationships evolve as antagonistic and topical exchanges that Morgenthau termed “discussions,”Footnote 11 resulting in what William Galston has called “arena[s] of contestation.”Footnote 12 People express their interests and aim to convince others about the righteousness of their perspectives. In these nonviolent discussions, people gain knowledge about themselves as well as about the life-worlds they inhabit and shape through their actions. Realizing their individual capabilities and experiencing powerFootnote 13 through acting together, people eventually develop their identities. It is for this reason that, according to Morgenthau, Europeans tend to consider political activity and engagement more highly than philosophical contemplation. The political, however, was being endangered by the rise of ideologies and what he identified as the lack of values in modern societies.
Morgenthau never fully elaborated the reasons for the disappearance of values, nor did he explain what values he was specifically speaking of. Christoph Frei argues that Morgenthau envisioned values similar to the sociologist Helmuth Plessner and included among them empathy, peace, tolerance, democracy, and liberty.Footnote 14 An investigation into the reasons why Morgenthau might have refrained from providing an elaboration would go beyond the scope of this contribution. It suffices to stress here that in Morgenthau's view a lack of values endangers the political, as they are necessary prerequisites for humans to be able to act in the first place.Footnote 15
In a later publication, Morgenthau explained this connection as follows: “Our knowledge of what justice demands is predicated upon our knowledge of what the world is like and what it is for, of a hierarchy of values reflecting the objective order of the world.”Footnote 16 Since values have disappeared in modern societies, people can only decide what is “convenient and what is not, but [they can no longer judge] between good and bad.”Footnote 17 In other words, the inability to judge renders them incapable of acting, and thereby deprives them of the ability to contribute to the construction of their life-worlds.
To avoid depoliticization in modern societies, values have to be reestablished. This, however, can only be achieved through individual contemplation.Footnote 18 Yet people lack the will and the strength to endure the solitariness of contemplation. It is this aspect that Morgenthau considered to be the basis of human tragedy. Since Richard Ned Lebow's 2003 study on The Tragic Vision of Politics, the tragic element in Morgenthau's thought has repeatedly attracted scholarly interest, but the contemplative aspect of it has received only limited attention.Footnote 19 Attempting to rejuvenate human abilities to act through contemplation is for most humans a daunting task because they fear that through self-reflection their commonly held assumptions could be shattered (Erschütterung der Seele).Footnote 20
On the Purpose of Science lays out a complex set of reasons for this condition. Since people are created in the “image of God,” they have a “vision of perfection”Footnote 21 and try to attain it. However, in the course of their quest, they realize that perfection is impossible because humans are tied to a specific time and space, which is why they can never accumulate absolute knowledge.Footnote 22 Realizing the futility of their ambitions, many people renounce their quest out of fear of being incapable of bearing the vacuity of their existence. Refraining from contemplation, people imagine a reality in collectivity that soothes their fears. As the labor lawyer Hugo Sinzheimer noted in a letter to his former clerk Morgenthau shortly before the Nazis gained power in Germany: “The political metaphysics and the belief in miracles, i.e., the absolute fear of reality, blurs the mind of Germans.”Footnote 23 Drawing on the work of sociologist Karl Mannheim, Morgenthau saw in this fear of facing a meaningless life the cause for the rise of ideologies in modern societies throughout Europe.Footnote 24 As Hans-Jörg Sigwart has recently argued:
The main objection of the realist critiques against the liberal zeitgeist is that it is based on particular forms of “wishful thinking” and on (mostly pseudo-religious) moral and political “illusions” that systematically eclipse the actual realities of social and political, and also of intellectual, life.Footnote 25
However, ideologies are not deliberate attempts to create an illusion of reality and to purposefully disorient people. Rather, they are the product of frenzied, collective processes in order to provide ontological security. In the course of these processes, however, the full scope of human meaninglessness is concealed. As Morgenthau put it in a later unpublished manuscript: “Being imperfect and striving toward perfection, man ought not to be alone. For while the companionship of others cannot make him perfect, it can supplement his imperfection and give him the illusion of being perfect.”Footnote 26
Immanent and Transcendent Science
Morgenthau's text lays out two ways for science to deal with the lack of values and the subsequent depoliticization in modern societies: it could pursue either an “immanent” or a “transcendent” strategy.Footnote 27 However, Morgenthau concludes that the first strategy—immanent science—is not a viable option because values do not play a role in this kind of science. This is because immanent scientists only engage in empirical, policy-oriented studies that do not question the sociopolitical and cultural life-worlds they are operating in. As a consequence, “science [turns] into an ideological doctrine of justification,”Footnote 28 as immanent science sustains the sociopolitical status quo, instead of offering a critical corrective. For Morgenthau, a value-free science was positively dangerous to politics because science would lose its societal function of supporting people in their quests to make decisions and engage with their peers.Footnote 29 The extensive criticism of behavioral sciences that Morgenthau offered in this manuscript anticipates the more substantial, often polemically presented concerns that he repeatedly voiced in the United States.Footnote 30
The second strategy—transcendent science—was, therefore, the only viable option for Morgenthau. Science had to aspire to a metaphysics, but not in the sense of Mannheim's world postulate (Weltwollung)—a fixed, normative set of ontological assumptions—as for Morgenthau this would lead to attempts to reify these assumptions through social planning, as he would expound in one of his first publications in the United States.Footnote 31 Rather, science as metaphysics meant for Morgenthau that it had to act as “an interpreter of the imaginable”Footnote 32 by making people aware of the myriad sociopolitical and cultural constellations that submerge into their specific life-worlds at a given time. Consequently, this form of science asks people to be able to endure (leiden) because they not only realize the limits of their physical abilities to mold their life-worlds but also understand the limits of their intellectual abilities. For Morgenthau, most people seek ways to conceal their imperfection, so transcendent science has to be prepared to be marginalized in public. As Morgenthau would put it in the mid-1950s:
Political science which is true to its moral commitment ought . . . to be an unpopular undertaking . . . it cannot help being a subversive and revolutionary force with regard to certain vested interests—intellectual, political, economic, social in general. For it must sit in continuous judgment upon political man and political society, measuring their truth . . . . By doing so, it is not only an embarrassment to society intellectually, but it becomes also a political threat to the defenders or the opponents of the status quo or to both; for the social conventions about power, which political science cannot help subjecting to a critical—and often destructive—examination, are one of the main sources from which the claims to power, and hence power itself, derive.Footnote 33
As they become aware of the intellectual and physical limits of human existence, Morgenthau argued, people should not give in to them, but should engage with these limits, learning to accept human fallibility.
This willful engagement with reality, to allude to Michael Williams's term,Footnote 34 rests on Morgenthau's reading of Mannheim's seminal Ideology and Utopia, where Mannheim laid out the spatio-temporal conditionality of knowledge. This concept allowed Morgenthau to argue that, although absolute knowledge and consequently a universal objectivity are inconceivable, science does not have to concede to relativism. Objectivity is still possible, albeit tied to the specific sociopolitical and cultural constellations that inform individual perspectives.Footnote 35 Embracing this form of objectivity as an academic standard, however, requires from its bearers (self)reflexivity and intellectual modesty toward other viewpoints. This means that transcendent scientists have to be willing to constantly review their own perspectives in light of constantly changing sociopolitical and cultural constellations. This also means that the intellectual contributions of others cannot be dismissed per se, but have to be carefully assessed and accepted as legitimate attempts to provide meaning to life-worlds. Through these arduous, long-term processes, scientists can fulfill their societal role by reestablishing values through which society at large regains its capacity to act.Footnote 36 In other words, for Morgenthau, while immanent science faces the danger of providing the intellectual justification to enforce ideological constraints, transcendent science can re-instill in people the capacity to act, through which the political can be reestablished and sustained.
With On the Purpose of Science, Morgenthau was promoting an elitist understanding of science and conceding a key societal role to an elite—a position in which we can clearly detect the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche.Footnote 37 Without scientists, people would be incapable of regaining their ability to act, for it is only scientists who have the qualities to face human meaninglessness and transcend it. It was only after his relocation to New York in the late 1960s, when he became acquainted with Hannah Arendt's democratic scholarship, that he modified this view. Scientists became no longer the sole guardians of the political in modern societies, but rather a part of a concerted effort by everyone to retain responsibility for their own life-worlds.Footnote 38 In this new scenario, scientists would take on a supportive role, helping people to formulate their interests and to develop empathy toward other potentially diverging viewpoints in public discourse (see Douglas Klusmeyer in this forum).
A Political Ethic
Before embarking to America, Morgenthau had produced the outline of a political ethics that asked for a shift in policymaking and even a reconsideration of its purpose in the direction of Hannah Arendt's “discourse ethic.” As she put it, “what is important is not so much what public discourse is about as the way in which public discourse takes place.”Footnote 39 This ethic does not draw on “ontological blueprints”Footnote 40 to create social laws in order to consolidate the current sociopolitical status quo.Footnote 41 It criticizes policymaking that turns questions of politics into issues of administration and that seeks solutions to practical dilemmas in the establishment of extensive bureaucracies, rather than engage with the contested nature of political questions.
Morgenthau never published Über den Sinn der Wissenschaft in dieser Zeit und über die Bestimmung des Menschen, but rather picked up themes from it for later works such as Scientific Man vs. Power Politics and Science: Servant or Master? With regard to his ethics of responsibility, the ideas developed in the manuscript anticipated a “politics as applied ethics,”Footnote 42 as we find in the writings of Raymond Geuss. Accordingly, dissenting positions need to be able to be voiced during decision-making processes. Furthermore, their development must be actively encouraged and sustained in the political realm. In this way, policymaking becomes a process that requires politicians and the public to face dissent and eventually to seek compromises.Footnote 43 It also implies that politicians have to take personal responsibility, for which Morgenthau had found an early role model in Gustav Stresemann, a long-standing Weimar Republic Minister of Foreign Affairs and co-laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1926.Footnote 44 Outcomes of policymaking processes can no longer be misinterpreted as the direct result of scientific-technological preconditions, but must be acknowledged as compromises that have arisen out of complex, collective negotiations, in which politicians play an important role, as it is their task to collate the various interests in society. They also have to ponder these interests and then pursue policy decisions that benefit people the most.
To achieve this ethics of responsibility, science not only has to be transcendent, it must also have an educational mission (Bildungsauftrag) for society at large. In this, universities have a key role to play. Morgenthau criticized the bureaucratization of universities, which turns students into consumers of academic degrees.Footnote 45 Their educational mission, he asserted, is rather to provide continuous support for people to seize opportunities to embrace their responsibilities. This means that the educational mission of science lies in contributing to establishing political forums that provide the space for people to engage in discussions through which societal change can be initiated. It is for this reason that Morgenthau supported, for example, the Adult Education Council of Greater Chicago and the New School for Social Research, and participated in teach-ins during the Vietnam War (see Klusmeyer in this forum).
