Hans Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations is a classic of political science, built on the firm foundation of Morgenthau’s watertight reasoning skills. The central aim of reasoning is to construct a logical and persuasive argument that carefully organizes and supports its conclusions – often around a central concept or scheme of argumentation. Morgenthau’s subject was international relations – the way in which the world’s nations interact, and come into conflict or peace – a topic which was of vital importance during the unstable wake of the Second World War. To the complex problem of understanding the ways in which the post-war nations were jostling for power, Morgenthau brought a comprehensive schema: the concept of “realism” – or, in other words, the idea that every nation will act so as to maximise its own interests. From this basis, Morgenthau builds a systematic argument for a pragmatic approach to international relations in which nations seeking consensus should aim for a balance of power, grounding relations between states in understandings of how the interests of individual nations can be maximized. Though seismic shifts in international politics after the Cold War undeniably altered the landscape of international relations, Morgenthau’s dispassionate reasoning about the nature of our world remains influential to this day.

Realism remains the most important and controversial vision of international politics. But what does it mean to be a realist? This collection addresses this key question by returning to the thinking of perhaps the most influential realist of modern times: Hans J. Morgenthau. In analyses of issues ranging from political philosophy, to international law, to the impact of nuclear weapons and the challenges of American foreign policy, the authors demonstrate that Morgenthau's thinkingexemplifies a rich realist tradition that is often lacking in contemporary analyses of international relations and foreign policy. At a time when realism is once again at the centre of both scholarly and political debates, this book shows that the legacy of classical realism can enrich ourunderstanding of world politics and contribute to its future direction.

Hans Morgenthau's classic text established realism as the fundamental way of thinking about international relations. Although it has had its critics, the fact that it continues to be the most long lived text for courses in international relations attests to its enduring value. Someone has said the study of international relations has for half a century been nothing so much as a dialogue between Morgenthau, those who embrace his approach, and those who turn elsewhere for enlightenment. After 50 years, the dialogue between Morgenthau and scholars from around the world continues more or less as in the past something with more intensity even in an "age of terror." The new edition preserves intact Morgenthau's original work while adding a 40 page introduction by the editors who explore its relevance for a new era. What follows the introduction are the perspectives of a dozen statesmen, scholars, and observers each offering insights on Morgenthau's concepts and ideas as they relate to current crises on every continent. They bring up to date the dialogue that began in 1948.

Although he is widely regarded as the 'founding father' of realism in International Relations, this book argues that Hans J. Morgenthau's legal background has largely been neglected in discussions of his place in the 'canon' of IR theory. Morgenthau was a legal scholar of German-Jewish origins who arrived in the United States in 1938. He went on to become a distinguished professor of Political Science and a prominent commentator on international affairs. Rather than locate Morgenthau's intellectual heritage in the German tradition of 'Realpolitik', this book demonstrates how many of his central ideas and concepts stem from European and American legal debates of the 1920s and 1930s. This is an ambitious attempt to recast the debate on Morgenthau and will appeal to IR scholars interested in the history of realism as well as international lawyers engaged in debates regarding the relationship between law and politics, and the history of International Law.

The balance of power has been a central concept in the theory and practice of international relations for the past five hundred years. It has also played a key role in some of the most important attempts to develop a theory of international politics in the contemporary study of international relations. In this 2007 book, Richard Little establishes a framework that treats the balance of power as a metaphor, a myth and a model. He then uses this framework to reassess four major texts that use the balance of power to promote a theoretical understanding of international relations: Hans J. Morgenthau's Politics Among Nations (1948), Hedley Bull's The Anarchical Society (1977), Kenneth N. Waltz's Theory of International Politics (1979) and John J. Mearsheimer's The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001). These reassessments allow the author to develop a more comprehensive model of the balance of power.

A new portrait of Henry Kissinger focusing on the fundamental ideas underlying his policies: Realism, balance of power, and national interest. Few public officials have provoked such intense controversy as Henry Kissinger. During his time in the Nixon and Ford administrations, he came to be admired and hated in equal measure. Notoriously, he believed that foreign affairs ought to be based primarily on the power relationships of a situation, not simply on ethics. He went so far as to argue that under certain circumstances America had to protect its national interests even if that meant repressing other countries’ attempts at democracy. For this reason, many today on both the right and left dismiss him as a latter-day Machiavelli, ignoring the breadth and complexity of his thought. With The Inevitability of Tragedy, Barry Gewen corrects this shallow view, presenting the fascinating story of Kissinger’s development as both a strategist and an intellectual and examining his unique role in government through his ideas. It analyzes his contentious policies in Vietnam and Chile, guided by a fresh understanding of his definition of Realism, the belief that world politics is based on an inevitable, tragic competition for power. Crucially, Gewen places Kissinger’s pessimistic thought in a European context. He considers how Kissinger was deeply impacted by his experience as a refugee from Nazi Germany, and explores the links between his notions of power and those of his mentor, Hans Morgenthau—the father of Realism—as well as those of two other German-Jewish émigrés who shared his concerns about the weaknesses of democracy: Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt. The Inevitability of Tragedy offers a thoughtful perspective on the origins of Kissinger’s sober worldview and argues that a reconsideration of his career is essential at a time when American foreign policy lacks direction.

This edited volume covers the development of the thought of the political realist Hans J. Morgenthau from the time of his arrival in America from Nazi-dominated Europe through to his emphatic denunciation of American policy in the Vietnam War. Critical to the development of thinking about American foreign policy in the post-war period, he laid out the idea of a national interest defined in terms of power, the precarious uncertainty of the international balance of power, the weakness of international morality, the decentralized character of international law, the deceptiveness of ideologies, and the requirements of a peace-preserving diplomacy. This volume is required reading for students of American foreign policy, and for anyone who wishes to understand the single most important source of the ideas underpinning American foreign policy since the end of the Second World War.

Hans J. Morgenthau, a founding proponent of political realism, remains the central figure in international relations scholarship of the twentieth century. His book Politics among Nations literally defined the field in 1948 as it heralded the post--World War II paradigm shift in American thinking about diplomacy. Yet when Morgenthau died in 1980 at the age of seventy-six, no one present at his funeral had an inkling about the first half of his life -- his education, his early productive career in Europe and America, or the roots of his political philosophy. In the first and only volume devoted to the intellectual formation of Morgenthau, Christoph Frei draws upon an overwhelming abundance of resources -- including a lengthy paper trail of previously unseen diaries, correspondence, notes, and manuscripts -- to disclose the compelling story of a great mind in the making. Frei identifies the bases of Morgenthau's ideas and clarifies many misconceptions, including Morgenthau's link with Augustinian thought, his relationship with Reinhold Niebuhr, and the impact of major thinkers such as Max Weber, Hans Kelsen, and Carl Schmitt on the scholar. He offers incontrovertible evidence of Friedrich Nietzsche's predominant influence on Morgenthau. Resoundingly praised in the original German, Hans J. Morgenthau is a brilliant life study that presents the first coherent picture of the European intellectual building blocks Morgenthau brought with him to America.