Morgenthau

William E. Scheuerman

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745657974
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The ideas of Hans Morgenthau dominated the study of international politics in the United States for many decades. He was the leading representative of Realist international relations theory in the last century and his work remains hugely influential in the field. In this engaging and accessible new study of his work, William E. Scheuerman provides a comprehensive and illuminating introduction to Morgenthau's ideas, and assesses their significance for political theory and international politics.

Scheuerman shows Morgenthau to be an uneasy Realist, uncomfortable with conventional notions of Realism and sometimes unsure whether his reflections should be grouped under its rubric. He was a powerful critic of the existing state system and defended the idea of a world state. By highlighting Morgenthau's engagement with the leading lights of European political and legal theory, Scheuerman argues that he developed a morally demanding political ethics and an astute diagnosis of the unprecedented perils posed by nuclear weaponry. Believing that the irrationalities of US foreign policy were rooted partly in domestic factors, he sympathized with demands for radical political and social change. Scheuerman illustrates that Morgenthau's thinking has been widely misunderstood by both disciples and critics and that it offers many challenges to contemporary Realists who discount his normative aspirations. With the advent of the cosmopolitan goal of international reform, Morgenthau's work serves up an unsettling mix of sympathy and hard-headed skepticism which remains crucially important in the development of the field.

Lucidly and persuasively written, this book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars seeking to understand the continued importance of Morgenthau's thinking.

1

Radical roots of Realism

David Held has recently offered a concise summary of Realist international theory:

Realism posits that the system of sovereign states is inescapably anarchic in character; and that this anarchy forces all states, in the inevitable absence of any supreme arbiter to enforce moral behavior and agreed international codes, to pursue power politics in order to attain their vital interests. This Realpolitik view of states has had a significant influence on both the analysis and practice of international relations, as it offers a convincing prima facie explanation of the chaos and disorder of world affairs. In this account, the modern system of nation-states is a “limiting factor” which will always thwart any attempt to conduct international relations in a manner which transcends the politics of the sovereign state.¹

If we accept this initial definition of mainstream Realism (and I see no reason why we should not), the young Hans J. Morgenthau was no Realist. In fact, he rejected central attributes of Realism as conventionally understood, including the claim that the modern state system could not be transcended in favor of a normatively superior alternative to it.

To be sure, Morgenthau described his own intellectual project as a quest for a “realistic” theory of international relations. His central thematic preoccupations from the very outset of his intellectual career were the pathologies of existing international law and the dominant positivist approach to analyzing it. Those pathologies, Morgenthau believed, could only be understood if we developed a hard-headed theory of international politics attuned to the dynamics of power and its tendency to distort law’s underlying normative aspirations. Only a realistic assessment of power relations on the global scene could sufficiently explain the actual operations of the international legal order.

How then could one begin to develop such a theory? The young Morgenthau repeatedly called for what he characterized as a sociological approach to the study of international law. As late as 1940, he classified his own theoretical endeavors as a contribution to legal sociology. In formulating his version of the sociology of international law, he relied on a substantial body of interwar left-wing legal scholarship. Morgenthau’s early political and legal thinking not only clashed substantially with core tenets of postwar Realist theory (including, as we will see, some elements of his own mature rendition of it), but built directly on an unabashedly left-wing model of peaceful social reform via legal means.

This interpretive claim seems surprising. How could Morgenthau’s tough-minded Realism possibly claim left-wing intellectual roots? Did the Weimar left decisively shape postwar US international relations theory? This reading should appear somewhat less jolting, however, after we have examined a widely neglected yet revealing conjuncture in Morgenthau’s prewar intellectual biography. Between 1928 and 1931, Morgenthau not only worked closely with one of the major voices in left-wing Weimar jurisprudence, Hugo Sinzheimer, but also developed close ties with a number of Sinzheimer’s protégés, all of whom were outspoken socialist lawyers who subsequently gained prominence as left-wing political and legal scholars. Well after the destruction of the Weimar democratic left and its vision of peaceful legally based reform for which Sinzheimer and his disciples fought, Morgenthau remained close to Sinzheimer, and he always counted him among the central forces in his intellectual development. Even though Sinzheimer is a nearly forgotten figure today, of little interest except to a dwindling band of left-wing labor lawyers, his work and its impact on Morgenthau demand a careful look.²

Roots of Realism in the Weimar left

In May 1928, the 24-year-old Hans J. Morgenthau joined Sinzheimer in Frankfurt as a Referendar in his law office, as well as his assistant at the University of Frankfurt, where Sinzheimer was a member of the law faculty.³ Morgenthau’s decision to work under Sinzheimer provides early evidence of the fierce intellectual and political independence which later so often landed him in rocky waters. Despite a conservative familial background, Morgenthau opted to pursue his legal ambitions under the guidance of one of Weimar’s most famous left-wing lawyers, a well-known Social Democrat (in an overwhelmingly right-wing and even authoritarian profession), a former member of the Reichstag regularly subjected to vicious anti-semitic attacks for daring publicly to challenge the most retrograde features of German wartime policy,⁴ and perhaps the key legal mind behind the quest for novel forms of labor and social regulation crucial to German Social Democracy’s quest for a peaceful transition from capitalism to democratic socialism. Sinzheimer was the main architect of the Weimar Constitution’s controversial promulgation of ambitious social rights: Article 151, for example, called for a new economic order organized in conformity with “the principles of justice,” Articles 157 and 159 recognized the rights of labor and labor unions, and Article 165 established worker participation in economic decision making and pointed the way towards a restructuring of economic life in a democratic socialist direction.

Although Morgenthau apparently at first assumed he would remain with Sinzheimer in Frankfurt for a mere six months, he stayed on for nearly three eventful years, in which he practiced law alongside Sinzheimer, published his first articles as well as a book on international law, and decided to pursue an academic career as a theoretically minded legal scholar specializing in international jurisprudence. All of this occurred in the context of the decay of Weimar democracy and rise of Nazism. Sinzheimer quickly served as a confidant on a whole series of intellectual, professional, and personal matters well after Morgenthau left Frankfurt in 1932, with Morgenthau developing heartfelt admiration for someone he later described as “passionately and eloquently devoted to the legally defined interests of the underdog – the worker exploited and abused and the innocent helplessly caught in the spider web of criminal law.”⁵ When Morgenthau fled Europe for the United States, it was Sinzheimer who saw him off from the docks of Antwerp.⁶ Nearly forty years later, when German legal scholars were organizing a conference to mark the centenary of Sinzheimer’s birth, Ernst Fraenkel – another Referendar of Sinzheimer’s who went on to an illustrious career as a political scientist in postwar Germany – wrote to Sinzheimer’s daughter to tell her that the conference organizers hoped to attract Morgenthau to participate, as a prominent member of what he dubbed the “Sinzheimer School.”⁷

Morgenthau’s 1978 autobiographical reminiscences suggest that the years in Frankfurt represented an intellectual liberation from the generally stultifying atmosphere of the German schools and universities he previously had attended. He recounted the lively intellectual climate of Weimar-era Frankfurt, where religious-minded socialists like Paul Tillich argued with Sinzheimer, Karl Mannheim was lecturing on sociology,⁸ and Marx and Freud were heatedly discussed at the Institute for Social Research (where Sinzheimer occasionally lectured). In addition, he became “life-long friends” with “a group of distinguished people [who] worked in that [i.e., Sinzheimer’s] office” – including Fraenkel, as well as Franz L. Neumann and Otto Kahn Freund – all of whom similarly served as Sinzheimer’s Referendar and later became prominent leftist scholars.⁹ One can imagine Morgenthau amid this group of talented young lawyers heatedly discussing the future of Weimar democracy and its special status as a political and social order transitionally situated, or so Sinzheimer and his left-wing students believed, “between capitalism and socialism.”¹⁰ A 1934 letter from Morgenthau to Sinzheimer, who as a famous Jewish socialist was forced to flee Germany for Holland, offers a vivid statement of the significance of Sinzheimer’s mentorship. After explaining to Sinzheimer that he had failed to respond to his letters only because they never made it to Geneva, where Morgenthau spent his first years in exile, he notes:

[h]ad I been so inclined, I could have broken off written relations, but never the inner relations existing between us, which can never be severed. For I was not only your employee. I also breathed the intellectual and moral air that emanated from you. Giving up the ties that such an influence creates would mean giving up my own personality.¹¹

Morgenthau’s autobiographical comments also reveal what lessons he later drew from the tragic figure of Sinzheimer, who spent his best years trying to exploit the new legal possibilities for social reform provided by the Weimar Constitution, before being forced to leave his homeland. Morgenthau retrospectively observed that the courtroom battles they fought together for the economically and socially disadvantaged “were marginal to the crucial issues with which society had to come to terms. What was decisive was not the merits of different legal interpretations but the distribution of political power.” Notwithstanding Sinzheimer’s lawyerly brilliance and the fact that the relatively progressive language of the Weimar Constitution meant that left-wing lawyers could often provide effective justifications for their views in court, he and his associates operated in the context of a “political system that had stacked the cards against him and his cause.”¹² Not surprisingly, these experiences left Morgenthau with a deep skepticism about the transformative possibilities of law in the context of profound social antagonisms and deep inequalities in power. That skepticism later served as a fundament of Morgenthau’s postwar version of Realism. The young Morgenthau, however, seems to have shared his teacher’s faith in the possibility of taming inequality by legal means.

Sinzheimer’s multifaceted writings defy easy summary, yet their basic starting point was straightforward enough.¹³ Like many on the left, Sinzheimer thematized the tension between formal legal freedom and equality and the social or empirical reality of dependence and inequality in the capitalist workplace. From the perspective of the law, the laborer and entrepreneur face each other on formally free and equal terms. In social and economic reality, however, this relationship is plagued by dependency and structural inequality. In contrast to those on the orthodox left who took this gap as evidence for the bankruptcy of bourgeois formal law, Sinzheimer considered the tension potentially productive. To be sure, the starting point for social and legal reform required the open recognition of the ideological and mystifying role performed by legal devices in the context of a deeply unjust social and economic status quo. Yet this acknowledgment need not lead to a one-sided debunking of the law. The normative promise of modern law and its implicit commitment to defensible ideals of freedom and equality in fact provided immanent possibilities for overcoming this troubling gap.

Despite the failure of most elected parliaments before the First World War to recognize the special needs of labor, Sinzheimer observed, decisive steps were already being taken towards developing a distinctive body of what he described as autonomous labor regulation. Even though labor in Germany still lacked a statutory, let alone constitutional, basis for its demands, a growing union movement was forcing employers to reach novel agreements concerning workplace conditions, wages, and a host of related matters. Organized social groups, in short, were independently developing a system of self-regulation in response to novel social trends. The task at hand, Sinzheimer argued, was not only to advance this process to the advantage of labor, but also to make sure that it possessed a sufficiently sturdy legal and constitutional framework. Any sensible system of labor law had to concede that decision making between labor and capital should take place in a relatively decentralized matter; many points of conflict between labor and capital were best tackled by specialized agreements between particular groups of employers and employees. However, statutory and constitutional legislation could successfully complement this process of autonomous decision making: well-designed legal and constitutional guarantees for the rights of labor, as well as new constitutionally based modes of both decentralized (i.e., workplace-centered) and centralized worker representation in economic decision making, could firmly ground a legally viable as well as egalitarian system of labor regulation to a greater extent than autonomous self-regulation between employers and employees would prove able to achieve.

Sinzheimer defended an ambitious model of works councils as well as a national “economic council” which would allow for substantial labor participation in overseeing the economy. In contrast to those inspired by the Soviet experience, he envisioned new institutional sites for worker participation as a complement to the main instruments of liberal democratic decision making. A political system dominated solely by worker soviets, he predicted, in opposition to the communist left, necessarily contained anti-democratic and authoritarian implications. If Germany instead could move in the direction of the model he proposed, the factual power advantages typically enjoyed by capital could be effectively checked and labor’s dependent status corrected. The gap between formal legal freedom and equality and the harsh realities of capitalism could be reduced and ultimately overcome without abandoning the lasting normative achievements of modern law. Amid the new “class balance between labor and the bourgeoisie” produced by the German Revolution of 1918, Sinzheimer apparently hoped, the right moment had come for aggressively advancing this reform agenda.¹⁴

In hindsight, Sinzheimer’s main intellectual achievements are probably twofold. First, he played a major role on the European continent in establishing labor law both as a distinctive body of law and as an object of legitimate scholarly interest. Previously, labor relations had been seen as falling under the general sphere of private law and thus, in principle, no different from other arenas of the law regulating private relations between legally equal and free subjects. Sinzheimer grasped that labor was a special commodity because it “has no other container than human flesh and blood” and thus could not be conflated with a piece of real estate, for example, or other forms of property.¹⁵ Because labor was an unusual commodity, labor law correspondingly possessed a special status within the legal order as a whole: it represented the very centerpiece of a social democratic reform project, whose main function was the liberation of wage labor from the illegitimate tutelage of capital.

Second, Sinzheimer was an early proponent of the sociology of law, which he conceptualized in a socially critical fashion. Influenced by Karl Marx and Max Weber, as well as the Austro-Marxist Karl Renner, Sinzheimer insisted that German legal scholarship should broaden its horizons beyond a traditional focus on the study and exegesis of positive law: a deeper understanding of the role of social factors in law’s operations was called for. Only a rigorous empirical or sociological examination of the law could provide a necessary understanding of its social context and, in particular, the relationship between law and the capitalist workplace. As Sinzheimer learned from Renner, legal norms might remain formally unchanged, yet suddenly serve fundamentally novel social functions.¹⁶ A gap could always emerge between a formal rule and the “real” rule of law. Sinzheimer’s own research in labor law suggested that changing social conditions might lead to new autonomous forms of legal self-regulation. Worried that the decisive “problem of the ‘transformation’ of social changes into new norms” had been neglected, Sinzheimer stressed how social “reality influences the conceptual groupings of existing norms,” as well as how norms emerge spontaneously in response to social change.¹⁷ The sociology of law called for an analysis of the fundamentally dynamic or historical character of the nexus between legal norms and reality.¹⁸

This embrace of the sociology of law, however, by no means implied discarding conventional legal methods and ideals altogether. Sinzheimer remained faithful to an a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyrigt page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Morgenthau’s uneasy Realism
• 1 Radical roots of Realism
• 2 Morality, power, and tragedy
• 3 Defending the national interest
• 4 Politics among nations and beyond
• 5 Utopian Realism and the bomb
• 6 Vietnam and the crisis of American democracy
• Conclusion: Morgenthau as classical Realist?
• Bibliography
• Index