The Realist

Description

‘International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power.’ Hans Morgenthau wrote these words in 1948 as Americans were grappling with their emerging global rivalry with the Soviet Union. His Politics Among Nations quickly became the defining international relations textbook. Henry Kissinger stated, ‘All of us who taught the subject after him, however much we differed from one another, had to start with his reflections.’

Morgenthau’s realism was rooted in the traumas he experienced in interwar Germany. Amid the rampant anti-Semitism of this period, his classmates spat on and ostracised him. He saw Hitler break the law with impunity when he marched on Morgenthau’s hometown, Coburg. Morgenthau concluded that abstract ideals could not protect him and that power only yielded to countervailing power. Fleeing to the United States in 1937, he became that country’s most influential international relations scholar. When his peers lined up behind the Vietnam War, Morgenthau made a stand, dismantling the case for war on realist grounds.

Meticulously researched and masterfully written, The Realist shows how Morgenthau’s ideas continue to shape the twenty-first century. Amid growing international disorder and the reemergence of great power competition in Europe and Asia, his realism is more relevant than ever.

Reviews

‘Hans Morgenthau was the most consequential American political theorist of the twentieth century. Henry Kissinger and others stood on his shoulders. Finally there is a full-bodied biography of the man. David M. Sacks, in discovering Morgenthau for a new generation, also defines foreign policy realism, a concept that has been vastly misunderstood.’ — Robert D. Kaplan

‘Hans Morgenthau’s writings are central to understanding the past, present, and future. In this gripping, definitive biography, David M. Sacks tells the story of the young man who fled Hitler’s Germany and connects it to the professor whose ideas and words provided direction for policymakers navigating the Cold War—ideas and words that continue to shape the thinking of almost everyone involved in the debate about America’s role in the world.’ — Richard Haass

Author(s)

David M. Sacks is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. An expert on China and Taiwan, he has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Foreign Affairs, Time and the BBC, among other outlets. He lives in New York with his wife and two daughters.