Morgenthau

1955 · réf. 90769 — New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1955. Second Edition Revised enlarged and reset stated. Second printing Stated. Hardcover. Good/Fair. xxxiv 4 615 1 xiii 3 pages. Maps. Charts. Footnotes. Illustrations. Tabular Data. Appendix. Bibliography. Historical Glossary. Index. DJ has substantial wear tears chips and soiling. Ink marks to text noted. The name of a previous owner in ink inside the front cover. A comprehensive theory of international relations revolving around the central principle of power. This revised edition issued during the height of the Cold War stresses charismatic power and elaborates on the discussion of political ideologies. He discusses the balance of power. Hans Joachim Morgenthau February 17 1904 - July 19 1980 was a German-American political scientist. He was one of the major twentieth-century figures in the study of international relations. Morgenthau is considered among the influential realists of the post-World War II period. Morgenthau made landmark contributions to international relations theory and the study of international law. Politics Among Nations was widely adopted as a textbook in U.S. universities. Morgenthau emphasized the centrality of power and "the national interest" -- "the struggle for power and peace" -- his concern was with the struggle for power and the ways in which it is limited by ethics norms and law. Derived from a New York Times article by Barry Gewen: At the start of the Cold War America found itself in a position of leadership for which it was intellectually unprepared. The approach that became the guiding principle of foreign policy over the next four decades was as devised by George F. Kennan known as containment. But the man who provided the intellectual scaffolding for it was Hans J. Morgenthau. Morgenthau set out his ideas most fully in his 1948 masterwork "Politics Among Nations" a book that bears returning to today for the lessons it offers a contemporary America struggling once again to clarify its stance toward a volatile world. Virtually as soon as it was published "Politics Among Nations" became one of the most influential books of the 20th century. Nearly 100 colleges and universities including Harvard Yale and Princeton adopted it for classes and within five years it apparently was being assigned on the nation's campuses more often than all of the other textbooks on foreign policy combined. It wasn't only college undergraduates who were reading it. The book's admirers constituted a Who's Who of the period's leading thinkers on foreign policy: Kennan Walter Lippmann Reinhold Niebuhr Raymond Aron and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Probably no one took more from "Politics Among Nations" than Henry Kissinger. "We shared almost identical premises" Kissinger said at the time of Morgenthau's death in 1980. "I never ceased admiring him or remembering the profound intellectual debt I owed him." Morgenthau's book so revolutionized thinking that its author has been called the founding father of the entire modern study of international affairs. Some have compared his status to that of Freud in psychology. At the dawn of the Cold War "Politics Among Nations" tried to steer a path between isolationists who were suspicious of any foreign entanglements and idealists who believed that America had a mission to convert the world to democracy. Locating that middle ground was the key to its success in 1948. It's an outlook that still has relevance today. Alfred A. Knopf hardcover