American Values and Power Politics:
MARSHALL, CHARLES BURTON
American Values and Power Politics The Purpose of American Politics. By Hans J. Morgenthau. Knopf. 359 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by Charles Burton Marshall Washington Center of Foreign Policy...
...declaratory goals and actual undertakings in foreign policy became unjoined...
...The modern world,' he tells us...
...Yet even if they had been defeated, posterity could have said of them: They deserved to be victorious...
...He has, in fact, consistently taken into account the connection between policy and the capacity to achieve intended results—the first obviously relating to politics and the latter to power...
...indeed, it is on the whole somber...
...Thus, he can more properly be described as being concerned with power politics, as anyone with a practical view of relevant world problems must be...
...ideas valuable not because they are pleasing and certain to succeed but because they are worthy of the effort and venture...
...The United States seemed to have lost the zest and talent for making its purposes cogent to the exterior world: "The creative faculty stands baffled and paralyzed in contemplation of the unprecedented gulf that separates the received ideas from the new experiences, despairing of its inability to bridge it...
...A prodigal redundancy of production and consumption preoccupied the country, with the effect of baffling rather than benefiting society...
...The problem in much of the world is how to fulfill nationhood rather than how to pass it by...
...Those who came before us," he writes in closing, "made it, as it were, easy for fate to grant them victory...
...The concepts especially stressed by Morgenthau concern the equalization of opportunity and the impact of authority—the latter, in a way conducive to widening the range of options open to individuals...
...Let us comport ourselves in such a fashion that posterity can say at least as much of us...
...Morgenthau calls it "the great paradox of this task, which arises from the opposition of sovereign states armed with nuclear weapons, that it cannot be accomplished by sovereign states armed with more and better nuclear weapons"—an approach which he likens to the folly of erecting a house atop a volcano...
...Political leadership must again grasp the essence of authority and stop worrying over the opinion polls, thus breaking "the tyranny of public opinion...
...Despite the rush to get the new model, I suspect the old apparatus will be around and useful for some time to come...
...Government was a marvel of organization, but streamlined planning and operations proved somehow inadequate in results...
...Nations, including specifically and essentially our own, must learn to transcend themselves...
...To regard Morgenthau as preoccupied with power without heed to the purposes to which it is to be harnessed is to miss an essential element in his thought...
...Nor has he postulated national interests as mere selfevident items of material concern...
...It describes a pre-Kennedy America in which issues were no longer vivid because the nation's values had come to be expressed in a vagueness that precluded controversy...
...Morgenthau has never said that a nation can be considered without regard for antecedent values...
...This has happened to Morgenthau, leaving him with a reputation as a sort of 20th century Machiavelli without the latter's explicit regard for virtu...
...Public life flagged...
...The nation was both fearful and oblivious of the dangers from without...
...References to the obsolescence of the nation state have recently gained the currency of cliche, but I am never sure what is meant...
...In these pages, Morgenthau is intent to find and to reaffirm those ideas of value in the nation's origin which are still relevant, valid and essential...
...Political leadership in the America of the '50s became a search for lowest common denominators and was bedazzled by public opinion or what it took for such...
...has left behind the sovereign nation state as a principle of organization for the purpose not only of the new supra-national tasks but also of the elemental task of any political organization: to safeguard the biological survival of its members...
...The Purpose of American Politics makes this explicit...
...Reviewed by Charles Burton Marshall Washington Center of Foreign Policy Research Hans Morgenthau's excellent book...
...The book is not full of easy reassurance...
...The author is somewhat vague, however, in explaining what he means by "leaving behind the nation state...
...How this goal of equality in freedom has actually worked within the country is what gives the nation a domestic history worth the telling, and the degree to which the nation proves concerned and able to project that goal abroad is, in Morgenthau's view, the measure of its achievement...
...Morgenthau calls for "a reorientation of the national outlook, a change in our national style," including a shift of emphasis and concern from the private to the public sector based on seeing private happiness as "a function of public happiness...
...The Purpose of American Politics, is an enhanced version of the Albert Shaw Lectures he gave at Johns Hopkins University two springs ago...
...Its politics were too largely subsumed into administration, and administration became a rigmarole of sorting ideas into pigeonholes of bureaucracy...
...Any writer, having achieved success, faces the danger of being discussed more widely than read, or at least than read well...
...Those who attempt to deal otherwise with world affairs call to mind Mark Twain's description of poets who indulge in moon talk without having been to the moon...
Vol. 44 • May 1961 • No. 21
