No Bold Words
Neumann, William L.
No Bold Words Politics in the 20th Century, by Hans J. Morgenthau. University of Chicago Press. Vol. 1, 431 pp. $10. Vol. 2, 312 pp. $7.50. Vol. 3, 391 pp. $8.95. Reviewed by William L....
...should be used only when it can be made an instrument of American policy...
...Last year she spent ten months in Moscow on the inter-university exchange program...
...Reviewed by William L. Neumann Hitler conferred one blessing on the United States in producing a new Diaspora: the flight of scholars from German universities to centers of learning on this side of the Atlantic...
...IRA KAYE is an attorney who has represented the South Carolina "Turks" in their school desegregation battles...
...The impact of these minds on the social sciences seems to have been almost as influential as that of refugee scholars like Albert Einstein on the physical sciences...
...IVOR KRAFT is director of the Children's Guild Training Project in Baltimore...
...It is surprising, therefore, to find the proponent of a limited policy telling the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the United States should have taken a more vigorous action in response to the Hungarian, Polish, and East German revolts...
...WILLIAM L. NEUMANN teaches history at Goucher College...
...The study of international relations, in particular, was reinvigorated and raised to a higher level of intellectual inquiry...
...This pretentious three-volume work, Politics in the 20th Century, has only the outward appearance of being Morgenthau's great opus...
...A beginner seeking an introduction to Morgenthau should turn to his 1948 text...
...The American political science Establishment is in need of a fresh infusion of critical thought, but the young Morgenthau's of the '60s will somehow have to be produced on native soil...
...Arriving in the United States in 1937 by way of academic posts in Switzerland and Spain, by 1943 his intellectual stature won him a post at the University of Chicago, where he has remained...
...Morgenthau's greatest contribution has been the statement of a number of principles which have come out of his analyses of the past...
...Louis Post-Dispatch...
...Nationalism, he saw, must now make way "for a political principle of larger dimensions...
...The distinguished author reveals himself in this work as an academic string-saver who presents here chiefly what others would consider ephemera...
...Morgenthau has also hammered away at the necessity of relating goals to actual power...
...Morgenthau's writing contains no bold words hurled from the ivory tower against the crippling confines of the Acheson-Dulles theses...
...But in applying these guide lines to current American policy, this collection demonstrates some timidity, inconsistency, and poverty of thought...
...He has traveled extensively in the Far East and Latin America...
...His new book, "America Encounters Japan: Perry to MacArthur," will be published this autumn...
...It is not, apparently, to grow out of the United Nations, since he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1959 that the U.N...
...His most influential book has probably been his Politics Among Nations, first published in 1948 and now a near-classic which has introduced thousands of college students to a mature analysis of international relations...
...Instead of an increasingly sterile study of the League of Nations, or the chronicling of diplomatic exchanges between nations, scholarship turned to the analysis of national power and to the dynamics of the international anarchy...
...Writing on the Berlin question in 1961, he said that this country can negotiate only over the "modalities of its presence" in West Berlin and that any acceptance of the status quo of East Germany must still be kept compatible with the American verbal "commitment to the unification of Germany...
...Forget the illusions of the recent past . . . the sentimental notion that foreign policy is a struggle between virtue and vice," he wrote in 1951...
...This may have been sound in the past, but in 1957 Morgenthau stated that technological developments had "completely destroyed the protective function of the nation state...
...The first volume consists largely of materials already published by the author between hard covers in 1958 as Dilemmas of Politics...
...His later writings show little progress in clarifying this thought and in defining this principle of larger dimensions...
...These are hardly guide lines for a fresh approach...
...Morgenthau has consistently attacked the utopianism which he finds in Wood-row Wilson and other preachers of moralistic policies...
...those familiar with his thought will already have read many of these writings on their first appearance...
...the second, "The Impasse of American Foreign Policy," and the third, "The Restoration of American Politics...
...Hans Morgenthau is among the foremost of this group of political scientists...
...With a few minor changes these three volumes consist of articles, book reviews, speeches, and even letters to the editor, published over the past twenty-five years and now squeezed into categories which give an impression of unity...
...The United States persists in declaring aims which cannot be achieved by the means which the nation is willing and capable of using...
...The first volume is titled, "The Decline of Democratic Politics...
...It is a comment on the affluence of the academic world that a publisher would expect someone to pay more than twenty-five dollars for the odds and ends of an author who has already set forth his thoughts more coherently in several earlier books...
...There is but "one guiding star, one standard for thought, one rule for action: The National Interest...
...Policy must therefore be adjusted even if it means shattering such sacred illusions as those growing out of the "containment" and "liberation" doctrines...
...PATRICIA CARDEN teaches Russian literature at Cornell University...
...THE REVIEWERS RICHARD DUDMAN is a member of the Washington staff of The St...
Vol. 27 • June 1963 • No. 6
