Entries on “Classical Realism,” “E.H. Carr,” and “Hans Morgenthau,” forthcoming in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics and International Relations, 4th edition, ed. Garrett Brown (Oxford University Press).

Alison McQueen, Stanford University [email protected]

Classical Realism Classical realism is a variant of realism in International Relations theory and is mostly strongly associated with the work of twentieth-century thinkers like E.H. Carr, George Kennan, and Hans Morgenthau, among others. Like all IR realists, classical realists take conflict to be an ineradicable feature of international politics and explain outcomes by appealing to the darker features of human nature (e.g. propensity to act on fear, the drive to dominate), the ordering principle of anarchy, the distribution of power (e.g. bipolarity, multipolarity), or changes in the distribution of power. However, three things distinguish classical realism from the dominant strand of IR realism— structural (or neo-) realism. First, classical realists assign comparatively greater importance to explanations that appeal to human nature. Second, classical realists tend to be more attuned to the role of uncertainty and contingency in international politics. They are therefore comparatively less optimistic about our ability to reliably predict state behavior. Third, classical realists rarely focus solely on explaining international political outcomes (i.e. what states do) and are comparatively more comfortable offering normative prescriptions (i.e. what states should do).

E.H. Carr Edward Hallett Carr (1892-1982) was a British diplomat, journalist, historian and International Relations theorist. He spent the first twenty years of his career (1916-1936) at the British Foreign Office. In 1936, Carr left the Foreign Office to accept the Woodrow Wilson Chair in the Department of International Politics at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. During his 11 years in this position, he wrote a number of books on international politics. However, his lasting contribution to the field of IR was The Twenty Years’ Crisis (1939), which argued for the importance of “peaceful change” and accepting the realities of power. According to Carr, the study of international politics was initially dominated by idealist or utopian scholars who were prescriptive, fact-insensitive, and optimistic that human reason can bring an end to war. This early utopianism was superseded by a realist approach that was analytical, fact-sensitive, and resigned to ineradicable conflict. Utopianism and realism are also recurrent tendencies in the practice of international politics. While Carr would ultimately be labelled a “realist” (particularly by his Cold War American readers), his position is more nuanced. He argues that utopianism and realism must serve as dialectical checks on one another. Realists expose the ways in which the moralistic rhetoric of utopians serves as a cover for power interests, while utopians reveal the moral poverty of pure realism.

Hans Morgenthau Hans J. Morgenthau (1904-1980) was a German-Jewish émigré scholar of International Relations who is most strongly associated with the school of classical realism. Morgenthau was trained in Germany and Switzerland as a lawyer and international legal scholar. His early work in the 1930s argued that international law should be more responsive to social and political change. Throughout this period, Morgenthau’s approach displayed two sets of commitments that would remain in tension throughout his later work. First, his arguments (like his politics) were broadly reformist. He defended sweeping changes to the international legal order and was critical of those who focused narrowly on questions of power politics. Second, like Carl Schmitt (with whom he had an uneasy intellectual relationship), Morgenthau conceived of conflict as constitutive of politics. Partly for this reason, Morgenthau was skeptical about ambitious projects of liberal international reform. He left Germany in 1932 and came to the United States in 1937. Morgenthau spent most of his productive postwar academic career at the University of Chicago (1943-1971), where he wrote his most influential works. Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (1946) offers a polemical critique of rationalism, “scientism,” and liberalism. He argues that liberals like Woodrow Wilson combine a faith in the power of human reason and science and technology to solve social and political problems. For Morgenthau, this reflects a dangerous hubris that is inattentive to human fallibility, the realities of power, and the complex and often tragic moral calculus of politics. Morgenthau’s most influential contribution to IR theory was his textbook, Politics Among Nations. First published in 1948, the book was the standard text for IR courses for several decades. Perhaps unfairly, Politics Among Nations is best remembered today for the “Six Principles of Political Realism” that first appeared in its second edition (1954). These principles offer a picture of realism as an approach that seeks to identify unchanging and objective laws of politics that are grounded in human nature, relies on national interest “defined in terms of power” to account for state behavior on the international stage, and squarely faces the tension between the demands of morality and those of politics. The rest of the work is more nuanced than these principles suggest, examining the causes of international conflicts, the political mechanisms (e.g. the balance of power) and the moral restraints that have successfully mitigated these conflicts in the past, and the likely efficacy of these mechanisms and restraints in a nuclear age. Arguing that a world state is the only stable bulwark against nuclear war, Morgenthau concludes with a tragic observation: “in no period of modern history was civilization in more need of permanent peace…[and] in no period of modern history were the moral, social, and political conditions…less favorable for the establishment of a world state.” In his later writings, Morgenthau took an increasingly forceful stand on the dangers nuclear war, arguing that deterrence was too fragile to be reliable and toying with various options for supranational nuclear oversight. While these writings began to put Morgenthau at odds with an American Cold War establishment that had previously welcomed him, his opposition to the Vietnam War led to an enduring estrangement. Drawing on familiar realist arguments about the national interest (such as those offered in In Defense of the National Interest, 1951), he argued that Vietnam was a strategic and political disaster for the United States. It was also the result of a crisis in American liberal democracy. Morgenthau’s later writings pushed in a more radical direction and were directed toward the prospects for both international and domestic political reform.