Know your Schmitt: a godfather of truth and the spectre of Nazism

Abstract

In a recent article in the Review of International Studies Hans-Karl Pichler argues that Hans Morgenthau's intellectual universe was saturated by ‘typically European philosophical problems’ which he transferred to an American political context. He shows this by looking at how Morgenthau tried to overcome the value determinacy of social science, as pointed out by Weber, by grounding his political realist theory in a Schmittean understanding of the political, which defines war – the friend/enemy distinction – as the essence of the political and founds it anthropologically in the evil, dangerous nature of human beings.