ABSTRACT
It is an unusually daunting task to review a work considered to be a classic in a few pages, let alone pass judgement on it. The task may be even more challenging when the work in question is unanimously considered to have ‘made the field’ of International Relations (IR) as we know it. 1 However, Hans J. Morgenthau's Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace 2 (PAN) presents us with an even greater challenge, which has to do with the constantly evolving nature of the text through its successive editions. The first difficulty is to ascertain which book is under scrutiny. Is it the 1948 first edition, still very close in tone and general orientation to the previous Scientific Man versus Power Politics (1946), with its rather explicit and recurring rejection of the scientific method? If there ever was something akin to a founding text that ‘made the field’ of IR, then the original 1948 edition would certainly qualify. The book was an instant academic best-seller, immediately ‘adopted as a textbook for foreign policy and international relations at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and Notre Dame Universities’. The following year, 90 colleges had adopted it throughout the USA, which was more than all other previous textbooks combined. 3 Generally, the book was well received, and the first reviews contributed to establishing its status as a ‘realist’ manifesto. In his Review of Politics, Waldemar Gurian saluted a ‘landmark’ in the US literature on international relations, and underscored Morgenthau's opposition to the ‘legalistic approach’ and to ‘idealism and utopianism’. 4
