ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the logic behind Morgenthau’s basic premise that international politics is a realm of necessity - a struggle for power among atomistically conceived and asocial states. It presents the main elements of Politics Among Nations. Human nature, according to Morgenthau’s metaphysic, has three dimensions; biological, rational, and spiritual. Morgenthau’s basis for positing international politics as a realm of continuity and necessity invokes a contextual dimension to political autonomy in addition to its substantive elements, revealing as naive the possibility of domesticating international politics without a radical structural transformation of the states system per se. For Morgenthau, then, international political theory is the link between philosophy and history. Morgenthau argues that the new balance of power ‘contains in itself the potentialities of unheard-of good as well as for unprecedented evil’. The chapter concludes with a summary of the central prescriptive implications of Morgenthau’s avowedly ‘empirical’ theory.
