MORGENTHAU, HANS J.

born Feb. 17, 1904, Coburg, Ger. died July 19, 1980, New York, N.Y., U.S. in full Hans Joachim Morgenthau German-born American political scientist and historian noted as a leading analyst of the role of power in international politics. Educated at the universities of Berlin, Frankfurt, and Munich, Morgenthau did postgraduate work at the Graduate Institute for International Studies at Geneva. He was admitted to the bar in 1927 and served as acting president of the Labour Law Court in Frankfurt. In 1932 he went to Geneva to teach public law for a year, but because of Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany in 1933, he stayed on until 1935. In 193536 he taught in Madrid, and then in 1937 he took up residence in the United States (naturalized 1943), serving on the faculties of Brooklyn (N.Y.) College (193739), the University of Kansas City, Mo. (193943), the University of Chicago (194371), the City College of the City University of New York (196874), and the New School for Social Research (197480). In 1948 Morgenthau published Politics Among Nations, a highly regarded study that presented a modern realist approach to international politics. Central to Morgenthau's theory was the concept of power as the dominant goal in international politics and the definition of national interest in terms of power. He called for recognition of the nature and limits of power and for the use of traditional methods of diplomacy, including compromise. A contributor to numerous scholarly periodicals and journals of opinion, Morgenthau was also the author of Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (1946), In Defense of the National Interest (1951), Dilemmas of Politics (1958), The Purpose of American Politics (1960), Politics in the Twentieth Century, 3 vol. (1962), and Truth and Power (1970).