Carl Schmitt and Hans Morgenthau: Realism and beyond

Abstract We now know that the young Hans Morgenthau was involved in an intense ‘hidden dialogue’ with Carl Schmitt, twentieth-century Germany’s most significant right-wing authoritarian political thinker.2 In his earliest Weimar-era writings, Morgenthau responded to Schmitt’s influential reflections on the ‘concept of the political’: Morgenthau’s assertion that Schmitt plagiarized core arguments from his 1929 dissertation is fundamentally accurate. As Morgenthau noted, his dissertation was partly intended as a critical response to a 1927 essay by Schmitt in which the right-wing theorist had defined ‘the political’ as constituting a fundamentally distinct and independent sphere of activity, existing alongside alternative modes of human activity.