The first biography of Hans Morgenthau, the pioneering political philosopher who escaped Nazi Germany and pioneered the approach to international relations—realism—that guided the United States through the Cold War and explains today’s world

“International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power.” Hans Morgenthau wrote those words at the dawn of the Cold War, as Americans were attempting to understand the emerging global rivalry with the Soviet Union. His book, Politics Among Nations, quickly became the defining textbook on international relations in the country, shaping generations of citizens, scholars, and policymakers. Henry Kissinger, who looked up to Morgenthau, stated, “All of us who taught the subject after him, however much we differed from one another, had to start with his reflections.”

Morgenthau’s realism was rooted in the traumas that he experienced in post-World War I Germany. When Morgenthau, as a top student in his class, was given the honor of delivering a speech in front of his school, his classmates turned their backs and held their noses at the “stinking Jew.” He was spat on and ostracized. When Hitler came to Morgenthau’s hometown for his first rally outside of Munich, the police stood aside as the Nazis took over the town. He concluded that abstract ideals could not protect him and that power only yielded to countervailing power.

Morgenthau fled Germany and eventually made his way to the United States. He was advised to give up his dream of becoming a professor and to instead take a job as an elevator attendant or a chicken farmer. After a series of dead-end jobs, he found a temporary position at the University of Chicago, and from there became the country’s most influential thinker on international relations. When his peers lined up behind the Vietnam War, Morgenthau made a stand, dismantling the case for the war on realist grounds.

Meticulously researched and masterfully written, David Sacks’ The Realist shows how Morgenthau’s ideas continue to shape the course of the twenty-first century.