Haro Karkour
The re-election of Donald J. Trump is a testimony that history tells its jokes more than once and leaves to theoreticians the task of explaining them. Without history, theory finds refuge in the ideal; without theory, history is a series of unrelated events. A theoretician is one who extends the baton of history; stretches history, as it were, to periods that tell society a great deal about its times. For a theorist seeking to make sense of the crisis of liberal order, this period is the 1930s–40s and coincides with the publication of the classical realist texts. Can these texts make sense of our times? No doubt they intended to.
Hans Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations ran five editions in his lifetime. In the fifth edition, in 1978, Morgenthau warned America of what history lay in store for those who forgot – or did not learn from – the Nazi experience. A society that is atomised, insecure about its future and powerless in the face of existential threats, Morgenthau wrote, ‘the United States is likely to partake to a growing extent in those tendencies in modern culture which have found their most extreme manifestations in Soviet Russia and National Socialist Germany’ (Morgenthau 1978, 121).
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