Critical literature on democratic peace and its limitations

The reliance of liberal democratic peace on neo-positivist methodology, according to critical scholars, renders the theory susceptible to the ideological rationalisation of US imperial wars. To address this limitation, critical scholars call for reflexivity and the exploration of alternative forces at play that explain the ‘darker side’ of democratic peace. It is not clear, however, how such reflexivity can be brought about to the public and what practical tools theorists hold, qua public intellectuals, to advance this objective.

‘The academic study of democratic peace’, writes Patrick Jackson in The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations, ‘has been almost completely dominated by a neo-positivist methodology.’Footnote ¹¹ Neo-positivist methodology is premised on two ontological assumptions that sustain liberal theory of democratic peace. First, mind–world dualism: liberal democratic states exist ‘out there’, independently from the theorists studying them. Second, ‘phenomenalism’: the ‘liberal zone of peace’Footnote ¹² can be observed empirically in the historical record, lending itself to generalisable statistical analysis and causal explanation. Critical scholars highlight the problem with this observer–observed dichotomy that lends itself to claims of value neutrality apropos concepts such as ‘liberal democracy’ and ‘war’.Footnote ¹³ Early on, Ido Oren observed that

‘Liberal democracy’, that is, is a political construct to describe America’s ‘friends’ – namely, it is an effect of peaceful relations with America, not a ‘causal variable’ in an empirically observable reality. As a neo-positivist theory, liberal democratic peace furthermore needs to assume the mind-independent reality of war. Yet critical scholars problematise the theory’s state-centric understanding of war.Footnote ¹⁵ In this view, covert actions, along with the imperial wars that preceded them, are outside the purview of the ‘liberal peace’.Footnote ¹⁶ This is because they do not constitute ‘interstate wars’ in the traditional sense defined by the Correlates of War.

Critical literature on democratic peace thus rejects the theory’s claims of value-neutrality and political disinterestedness. Such claims omit what Geis and Wagner refer to as the ‘darker side’ of democratic peace, namely the theory’s ideological employment to justify US imperial wars.Footnote ¹⁷ Instead, liberal democratic peace offers ideological justification for what critical scholars refer to as the ‘master narrative of empire’.Footnote ¹⁸ This is the narrative of Bush Jr’s ‘war on civilisation’,Footnote ¹⁹ the ‘failed state’,Footnote ²⁰ the Afghan ‘tribe’,Footnote ²¹ and the ‘failure’ of the 2011 Arab uprisings.Footnote ²² In all these instances, the narrative of empire is premised on liberal eschatology and a linear view of history that reduces ‘others’ to temporal backwardness.

To address these limitations, critical scholars call for reflexivity and the exploration of alternative forces at play that explain the ‘darker side’ of democratic peace. Christopher Hobson calls for the exploration of global capitalism and its role in the ‘prevent[ion] [of] wider democratic peace’.Footnote ²³ Similarly, Beate Jahn challenges the role of private interests in propagating past imperialism and contemporary ‘liberal wars’.Footnote ²⁴ But if private interests in the political economy of empire play a crucial role in ‘liberal wars’, what role do scholars play against the usurpation of the foreign policy apparatus by these interests? Furthermore, how are citizens, who consume the news media that are also governed by private interests, to be empowered to counter the narrative propagated by these interests? These questions are important because, as Geis and Wagner acknowledge, it is only a short road from Konigsberg to Kandahar.Footnote ²⁵ The asphalt from which this road is made is filled with public deception and glued together with nationalism.Footnote ²⁶ As Brent Steele recounts,

In this context, the critical literature’s plea ‘for introducing more self-criticism and self-reflexion’ needs to explain how such reflexivity can be brought about to the public in the midst of widespread deception to justify ‘democratic wars’.Footnote ²⁸

A notable exception is Piki Ish-Shalom’s work. Ish-Shalom argues that liberal democratic peace theory was ‘trivialised’ – that is to say, abused by power to justify ends beyond the intentions of its authors.Footnote ²⁹ As these authors did not intend their theories to justify the 2003 Iraq War, Ish-Shalom argues, they could not be held morally responsible for it. As scholars, however, they bear ‘social responsibility’ to act as ‘theoretician citizens’, namely as ‘contributors of theoretical insights [to] enrich policy shaping, endowing it with rational qualities that would result in reasonable policies equipped to cope with the complexities of reality’.Footnote ³⁰ These ‘theoretical insights’, Ish-Shalom writes, should aim to foster ‘public deliberation’, helping citizens to ‘doubt’ and ‘ask questions’.Footnote ³¹ But how can theorists ensure their theories help citizens raise ‘doubts’ and ‘ask questions’, rather than reinforcing the dominant ideology in society? How can theory retain its reflexivity vis-à-vis the dominant ideology in a society that reifies the political into us/democracies vs them/autocracies binaries? Furthermore, how can it translate this reflexivity into an open public sphere where citizens can deliberate the nation’s interests and values spatio-temporally?

To the latter questions, critical scholars offer no satisfactory answers. Instead, critical scholars engage with the question of why liberal democratic peace theory became ‘trivialised’ and offer answers in its ‘objectivity’ claimsFootnote ³² and parsimony.Footnote ³³ It is true that liberal democratic theorists’ claims of ‘objectivity’ made their theories attractive to power, and parsimony gave their theories rhetorical power to manipulate the public. The issue at hand, however, is the relationship between theory and the dominant ideology, and it cannot be resolved by adding more complexity to theory, by clarifying explanatory premises,Footnote ³⁴ or by transparency about the theorist’s ideological commitments.Footnote ³⁵ For, important as these steps are, the problem remains that liberal democratic peace theory, as John Owen notes, is rooted in the same liberal ideology that has rationalised US wars since 1776.Footnote ³⁶ The theory was thus not first formulated apolitically before it was ‘trivialised’ or ‘abused’ by power. As Steele notes, liberal democratic peace theorists were ‘quite comfortable’ that their theories ‘should be part of the political discourse’.Footnote ³⁷ In relation to the dominant ideology, liberal democratic peace scholars had two tasks where they failed: first, to distance their theory from the dominant ideology in society; and second, to challenge this dominant ideology and help retain the openness of the public sphere.

To accomplish these tasks, theory, including critical theory, requires a tool that puts limits on the dominant ideology’s rationalisation of power and its closure of the political as the spatio-temporal realm of the plurality of interests.Footnote ³⁸ Ideologies, ultimately, attempt to conceal the ‘essentially, and not just superficially, contested nature of the political realm’.Footnote ³⁹ To formulate knowledge that is appropriate for the ‘contested nature of the political realm’, therefore, ‘nonideological knowledge’ as Jahn writes, ‘requires an explicit engagement with, and exploration of, its limitations’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Or, as Morgenthau puts it, ‘a theory of politics, to be theoretically valid, must build into its theoretical structure, as it were, those very qualifications which limit its theoretical validity and practical usefulness’.Footnote ⁴¹ Without a practical tool that offers these qualifications, the ‘practical usefulness’ of theory encloses the new possibilities that criticality allows and, rather than retaining the openness of the political in the public sphere, it turns itself into an ideology.

IR theorists thus require practical tools, built into theories, that can be employed to retain scholarly and public reflexivity. Before unpacking Morgenthau’s conceptualisation of this tool, the article will justify the proposition that Morgenthau sought public reflexivity in the first place. This is because it is commonplace to juxtapose ‘rationality’ and ‘public opinion’ in a realist foreign policy.Footnote ⁴² The following section demonstrates that this juxtaposition is based on a misunderstanding of Morgenthau’s argument on the role of public opinion in a realist foreign policy.

Public opinion and realist foreign policy: Common misconceptions

This section refutes the common assumption in the discipline that a classical realist foreign policy is suspicious of public opinion. In anticipation of the criticism that there may be ‘several Morgenthaus’ in different writings and contradicting each other on this question, the section draws on the same texts cited by critics.Footnote ⁴³ Upon closer reading and contextualisation of these texts, it argues that this false assumption is perpetuated in the discipline due to a conflation of Morgenthau’s concept of the political with Carl Schmitt’s and a misunderstanding of what Morgenthau meant by public opinion.

The conventional wisdom in IR is that classical realists in general, and Morgenthau in particular, saw public opinion as anathema to a foreign policy that follows the rational dictates of the national interest. ‘Realists’, Dan Reiter writes, ‘have long been sceptical that political institutions or public opinion affect foreign policy behaviour.’Footnote ⁴⁴ The most elaborate and sustained critique of Morgenthau on this subject is presented by Daniel Bessner and Nicholas Guilhot. Bessner and Guilhot argue, correctly, that Politics among Nations is a book for policymakers.Footnote ⁴⁵ Public opinion, Bessner and Guilhot add, represented a problem for Morgenthau; a nuisance for diplomatic and policy elites.Footnote ⁴⁶ Not only Morgenthau but ‘émigré classical realists’ in general, Bessner and Guilhot write, ‘asserted that decisionmakers must be unconstrained by useless laws or ignorant publics incapable of understanding international relations’.Footnote ⁴⁷ ‘Morgenthau’, therefore, ‘criticised public opinion for its naïveté, stupidity, and destructiveness.’Footnote ⁴⁸

Bessner and Guilhot attribute Morgenthau’s rejection of democratic norms to the influence of Schmittian decisionism on his thought.Footnote ⁴⁹ Morgenthau however was a critic of Schmitt, ever since his postdoctoral dissertation.Footnote ⁵⁰ ‘Morgenthau’, Hartmut Behr and Felix Rösch write, ‘deplored Schmitt’s understanding of the political on moral and conceptual grounds.’Footnote ⁵¹ ‘No German political thinker of the interwar period was more aptly endowed with intellectual ability’, Morgenthau described Schmitt in his autobiography, adding ‘but it is doubtful whether any surpassed him in lack of principle and servility to his Nazi masters’.Footnote ⁵² In Morgenthau’s view, the problem with Schmitt’s concept of the political, centred on a priori friend/enemy categories, is that it reifies these categories, thus limiting ‘humankind’s potentialities to act socially and politically in the world’.Footnote ⁵³ Schmitt’s dualistic conception of the political, in effect, ‘restricts humankind’s spectrum of action towards the problems of war and peace, the regulation of conflicts and disputes, as well as action in diplomacy, in humankind’s engagement in the public sphere and the creation of order, and in foreign policy’.Footnote ⁵⁴

Morgenthau’s concept of the political, unlike Schmitt’s, ‘does not have a fixed content which can be determined once and for all’.Footnote ⁵⁵ To Morgenthau, any activity, inside or outside the state, can take political value depending on its ‘intensity’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Morgenthau, in other words, is committed to the openness of the political in the public sphere. This commitment, as Behr and Rösch argue, ‘was deeply seeded in his European experience’.Footnote ⁵⁷ This experience, which culminated in the rise of the Nazis and the Holocaust, ‘reinforced Morgenthau’s conviction that the political is the central aspect of society and that therefore active civic engagement is required to prevent the violation of a political and public sphere of free and discursive contestation’.Footnote ⁵⁸ To Morgenthau, neither the state has a monopoly over political matters, nor is the public incapable of engaging in the political in the public sphere. Indeed, Morgenthau criticised US policymakers who engaged in a campaign of public manipulation based on ‘a profound misunderstanding of the nature of public opinion and of the intelligence and moral character of the American people’.Footnote ⁵⁹ It was the media that gave US policymakers a false perception of public opinion. ‘While the media may roughly indicate the American mind’s lack of information’, Morgenthau wrote, ‘they give only a dim inkling of its native intelligence and moral reserves.’Footnote ⁶⁰

In defence of the intelligence of the average citizen, Morgenthau for instance castigated those who attempted to justify the abdication of the ‘politically conscious public’ in the face of scientific expertise.Footnote ⁶¹ ‘This juxtaposition between the knowledgeable and objective scientist and the ignorant and subjective layman’, Morgenthau wrote, ‘greatly oversimplifies and distorts reality.’Footnote ⁶² Neither the former is ‘as objective and knowledgeable as he appears to the public’ nor the latter is ‘as ignorant and subjective as he appears to himself’.Footnote ⁶³ Morgenthau drew a distinction between the knowledge that the scientist has monopoly over – ‘the reasoning behind the creation and operation of technological devices’ – and the ‘mental processes that go into the making of a decision on the construction and political-military effects of a new technological device’.Footnote ⁶⁴ The latter involves speculation about the future and is ‘political in nature’. Crucially, ‘the expert does not know more about the likely political and military effects of the great technological decisions of our age than the man in the street’.Footnote ⁶⁵ These ‘decisions’ concern questions such as ‘the need for on-site inspections to police a test-ban treaty or the feasibility of the H-bomb or of an antimissile system, [wherein] the scientist, like everyone else, must rely on his hunches’.Footnote ⁶⁶ The average citizen is no less capable than the ‘scientific expert’ of making informed political decisions about these matters of scientific complexity involving nuclear technology. In fact, the average citizen’s decision may in some instances be even superior to the ‘expert scientist’: ‘The politically aware scientist, then, has no advantage over the scientifically informed layman, and if the former is not politically aware he is even inferior to the latter.’Footnote ⁶⁷

The target in Morgenthau’s critique of ‘public opinion’ was thus not the public’s intelligence or inability to understand politics, including in matters of technological complexity, but the private interests of the press, minorities (lobby groups) in Congress, and the radio that transmitted a false picture of public opinion that reflected their interests. As these private interests took hold, Morgenthau castigated US foreign policy for its democratic deficit. ‘A vociferous, passionate, well-financed, and well-organised minority’, Morgenthau protested, ‘was able first to impose its will upon a minority of Congress and then to frighten the Administration into pursuing, against its better judgment, policies that failed.’Footnote ⁶⁸ Morgenthau’s argument vis-à-vis the role of public opinion in foreign policy was thus not that the latter required shielding form the former. Rather, foreign policy requires a public sphere that is mobilised and capable of offering a democratic mandate to the government in matters of foreign policy. As Tjalve and Williams write, to Morgenthau, ‘the absence of a mobilised public sphere within which to negotiate a collective sense of purpose often reduced liberal political leadership to the vacillating pursuit or placation of whatever interests were able to present themselves as expressing public opinion or the national will at a given moment’.Footnote ⁶⁹ This ‘sense of purpose’, according to Morgenthau, is ‘equality in freedom’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Each generation of American citizens ought to give equality in freedom a spatio-temporal meaning in a concrete sense. This meaning, in turn, forms the basis of the national interest. For the ‘kind of interest’, which comprises the national interest, does not have a fixed meaning but depends on the ‘particular period of history’ and ‘the political and cultural context within which foreign policy is formulated’.Footnote ⁷¹ In the absence of a public sphere, the national interest becomes usurped by private interests and powerful lobby groups. The public, on the other hand, turns to apathy and disinterestedness in matters of foreign policy. ‘There is apathy all around’, Morgenthau protested in The Purpose of American Politics; ‘this lack of interest in public issues result[ed] in the cessation of genuine political activity by the citizen’.Footnote ⁷²

The misconception in the discipline that Morgenthau was cynical about public opinion in foreign policy is thus based partly on the conflation of his concept of the political with Schmitt’s and partly on the misunderstanding of what Morgenthau meant by public opinion. While Morgenthau was critical of public opinion as a reflection of the views of the media or private interests, he supported democratic control over foreign policy, namely a public that is offered real policy choices, informed about their trade-offs, and able to meaningfully engage in a process of deliberation.Footnote ⁷³ Morgenthau was not driven by a ‘conservative ideology’ that stipulated ‘minimal democracy’ and ‘only expected [the public] to participate in elections’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Not only did Morgenthau castigate such a ‘minimal’ view of democracy, but he also saw ‘the decline of the public realm’ as a threat to American civilisation, as the stillness of the status quo meant that American society was losing its vitality and ability to negotiate urgent political matters.Footnote ⁷⁵ ‘The citizen becomes so engrossed with cultivating his private garden’, Morgenthau wrote, ‘that he remains a citizen only in the formal sense of enjoying political rights that he sporadically and lackadaisically makes use of. In the full sense in which citizenship means making the public business one’s own, he ceases to be a citizen.’Footnote ⁷⁶ Ceases, that is, to engage in the contest of diverse interests from which power is generated in the public sphere. The public sphere, in turn, becomes infiltrated ‘by the competition of political professionals, representing parochial interest groups, for the control of the administrative apparatus’.Footnote ⁷⁷

In sum, this section demonstrated that the assumption that public opinion is anathema to Morgenthau’s realist foreign policy is problematic. To Morgenthau, the problem was not public opinion but those who, in its name, conflated the national interest with their private interests. The following section outlines the historical context where Morgenthau presented his critique of these interests and the elite deception of the public to advance the cause of imperial wars.

Morgenthau and the problem of deception in US foreign policy

This section contextualises Morgenthau’s dissent against the US government’s deception of the public during the Cold War. To Morgenthau, Vietnam was a symptom of a broader decline in US democratic politics, epitomised in a government that chose to govern through deception to advance the cause of imperial wars. This deception did not only deviate US foreign policy from its rational course but also posed a threat to democracy and race relations in the US.

In a letter to a friend from 11 December 1941, right after Pearl Harbour, Morgenthau wrote,

Morgenthau’s contribution took the form of not only advising the US government, but also of dissenting against a political leadership that engaged in a campaign of public deception and took upon itself the moral crusade against communism. From the early days of the Cold War, Morgenthau argued that US elites resorted to grandiose declarations and elevation of ‘modest occasions’ into crises. The Truman Doctrine is one such example where

The manufacturing of a ‘crisis’ propagated what Douglas Klusmeyer refers to as the ‘ideology of the national security state’, which ‘subordinated all other aspects of foreign policy to the struggle against [the] communist threat’.Footnote ⁸⁰ This led to a policy that was ‘unsound in conception and unworkable in practice’.Footnote ⁸¹ For it meant that US elites were required to act on their words to contain communism ‘all over the world’, whether or not US vital interests were at stake. Deception of the public, through the manufacturing of crises and exaggeration of threats abroad, turned elites into prisoners of their own lies. Lacking the ability and will to contain their exaggerated threats, elites ‘must then resort to ever stronger doses of deception; and the people inevitably react with ever deeper doubt, bewilderment and cynicism’.Footnote ⁸² To return to the example of the Truman Doctrine,

These words were written in 1951, well before Morgenthau’s critique of the Johnson administration’s campaign of deception in Vietnam. It shows that deception was ubiquitous in US foreign policy and did not occur ‘rarely’ in times of crises or to justify a specific war.Footnote ⁸⁴ Furthermore, it shows that Morgenthau was not only opposed to US elites deceiving the public but also viewed such deception as a threat to democracy. Each time the lies were uncovered, it led the public to ‘inevitably react with ever deeper doubt, bewilderment and cynicism’.Footnote ⁸⁵

US elites’ declaration that the nation had embarked on a universal crusade to contain communism ‘all over the world’, in effect, abstracted the threat of communism from concrete reality. This led to deception on two levels. First, it led to the exaggeration of the threat, making the public falsely believe that US vital interests were at stake even when the concrete situation did not dictate so. For instance, Morgenthau argued that the concrete situation in Vietnam did not involve US vital interests because the success of the communist regime had no ultimate bearing on the global balance of power between the US and the USSR.Footnote ⁸⁶ The misapplication of containment in Vietnam masked this reality. Rather than engage in a careful assessment of US vital interests in the concrete situation in Vietnam, Morgenthau argued, US policymakers instead sought ‘to put the principle of the Truman Doctrine into practice by identifying revolution with Communism and trying to stop Communism everywhere’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Second, the universal crusade against communism was deceptive in its ideological role: it rationalised power and concealed the contested nature of politics as the realm of the plurality of interests. Embarked on this moral crusade, US elites came to ‘portray to themselves that an act of power is in fact an act of morality’.Footnote ⁸⁸ They ‘proceed[ed] with a good conscience, being assured of [their] moral superiority and the moral inferiority of the object of [their] power’.Footnote ⁸⁹ This, in turn, limited the spatio-temporal negotiation of America’s interests not only in diplomacy, but also in an open public sphere domestically. The universal crusade against Communism, abstracted from concrete reality, became the universal moral end that annulled all other ends; the overarching interest defined in the abstract that annulled the spatio-temporal negotiation of other interests. In short, it did not only threaten peace in Vietnam but also enclosed the public sphere in America.

Vietnam, in this context, was a symptom of a larger problem in US domestic politics. The scholarship on Morgenthau’s critique of US foreign policy in Vietnam refers to his critique of US policy failure to advance the national interest.Footnote ⁹⁰ Morgenthau’s critique of US foreign policy in Vietnam however transcends the policy failure. The critique challenges the state-centric view of the war altogether. This view fails to account for the ‘global social relations’ that critical scholars identified as central to constituting both democracy and war.Footnote ⁹¹ There are two ways in which Morgenthau challenges the state centric view of the war. First, the state is not a ‘black box’ for Morgenthau; there is a relationship between the closure of the public sphere at home, what Morgenthau refers to as the ‘decline of the public realm’,Footnote ⁹² and the excessive use of force abroad. This decline encloses the ‘spheres of elasticity’, that is, the ‘public sphere in which differences can be expressed and the resulting agonism can evolve peacefully, which is why it facilitates finding compromises rather than imposing consensus’.Footnote ⁹³ The closure of the public sphere enables private interests to gloss over the political as the realm of deliberation and adjustment of interests; namely, to manipulate the public through the media, or, failing this, to employ ‘law enforcement’ against dissenters to advance the cause of wars that do not serve the interest of the nation. Secondly, Morgenthau challenges the state-centric view of the war by highlighting the interlink between America’s wars abroad on one hand and democracy and race relations at home on the other.Footnote ⁹⁴ The state does not stand in the demarcation line between the ‘outside’, defined by anarchy, and the ‘inside’, defined by liberal democracy.Footnote ⁹⁵ Rather, the failure to address the question of racial inequality at home also turns America into ‘soulless giant’, an imperial power against which anti-colonial forces unite. In Morgenthau’s words, ‘the racial minorities of America are in the process of merging into that vast movement of non-white peoples, comprising four fifths of mankind who demand equality’.Footnote ⁹⁶ The denial of their rights and the denial of the rights of the Vietnamese to self-determination are part of the same story of global race relations transcending the state.

Morgenthau’s theorisation of deception and its role in irrational policies thus stands in contrast to later neo-realists who argue that deception should not be perceived solely in a negative light as it may or may not advance the national interest. This line is pursued in John Mearsheimer’s Why Leaders Lie and Schuessler’s Deceit on the Road to War.Footnote ⁹⁷ Schuessler distinguishes between ‘deception that advances the national interest and deception that harms the national interest’ and argues that ‘deception cannot be ruled out a priori as contrary to the national interest’.Footnote ⁹⁸ But as deception, in the form of exaggerated foreign threats, is not rejected in principle, its negative impact on democracy and race relations at home is left untheorised. As David Blagden and Patrick Porter note in the context of the War on Terror, over two decades of national security discourse centred ‘around dangerous fanatical foreigners … inadvertently heightened xenophobia … increased toxic and potentially violent identity politics and racial divides’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Furthermore, deception plays a role in the ‘academic-industrial complex’, comprising of the ‘blob’ that perpetuates contemporary US wars.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Neo-realists treat the latter as merely deluded by liberal ideals or a ‘hell of good intentions’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The problem with this ‘well-meaning’ narrative, as Campbell Craig puts it, is that it elides accountability for deception, as elites advance disastrous policies and face no career consequences. For instance, ‘Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, two of the most influential Democratic supporters of the war, were their party’s nominees for president in 2016 and 2020’.Footnote ¹⁰²

In contrast to neo-realists, deception in Vietnam, for Morgenthau, had ‘emerging properties’ for US democracy.Footnote ¹⁰³ It revealed the failure of American democracy and undermined democracy even further. This is because Vietnam (as with Iraq later) constituted what Robert Shapiro refers to as ‘damned lies’, a category of lies that cannot be challenged because information is not available, at least not in the immediate term.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ This category of lies was a concern for Morgenthau because it creates a sense of mistrust in government.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Morgenthau went as far to argue that this dynamic – of popular frustration and mistrust – puts US democracy in danger of succumbing to totalitarian rule, akin to what was seen in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany:

This explains why, when deception is ubiquitous, scholars should not abandon the public sphere. The empowerment of the individual to engage in the public sphere plays a vital role in bestowing a sense of trust and community that acts as a bulwark against the descent of democracy to demagoguery.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Deception, through heightening the individual’s sense of mistrust, frustration, and existential alienation, renders the individual prey to demagogues. ‘Morgenthau certainly has good reasons to be suspicious of nationalism’, Williams writes, ‘but his rejection of its affective power leaves him with the fundamental problem of sustaining or reviving a virtuous and self-limiting political order when the increasingly bureaucratized and anomic conditions that he sees characterizing modern politics militate against such developments.’Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The Iraq War and rise of neo-conservatism, the context of Williams’s critique of Morgenthau, along with the resurgence of populist nationalism, show that history bears out this critique. Still, Morgenthau does not dismiss the affective power of nationalism. The restoration of a public sphere in Morgenthau’s thinking plays a role in the creation of what Robert Putnam refers to as ‘social capital’, the feeling of trust and community that reduces anomie in society.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ It is precisely the absence of this public sphere where the individual can be empowered, and social solidarity can be spontaneously formed, that gives rise to demagogues who restore social solidarities in political religions.

In sum, as the historical analysis in this section demonstrates, throughout the Cold War Morgenthau was grappling with the same issues that later critical scholars of democratic peace grappled with in Iraq: the problem of deception and the national security state, usurped by private interests, driving imperial wars that do not only contradict the national interest but also undermine democracy and race relations at home. What, then, is the role of scholars in addressing this problem? How can scholars not only retain scholarly reflexivity vis-à-vis the status quo but also translate this reflexivity to the public?

Scholarly reflexivity: From theory to practice

The practical tool that Morgenthau offers to translate reflexivity to the public is the signpost of ‘interest defined in terms of power’. This signpost reminds political actors of the contested nature of politics as the realm of a plurality of interests striving for power. It challenges attempts to gloss over this plurality by ideologically rationalising power in the name of universal ideals. This helps restore the political as an open – contingent and indeterminate – space that is not reified by the dominant ideology of the powers-that-be. The signpost is thus an important tool for scholars to retain an open public sphere where the public can deliberate the nation’s fundamental interests and values spatio-temporally, and offer democratic control.

‘Interest defined in terms of power’ does not mean that there is only power that states pursue. Rather, power, as Rösch argues, is a normative concept to Morgenthau that ‘enables people to constantly construct their life-worlds by forming societies as temporal manifestations of the common good … through the alignment of their antagonism of interests’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In domestic politics, totalitarian regimes abolish this normative concept of power through eliminating the political as a plurality of interests. In foreign policy, the elimination of this concept of power is through policies that fail to acknowledge the plurality of interests internationally. To Morgenthau, depoliticisation in one realm feeds into the other: moral and political abstractions abroad, the fight against ‘communism everywhere’, echo the narrowing of the public sphere where a plurality of interests can challenge such abstractions.Footnote ¹¹¹

Morgenthau’s signpost restores the plurality of interests through recognising the limits of attempts to rationalise power in the name of universal ideals. The recognition of limits, as Steele argues, ‘creates the possibility of freedom’.Footnote ¹¹² This is because universal ideals that are abstracted from concrete reality surrender the political actors’ free will to define these ideals spatio-temporally. They thus operate as ‘bases for discipline and control’.Footnote ¹¹³ By inhibiting the dominant ideology from rationalising power through invoking universals, Morgenthau’s signpost guards against the ‘discipline and control’ imposed by their closure of the political as a spatio-temporal space where a plurality of interests and new possibilities can emerge. Armed with this signpost, the theorist becomes the guardian of the plurality of interests in the political – that is to say, of criticism and possibilities in an open public sphere. An ‘important philosophical foundation’ for Morgenthauian reflexivity, therefore, as Hom and Steele argue, is ‘an open, indeterminate vision of time’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In this vision, ‘each present holds the possibility of novelty, and novelty itself constitutes reality by contravening past reconstructions and by enabling new novelties and subsequent new realities’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The key question for public reflexivity is how to retain this open time – that is to say, to protect the public sphere from predetermined abstractions that subordinate the ends of politics to universals. Morgenthau’s signpost performs this role contra the reifying power of universals. It thus opens a space for what Hom and Steele refer to as ‘temporal creativity’, which ‘holds that every moment, is indeterminate and therefore an opportunity to begin, to adapt, to revise – to reflect’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ As a result, it not only is a tool for diplomacy between nations but also gives scholars a role in translating reflexivity to an open public sphere where the public can deliberate, adapt, revise, and reflect on their interests.

To Morgenthau, public opinion is primarily an empirical concept, in the sense that it is a political force that the government is required to heed, inform about the policy choices, and gain its consent. However, when the government fails to play this role and engages in deception to ideologically rationalise imperial wars, the scholars’ role becomes key to translate reflexivity to an open public sphere.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In failing to play this reflexive role, scholars become part of an ‘academic-political complex’; that is to say, their interests become indistinguishable from the powers-that-be.Footnote ¹¹⁸ In contrast, ‘realism’, as Muriel Cozette writes, is ‘best described as a permanent critique of the powers-that-be that constantly challenges the status quo and the ideological apparatus upon which it rests’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Morgenthau’s dissent against the ideological application of containment in Vietnam did not only unveil ‘a dangerously insulated policymaking apparatus’ comprised of elites who ‘had lost the capacity for prudent judgment or critical thinking’.Footnote ¹²⁰ Importantly, Morgenthau’s dissent stood as a guard against the dominant ideology of the powers-that-be and its depoliticisation of the public sphere, through ensuring that it remained open for the public to deliberate the nation’s fundamental interests and values spatio-temporally, and offer democratic control.

Morgenthau recognised that the scholar’s dissenting voice – particularly in instances when ‘public opinion’ is weaponised by powerful interest groups – may contradict both the government and the majority for the sake of peace abroad and democracy at home. It is in this sense that Morgenthau writes that ‘by upholding the rational principles of sound foreign policy’ scholars qua public intellectuals in dissent offer ‘an alternative to the foreign policy pursued by the government with the support of the majority’.Footnote ¹²¹ This alternative, as was the case in Vietnam, would guide the public to raise doubts and ask questions: whose interests does this policy or war serve? How are these interests compatible with the collective interest and fundamental values of the nation? The objective, ultimately, is to restore ‘to the people the ability to control’, by which Morgenthau means to provide democratic control.Footnote ¹²² Meanwhile, the dissent of the scholars, ‘performs a vital function for the political and moral welfare of the Republic’.Footnote ¹²³ For ‘if the government should pursue a foreign policy that is … repugnant to the very principles upon which American democracy is based, the dissenting minority, by its very existence, would remind the government and its majority of the continuing vitality of those principles’.Footnote ¹²⁴

The scholar’s role in translating reflexivity to the public is crucial in times when deception is ubiquitous and public opinion is weaponised to publicise moral crusades. For it is in these times that the scholar’s attempt to influence elites is frustrated by power. Reflecting on his experience as consultant to the Johnson administration (until his dismissal in 1965), Morgenthau recounts his naivety in believing that ‘one only needs to call the President’s attention to the probable consequences of certain policies and show him the alternatives and their probable consequences, and he will choose a policy most likely to serve the national interest’.Footnote ¹²⁵ ‘By 1970’, writes William Scheuermann, ‘Morgenthau would openly declare that he no longer shared the implicit assumption that the most important function of the public intellectual was to provide sound advice to political leaders.’Footnote ¹²⁶ The problem, which Morgenthau already explained 10 years earlier, was that the leadership abdicated its role of informing the public about the policy choices and gaining democratic consent.Footnote ¹²⁷ Public opinion thus became ‘at best disposition, mood, or taste’, instrumentalised in the hands of private interests ‘who possess a near monopoly of the most effective technologies of communication’.Footnote ¹²⁸ The transfer of power from elected elites to private interests distorted the scholars’ relationship to those elites. The scholar’s role in offering a sound advice was dismissed not due to its lack of merit in relation to the facts, but because it ran contrary to private interests that held real power. Thus, Morgenthau concluded, ‘it has become obvious that the great issues of our day – the militarisation of American life, the Vietnam war, race conflicts, poverty, the decay of the cities, the destruction of the natural environment – are not susceptible to rational solutions within the existing system of power relations’.Footnote ¹²⁹ It is only by challenging these ‘power relations’ that the status quo can change, and, for this, the scholar cannot rely on advising elites alone but needs to challenge the dominant ideology through translating reflexivity to the public sphere.

Morgenthau’s reflections on the broader ‘system of power relations’ in which public scholarship is embedded showcases his move beyond what Jahn refers to as a ‘reductionist conception of reflexivity’ that embodies contemporary critical theories in IR. This is a conception that fails to reflect on, and succumbs to, the ‘political and social pressures’ of the status quo.Footnote ¹³⁰ In this context, Morgenthau’s signpost offers a tool to re-politicise the dominant ideology that inhibits a ‘systematic’ reflexivity that engages with the broader social and political struggles in which theory and the theorist are embedded. Armed with this signpost, scholars engage in what Molloy terms as ‘political reflexivity’,Footnote ¹³¹ namely dissent against the dominant ideology of the powers-that-be, distance their scholarship from it, and create ‘alternative thinking spaces’ for deliberations in the public sphere.Footnote ¹³²

An objection here is that public deliberations require a moment of decision. In this moment, particularly if a government is involved in diplomatic negotiations, secrecy is key for success.Footnote ¹³³ ‘Secrecy in negotiation’, Morgenthau would have agreed, ‘grows from the objective nature of negotiations. No negotiation of any kind … can be carried out in public without defeating their very purpose: the transformation of conflicting and inchoate interests into a common purpose of the contracting parties.’Footnote ¹³⁴ How is Morgenthau’s emphasis on secrecy reconciled with the requirement of democratic control? The answer is that diplomacy does not absolve policymakers from the task of informing the public about the policy choices and attaining their consent. Morgenthau clarifies this as follows:

In other words, the requirement of secrecy in diplomacy is not a free ticket to engage in deception; the leadership is still required to disclose the issues and gain public consent even in situations, such as during diplomatic negotiations, that require secrecy. When the leadership fails to disclose the issues, and chooses to govern by deception, it is the scholar’s responsibility to dissent in the defence of peace and democracy.

It is crucial to note that to Morgenthau the scholar’s reflexive role is an ideal type, due to ‘the limitation of origin, which determines the perspective from which [the scholar] looks at society, and the limitation of purpose, which makes [the scholar] wish to remain a member in good standing of that society or even to play a leading role in it’.Footnote ¹³⁶ As Steele notes, Morgenthau’s experience in Vietnam highlights the ‘incredible difficulties of speaking out into the public sphere’.Footnote ¹³⁷ Not only did Morgenthau lose the presidency of the American Political Science Association,Footnote ¹³⁸ but the administration also mobilised ‘project Morgenthau, which had sent staffers culling through the scholar’s writings in search of errors … to undermine Morgenthau’s reputation as an expert’.Footnote ¹³⁹ Scholars, thus, ‘must be aware’ of these limitations and ‘the awareness of [their] moral commitment to the truth must mitigate the limitations of origin as well as the compromises between the moral commitment and social convenience and ambition’.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

But can this ‘awareness’ render scholars less susceptible to deception than the public or the government?Footnote ¹⁴¹ Scholars, as all citizens, are susceptible to deception, but they are also able to mitigate it by two means. First, by not pretending to know the ultimate moral and political ends of society, but facilitating a critical citizenry that deliberates them. It is in this sense that Morgenthau refers to the scholar’s ‘commitment to the truth’. ‘Being committed to truth’, Rösch writes, ‘did not imply that scholars possessed absolute knowledge that only had to be passed on to other people.’Footnote ¹⁴² Rather, ‘scholars … act as facilitators of the political by asking people questions about themselves, their life-worlds, and their relations with(in) these life-worlds. Through reflecting on these questions people gain awareness about their interests, helping them to become critical citizens.’Footnote ¹⁴³ The goal is ‘helping people to formulate their interests and to develop empathy toward other potentially diverging viewpoints in public discourse’.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ The scholar’s reflexive role, therefore, lies not in telling the public what their interests are. Instead, it is to act as facilitators of a critical, empathic, and engaged citizenry.

Still, how can the scholar facilitate deliberations without themselves falling into the deceptive power of ideology? A second means by which deception is to be mitigated is by recognising the imposition of power in theory qua practice and setting limits on the theory’s ideological rationalisation of power. This means embracing the tendency in power to mask itself and operate under ideological veils in both theory and practice – veils that mask the reality of power not only from society, but also from the scholars themselves. From this premise power emerges not as domination but as a self-limiting tool in the process of theorisation itself, offering no crystal ball to the universal moral and political ends of society but guarding precisely against the deceptive power of such ends.