‘The Twilight of International Morality’? Hans J. Morgenthau and Carl Schmitt on the end of the Jus Publicum Europaeum

Abstract

Abstract The relationship between Carl Schmitt and Hans J. Morgenthau was fraught with all kinds of tensions.1 Both were, at least in the 1920s, conservative legal theorists who were critical of liberal accounts of politics and the law. Schmitt was approximately 20 years Morgenthau’s senior, and initially the latter appears to have regarded him as a potential mentor, sending him a copy of his doctoral thesis which overed a friendly critique of Schmitt’s very influential Concept of the Political (1st edn. 1927).