Suchergebnisse

One side effect of the mobilization of the Nazi-Fascist regimes for their war against Western civilization was the coup de grace it gave to American intellectual isolation. The "intellectual migration" of the pre-war years brought to our shores a host of men and women who have transformed the American academic, scientific and aesthetic landscapes. Nowhere has this effect been more evident than in the field of political philosophy. Men and women such as, to name but a few, Hannah Arendt, Carl Friedrich, Arnold Brecht, Leo Strauss and Waldemar Gurian brought new historical and metaphysical depth to what had largely become a genteel, bland and decaying field of study. Among these figures Hans Morgenthau stands out because of the breadth of his interests, because of the extent of his impact on thinking outside the narrowly academic milieu, and because of his recent improbable role as intellectual fellow-traveler of the young, the disaffected and the idealistic in their struggle against the war in Vietnam. The latter role has brought him both public notoriety and journalistic excoriation and is regarded by many as being in direct conflict with the basic positions he has espoused throughout the rest of his intellectual life.

Since the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in the late summer of 1968 hopes for détente between East and West have ebbed. The ruthless suppression of internal political autonomy in that often overrun nation seems to have given the lie to all those who have asserted that under the common pressures of modern industrialized society the social systems of the United States and the Soviet Union were becoming more and more alike. The use of the naked force of the Red Army to destroy the Czech road to socialism has left in ruin not only immediate aspirations for a reduction of international tensions in Central Europe but the broader faith in a future peace based on a convergence of the democratic and the Communist ways of life.