ヨーロッパ知識人がみた知と権力――ハンス・J・モーゲンソーとスタンリー・ホフマンのアメリカ知識人批判――

抄録

This paper explores the experience of the two prominent émigré International Relations (IR) scholars, Hans J. Morgenthau (1904–1980) and Stanley Hoffmann (1928–2015), both of whom fled from war-torn Europe to the United States, especially focusing on their views on the roles and ethics of the intellectuals in the society. Being “outsiders” in American academia and society, they both critically analyzed the status of American IR scholarship in a detached way.

Morgenthau criticized a “new scholasticism” widely found in American IR scholarship, which he defined as “an intellectual exercise executed with a high degree of acumen and sophistication, that tells us nothing we need to know about the real world.” Seeing scholars’ primary mission in “speaking truth to power,” even if power may try to discredit, silence, and corrupt them, Morgenthau insisted that a scholar should not be silent when great issues were before the public and the government. Though Morgenthau several times served the government as an adviser to the State Department and the Defense Department, he gradually became disillusioned with the government’s dogmatic cold war policy, and turned himself from a Washington Policy adviser into one of the harshest critics of American military involvement in Vietnam. During the 1960s, Morgenthau attended numerous anti-war teach-ins and protest events, where he severely criticized the so-called “best & brightest” who served the Kennedy and Johnson administration for spreading self-serving myths and deluding themselves and the nation.

In his seminal article “An American Social Science: International Relations” published in 1977, Hoffmann bitterly criticized the proximity of IR scholarship to the corridors of power, arguing that intellectuals should be independent from political and any other undue external influence, and seek knowledge for their own sake. Unlike his colleagues at Harvard, such as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Hoffmann never felt tempted to serve the government as a policy adviser or become involved in policy-making in Washington D.C. He continuously warned of a risk that scholars’ activities would be shaped not by pursuit of truth but by their desire to be “relevant” to policy concerns. Hoffmann also criticized American scholars’ preference for abstract theorizing and their indifference to concrete lives of the people in the other countries. Hoffmann always put his emphasis on history and human agency. Being a French intellectual in the United States, Hoffmann continuously criticized American exceptionalism and emphasized how this hubristic concept made American people blind to new realities in world politics. Hoffmann was one of the most vocal opponents of George W. Bush’s Iraq War, which cast a dark shadow on the transatlantic relations.

Morgenthau and Hoffmann were never afraid of being an outsider in American society in their pursuit of fulfilling their duty as an intellectual. At the same time, from the experience that they could find a refuge in the United States after long suffering in Europe, they believed in America’s moral authority and its long tradition of democracy, which gave them courage to stand up for the truth. In their belief and behavior, they were more “American” than American intellectuals who yielded to power and betrayed American ideals.