Love and Power, Morgenthau

“The aspiration for love and the quest for power are the two fundamental forces which determine human relations.”

Love and Power is Hans J. Morgenthau’s most philosophical work and a revealing companion to his better known political realism. Written during the Cold War, when nuclear power, ideological conflict, and moral idealism collided, the essay reflects Morgenthau’s attempt to ground politics in a sober understanding of human nature rather than utopian hope or moral sentimentality.

Morgenthau argues that human beings are driven by two irreducible impulses: Love is the desire for union, intimacy, and transcendence of the self; it seeks to erase boundaries between persons. Power, by contrast, is the drive for self-assertion, influence, and control. These impulses are not accidental or pathological—they are constitutive of what it means to be human. Crucially, they cannot be fully reconciled. Love dissolves the very separateness that power requires, while power undermines the self-surrender that love demands.

The essay’s central claim is therefore tragic rather than hopeful: human life is shaped by an unresolvable tension. Morgenthau rejects the idea that politics can be redeemed by love alone, warning that attempts to moralize power lead to illusion, hypocrisy, or catastrophe. At the same time, he insists that power without moral restraint degenerates into domination and violence. Politics, then, is the realm where power must be exercised responsibly, with full awareness of its moral costs.

Historically, Love and Power stands as Morgenthau’s quiet rebuke to both Cold War idealism and technocratic rationalism. It shows that even the most hard-nosed realist understood politics as a moral drama, rooted in the contradictions of the human condition.

We will be in room 3-20A at the Central Library.