Hans and Hannah.

• Author: Gewen, Barry
• Position: Hans Morgenthau, Hannah Arendt - Biography

In the late 1940s, Leo Strauss left the New School for Social Research in New York to take a position at the University of Chicago. Hans Morgenthau, who was a professor in the Political Science Department and on his way to establishing himself as the father of realism, was instrumental in securing the post for Strauss, and the two men, whose life experiences were so very similar, immediately formed a close bond. Morgenthau told an associate that he learned more from Strauss "in a few minutes' conversation than from hours with other political scientists." Strauss was equally admiring of Morgenthau. Yet that initial compatibility masked deeper incompatibilities--both in outlook and personality--that weren't long in coming to the surface and scotched whatever element of sympathy existed between the two men.

Some years later, Hannah Arendt came to Chicago. She and Strauss never got along (though they had known each other since their student days in Germany when, it is said, Strauss courted her). But her relationship to Morgenthau was very different, and also very different from Strauss's relationship to Morgenthau. In contrast to the Strauss-Morgenthau connection, there always remained a quality of sympathy between Arendt and Morgenthau--colored, it should be said, by an element of the erotic.

The two met in the early 1950s, and developed an unshakable friendship that lasted up to Arendt's death in 1975. Hans Jonas, who had known her in Germany during the 1920s and who saw her every day when they attended the University of Marburg, remembered that "it was almost to be taken for granted that men of high intelligence and sensibility would be enchanted by Hannah." Morgenthau was enchanted. "What struck one at first meeting Hannah Arendt," he recalled, was "the vitality of her mind, quick--sometimes too quick--sparkling, seeking, and finding hidden meanings and connections beneath the surface of man and things." She had an extraordinary depth of knowledge combined with rare intellectual passion. "As others enjoy playing cards or the horses for their own sake, so Hannah Arendt enjoyed thinking."

On another occasion, Morgenthau likened her manner of thinking to poetry:

If you consider the enormous suggestiveness of her insights into political matters ... you realize that her mind worked in a way not dissimilar to the poetic mind, which creates affinities, which discovers relationships that appear obvious once they are formulated but that nobody had thought of before the poet formulated them. And in an expression of grievous sorrow at her death, he said: "I am left with an unutterable regret."

Arendt has been described as Morgenthau's "intellectual companion," and through the decades of their friendship, each supported the other in good times and bad. There was no more trying period for Arendt than the months in the mid-1960s when the controversy over her book Eichmann in Jerusalem was burning white-hot. Along with Mary McCarthy and Karl Jaspers, Morgenthau was unfailingly loyal. He dined with her at the University of Chicago faculty club when other faculty members made a point of shunning her, and when she was attacked in the New York Times, he wrote a letter to the editor in her defense. Reporting from New York, where a public meeting to discuss her ideas on Eichmann quickly deteriorated into a shouting match, Morgenthau said: "The Jewish community is up in arms." He continued, "Reality has protruded into the protective armor of illusion and the result is psychological havoc." For her part, Arendt was there for him when he was suffering through a series of illnesses. And when he was in danger of damaging his professional reputation because of his opposition to the Vietnam War, she was by his...