John H. Heart

John H. Herz (German name until 1940 Hans Hermann Herz , pseudonym: Eduard Bristler ; born September 23, 1908 in Düsseldorf , † December 26, 2005 in Scarsdale , New York ) was a German-American political scientist and an important pioneer of neo-realism in international relations . Herz is best known for the theory of the security dilemma that he founded .

Life

Hans Hermann Herz was the oldest child of the judge Carl Herz and his wife Elise, née. Aschaffenburg , he had two brothers and a sister. After graduating from the Hindenburg School in Düsseldorf, he studied law , literature and philosophy at the universities of Freiburg , Heidelberg , Berlin , Cologne and Bonn from 1927 . From 1930 to 1933 he was a court trainee in Düsseldorf. During his legal clerkship he did his doctorate in Cologne in 1931 with Hans Kelsen , the title of his dissertation was The Identity of the State .

In 1933 Herz was dismissed from his traineeship as a Jew and then worked for two years in a law firm. In 1935 he emigrated to Geneva on a student visa, where he studied international relations at the institute universitaire de hautes études internationales through Kelsen's agency . He completed his Geneva studies in 1938 with a diploma. During this time he also worked as a translator and lecturer for the International Labor Organization (ILO).

In 1938 Herz emigrated with his brother Werner to the United States via Paris and Le Havre . In the same year he became an assistant at Princeton University . In 1939 he anglicized his first name in John (he became a US citizen in 1944). After brief teaching at Trinity College in Hartford , he taught from 1941 to 1952 (with interruptions due to the war) at Howard University , most recently as a professor. From 1943 to 1945 Herz was an employee of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), in 1945 he was an advisor to Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson at the Nuremberg Trials and from 1946 to 1948 political analyst at the United States Department of State . From 1952 he taught as a professor in the Department of Political Science at the City University of New York . He turned down two appointments at German universities: in 1960 at the Otto Suhr Institute at the Free University of Berlin and in 1966 at the University of Frankfurt as the successor to Carlo Schmid . In 1977 he retired .

Political science significance

Herz linked two intellectual currents or intellectual schools in international relations , which are mostly in radical opposition to one another. Realism and idealism . In his book Political realism and political idealism in 1951 he analyzed the two basic types of political behavior and sketched a synthesis with what is known as “real liberalism” or “idealistic realism”. By combining realistic insights with idealistic objectives, he wanted to look for ways of balancing and relaxing in foreign policy. As a result, he clearly distinguished himself from Hans Morgenthau , who had based his foreign policy realism much more on the friend-foe contrast in the sense of Carl Schmitt . For Herz, too, the power problem was at the center of international relations, but he did not, like Morgenthau, justify it anthropologically . He explained it with what is known as the security dilemma . People and states in the pursuit of security have the constant need to expand their power.

Awards

In 1951, Herz received the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award . In 1974 he was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit.

Fonts (selection)

• As Eduard Bristler: The International Law Doctrine of National Socialism . Emil Oprecht Verlag, Zurich 1938
• Political realism and political idealism. A study in theories and realities . University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1951.
  • Political realism and political idealism. An investigation into theory and reality . From the American by Walter Seib, Hain, Meisenhein am Glan 1959.
• International politics in the atomic age . Columbia University Press, New York 1959.
  • World politics in the atomic age . From the American by Lili Therese Faktor-Flechtheim, Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1961.
• With Gwendolen M. Carter: Government and politics in the twentieth century . Praeger, New York 1961.
  • Forms of Government of the 20th Century . From the American by Lili Therese Faktor-Flechtheim, Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1962 (second edition 1963, third edition 1964).
• Of survival. How a worldview came about. Autobiography. Droste, Düsseldorf 1984. ISBN 3-7700-0660-7

literature

• Desider Stern : Works by authors of Jewish origin in German , Vienna 1969.
• Walter Tetzlaff: 2000 short biographies of important German Jews of the 20th century. Askania, Lindhorst 1982, ISBN 3-921730-10-4 .
• Gerhard Donhauser: John Herz . In: Robert Walter / Alfred Schramm: The circle around Hans Kelsen. The early years of pure legal theory , Vienna: Manz 2008 (series of the Hans-Kelsen-Institut; 30), ISBN 978-3-214-07676-4 , pp. 145–152.

Web links

• Literature by and about John H. Herz in the catalog of the German National Library
• Entry on John H. Herz in the virtual personal lexicon of international relations (PIBv), edited by Ulrich Menzel , Institute for Social Sciences at the Technical University of Braunschweig .
• Christian Hacke : A pioneer of the 21st century. On the death of the great "idealistic realist" John H. Herz . In: Internationale Politik 2, February 2006, pp. 95–97.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ulrich Menzel : Between idealism and realism. The doctrine of international relations. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2001, p. 17 f.
2. ↑ Biographical information is based on the entry on John H. Herz in the personal lexicon of international relations virtual (PIBv), edited by Ulrich Menzel , Institute for Social Sciences at the Technical University of Braunschweig .
3. ↑ Information in this section is based, unless otherwise stated, on Christian Hacke : Ein Vordenker des 21. Century. On the death of the great "idealistic realist" John H. Herz . In: Internationale Politik 2, February 2006, pp. 95–97.