Gregg Herken

Teller: still controversial

In a review of a previous, hagiographic, biography of Edward Teller, Richard Rhodes-author of the definitive book on the making of the atomic bomb – mused that someone, somewhere should one day write a critical biography of the physicist who was the most politically influential scientist of the last 100 years. BBC producer and editor Peter Goodchild has written such a book, and the results are decidedly mixed.

American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War (review)

that politics is governed by “objective laws” with roots in human nature. Such tension between epistemological skepticism and strong claims about knowledge is common in political science, not least today. It would have been interesting, therefore, to learn something about Morgenthau’s solution to the problem. Frei does comment on another tension in Morgenthau’s outlook: How can skepticism à la Nietzsche be combined with humanist idealism? Morgenthau, according to Frei, considered the opposition between politics and ethics to be inescapable, tragic, and eternal. The one strategy for moral action is to choose the lesser evil. Prudence—”the weighing of the consequences of alternative political actions”—is the supreme virtue. This inevitably leads to the question of how Morgenthau saw the relation between his advocacy of prudence and his antirationalist view of politics as a matter of human impulse. Frei’s book does not take up this matter, but his account of the sources of American realism is an important contribution in its own right.