Hans J. Morgenthau — An Intellectual Biography

Why it’s on the list: Christoph Frei’s account of the intellectual formation of Hans Morgenthau, the man who founded political realism — the German years the American reputation skips.

Where I heard about it

• A crowd-sourced X thread — in the replies to Tim Hwang’s question about the greatest, rarest PDFs online, November 2024.

About this edition

It surfaced in the same thread as the PDFs in my Library of Alexandria, but it is a book still in print — so it belongs here, pointing at a copy to buy, rather than in a collection whose premise is archiving documents that would otherwise disappear.