Review of Richard W. Sterling, Ethics in a World of Power: The Political Ideas of Friedrich Meinecke (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1958; London, Oxford University Press, 1959)

Meinecke’s student and friend, Richard Sterling, composed this intellectual biography concerning Meinecke’s political ideas. Born in 1862, Meinecke was raised to venerate Hegel, Ranke, and Bismarck as pillars of the German State and conservative nationalism. Wight summed up Meinecke’s political evolution as follows: ‘In the first World War he justified the ultimatum to Serbia and the invasion of Belgium, he approved of unrestricted submarine warfare, and he explained to the minority peoples of the Central Powers that though the nation-state had been the proper goal for the Germans, it was their duty to remain content with the multi-national state. The shock of defeat started him on an assiduous criticism of his old beliefs. The moral autonomy of the State, the primacy of foreign policy, international relations as the fruitful competition of vigorously egotistic Powers, all gradually dissolved. He moved nearer to Goethe, and as an old man came to find the ultimate truth of politics not in the ideal, super-individual corporate personality of the nation-state, but in the martyrdom of the individual rebel against Hitler’s Reich.’