¹ The most important secondary acounts of Niebuhr's career up to 1941 are Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr, “Reinhold Niebuhr's Role in American Political Thought and Life,” in Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious, Social, and Political Thought, eds. Kegley, Charles W. and Bretall, Robert W. (New York, 1956)Google Scholar; Meyer, Donald B., The Protestant Search for Political Realism, 1919–1941 (Berkeley, 1960)Google Scholar; and Stone, Ronald H., Reinhold Niebuhr: Prophet to Politicians (Nashville, 1972)Google Scholar. I have also benefited from the briefer but provocative treatments of Niebuhr's prewar career in Gilbert, James B., Designing the Industrial State (Chicago, 1972), pp. 240–265Google Scholar, and Lasch, Christopher, The New Radicalism in America (New York, 1965), pp. 290Google Scholar; 299–306. The time is clearly ripe for a full-scale critical biography of Niebuhr's whole career.

² Schlesinger, Arthur Jr, “Prophet for a Secular Age,” New Leader, 24 01 1972, p. 12Google Scholar; Herberg, Will, “Christian Apologist to the Secular World,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review, 11 (05, 1956), 12Google Scholar; Morgenthau, Hans, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (Chicago, 1946), p. 40Google Scholar; Bundy, McGeorge, “Foreign Policy: From Innocence to Engagement,” in Paths of American Thought, eds. Schlesinger, Arthur Jr and White, Morton (Boston, 1963), p. 306Google Scholar; Kennan, George, quoted in Thompson, Kenneth W., Political Realism and the Crisis of World Politics (Princeton, 1960), p. 23Google Scholar. Political realists like Kennan and Morgenthau have not always agreed with Niebuhr about what constitutes a “realistic” foreign policy. This debate of the late forties and fifties, which lies beyond the scope of this essay, is treated in Good, Robert C., “The National Interest and Political Realism: Niebuhr's ‘Debate’ with Morgenthau and Kennan,” Journal of Politics, 22 (11, 1960), 597–619CrossRefGoogle Scholar [revised version in Foreign Policy in the Sixties, ed. Hilsman, Roger (Baltimore, 1965), pp. 271–292]Google Scholar.

³ A.D.A. Resolution, March, 1957, cited in Gilbert, James, Designing the Industrial State (Chicago, 1972), p. 310Google Scholar. Some postwar liberals, including Sidney Hook, Morton White and Charles Frankel, rejected Niebuhr's theology while often applauding his political stance; but many others either accepted it themselves or recognized its utility for the liberal cause. Niebuhr, stressed that his theology grew out of his political analysis in “Ten Years That Shook My World,” Christian Century, 26 04 1939, p. 542Google Scholar.

⁴ Reinhold Niebuhr, Leaves from, the Notebook of a Tames Cynic (1929; reprinted ed., Cleveland, 1957), p. 32.

⁵ Schlesinger, , “Niebuhr's Role in American Political Thought,” in pp. 139–140Google Scholar. Schlesinger's essay points us in the right direction in the task of explaining the origins and character of Niebuhr's liberal realism—by focusing on Niebuhr's consistently ambivalent attitude toward Marxism and his scorn for the ideology of “intelligent planning,” which in the thirties he associated particularly with John Dewey. Yet Schlesinger, deeply committed in his essay to an apotheosized New Deal, is primarily concerned to appropriate Niebuhr as a (very belated) New Deal theorist. He tends to see Niebuhr's development in the thirties and forties as a case of progressive, even necessary, evolution away from a flirtation with Marxist “illusions” toward Roosevelt's hardheaded “gradualism and mixed economy.” This “Dark Ages” to “Enlightenment” model of development seriously distorts Niebuhr's career. Yet Schlesinger's essay cannot be negected. The only full-length scholarly study of Niebuhr's career suffers from its failure to follow out Schlesinger's main insight: that Niebuhr's thinking during the thirties was not only continuous with, but also a gradual elaboration of, his liberal realism of the forties. See Stone, , Niebuhr: Prophet to Politicians, esp. pp. 90–92Google Scholar.

⁶ Schlesinger claims incorrectly that “by 1933 he explicitly repudiated the note of tolerance for myth on which Moral Man ended.” In fact Niebuhr had rejected only communist myths, not myth in general, as A n Interpretation of Christian Ethics, published two years later, would make clear. Schlesinger, , “Niebuhr's Role in American Political Thought,” p. 139Google Scholar.

⁷ Mumford, Lewis, Faith for Living (New York, 1940), pp. 46–47Google Scholar, 66, 93–94. For a helpful survey of the idealist critique of instrumentalism from Croly to Mumford see Pells, Richard H., Radical Visions and American Dreams (New York, 1973), esp. chaps. 1 and 3Google Scholar.

⁸ Mumford, Lewis, The Golden Day (New York, 1926)Google Scholar and idem, Faith for Living, p. 67; Frank, Waldo, Chart for Rough Water (New York, 1940), p. 139Google Scholar. Cf. Croly's, The Promise of American Life (New York, 1909, chap. 1),Google Scholar where the argument for a return to tradition is more subtle: it is the American “tradition” to transcend “traditional” social and political arrangements. But as Pells makes clear, Croly was at one with the idealists in seeking “an ‘organic’ society.” Pells, , Radical Visions, p. 6Google Scholar.

⁹ Niebuhr, Reinhold, The Nature and Destiny of Man, vol. 1 (New York, 1941), 110Google Scholar; Frank, , Chart for Rough Water, p. 164Google Scholar; Niebuhr, R., review of Frank, Nation, 11 05 1940, pp. 600–601Google Scholar. R. Alan Lawson's recent study of the conflict between “pragmatic rationalists” and “liberal traditionalists,” while treating Niebuhr only tangentially, mistakenly identifies him with the position of Mumford and Frank, on the ambiguous grounds that he too was a “believer in the salutary presence of tradition” (Lawson, , The Failure of Independent Liberalism, 1930–1941 [New York, 1971], p. 176)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Mumford, Lewis, “What I Believe,” Forum, 11, 1930, p. 163Google Scholar; Niebuhr, R., review of Mumford's Technics and Civilization, Christendom, I (08, 1935), 187–188Google Scholar; idem, review of Mumford's Men Must Act, Radical Religion, 4 (Spring, 1939), 44–45; idem, “English and German Mentality—A Study of National Traits,” Christendom, I (Spring, 1936), 476.

¹¹ Niebuhr, Reinhold, “Russia Makes the Machine Its God,” Christian Century, 10 09 1930, p. 1080Google Scholar; idem, “The Church in Russia,” ibid., 24 September, 1930, p. 1146; idem, “The Land of Extremes,” ibid., 15 October, 1930, pp. 1242–43; idem, “The Religion of Communism,” Atlantic Monthly, April, 1931, pp. 465, 468.

¹² Niebuhr, , “The Religion of Communism,” 468Google Scholar; idem, “Marxism and Religion,” World Tomorrow, 15 March, 1933 p. 254; idem, “Radicalism and Religion,” World Tomorrow, October, 1931 p. 326.

¹³ Niebuhr, Reinhold, “After Cavitalism—What?” World Tomorrow, 1 03, 1933, p. 204Google Scholar; Dewey, John, “Unity and Prowess,” World Tomorrow, 8 03, 1933, pp. 232–33Google Scholar; Niebuhr, Reinhold, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York, 1932), pp. xv–xvi, 219Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Niebuhr, Reinhold, “A Reorientation of Radicalism,” World Tomorrow, 07, 1933. D. 443Google Scholar; idem, “A New Strategy for Socialists,” World Tomorrow, 31 August 1933, op. 490–92: idem, “Making Radicalism Effective,” World Tomorrow, 21 December, 1933, pp. 682–84.

¹⁵ A myth was for Niebuhr a story which dramatized, or a proposition which asserted, essential truths about the human condition, but the truth of which it was beyond the power of “reason” to demonstrate. He made no systematic inquiry into the epistemological basis of the truth in myth, but his implicit appeal was to a theory of “personal knowledge” like Polanyi's or to the “illative sense” of Newman. According to such a theory, it is both “reasonable” and quite common for men to give assent to propositions which “make sense,” but which cannot be “scientifically” tested. For later statements of the same theme, see his essay “The Truth in Myths” [1937], in Faith and Politics (New York, 1968), pp. 15–31Google Scholar, and “As Deceivers, Yet True,” one of the “sermonic essays” in his Beyond Tragedy (New York, 1937), pp. 3–24Google Scholar. In The Nature and Destiny of Man the argument is the same but instead of myths he speaks of “conceptions of the world” which “transcend the canons and antinomies of rationality” (vol. I: 12). On the general interest during the thirties in myths and symbols as means of social cohesion (especially the work of Kenneth Burke, Thurman Arnold, and Harold Lasswell), see Pells, , Radical Visions, pp. 322–327Google Scholar, and Susman, Warren, “The Thirties,” in The Development of an American Culture, eds. Coben, S. and Ratner, L. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1970), pp. 192–193Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Niebuhr, Reinhold, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (New York, 1935), pp. 10–13Google Scholar, 17, 26, 83–84. On the common tendency to rely on “portraiture” in social analysis during the thirties, see again, Pells, , Radical Visions, especially his analysis of James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, pp. 246–251Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Niebuhr, , Interpretation of Christian Ethics, pp. 17Google Scholar, 19, 22, 72, 124. In one of his rare contributions to a Marxist periodical Niebuhr urged that “Marxism must find a way, as all religion must, to learn that its myths are great truths which contain many little lies. It must learn not to insist on these little lies as part of the great truth.” To achieve that goal it must refuse “prematurely to domesticate the absolute and final in some form of history” (“Religion, and Marxism, ,” Modern Monthly, 02, 1935, pp. 713–14)Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Niebuhr, Reinhold, “Is Social Conflict Inevitable?” Scribner's, 09, 1935, pp. 166–69Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Niebuhr, Reinhold, “The United Front,” Radical Religion, 1 (Winter, 1936), 4Google Scholar; idem, “Roosevelt's Merry-Go-Round,” Radical Religion, 3 (Spring, 1938), 4; idem, “The Return to Primitive Religion,” Christendom, 3 (Winter, 1937–38), 5.

²⁰ Niebuhr, Reinhold. “Germany and Modern Civilization,” Atlantic Monthlv, Tune. 1935. p. 843Google Scholar; idem, “Notes from a London Diary.” Christian Century. 12 July, 1933. D. 904; idem, “The Germans; Unhappy Philosophers in Politics.” American Scholar, 2 (October, 1933). 418.

²¹ Niebuhr, Reinhold. “Our Romantic Radicals.” Christian Century, 10 04 1935 p. 476Google Scholar; idem, “Encrlish and German Mentality—A Study of National Traits,” Christendom, I (Spring, 1936), 476.

²² Niebuhr, Reinhold, “The Revolutionary Moment,” American Socialist Quarterly, 4 (06, 1935) 8Google Scholar; idem, “The Russian Mystery,” Radical Religion, 2 (Autumn, 1937) 5; idem, “Our Romantic Radicals,” 474; idem, “The Peril of Western Democracies,” Radical Religion, 4 (Winter, 1938), 2–3.

²³ Niebuhr, Reinhold, “The Domestic Situation,” Radical Religion, 3 (Summer, 1938), 4Google Scholar; idem, “New Deal Medicine,” Radical Religion, 4 (Spring, 1939), 2; idem, “What Is at Stake?” Christianity and Crisis, 1 (May, 1941), 1–2.

²⁴ Niebuhr, , “Ten Years That Shook My World,” 545Google Scholar; idem, “Fighting Chance for a Sick Society,” Nation, 22 March, 1941, pp. 359–60; idem, Power and Justice,” Christianity and Society, 8 (Winter, 1942), 10.

²⁵ Niebuhr, Reinhold, “The Moscow Trials,” Radical Religion, 2 (Spring, 1937), 2Google Scholar; idem, “Fascism, Communism, and Christianity,” Radical Religion, 1 (Winter, 1936), 7–8. In his final analysis of the Moscow trials Niebuhr contended that despite the “particularly vexatious tyranny” of Stalin, “every society must finally define its course and assert its will not only against foreign foes but against dissenters within its own household … one is inclined to prefer Stalin's relativism and compromise to the unstatesmanlike absolutism of Trotsky” (“Russia, and Marx, Karl,” Nation, 7 05, 1938, p. 531)Google Scholar.

²⁶ Niebuhr, Reinhold, “Leaves from the Notebook of a War-Bound American” [a dispatch from Britain—note the pun in war-bound], Christian Century, 25 10 and 6 12, 1939, pp. 1298Google Scholar, 1503; idem, “The International Situation,” Radical Religion, 5 (Winter, 1940), 1.

²⁷ Niebuhr, Reinhold, “The Russians and Our Interdependence,” Christianity and Crisis, 1 (08, 1941), 1–2Google Scholar; idem, “The Anglo-Russian Pact,” Christianity and Crisis 2 (June, 1942), 3; idem, “The Russian Situation,” Christianity and Crisis, 2 (November, 1941), 2.

²⁸ Niebuhr, Reinhold, “Nationalism and the Possibilities of Internationalism,” Christianity and Society, 8 (Fall, 1943), 5–6Google Scholar.

²⁹ Niebuhr, Reinhold, “Awkward Imperialists,” Atlantic Monthly, 05, 1930, p. 673Google Scholar; idem, “Perils of American Power,” Atlantic Monthly, January, 1932, pp. 90, 95; idem, “Imperialism and Responsibility,” Christianity and Crisis, 1 (February, 1941), 6; idem, “American Power and World Responsibility,” Christianity and Crisis, 3 (April, 1943), 3; idem, “Nationalism and the Possibilities of Internationalism,” 6.

³⁰ Niebuhr, , “Imperialism and Responsibility,” 6Google Scholar; idem, “Anglo-Saxon Destiny and Responsibility,” Christianity and Crisis, 3 (October, 1943), 2–4. Of Niebuhr's many articles urging not only imitation of, but indissoluble links with, Britian see especially, “Christianity and Politics in Britain,” Christianity and Society, 8 (Summer, 1943), 6–7Google Scholar; idem, “Factors of Cohesion,” Spectator, 18 June, 1943, pp. 562–63; idem, “Understanding England,” Nation, 14 August, 1943, pp. 175–77.

³¹ Niebuhr, Reinhold, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (New York, 1944), pp. 1Google Scholar, 10, 33, 41, 79, 189–90 (italics added ).

³² Niebuhr, , Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, pp. 32–33, 183Google Scholar.

³³ Niebuhr, , Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, pp. 79Google Scholar, 115, 117; idem, “Study in Cynicism,” Nation, 1 May 1943, p. 638.

³⁴ Schlesinger, Arthur Jr, review of Niebuhr's Discerning the Signs of the Times, Nation, 22 06, 1946, p. 753Google Scholar.

³⁵ For their critical readings of earlier drafts of this essay I am indebted to Barton J. Bernstein, David Brion Davis, Richard Gillam, T. J. McDonald, and Michael Novak.