¹ In Niebuhr's essay, “Peace and the Liberal Illusion,” the charge is put in succinct form: “The cultural foundation of western democracy is eighteenth and nineteenth century liberalism. This liberalism rests upon rationalistic optimism. It believes that it is comparatively easy to ‘substitute reason for force’ and that mankind is embarked on a progressive development which will substitute ‘free cooperative inquiry’ for political partisanship and social conflict. It regards the peculiar ambitions and desires of races and nations as irrationalities which must gradually yield to universal values, generally recognized and established by reason, that is, by some kind of discarnate reason of pure objectivity” (Christianity and Power Politics, New York, 1940, p. 84).

² Cf. “Why the Christian Church Is Not Pacifist,” in ibid.; also The Nature and Destiny of Man, Vol. 1. New York, 1941.

³ Moral Man and Immoral Society, New York, 1932, p. 18.

⁴ It is perhaps well to emphasize from the start that this moral ambiguity which Niebuhr sees as inherent in human existence is to be traced to the conviction that the potentialities of man which enable him to rise above “nature” and immediate self-interest also enable him to have desires unknown to nature. Man's freedom not only allows him to be “human” in a sense unknown to nature, but also to be inhuman in a sense unknown to nature. It is in this sense that Niebuhr speaks of the moral ambiguity of human freedom. It must also follow that rational, moral, and religious resources partake of this same ambiguity. It is, in fact, these latter resources that give human egotism its awful potency. The remarks to follow elaborate on this idea.

⁵ Niebuhr's distinction between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness has as its basis the conflict between the demands of the “moral cynics, who know no law beyond their will and interest,” and “those who believe that self-interest should be brought under the discipline of a higher law” (The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, New York, 1944, p. 9). Thus evil is regarded as the assertion of self-interest without regard to the whole.

⁶ Christianity and Power Politics, p. 156.

⁷ ibid., p. 157.

⁸ Moral Man and Immoral Society, p. 231.

⁹ The Nature and Destiny of Man, 11, New York, 1943, p. 266.

¹⁰ ibid., p. 267.

¹¹ ibid., p. 268.

¹² The thought may be expressed by noting the apparent paradox that power is at once the indispensable prerequisite for, and the greatest challenge to, any structure of justice.

¹³ The antithesis Niebuhr has described in Moral Man and Immoral Society appears to be founded on the assumption that for the individual the highest ideal must be unselfishness; for society it must be justice—that is, an approximate equality which must be achieved in part by such means as self-assertion, resistance, and coercion. Tension arises not only as a result of differing ideals, but as a consequence of the disparity in the methods peculiar to each sphere. “Politics will, to the end of history, be an area where conscience and power meet, where the ethical and coercive factors of human life will interpenetrate and work out their tentative and uneasy compromises” (p. 4). Part of the difficulty here arises, I think, from the questionable implication that the “purely ethical ideal” for the individual must be entirely autonomous, whereas the social ideal is largely of a heteronomous character. The latter assumption is surely true. The assumption of the autonomous character of the “purely ethical ideal” is a mistake, however. In any event, the actual distinction is considerably more relative than Niebuhr would seem to have indicated in Moral Man and Immoral Society.

¹⁴ ibid., p. 88.

¹⁵ Still, the distinction is not made without some qualification, and throughout Moral Man and Immoral Society Niebuhr displays some uncertainty as to the degree to which the distinction is justified.

¹⁶ The Nature and Destiny of Man, 1, p. 211.

¹⁷ ibid., pp. 208–9.

¹⁸ ibid., p. 209.

¹⁹ The Irony of American History, pp. 36–37.

²⁰ Christianity and Power Politics, particularly the essay, “Idealists as Cynics.”

²¹ “The Illusion of World Government,” Foreign Affairs, XVII (April 1949), p. 387. See also Niebuhr's, remarks in “The Theory and Practice of UNESCO,” International Organization, iv (February 1950), pp. 3–11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²² I am using the term “failure” here in its most obvious sense, that is, the inability to reach the intended goal.

²³ It is this thought which seems to run throughout The Irony of American History.

²⁴ “It is even more grievously wrong,” Niebuhr has rightly warned, “either to bow to ‘waves of the future’ or to yield to inertias of the past than to seek illusory escape from historical difficulties by Utopian dreams” (The Irony of American History, p. 144). It is to be noted that the idea of “political necessity” serves as a very comforting ideological device, since nothing is quite so reassuring as the thought that one acted as one had to act and, therefore, ought to have acted. (The same idea can be projected into the future to justify intended action.) From the point of view of a purely causative description of political behavior, and nothing more, the assertion that one acted as one had to act is trivially true. From the point of view of a normative interpretation—or evaluation—the same point may be quite false. Niebuhr has remarked that “What is significant about the Christian ethic is precisely this: that it does not regard the historic as normative” (Christianity and Power Politics, p. 215). It must be observed that this refusal ought to form the significant characteristic of any decent ethic.

²⁵ This element of exaggeration has always been characteristic of Niebuhr's critique of “liberal political thought,” but nowhere does it seem so patent as in The Irony of American History.

²⁶ Ibid., p. 41.

²⁷ The Irony of American History, p. 133.

²⁸ Ibid., p. 13.

²⁹ “As politics deals with the proximate ends of life, and religion with ultimate ones, it is always a source of illusion if the one is simply invested with the sanctity of the other” (ibid., p. 120).

³⁰ Ibid., p. 6.

³¹ Niebuhr has himself emphasized almost all of these points in earlier writings. And it is for this reason that, despite the general tenor of The Irony of American History, I think there could be no greater mistake than to associate Niebuhr with those who either deride or despair of man's attempts to improve the human situation. His so-called “pessimism” may deny the possibility of constructing a heaven on earth, but it has never denied the possibility of the most considerable improvement on earth. It must also be observed that if Niebuhr has concentrated almost exclusively in The Irony of American History on the dangers that attend a too optimistic secular philosophy, he has been just as diligent elsewhere in making clear the social and political hazards of religion.