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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
Interpreters of Reinhold Niebuhr generally ascribe the inconsistencies in his view of history to either his changing mind or inadequacies in the development of Christian realism. These perspectives can be insightful but they neglect larger and more systematic questions about the relation of Niebuhr to the specific historical period he addresses, that of liberalism. This essay argues that Niebuhr's work both draws more deeply on liberal assumptions and poses sharper historical criticism than is often recognized. The analysis provided below demonstrates that while Niebuhr identifies the rationalized self-legitimation in the liberal teleology of progress, his view of the historical development of individuals and societies reproduces the idea that liberal society is the culmination of all previous historical periods. The difficulties Niebuhr has in overcoming the limits of liberal categories are instructive regarding the complexity of criticizing a society of which we are a part.
1 Niebuhr, Reinhold, “Intellectual Autobiography” in Niebuhr, Reinhold, His Religious, Social and Political Thought, Charles W., Kegley, ed. (New York: Pilgrim, 1984), pp. 7–8.Google Scholar
2 Political scientist Thomas A. Spragens, Jr. employs Niebuhr the ironist in his analysis of the contradictory and often destructive path of Enlightenment rationalism and its politics in The Irony of Liberal Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. x.Google Scholar Others, such as Rosemary Ruether, locate Niebuhr at the heart of bourgeois politics. In discussing Niebuhr's distinction between public and private morality, Ruether comments: “Reinhold Niebuhr became the chief formulator of this essential dichotomy in bourgeois culture between the home and public life.” Ruether, Rosemary, New Woman, New Earth (New York: Seabury, 1983), p. 199.Google Scholar Judith Vaughan develops this problem further in relation to Niebuhr's, concept of sociality in Sociality, Ethics, and Social Change (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983).Google Scholar Still others hold that Niebuhr's Christian realism provides the only sound basis from which to criticize not just liberalism but any body of social thought. Langdon Gilkey argues that its empirical and pragmatic approach to history shows that “no society can permanently guarantee either justice or peace.” In his article, “Reinhold Niebuhr as Political Theologian” in Reinhold Niebuhr and the Issues of Our Time, Harries, Richard, ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1986), p. 181.Google Scholar This perspective is also evident in the persistent references to Niebuhr, the circumspect political critic. For example, historian Diggins, John Patrick evokes Niebuhr's voice as an antidote to the hubris of politicians in The Lost Soul of American Politics (New York: Basic Books, 1984).Google Scholar
3 Richard Wrightman Fox makes a strong contribution to broadening our understanding of Niebuhr's relation to liberalism in his recent biography. See, for instance, discussions on pp. 134, 144-45, Reinhoid Niebuhr, A Biography (New York: Pantheon, 1985).Google Scholar
4 For example see Ruether; Vaughan; Harrison, Beverly, Making the Connections, Robb, Carol. S., ed. (Boston: Beacon, 1985);Google ScholarCannon, Katie, “Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: The Womanist Dilemma in the Development of a Black Liberation Ethic,” The Annual, The Society of Christian Ethics, 1987;Google ScholarWest, Cornell, Prophecy Deliverance: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982);Google ScholarSmith, Ruth L. and Valenze, Deborah M., “Mutuality and Marginality: Liberal Moral Theory and Working-Class Women in Nineteenth-Century England,” Signs 13 (Winter 1988), 277–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5 Stone, Ronald, Reinhold Niebuhr: Prophet to Politicians (Nashville: Abingdon, 1972), p. 140.Google Scholar
6 Ibid., p. 138.
7 McCann, Dennis, Christian Realism and Liberation Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1982), p. 102.Google Scholar
8 Ibid., p. 129.
9 Gamwell, Frank I., Reinhold Niebuhr's Theistic Ethic” in The Legacy of Reinhold Niebuhr, Scott, Nathan A. Jr., , ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 66.Google Scholar
10 Ibid., pp. 82-83.
11 Marshal Berman provides a compelling discussion of this outlook in the chapter “Goethe's Faust: The Tragedy of Development” in All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), pp. 38–86.Google Scholar
12 Niebuhr, Reinhold, The Nature and Destiny of Man: Human Nature, Vol. 1 (New York: Scribner's, 1941), p. 27.Google Scholar Hereafter cited as Human Nature.
13 Niebuhr, Reinhold, The Nature and Destiny of Man, Vol. 2 (New York: Scribner's, 1943), p. 159.Google Scholar Hereafter cited as Human Destiny.
14 Ibid., p. 240.
15 Niebuhr, Reinhold, “Reply to Interpretation and Criticism” in Reinhofd Niebuhr: His Religious, Social and Political Thought, Kegley, Charles W., ed. (New York: Pilgrim, 1984), p. 509.Google Scholar The rejection of ontological categories also has affinity with Sartre's existentialist view of human nature.
16 Human Destiny, p. 40.
17 Ibid., p. 152.
18 Niebuhr, Reinhold, The Self and the Dramas of History (New York: Scribner's, 1955), p. 45.Google Scholar
19 Ibid., p. 61.
20 The Self and the Dramas of History, p. 42. Neibuhr accurately recognizes that Marx retains the Enlightenment assumption of the rationality of human beings. To the extent that this view is an aspect of Marx's analysis of the proletariat, Niebuhr correctly associates Marx with liberalism. At the same time Niebuhr does not grasp the historicized character of Marx's analysis.
21 Human Nature, pp. 108-11.
22 Ibid., pp. 194-95.
23 Niebuhr, Reinhold, The Irony of American History (New York: Scribner's 1952), p. 6.Google Scholar Also Human Destiny, p. 206.
24 Human Destiny, p. 240.
25 Niebuhr, Reinhold, Beyond Tragedy (New York: Scribner's 1937), p. 34.Google Scholar
26 The Self and the Dramas of History, p. 51.
27 Human Destiny, p. 8.
28 Ibid., p. 25.
29 Niebuhr, Reinhold, Faith and History (New York: Scribner's, 1949), p. 75.Google Scholar
30 Ibid., p. 78. The attempt to remove or domesticate death is perhaps the most striking instance of a pattern by which liberal Protestantism at the turn of the century banished all dramatic and disjunctive moments from its view of human life. See Lears, T. Jackson, No Place of Grace (New York: Pantheon, 1981), pp. 22–24.Google Scholar
31 Niebuhr's argument that self-interest is not harmless but problematic distinguishes him from the liberalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but his reliance on this concept for an analysis of society ties him back in to liberalism. See Smith, Ruth L., “Morality and Perceptions of Society: The Limits of Self Interest,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 26 (September 1987), 279–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
32 Beyond Tragedy, pp. 5-8.
33 Faith and History, p. 214.
34 Human Destiny, p. 13.
35 Gamwell, pp. 64-65.
36 Ibid., p. 77.
37 Human Nature, pp. 57-58.
38 Ibid., p. 61.
39 Faith and History, p. 7.
40 Human Nature, pp. 56-61.
41 Niebuhr, Reinhold, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Scribner's, 1932).Google Scholar
42 Niebuhr, Reinhold, Reflections on the End of an Era (New York: Scribner's, 1934), p. 88.Google Scholar
43 Human Nature, p. 59.
44 Bernard Loomer discusses Niebuhr's classical view of the self in the essay “The Free and Relational Self.” Loomer does not place his discussion within the historical context of liberalism but instead emphasizes the contrast of the classical view with a process or relational one: “The Free and Relational Self” in Belief and Ethics, Schroeder, W. Widick and Winter, Gibson, eds. (Chicago: Center for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1978), pp. 69–86.Google Scholar
45 Beyond Tragedy, p. 36.
46 The Self and the Dramas of History, p. 56.
47 Ibid., p. 59.
48 Marx, Karl, The German Ideology in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 5 (1845-1847) (New York: International Publishers, 1976), p. 229.Google Scholar
49 The Self and the Dramas of History, pp. 240-42.
50 See White, Hayden W., Translator's Introduction: “On History and Historicisms” in Antoni, Carlo, From History to Sociology: The Transition in German Historical Thinking (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1959), p. xxiii.Google Scholar
51 See Butterfield, Herbert, The Whig Interpretation of History (New York: Scribner's 1951), p. 11.Google Scholar
52 Harrison, Beverly, Making the Connections, Robb, Carol S., ed. (Boston: Beacon, 1986), p. 59.Google Scholar
53 For example, see Chapter Three, “Happiness, Prosperity, and Virtue” in The Irony of American History.
54 Beyond Tragedy, p. 225.