Reinhold Niebuhr has fair claim to be the most influential theologian of the twentieth century in the realm of politics and international relations. President Jimmy Carter kept a book of Niebuhr’s writings by his bedside, regarding it as his political bible, and Niebuhr shaped the thought of a whole generation of leading Democrat politicians. A leading political philosopher of the realist school said of Niebuhr that ‘he was the father of us all’. Then after his death in 1971, having been a major intellectual force for four decades, he fell out of view.
All this changed in 2005. Arthur Schlesinger wrote a major article for the New York Times urging Americans to rediscover Niebuhr. The Irony of American History was reissued with a new introduction in 2007 making the same point. In the same year Obama acknowledged his debt to Niebuhr, giving a masterly summary of his thought on the hoof whilst campaigning.
Now, in another decade, is a good time both to assess Niebuhr in his times and reflect on what his permanent legacy might be. This 637-page handbook enables us to do both. A first section sets Niebuhr in his times: his family background, the economic crisis of the 1930s, World War II, the height of US power and the Cold War, and the wider struggle for justice. Niebuhr’s massive achievements in the earlier periods is relatively clear: the need to take power seriously in the struggle for social justice, the call to oppose Germany and then communism. After that, the record is more confused and contentious. He was too often claimed by the Right in the cold war period, whereas his own attitude was much more nuanced. Kennedy presented him with a dilemma. According to Gary Dorrien he told friends that Kennedy and his brother ‘were ruthless, dishonest and shallow. Realism lacking a moral compass was dangerous.’ However, when the Republicans nominated Nixon, he ‘resolved to hold his nose, vote for Kennedy and hope for the best’. He was also critical of Kennedy’s chronic adultery, and unlike most of his friends did think that personal morality mattered in politics. Niebuhr’s own position for most of his life is best compared to the right wing of the British Labour party, someone like Dennis Healey, strong on both defence and social justice. Niebuhr accepted the domino theory of communism and thought Vietnam was an impossible problem. Though he initially supported Kennedy, he rapidly turned against the war, feeling the irony of doing so, guilty about his lack of patriotism and, for the first time in his life ashamed of his country.
The second section of the book considers Niebuhr’s allies and adversaries, his brother H. Richard Niebuhr, Karl Barth, George Kennan, John Dewey, Paul Tillich, John Courtney Murray, Martin Luther King Jr and, most interestingly, the Jewish thinker Abraham Heschel who gave the eulogy at Niebuhr’s funeral.
The third section of the book considers Niebuhr’s fundamental stance on God, sin, love, Christology, ecclesiology and eschatology. It is important to note that Niebuhr was not a systematic theologian but a social ethicist, and there are well-known weaknesses in this area. However, as the editors bring out in the introduction, although Moral Man and Immoral Society could have passed as secular political philosophy, Niebuhr, in response to his critics, drew out its underlying theology in The Nature and Destiny of Man, and applied it thereafter. His stance on sin was important at the time and needs still to be addressed. Like Tillich he was influenced by Kierkegaard’s view that anxiety about our fragility and mortality lay at the root of all sin. But I wonder if this heady notion is true enough to the reality of human behaviour. We are self-interested from the start; we have to be, otherwise we would not survive. Our failure would seem to arise from our failure to open our eyes to the reality of the other, whether human or God, and to become locked in ourselves as a result. No less fundamental, Niebuhr has been criticized by feminists for a very masculine understanding of sin as pride, whereas for a woman it might be just the opposite – a failure to stand up for herself, with the stress on pride as sin only reinforcing her submission to male dominated structures.
Feminism is considered in the fourth section on ethics, as is Niebuhr’s famous emphasis on irony, and his brilliant defence of democracy. The fifth section on politics and policy considers areas where Niebuhr was strong and made a major contribution – areas such as economic policy, foreign policy and international relations and also areas where he was weak. Though he became a strong supporter of Martin Luther King Jr, he was slow in picking up the cause. He was not prescient enough to be aware of feminist stirrings, the need for affirming same-sex relationships or the ecological crisis. A final section looks at Niebuhr’s legacy. Here Jeffrey Stout and, in an earlier section G. Scott Davis, consider his important debate with Paul Ramsey, who reintroduced classic just war criteria into American thinking. Niebuhr, with his unqualified emphasis on consequences as the only criteria for judging actions, rejected both any concept of natural law and any absolute moral norm. Niebuhr should have seen that assessing consequences is a fundamental part of Just War thinking, and Ramsey was surely right in affirming some actions, such as intentionally hurting the innocent, as being wrong in all circumstances.
Any student of any aspect of Niebuhr’s thought will need to use this comprehensive handbook. But it also brings home how there is no substitute for the power of Niebuhr’s own writing, with its combination of passion and intellectual balance. The passion supplied by the fact that, as his wife Ursula always stressed, her husband was essentially a preacher and pastor, the balance being provided by his clear-headed realism. What John Bew calls ‘a Niebuhrian sensibility’ is still very much needed in the confused world of our own times, especially in the field of statecraft.
I did find the bibliography extremely clumsy and difficult to use. Instead of having one consolidated list of Niebuhr’s major works, another of his articles, and a third of secondary literature, there are books listed after every chapter. This means that a list of Niebuhr’s major writings is repeated a score of times and it is very difficult to locate where you might find another book or a particular article.
