Reinhold Niebuhr's “Christian realism” had an impact on a variety of individuals, foremost among them Hans J. Morgenthau, a man Niebuhr regarded as a friend and whom he once termed “the most brilliant and authoritative political realist.”Footnote 1 Morgenthau in turn characterized Reinhold Niebuhr as perhaps “the greatest living political philosopher in America.”Footnote 2 This essay focusses, first, on both the personal and professional association between Niebuhr and Morgenthau and, second, on the distinct shades of difference between their understanding of political realism.
Curiously, while Niebuhr and Morgenthau unabashedly admired one another and often expressed reliance on each other's contributions, Christoph Frei's recent intellectual biography of Morgenthau played down any influence Niebuhr might have had on him.Footnote 3 Frei is content merely to suggest that Morgenthau simply “used Niebuhr's language to introduce his German intellectual heritage in an unobjectionable manner in America.”Footnote 4
I would suggest that perhaps Frei was slightly remiss in marginalizing Niebuhr's influence on Morgenthau within the American context. H. Stuart Hughes made an interesting observation that might well be apropos in the case of Morgenthau. In the wake of commenting on the difficulty Americans had understanding the theologian Paul Tillich, Hughes wrote,
The other intellectual émigrés with concerns extending beyond the boundary of a single discipline had encountered a similar half-understanding in the lands of English speech. Readers thinking exclusively in the English language almost never succeeded in entering fully into the idea world of men whose deepest reflections continued to go on in the other language they had spoken as children. Even Wittgenstein, whose influence had been the greatest of the German- or Austrian-born of his generation and whose writings were unique in being published in parallel in German and English texts – whose experiments with two languages in which he was almost equally fluent might have been expected to bridge, if any human being could do so, the gap between these universes of discourse – even Wittgenstein suffered the fate of transmutation by his adherents into far more of an Anglo-American analytic philosopher than he actually had been or had become.Footnote 5
If we reverse this insight and make ourselves aware of the difficulty the German-speaking Morgenthau might have had, not only in being understood by his American audience but also in “entering fully into the world of” an America quite new to himself, then Niebuhr's role – along with other influential Americans in Morgenthau's newly adopted world – might have played a larger part than Frei ever imagined.
While possibly colored by the affection and nostalgia of their later years, there was an interesting exchange of letters between these two old friends. Niebuhr, while ill and convalescing in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, sent Morgenthau a brief letter dealing with Morgenthau's analysis of American foreign policy in which he wrote, “I am forced to ask whether all my insights are not borrowed from Hans Morgenthau.”Footnote 6 Within the month Morgenthau wrote back, “You raise the question ‘whether all my insights are not borrowed from Hans Morgenthau,’ I have asked myself the same question with reference to you, and I am sure I have by far the better of the argument.”Footnote 7
Martin Halliwell points out that “there is a question when it comes to Morgenthau and Niebuhr as to who influenced whom the most.”Footnote 8 While Michael J. Smith insisted that Morgenthau “sought to incorporate Niebuhr's insights (in the process, of course, secularizing them) into a general theory of international politics,” Frei explicitly rejects Smith's claim.Footnote 9 Morgenthau's former student and a ranking political theorist in his own right, Kenneth Thompson, however, claimed that Morgenthau “translated certain traditional European ideas to fit the American experience,” continuing
to rethink and restate these ideas to accord with the realities of American democracy … particularly in his later writings. His achievement was the more remarkable because he celebrated the uniqueness of American ideas and institutions at the same time that he defended without compromise what he called the iron law of international politics.Footnote 10
Thompson's observation speaks volumes, partly corroborating and partly contradicting Frei's opinion. It seems to me rather significant that Niebuhr was twelve years older than Morgenthau when they first met in Chicago. It appears reasonable to conclude that in finding a profound intellectual kinship with this older American – also of German background and fully conversant with the German language – at the very least Reinhold Niebuhr proved to be one of Hans Morgenthau's main sources in America for thinking and writing in American terms in an American context for an American audience.Footnote 11 Perhaps Roger Shinn, who knew both Niebuhr and Morgenthau, put matters in proper perspective when claiming that while he was “not affirming that either man derived their thought from the other,” he was willing to say “that their relationship enriched the insights of both men and showed the possibility of communication between worlds of discourse [theology and politics] that are too often kept separate.”Footnote 12
NIEBUHR'S INTERACTION WITH MORGENTHAU
Niebuhr and Morgenthau apparently met for the first time in 1944 at the University of Chicago, where Morgenthau had been teaching since 1943. Niebuhr was on the lecture circuit and had spent some time at the university. This was soon after the publication of his prestigious Gifford Lectures (1941–43) – a time when Niebuhr's reputation was approaching its zenith. The year 1944 was also when Niebuhr, working from themes set forth in The Nature and Destiny of Man, published his vindication of democracy in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. Morgenthau, of course, was familiar with Niebuhr's writings and had read The Nature and Destiny of Man as well as Moral Man and Immoral Society – the book with which Niebuhr had early on made such an impact. It was soon after this, in 1946, that Morgenthau published his first important book since coming to America, Scientific Man Versus Power Politics, which clearly echoed one of the major themes Niebuhr had attacked, namely “scientism.” Morgenthau defined scientism as
the belief that the problems of social life are in essence similar to the problems of physical nature and that, in the same way in which one can understand the laws of nature and, by using this knowledge, dominate nature and harness it to one's own ends, one can understand the facts of society and, through this knowledge, create a gigantic social mechanism which is at the command of the scientific master.Footnote 13
It is not that Morgenthau and Niebuhr were denigrating science. Rather they opposed what they believed to be the misapplication of scientific method. Niebuhr saw the usefulness of the scientific method in the domain of human affairs as severely limited. It is limited, first, by the fact that “history” is more complex and full of contingencies than is “nature.” For Niebuhr history is full of irony, which adds to its unpredictability. Second, scientific methodology is inappropriate because man is not a disinterested observer in the manner in which a scientist is supposed to be in relation to nature. The self, Niebuhr maintained, both resides within and creates history and, as an agent in history, comes to a perspective on his own domain with vested interests and values.Footnote 14
In Scientific Man Versus Power Politics Morgenthau also credited Niebuhr with having “most illuminatingly treated” in his books the subject of the concluding chapter.Footnote 15 In his review of Morgenthau's book Niebuhr lamented that “this very important little book has been, so far as I know, completely ignored by the journalists of opinion, probably because the prejudices and idolatries of a scientific age, which it attacks, are still dominant in most of our intellectual centers.”Footnote 16 In a letter expressing gratitude for Niebuhr's review and disappointment that his book had not been reviewed in The Nation, Morgenthau wrote,
The theological responses to the book have generally been very gratifying. The philosophic ones have been mixed, but at least understanding … The reactions of the political scientists are mostly disastrous; the reviewer for The American Political Science Review calls me “often dogmatic, at times supercilious, and not infrequently sneering and flippant.” A review by a former president of the American Political Science Association … is in a similar vein.Footnote 17
Of course Scientific Man Versus Power Politics would, in due course, be seen as a watershed book. But Niebuhr, at the time of its publication, had put his finger on the problem when he wrote back to Morgenthau that when “you challenge the credos of our day so basically … I can imagine what the reviews are like.”Footnote 18
Scientific Man Versus Power Politics inaugurated Morgenthau's highly influential and well-deserved reputation in America. And when Politics among Nations appeared in 1948 Morgenthau's prestige not only increased, but his dominance in the field of international politics was assured for the next quarter of a century. In the first edition of Politics among Nations Morgenthau cited or referenced Niebuhr's books Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) and Christianity and Power Politics (1940), and his articles “Democracy as a Religion” (Christianity and Crisis, 4 August 1947) and “Myth of World Government” (The Nation, 16 March 1946). Added citations in later editions included Christian Realism and Political Problems (1953) and the articles “Illusion of World Government” (Foreign Affairs, April 1947) and “Moral Implications of Loyalty to the UN” (Edward W. Hazen Foundation, 1952).
Through the years Niebuhr and Morgenthau continued to cite each other on a variety of matters, both substantive and peripheral. In praising the realist E. H. Carr, for example, Morgenthau held, “No other thinker, with the exception of Reinhold Niebuhr, has seen more clearly and exposed with more acute brilliance the essential defects of Western political thought.”Footnote 19 In the same volume Morgenthau criticized Walter Lippmann, claiming that “Herbert Butterfield, Reinhold Niebuhr, myself, and others have tried to show how much more ambiguous and involved the relations between reason and politics are than is suggested by [Lipmann's] simple rationalistic faith.”Footnote 20 Morgenthau also had Niebuhr contribute an article entitled “Germany and Western Civilization” for a book he edited in 1951 on postwar Germany.Footnote 21
In 1965, the year Niebuhr published Man's Nature and His Communities, he and Morgenthau had a most interesting exchange. Morgenthau first wrote to Niebuhr that “I want you to know that I have been following your writings with very great interest, as usual, and am particularly gratified to learn you have recently paid some attention to my writings as well.”Footnote 22 A few days later Niebuhr wrote back:
Dear Hans: Excuse me for addressing you in the familiar form when you address me as Professor Niebuhr. I only do this in order to underscore your misunderstanding when you say [you are pleased to learn that I] “have recently paid some attention to my writings as well.” My dear friend, Hans, I have not just recently paid attention to them. I have read all your writings avidly and have been particularly impressed by what you said about Vietnam.Footnote 23
Late in his career Niebuhr was invited by Robert Oppenheimer to take up residence at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, where he would write The Structure of Nations and Empires. The year was 1958 and Niebuhr, who had the first of a series of strokes in 1952, suffered from diminished abilities and had a much curtailed schedule of activities as the decade progressed. Although suffering from intermittent depressions Niebuhr looked forward to writing a book in which he hoped to prove to both himself and others that he could write in the academic vein of more traditional scholarly works. In a sense this was a shame because Niebuhr's forte was the powerful, incisive, and polemical kind of writing in which he had excelled throughout his long career. Niebuhr's biographer, Richard W. Fox, noted that when the book came out in 1959 it largely fell on dead ears – the response being “tepid when it was not silent or scornful.”Footnote 24 Among Niebuhr's friends who labored with and for him during his writing of the book were George Kennan, Kenneth Thompson, and Hans Morgenthau – three of his compatriots in the camp of political realists. Kennan, according to Fox, “sensed … a certain fatigue in Niebuhr's work.” And all three friends, while offering “some reassurance with their prepublication plaudits … mixed some misgivings with glowing sentiments.”Footnote 25
Whatever reservations Morgenthau had about Niebuhr's book he later paid tribute to his efforts in a review published in Christianity and Crisis. Crediting Niebuhr with laying “bare the mechanism by which morality clothes politics with underserved dignity and politics transforms morality into an instrument of political domination,” Morgenthau isolated the “paradox that nature is much more unambiguously susceptible to human understanding than is society” as “the moving force of Reinhold Niebuhr's new book.”Footnote 26 Many years later Niebuhr remembered Morgenthau's help back in 1959 when, in a letter of 13 January 1970, he wrote,
I cease to do any significant work, on account of various failures of the flesh. Hence, I am the more dependent upon old friends like you. I have often reported to my friends what an honest and helpful critic you were of the manuscript that I produced at the Institute.Footnote 27
Niebuhr's and Morgenthau's most direct practical influence came in the decade between 1949 and 1959 when they participated in meetings of the Policy Planning Staff of the Department of State, which was founded on 5 May 1947 by General George Marshall for the purpose of formulating, developing, and advising on America's long-range foreign-policy problems. George Kennan was its director and, along with many others, brought realists such as Niebuhr, Morgenthau, and Arnold Wolfers in for various sessions. Niebuhr was there for two sessions in June of 1949. What Kennan found attractive, according to Richard Fox's interview with him, was Niebuhr's “philosophical perspective” more than his “political judgments and foreign-policy views.” Niebuhr returned many times and, according to Fox, “continued to give voice to his modestly idealistic realism.”Footnote 28 Niebuhr's trips to Washington grew less frequent as his physical capacities declined. Kenneth Thompson, in recalling Niebuhr's 1959 trip – his first since the stroke he suffered in 1952 – told of a conversation on foreign policy at which he was present along with, among others, Mogenthau, Kennan, Wolfers, Walter Lippman, New York Times correspondent James Reston, and Dean Rusk. The notes Thompson jotted down showed a far more favorable portrait of Niebuhr than we find in Fox's account. Thompson's notes read:
Niebuhr had the historian's command of the facts [and while having] little time for the more simple-minded moralists [these] contemporary policymakers were not impatient with Niebuhr; surely one reason [being] his mastery of political realities and the facts. [Niebuhr] was at home in the theoretical world of the philosopher, the theologian, and the philosopher of science [and] recognized this was not the world of the politician or statesman. [Finally] it was Niebuhr, conspicuous as a lone theologian among the theorists who met in Washington, who was the first to insist that no single overarching norm in international politics provided the basis for evaluating and judging all other norms. This viewpoint set him apart from those who saw freedom or security or justice as the controlling objective of American foreign policy. He concurred with Justice Holmes' phrase: “People are always extolling the man of principle but the superior man is the one who knows he must find his way in a maze of principles.”Footnote 29
Two of the most prominent and outstanding exchanges between Niebuhr and Morgenthau came five years apart in the 1960s – first, a 1962 tribute to Niebuhr, and second, an exchange on “The Ethics of War and Peace in the Nuclear Age” published in 1967.Footnote 30 Specific aspects of these rare direct exchanges of views will come into play below in the appropriate context.
By the time Morgenthau had moved from Chicago to New York in 1968 Niebuhr was in a state of seriously declining health. They no doubt saw more of each other than before and were involved in discussions regarding both the nuclear stalemate between the United States and the Soviet Union and the evolving quagmire of the Vietnam War. Both Niebuhr and Morgenthau ended up opposing American intervention, although Morgenthau arrived at that position earlier than Niebuhr. Niebuhr kept wanting to believe that the rationale given by the Johnson administration was valid. Finally, however, he awakened to the erroneous assumptions on which United States intervention had been based and attacked that intervention. Niebuhr finally came to admit that he had supported the war for far too long and for bad reasons. Based on his chapter “To Intervene or Not to Intervene” from the book A New Foreign Policy for the United States (which itself had appeared in an earlier form in the journal Foreign Affairs, April 1967), Morgenthau argued that
the policies the United States is pursuing in Vietnam are open to criticism on three grounds: they do not serve the interests of the United States, they even run counter to these interests, and the objectives we have set ourselves are not attainable, if they are attainable at all, without unreasonable moral liabilities and military risks.Footnote 31
For many “realists,” including his friend Henry Kissinger, opposition to the war was an act of heresy. In an interview for the 1977 tribute to him Morgenthau stated that he had since 1961
warned against our military involvement in Vietnam. When we got involved in 1965 I opposed the involvement. I simply applied certain basic principles of foreign policy which I had formulated almost twenty years earlier to the situation in Vietnam. … Since I had been previously regarded as a hard-liner in foreign policy, people jumped to the conclusion that I was bound to support any hard line even if it was unsound. This line I certainly regarded then and still regard today as utterly unsound. People have asked me from time to time how I reconcile my opposition to the Vietnam War with my basic position on foreign policy. … I have always referred the questioner to one of the basic principles I developed in the first edition of Politics Among Nations (1948) concerning the correct conduct of foreign policy: Never put yourself in a position from which you cannot retreat without loss of face and from which you cannot advance without undue risk.Footnote 32
Denying any risk-taking on his part in opposing the war (largely because he did not anticipate the firestorm of criticism he would receive from both the administration and his academic colleagues), Morgenthau wrote that he
had pointed out that the war in South Vietnam was primarily a civil war, not a war of foreign aggression; that the domino theory was a literary invention with no correspondence in historic experience; that counterinsurgency was not a military tactic which could be applied indiscriminately and with any chance of success in a situation in which large masses of indigenous people took to arms for deeply felt national and social objectives,
and finally
that the Saigon government could not keep itself in power for any length of time without the massive military support supplied by the Unites States, and that to speak here of the defense of freedom and democracy against its enemies was stretching terms beyond endurance.Footnote 33
In May 1970 Morgenthau wrote Niebuhr a letter in which he mentioned that he had
just written an article on the Cambodian adventure, of which I shall send you a copy. The incompetence and pathology is really shocking. I have also just finished a collection of essays which will be published this summer under the title TRUTH AND POWER. Your departure from New York has created a painful void for your friends. I wish there was something I could do to make life a little bit easier for you and to show you my affection.Footnote 34
Morgenthau, and Kenneth Thompson, were welcome guests at the Stockbridge, Massachusetts home where Niebuhr spent his last year. Morgenthau wrote to Niebuhr on 24 August 1970, recalling a recent visit. “Just a line,” he wrote,
to tell you how great an experience it was to talk to you again and, more particularly, to listen to you after so long an interval. I only am sorry that I delayed that experience so long, for no good reason except lack of initiative.Footnote 35
Niebuhr replied three days later in a brief note thanking him for his letter and saying that “yours and Kenneth's [Kenneth Thompson] visit were a boon to all of us. I need not tell you how much your thought has influenced me, so your visit was doubly welcome.”Footnote 36 On 17 March 1971, just short of three months prior to Niebuhr's death, Morgenthau wrote to Niebuhr telling him that the previous day he had been “at the dinner celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of Christianity and Crisis. Your name was mentioned so often and with such enthusiasm and admiration that the evening in good measure became a celebration of your stewardship.”Footnote 37 After Niebuhr's death Morgenthau continued to correspond with Ursula Niebuhr, Reinhold's wife, and Ursula remarked in a letter that she was “so glad to remember that Reinhold had that visit from you and Kenneth Thompson last year.”Footnote 38
NIEBUHR'S THEOLOGICAL “DISPOSITION”
The common ground Niebuhr and Morgenthau shared was considerable as well as familiar and need not be recited here. My concern is to focus upon those aspects of the Niebuhr-Morgenthau dialogue that revealed the specific character of Niebuhr's own “realism.”Footnote 39 While sharing an identity as “political realists” Niebuhr and Morgenthau agreed on a very broad range of convictions pertaining to power politics. The source of the major difference between them is made strikingly evident in a crucial amendment Morgenthau made to his admission (cited in the previous note) that he and Niebuhr had “come out pretty much the same on politics.” Morgenthau quickly adds the qualifier, “but I do not need all his metaphysics to get where we both get.”Footnote 40 It is precisely Morgenthau's admission that they came to essentially the same place but without dragging along the religious/metaphysical baggage that suggests something more than merely “peripheral differences” in their respective views of “realism.”
In brief it can be said that there are overarching and substantive differences between Niebuhr and Morgenthau and that they are to be found within the theological orientation that gives Niebuhr what James Gustafson calls a “disposition” to see the world in a certain way. Indeed, virtually all of Niebuhr's disagreements with his realist friends derive from this “disposition” – this theological frame of reference from which Niebuhr drew so consistently and so well. Niebuhr was a “Christian realist” whose particular version of realism provided the vantage point from which he found reason to criticize his friend Hans Morgenthau.
Christian realism has, as John Bennett points out, a specific historical context, developing “in a polemical situation” in which there is “a specific concern to counteract the one-sided optimism and idealism of the liberalism of the time.”Footnote 41 In Niebuhr's case this applied equally to both religious and political liberalism. If sufficient attention were paid to this context much of the pointless squabbling over the sense in which Niebuhr is to be regarded as a conservative, or the degree to which the terms “realism” and “idealism” structure the discussion about Niebuhr, would be properly avoided. The historical context of Niebuhr's “Christian realism” was America's social liberal tradition and the liberal theology that had given it a religious impulse and expression. Niebuhr was speaking within, and contesting with, this tradition – contesting with ammunition drawn from whatever intellectual quarter he found useful. Niebuhr was a liberal seeking to set the socially responsible impulses of the Protestant liberal tradition on firmer theological ground in order to render it more realistic, and therefore more effective. He was never at home in conservative houses, either religious or political – houses whose moral views Niebuhr considered deficient in their social dimension and whose visions of theology were wooden and narrowly dogmatic.Footnote 42 Indeed, in the autobiographical update Niebuhr provides in his last important book he wrote that he had a
strong conviction that a realist conception of human nature should be made the servant of an ethic of progressive justice and should not be made into a bastion of conservatism, particularly a conservatism which defends unjust privileges. I might define this conviction as the guiding principle throughout my mature life of the relation of religious responsibility to political affairs.Footnote 43
It hardly need be said that Niebuhr's view of Christianity and its relevance for an understanding of politics was the only such view or that it was widely shared by others within the Christian fold. Two things stand out about Niebuhr's contribution here. First, he was unique in the degree to which his grasp of the Christian faith and its insights into our political existence had a measurable impact upon major figures in the areas of politics and history – both scholars and statesmen who normally paid little heed to theologians.Footnote 44 Second – and of utmost importance for the religious tradition itself – is the fact that Niebuhr's “Christian realism” provided a vantage point for Christian self-criticism, including a discernment of the irrelevancies and pretensions of so much of what passes as Christian piety. Both of these were litmus tests for the credibility and astuteness of Niebuhr's “Christian realism.”
What separated Niebuhr from Morgenthau was his view of man's radical freedom – a freedom out of which Niebuhr's understanding of both human dignity and human misery arose.Footnote 45 Niebuhr's own formulation of the Pascalian conundrum at the outset of his Gifford Lectures is legendary and defines the parameters for his understanding of humankind's intractable condition. Niebuhr wrote that
Man has always been his own most vexing problem. How shall he think of himself? Every affirmation which he may make about his stature, virtue, or place in the cosmos becomes involved in contradictions when fully analyzed. … If man insists that he is a child of nature and that he ought not to pretend to be more than the animal which he obviously is, he tacitly admits that he is, at any rate, a curious kind of animal who has both the inclination and the capacity to make such pretensions. If on the other hand he insists upon his unique and distinctive place in nature and points to his rational faculties as proof of his special eminence, there is usually an anxious note in his avowals of uniqueness which betrays his unconscious sense of kinship with the brutes.Footnote 46
On both sides of the issue, Niebuhr's view of the “nature of man” set him apart from the political realists. With respect to the dignity of man, the fact that the self is defined by the law of love stretches the meaning of justice far beyond the bounds of its usual political meaning. With respect to the misery of man, the fact of sin – that the self in its self-love is in violation of the law of love – gives Niebuhr a broader, deeper, and more subtle sense of human propensities for evil than is found in political realists such as Morgenthau. Both realities – human dignity and misery – arising out of the self's freedom, revealed a highly complex and nuanced understanding of the self's creative and destructive capabilities. And it is this understanding that had direct bearing on Niebuhr's formulation of political realism. Indeed, both his analysis and appreciation of democracy as well as his understanding of what was possible in international politics derive from this theological “disposition.”
For Niebuhr sin was understood essentially as pride, the pride of the spirit that expresses itself in three forms: through power, through knowledge, and through virtue. There is, therefore, the lust for power (so basic to all political realists), intellectual pride – a spiritual sublimation of man's pride of power, and moral pride – the pride of self-righteousness. This latter is the most insidious form of pride because, as the quintessential spiritual form of pride, it finds expression as religious arrogance – “arrogance in the very name of Christ,” as Niebuhr would label it. Such arrogance results in “the worst form of intolerance” – a “religious intolerance, in which the particular interests of the contestants hide behind religious absolutes. The worst form of self-assertion is religious self-assertion in which, under the guise of contrition before God, He is claimed as the exclusive ally of our contingent self.”Footnote 47
It was also Niebuhr's understanding of the Christian view of grace that spared him from the degree of pessimism that one detects in Morgenthau's tragic sense of life. There was, for Niebuhr, a “beyond tragedy” – a perspective of hope, of faith, of love, and of forgiveness that renders pessimism penultimate rather than ultimate.Footnote 48 This was not, as some have said, a capitulation to cynicism or fatalism. Rather it was an expression of what Niebuhr called the “nonchalance of faith” regarding the failures, contradictions, and penultimate tragedy of history. Contrary to a counsel of despair and passivity, Niebuhr's Christian realism found here a release into a life of responsible action, free from both excessive expectations and extreme despair. As James Gustafson put it, for Niebuhr the “revelation of God's grace” provides a “stance or basic disposition toward the world” in which “one can be realistic and hopeful at once … pragmatic without illusions about fulfilling the ultimate good in his relative and temporal efforts.”Footnote 49 Although this “disposition,” rooted in Niebuhr's view of Christian faith, might allow Christians to be ultimately hopeful, Niebuhr's religious viewpoint, as Michael J. Smith put it, would “not attract the skeptically minded.”Footnote 50 And, of course, the list included the quintessential realist Hans Morgenthau, who, according to Martin E. Marty, “was the most eloquent among those who could take Niebuhr without his religion.”Footnote 51 Yet curiously Morgenthau credited Niebuhr for being our “greatest living political philosopher” precisely because he was a theologian and not simply a statesman, a practical politician, or a professor of political science. The curiosity is merely that, and not, as it might seem, a contradiction. For the reason Morgenthau made this judgment is not because of the truth value of Niebuhr's theology (i.e. “metaphysical beliefs”), but because his theology provides him with a perspective “from the outside – sub specie aeternitatis – to develop such a political philosophy.” Statesmen, political practitioners, and professors of political science simply take our institutions for granted without standing back, as it were, and looking afresh.
While Niebuhr's theological disposition provided a sense of serenity arising from a trust that the justifying love of God alone overcomes the ambiguity of its existence, it also led him to an ironic view of history – a view that reveals the seemingly chance events in life to be less fortuitous than they appear and implicates us as having some responsibility for history's ironic outcomes. Such a view enables us to strive for a benign yet critical detachment wherein a sense of responsibility rather than mere tragic or pathetic reaction is made possible. As a Christian realist Niebuhr's ironic view of history offers, on the one hand, an opportunity to be open to the unintended outcomes of our actions and, on the other, a recommendation for critical and detached responsibility.
Christian realism, for Niebuhr, was a fundamental reorientation growing out of a reaction against excessive idealism and utopianism – a reorientation that relied in part on Niebuhr's discernment of historical precedents within the Christian tradition. Yet in Niebuhr's hands, as Kenneth Thompson observed, “what emerged was a philosophic position that was uniquely and distinctly his own.”Footnote 52
VARIOUS SHADES OF REALISM
What defines realism for realists such as Niebuhr and Morgenthau is their historically based reaction to, and rejection of, excessive liberal moralism, idealism, and utopianism.Footnote 53 This historical context underpins Morgenthau's 1962 tribute to Niebuhr, when he credited Niebuhr with “the rediscovery of Political Man.”Footnote 54 It was this “rediscovery of Political Man” that informed Niebuhr to define political realism as the disposition to take into account all factors in a political situation which offer resistance to established norms, particularly the factors of self-interest and power.Footnote 55 This disposition led Colm McKeogh to observe that “constraint is thus the core of political realism” – constraints, for example, that with Niebuhr and other realists are “founded on their view of human nature.”Footnote 56 It was Niebuhr's view of human nature, framed by the uniquely powerful analyses of his Christian realism, that gave unique shading to his understanding of political realism. And it is to their respective views of power and national self-interest that we turn in order to clearly observe the particular shading their realism receives.
1. Power
According to Stanley Hoffmann, Morgenthau tied “his sweeping analyses to two masts, the concept of power and the notion of the national interest.”Footnote 57 Morgenthau had claimed that the very first lesson Niebuhr provided us with was the fact that the all-pervasive “lust for power” persists as “an intrinsic quality of human nature itself,” and therefore “cannot be reformed out of existence.”Footnote 58 Niebuhr certainly knew that the problem of power was an important one and had significant bearing on domestic as well as international politics. He had acknowledged that “there has never been a scheme of justice in history which did not have a balance of power at its foundation.”Footnote 59 As Kenneth Thompson emphatically stated, Niebuhr had “declared war on the most fateful illusion of all, the liberal view of power, according to which power was an archaism, the last remnant of the barbaric, pre-industrialized, feudal age.”Footnote 60
Niebuhr certainly acknowledged that the lust for power was a “universal” element in human affairs. But he did not view it as definitive of what human nature is like. It was because of such interpretive tendencies that Niebuhr rejected those he viewed as too pessimistic – as “cynical” realists.Footnote 61 While he spared him such an indictment, he nonetheless felt that Morgenthau's mistake was in misunderstanding the relation between the will to power and the impulse of love in human nature. Morgenthau saw power and love to be “organically connected, growing as they do from the same root of loneliness.” Thus it is the “striving to escape loneliness [that] gives the impetus to both the lust for power and the longing for love.”Footnote 62 Niebuhr saw the relation between the lust for power and love quite differently, and thought that “in Morgenthau's realistic rigor to isolate the dominant motives of the nations [the lust for power] from the pretended higher one [the hypocritical pretense of a deeper loyalty to higher values], he may have made the mistake of obscuring the important residual creative factor in human rationality.”Footnote 63
Michael Smith rightly pointed out that whereas “for Morgenthau the will-to-power is the starting point of analysis; for Niebuhr it is an aspect of the sin of pride which itself is part of a larger analysis.”Footnote 64 Unlike Morgenthau, Niebuhr did not view the “lust for power” as a “law of nature.” Moreover, Niebuhr cast the “lust for power” in a broader and deeper channel than did Morgenthau. While Niebuhr held that what he called the “will to power” was an undeniable fact of experience as well as a perennial feature in human affairs, he discerned “spiritual” depths in the will to power that extended its meaning. Niebuhr saw the “will to power” as a spiritualized modification of the mere survival impulse. Power as such in the human being is a neutral phenomenon that is paradoxically subject to a double transmutation. On the one hand, it becomes the will to “self-realization” whose highest form is “self-giving.” Following the biblical paradox that “he who gains himself shall lose himself, while he who loses himself shall gain himself,” Niebuhr insisted that the law of love (agape) means that only in self-giving can the self achieve fulfillment. It is love that defines our “essential nature” for Niebuhr, and not the “lust for power” or unbridled self-interest. On the other hand, because the self is anxious in its finite freedom, the self, through the sinful pride of self-love, violates the law of love. Consequently, the power that inheres in the survival impulse is spiritually transmuted into the will to power understood as the desire for power and glory.Footnote 65
Undoubtedly self-love – in which the self falsely makes itself the center of existence – plays havoc in all areas of life and constantly threatens the very fabric of community. But for Niebuhr egotism, or self-love, “is ‘natural’ [only] in the sense that it is universal, it is not natural in the sense that it does not conform to man's nature who transcends himself indeterminately and can only have God rather than self for his end.”Footnote 66 The imperialistic impulse in every person that St. Augustine knew so well, though all-pervasive, is a corruption of human nature and not, as Michael Smith claimed is the case with Morgenthau, central to self-identity. Niebuhr thought that because Morgenthau viewed the self as inevitably turning to power to achieve what it found unachievable through love,Footnote 67 he obscured “the important residual creative factor in human rationality.”Footnote 68 Because Morgenthau saw the desire for power arising both from the “logic of competition” and from a universal animus dominandi that overwhelms the former, he gave us, in Smith's words, “a form of original sin which, unlike Niebuhr's, is both necessary and inevitable.”Footnote 69
Niebuhr's concern with power in the political arena was driven by his interest in issues of justice and injustice. For Morgenthau there was nothing much more to expect than that the struggle for power was both all-pervasive and, therefore, the beginning and end of discussion. Niebuhr, on the other hand, saw this struggle, though constant, as open to modification and sometimes able to be transcended in the quest for justice. Justice, for Niebuhr, was both the adjudication of conflicts of self-interest by the balancing of power and the embodiment of love in the fabric of social life. Since it was the law of love that defined the self, it was love that enabled the self to discern and meet the needs of others in ways that the discriminate adjudication of interests and balancing of power against power cannot know or achieve. Niebuhr understood justice as love making its way in the world, prompting “us to seek ever wider and more inclusive structures of justice.” Even in the domain of international power politics Niebuhr felt that the residual creative element in human rationality that Morgenthau's analysis obscured was evident.
Given his conviction that the power impulse was a corruption of love, even the “strength of the modern nation's self-regard and power impulse has not eliminated the residual capacity of peoples and nations for loyalty to values, cultures, and civilizations of wider and higher scope than the interests of the nation.” Being ever the realist himself, however, Niebuhr insisted that “the proportionate strength of the ‘lower’ and the ‘higher’ motives and ends is seriously altered in collective morality.” He fully realized that “the power impulse of the nation is, in fact, so strong, and its sense of a higher loyalty so weak, that only an irrelevant idealism would speculate about the possibility of the nation subordinating its national interest to that of an overarching culture.” What Niebuhr was interested in was that realists like Morgenthau acknowledge “the possibility that even a residual loyalty to values, transcending national existence, may change radically the nation's conception of the breadth and quality of its ‘national interest.’”Footnote 70
2. National Interest
The theological basis for Niebuhr's analysis of power also led to key differences with Morgenthau over the nature and place of self-interest in the life of nations. In Niebuhr's conviction that love is the law of the self, and that self-love is a violation of that law, we find the wellspring for his critique of the political realist's assessment of self-interest in political affairs. As Niebuhr put it,
there are modern realists, for instance, who, in their reaction to abstract and vague forms of international idealism, counsel the nation to consult only its own interests. In a sense collective self-interest is so consistent that it is superfluous to advise it. But a consistent self-interest on the part of a nation will work against its interests because it will fail to do justice to the broader and longer interests, which are involved with the interests of other nations.Footnote 71
The corrective for such extreme realism, Niebuhr believed, rested with “the Augustinian formula for the leavening influence of a higher upon a lower loyalty or love” as being “effective in preventing the lower loyalty from involving itself in self-defeat.”Footnote 72
Niebuhr and Morgenthau realized the ambiguity and levels of complexity in speaking of national self-interest. They both understood that what passed for the national interest was not as “national” as it would appear in any unitary, abstract, consensus-based sense. In his 1967 discussion with Niebuhr, Morgenthau, after pointing to the abstract character of speaking of “nations and the moral acts of nations,” observed that “there is no such thing as a ‘nation’ which can act by itself. There are officials who can act on behalf of the nation because there are constitutions that tell them to do so.”Footnote 73 Moreover, there are within any democratic nation various centers of power and influence that act upon what is assumed to be the national interest.
Beyond the admitted difficulties in determining what the national interest should be or whether, in any given instance,Footnote 74 what passes for the national interest is truly in the nation's best interests, Niebuhr had grave reservations about the tendency of his realist friends, including the venerable diplomat George Kennan,Footnote 75 to define national self-interest as a moral end in itself. Not only did Niebuhr deny that the national interest possesses moral dignity, he also felt that such a claim was abortive in that it inclined a nation to define its interests too narrowly, thus sacrificing those mutual interests it has with other nations. Niebuhr, as Gordon Harland noted, “was continually showing how the Christian understanding could widen the vision of realists and thus provide a sounder and more humane basis for American policy.”Footnote 76 In his treatment of his fellow realists Niebuhr was most concerned with stressing the need to find areas where values transcending self-interest intersect with the national interest itself.
Niebuhr felt very strongly that the responsible view “must know the power of self-interest in human society without giving it moral justification.”Footnote 77 His view was that “a realism becomes morally cynical or nihilistic when it assumes that the universal characteristic in human behavior must also be regarded as normative.”Footnote 78 Advocating the kind of realism they did, both Morgenthau and Kennan had greater difficulty than Niebuhr in relating ethical norms to political life.Footnote 79 In fact they tended to ignore the issue on the basis of its complexity. However, as Niebuhr saw it, the point needed to be stressed that
a preoccupation with our own interests must lead to an illegitimate indifference toward the interests of others, even when modesty prompts the preoccupation. The cure for a pretentious idealism … is not egotism. It is a concern for both the self and the other in which the self, whether individual or collective, preserves a “decent” respect for the opinions of mankind derived from a modest awareness of the limits of its own knowledge and power.Footnote 80
When Niebuhr came to grips with Morgenthau's Politics among the Nations he confronted a similar issue. Niebuhr's concern was to
raise once again the question whether a realistic interpretation may not err in obscuring the residual capacity for justice and devotion to the larger good, even when it is dealing with the dimensions of collective behavior in which the realistic assumptions about human nature are most justified.Footnote 81
Although Morgenthau sometimes seemed to suggest that nations possess loyalties and values beyond their own interests, he perceived appeals to such loyalties and values as fraudulent. Any invocation “of moral principles for the support of national policies … is always and of necessity a pretense.”Footnote 82 In their 1967 discussion for the journal War/Peace Report Niebuhr, discussing his criticism of Morgenthau made back in 1965, noted that “on the whole I think” Morgenthau
rightly [maintained] that moral reasons given by nations for their actions are pretenses to justify their national self-interests. Of course, he says that to some extent national self-interest may be acknowledged. My point is that people, even nations, engage in this pretense because they are moral. This pretense is not engaged in to aid the ally or defeat the enemy, but to convince the people themselves that they are behaving morally.Footnote 83
Because he was so focussed on the pretension and hypocrisy of nations' hiding their self-interests behind the mask of some “higher virtue,” Morgenthau strongly advised that we emphasize only the national interest in the conduct of foreign affairs. Niebuhr absolved Morgenthau of the charge of his critics that he was proposing an inward-looking, arrogant nationalism. What Niebuhr wanted was for Morgenthau to entertain the question of whether there is “anything in the anatomy of man, as a ‘rational’ and ‘moral’ creature, which prompts his embarrassment about the consistent self-regard of his parochial community and the consequent hypocrisy of claiming a higher motive than the obvious one.”Footnote 84
This exchange took place in 1967, when Morgenthau and Niebuhr addressed each other directly – far more directly than in the New York gathering when Niebuhr, too ill to attend, merely responded to those who paid tribute to him in the print version of the meeting. In the pages of The War/Peace Report we witness their direct interchange.Footnote 85 Niebuhr, while having acknowleded self-interest in all political action, and knowing nations never “sacrifice themselves for other nations,” wanted nonetheless to insist (and get Morgenthau to agree) that “the Marshall Plan, which might be defined as an act of wise self-interest, really [did] include interests other than our own.”Footnote 86 It is the wisdom of statesmanship, he urged, to use self-interest for moral ends, both domestically and internationally. Morgenthau remained a bit more suspicious, noting that in speaking “of nations and moral acts of nations” we are talking about “an abstraction.” Moreover, while moral considerations obviously enter into the President's actions, whenever “we are dealing with a principle of abstract justice on the one hand and a consideration of national self-interest on the other, the latter wins over the former every time.”Footnote 87
In essence Niebuhr considered Morgenthau's appeal to realism as having missed something important. He believed that in too narrowly spotlighting the dominant motive of the nations the “important residual creative factor in human rationality” is overlooked. In arguing for the superiority of Augustine as a “more reliable guide than any known thinker,” Niebuhr insisted that while
modern “realists” know the power of collective self-interest as Augustine did … they do not understand its blindness. Modern pragmatists understood the irrelevance of fixed and detailed norms; but they do not understand that love must take the place as the final norm of these inadequate norms. Modern liberal Christians know that love is the final norm for man; but they fall into sentimentality because they fail to measure the power and persistence of self-love.Footnote 88
Niebuhr's unwavering conviction was that the norms of justice which can and must be instruments of the love commandment are relevant to international as well as domestic life. A Christian realism does not sacrifice anything in the way of a “realist” approach to the political order. Indeed it deepens and enhances such an approach.
INTERNATIONAL POLITICS AND WORLD VISION
Kenneth Thompson wrote that “perhaps Niebuhr's chief contribution to the realm of international politics can be found in his bold and fearless attacks on the most widely held illusions, such as the misconception that institutions in and of themselves would reshape international society.”Footnote 89 According to Ronald Stone, when Niebuhr was in attendance at sessions of Kennan's Policy Planning Staff, Niebuhr
played the role of critic when world government proposals were discussed. His position was to promote all possible international cooperation and organization, but not to allow utopian visions of world government to interfere with the complicated task of securing the precarious order and justice that were available within the existing system.Footnote 90
Living only up to the Cold War era, Niebuhr held out little expectation for the establishment of a viable transnational organization that could effectively maintain world order. Although he valued the United Nations he did not, according to Kenneth Thompson, see it “as the source of much hope, although he was more optimistic about its economic and social activities than its role as a peace and security agency in the Cold War.”Footnote 91 At the most he felt that if each side in the bipolar balance of power (between the United States and the Soviet Union) could temper the ideological fanaticism that demonizes the opponent and prevents compromise and cooperation, the possibility of nuclear stability could increase.Footnote 92
Niebuhr clearly recognized international politics to be essentially anarchical, that “beyond the national (and in a few cases the imperial) community lies international chaos, slightly qualified by minimal forms of international cooperation,” and that “the problem of overcoming this chaos and of extending the principle of community to world-wide terms has become the most urgent of all the issues which face our epoch.”Footnote 93 While at the time a clear direction in World War II was still an open question, Niebuhr was thinking ahead to the postwar world. He much preferred the approach of those he calls “historical realists” over that of the “rationalists and idealists” when it came to notions of the feasibility of world government. Having had a long track record of playing down the likelihood of establishing anything like a “world government,” Niebuhr consistently attacked a variety of views that espoused just such a possibility. His point was that, sadly, the possibility of achieving a workable world government bore no relation to the desire for or urgency of one.
Whereas the idealists thought in abstract moral terms and pointed to the pressing need of finding a global solution to world government, the historical realists had the definite edge. They understood the “perennial problems of politics” that resisted such a simple solution. With respect to the realists whose wisdom he favored, Niebuhr made a distinction. On the one hand there are those realists who, wholly cynical as to the likelihood of moving beyond the anarchy of international life, saw only a balance of power as the solution to international chaos. This, for Niebuhr, was no solution at all, but rather at best a holding action – one that was destined to break down and degenerate into future conflicts. On the other hand, there were those he labeled “imperialistic realists” who at least knew that in order to achieve a workable balance of power there must be an organizational center. Since world government was illusory, this group advocated that a coalition or hegemony of postwar powers assume the mantle. The major flaw here as Niebuhr saw it was that such a solution did not take very seriously the problem of global justice and ignored the issue of tyranny in the hegemonic order that was to be achieved via the imperial process.Footnote 94 For Niebuhr it was axiomatic that “the less a community is held together by cohesive forces in the texture of its life the more it must be held together by power.” This fact led him “to the dismal conclusion that the international community lacking these inner cohesive forces, must find its first unity through coercive force to a larger degree than is compatible with the necessities of justice.”Footnote 95
Niebuhr, of course, scorned any naive proposal calling for “a world constitutional convention which would set up the machinery of a global constitutional order and would then call upon the nations to abrogate or abridge their sovereignty in order that this new created universal sovereignty could have unchallenged sway. No such explicit abnegation,” he insisted, “has ever taken place in the history of the world.”Footnote 96 In addition to the patent absurdity of such a hope Niebuhr called upon Augustine, who, in the context of Stoic euphoria over the prospect of a cosmopolis in the form of a benign Pax Romana, cautioned that a world community “is fuller of dangers as the greater sea is more dangerous.”Footnote 97
The problem went deeper, however. Niebuhr argued that beyond the fact that governments cannot be created by fiat, governments themselves have only “limited efficacy in integrating a community.” Communities, Niebuhr never tired of emphasizing, emerge out of organic factors – meaning by this elements such as geographic boundaries, ethnic homogeneity, language, unique cultural forces, and some common experience and traditionFootnote 98 – namely a historic process and not an artificial contrivance.Footnote 99 Communities, Niebuhr contended, were not created by government. “The authority of government is not primarily the authority of law nor the authority of force, but the authority of the community itself. Laws are obeyed because the authority of the community accepts them as corresponding, on the whole, to its conception of justice.”Footnote 100
Niebuhr was here in agreement with the notable jurist of international law, Hans Kelsen, when, in criticizing Gerhart Niemeyer's Law without Force, Niebuhr wrote that men such as Niemeyer
imagine that nations insist upon absolute sovereignty only because we have had a “natural law” which justified such sovereignty; and that therefore a new definition of international law, which denied the principle of absolute sovereignty of nations, would serve to annul the fact. They think that we lack an international government only because no one has conceived a proper blueprint of it. … These pure constitutionalists have a touching faith in the power of a formula over the raw stuff of history.Footnote 101
Life, Niebuhr contended rather pithily in 1953, “is a better unifier than law. Law can only define and perfect what life has established.”Footnote 102
Morgenthau, speaking in “theoretical terms,” said that
a stable order requires three elements: first, a central power that cannot be challenged by any sub-power within the community; secondly, loyalties that transcend parochial loyalties, and thirdly, a common expectation of justice, which at least will promise all important segments of the population a modicum of satisfaction for their aspirations.
Niebuhr replied,
In the history of democracies, there is always sovereign power at the center which operates by the consent of the governed. Now this consent permits the sovereign power to use armed might to quell dissent. I think there is no possibility of getting on the world level a sovereign power that has sufficient consent of the governed from all over the world so that it can use military power to put down dissent. So I would say real world order is probably impossible for decades to come. First there must be integration on all levels.Footnote 103
However urgent the situation, Niebuhr saw no clear solution on the horizon. Technological achievements had actually exacerbated perennial problems by having “established a rudimentary world community” but not having “integrated it organically, morally or politically.”Footnote 104 In 1955 he deplored the fact that we now “face the problem of integrating the world community under unanticipated hazards” – Communism's attempt to “organize the whole world upon the basis of its utopian vision” and “the development of atomic weapons.”Footnote 105 By 1949, the year both superpowers possessed the hydrogen bomb, Niebuhr pointed to the stark urgency of finding our way toward some transnational arrangement.Footnote 106
Niebuhr was in hopes that over time expanded loyalties and trusts (increased economic interdependences, fear of mutual annihilation, and perhaps the moral one – that enlightened people perceive some obligation to their fellow human beings beyond the limits of the nation-state) would occur and that, as this happened, more adequate institutional arrangements would emerge. Niebuhr, however, was not sanguine about the overall prospect. Economic independence might instead lead to the strong outmaneuvering or outvoting the weak. And the prospect of nuclear annihilation seemed too abstract as compared to threats from tangible foes. Finally, for Niebuhr, the “inchoate sense of obligation to the inchoate community of mankind,” however important, “did not have as much immediate political relevance as is sometimes supposed.”Footnote 107
Overall, Niebuhr and Morgenthau remained sadly pessimistic as to any realistic hope for a solution to this most pressing problem. Niebuhr's judgment was that
there cannot be a world peace without a world army – a United Nations army – that would quell any defiance of the United Nations. Now the nations are far from integrating their armies into a world army; nor is there any prospect that any nation will submit its sovereignty to a world government. … There is no prospect of averting disaster in the next decades through a constitutional convention. A constitutional convention would not solve the problem of order so long as the world itself has not become integrated, as the national community has been integrated.
Morgenthau, returning to the view that we are stuck with the nation-state system for the foreseeable future, held out the hope that
the anarchic tendencies of that nation-state system can be mitigated and developed toward world integration by intelligent diplomacy. Common interests can be created and antagonistic interests can be reconciled. All kinds of things can be done to oil the machinery that keeps peace and order among sovereign nations. That is the immediate hope.Footnote 108
ETHICS AND POLITICAL REALISM
Roger Shinn claimed that “the most striking paradox in [Morgenthau's] paradoxical character concerned the place of morality in human life and especially in politics.”Footnote 109 A generation earlier Shinn had given voice to this paradox between the realist and the moralist, and found “Morgenthau far more attractive because of his undisguised ethical concern.”Footnote 110 Perhaps Shinn is correct. We find that Morgenthau, in his very first major American publication, called for a renewal of “those intellectual and moral faculties of man to which alone the problems of the social world will yield.”Footnote 111 Morgenthau's recent biographer Christoph Frei obviously agreed when he maintained that Morgenthau
never was nor could he ever be solely a realist. Such was his nature that two sides were always present: the lucid, dispassionate observer of reality and the deeply passionate moralist. Which side of his nature was more strongly manifested at any given time depended largely on his surroundings. “I might have become a great idealist if I had lived in a realistic environment,” he wrote many years later without a trace of irony. Fate, however, had cast him adrift in America – in an intellectual environment where the lessons of the realist were bound to create a greater stir than his basic liberal values.Footnote 112
No doubt because of that fact critics of Morgenthau, as his one-time student Kenneth Thompson put it, “overlooked Morgenthau's early emphasis on the limitations and proper use of power, its integral relations to national purpose and the constraints of national interest. They also overlooked his extended analysis of international morality and the role of ethics, mores, and laws.”Footnote 113
While not excluding ethics from the domain of politics, Morgenthau seemed only willing to see good and evil as bearing on the issue of lesser or greater evils. Politics was, in his account, “the ethics of doing evil” in which choices between greater or lesser evils are both crucial and the sum total of ethical consideration. In the context of talking about Christian ethics he wrote that the moral strategy of the “lesser evil” looks for that particular action at one's disposal “which is likely to do the least violence to the commands of Christian ethics.”Footnote 114 Morgenthau's famous statement is apropos:
To know with despair that the political act is inevitably evil, and to act, nevertheless, is moral courage. To choose among several expedient actions the least evil one is moral judgment. In the combination of political wisdom, moral courage and moral judgment, man reconciles his political nature with his moral destiny.Footnote 115
The political act is inherently evil and man, for Morgenthau, is, in essence, “political” man. The statesman must concern himself “with human nature as it actually is,”Footnote 116 and, in doing so, seek out the most effective and least evil of whatever realistic actions are open to him. How the statesman is to bring together what is an effective course of action with what is of a lesser evil is not spelled out other than to suggest it depends entirely on the wisdom and ability of the particular statesman. In this process one seeks out the individual with a sense of moral responsibility to so equip himself with the requisite statesmanlike wisdom and ability.Footnote 117
On the matter of “prudence” Niebuhr saw limitation. “Considerations of prudence … inevitably arrest the impulse toward, and concern for, the life of the other.”Footnote 118 Yet under the prompting of criticism from Kenneth Thompson, Niebuhr seemed to accept the charge that he came “rather late in arriving at the idea that prudence as well as justice must be a norm of statesmanship.”Footnote 119 While Niebuhr never denied the importance of prudence in politics, he did think that when seeking to find a meeting point between parochial interests and the general interest in the art of statecraft, prudence alone would lead the statesman to define interest too narrowly. “It is necessary, therefore,” Niebuhr wrote, “to draw upon another moral and spiritual resource to widen the conception of interest.” And that resource is the “sense of justice” that can “prevent prudence from becoming too prudential in defining [the parochial] interest.”Footnote 120
What Roger Shinn found most striking of all was Morgenthau's explicit religious references made in his book Science: Servant or Master published in 1972 – a book dedicated to “the memory of Reinhold Niebuhr” (Niebuhr having died the year before). In this book Morgenthau, confronting the terrible dilemma of nuclear destruction, insisted that nothing less was required than a radical transformation of human nature (something wholly inconsistent with his views on the nature of man). He went on to say that while we humans inevitably suffer, God cannot, and introduced something akin to the Christian view of a suffering God-man who identifies with human suffering. Shinn did not know quite what to make of this, but was unwilling to “ascribe it to the musings of an aged man” since Morgenthau claimed that he had written these reflections in the 1930s. Expressing an unfulfilled desire to have conversed with Morgenthau about his use of religious language, Shinn let the matter drop.Footnote 121
My guess is that the ethical import of Morgenthau's newfound religious expressions would not have found its way into the kind of creative dialectical relationship Niebuhr's religious views had within the world of power and politics. At the very best it would have found no better place than in the general view Morgenthau held that, as real as morality is in human existence, it has precious little place in the dynamics of political affairs. Morgenthau's vision remained dualistic – between the realities of actual life rooted in a thoroughgoing anthropological pessimism, and a transcendental realm of “ought” in which ethical norms are recognized but dismissed as inapplicable to actual life. The fact that he recognized a tension between the two is important. Nevertheless, for Morgenthau it is a tension that lingers, devoid of any possible resolution. Indeed its elements remain devoid of sufficient relationship to be related in any creative fashion. There was no attempt to dialectically relate transcendent norms to political reality as there was at the very core of Niebuhr's thought and program.Footnote 122
NIEBUHR'S “UNSOLVED PROBLEM”
Niebuhr, of course, was unwilling to accept that which he acknowledged along with the realists to be universal in human nature being normative also. If self-love and the lust for power are what define human nature, all ethical standards are voided. Niebuhr, Kenneth Thompson maintained, saw agape as the “law” of life and ably related this norm of sacrificial and heedless love to political realities. He also claimed that this was, paradoxically, “the source of [Niebuhr's] deepest insights and his most misleading political estimates.”Footnote 123 Thompson noted certain virtues in Niebuhr's position: love serves the prophetic function of inspiring self-criticism of political actions. Love has a moderating influence on the pursuit of interest wherein our reason alone as an instrument of achieving discriminate justice is, itself, too involved. Love by creating a spirit of contrition can break some of the pride of the implacable contestants. Compromise can be achieved when the pretension of the individual and collective ego are laid bare and the dishonesties of conflict are indicated. Love assists in the identification of mutual interests which reason corrupted by passion might otherwise obscure. At a more proximate level, reason and morality qualify and mitigate the political struggle by tempering power with justice.Footnote 124
Yet Niebuhr, whose major strength was attempting to relate transcendent norms to both domestic and national self-interests, was also viewed as vulnerable to criticism here. In domestic politics critics questioned his success at relating agape to the realities of justice. Niebuhr's passion for social justice recognized the need for balances of interest among elements within society. Yet he consistently claimed that without a love that pulls us beyond the bare requirements of balancing interests, justice cannot be carried beyond mere calculation and soon degenerates into a mere “balance of power” between those elements.Footnote 125 Even in the field of international politics Niebuhr insisted that the norm of love could help to lift a nation out of the narrow, self-enclosed egotism that prevents it from seeing beyond its own self-interests to include the interests of others. And it is precisely here that a critic like Thompson saw a definite parallel to the problem others discerned in Niebuhr's efforts to relate love and justice within a democracy.
Kenneth Thompson was a student of Morgenthau and a professed admirer of Niebuhr. He knew the reasons George Kennan credited Niebuhr with having exercised so great an influence on him as well as others in the realist circle, regardless of whether Kennan actually termed Niebuhr “the father of all of us.” Thompson pointed to the fact that the “intellectual debt to the Protestant theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr,” by the likes of Kennan and Morgenthau – among numerous others – derived from his 1932 book Moral Man and Immoral Society, which “elaborated a realistic theory of international politics.” Yet Thompson, a man Niebuhr refers to as one of his “friendly critics,” delivered what is perhaps the most poignant criticism of Niebuhr's contribution to political theory. In acknowledging Niebuhr's immense contribution to understanding of the problem of morality in international politics, Thompson pointed to the fact that “the realm of politics is the twilight zone where ethics and power meet, and it is in this troubled zone that Niebuhr has made his deepest thrust.”Footnote 126 Yet it was also here where we find “the unsolved problem in Niebuhr's political philosophy,” an unsolved problem that stemmed from his difficulty in establishing the “relevance – or irrelevance” to “concrete political problems” of the norms of love and justice he derived from his religious faith. In effect the “unsolved problem in Niebuhr's philosophy arose precisely from this crowning point in his thought.”Footnote 127
In an article published the year before the one that appeared in the Kegley-Bretall volume in 1956, Thompson wrote that Niebuhr's analysis of “the international scene proceeds simultaneously at two levels.” While “he constructs a rational theory of the behavior of states based on the primacy of their interest” – thus traveling “the same road as other contemporary realists” – Niebuhr was “concerned to establish a normative theory in order to avert what he has called the abyss of moral cynicism inherent in a merely rational theory.”Footnote 128 It was Niebuhr's effort to relate the standard of love to the “relative and proximate terms more appropriate to the realities of politics” that defined the problem for Thompson, and he saw Niebuhr as having come up short. Thompson's contributing essay to the Kegley-Bretall volume was a reworking of the 1955 article and, with some reformulation, repeated the same criticism.Footnote 129 Thompson claimed that “Niebuhr's most serious political errors have arisen from a confusion of normative principles with the possibilities inherent in a given political context.” Thompson voiced an even sharper criticism. He asserted that, until recently, Niebuhr's use of abstract ideological terms gave his own political philosophy the same “fundamental defect … for which he has criticized so unsparingly both liberal and Marxian thought. In seeking to apply an absolute ethic however indirectly to politics, he has in the past disregarded or underestimated the iron law of politics and the enduring truths of foreign policy.”Footnote 130 To some extent Thompson saw that Niebuhr, in having “moved in the direction of a pragmatic view of world politics, has dealt with increasing emphasis upon the limits of a rational as well as a normative theory in practice.” And in a double-edged compliment Thompson reckoned that although Niebuhr's focus on theology and normative theory has left the “systematic study of the ‘laws’ of interest and politics” to his followers, he “has clarified and illuminated” the “tragic paradoxes of politics … as no other present-day political philosopher.”Footnote 131 Sadly Niebuhr, in his reply to critics in the 1956 Kegley-Bretall volume, never came to grips with Thompson's rather potent criticisms.
