I. A “Realist” Critique of Liberalism: Against Sentimentalism, Complacency, and Self-Righteousness

In examining Niebuhr's shifting attitudes, and potential contributions, to liberalism, we must be clear about what is meant by liberalism, and what Niebuhr understood liberalism to be—and how these differ. Here I will be discussing several overlapping, but significantly different, versions of liberalism. The first, which we might call “liberalism broadly speaking,” refers to a political theory that champions limited, representative governmental institutions, and constitutional protection and cultural respect for individual rights. Such rights are understood as valuable in allowing each individual adult to “make as many effective decisions without fear or favor about as many aspects of her or his life as is compatible with the like freedom of every other adult,” by protecting individuals against “the incursions of public oppression.”Footnote ¹³ These institutional prescriptions reflect an underlying commitment to the idea that all individuals have an irrefragable moral claim to be treated justly, where just treatment involves being permitted to exercise their abilities to chart the course of their own lives, having some say in what is done to them, and being offered principled explanations for any coercive demands to which they are subjected—claims which they can comprehend and which they could, in principle, accept.Footnote ¹⁴ These commitments reflect an underlying respect for the dignity of individuals, and a belief that individual self-determination and self-development are intrinsic goods to be fostered.Footnote ¹⁵

The young Niebuhr—following many of his contemporaries—understood liberalism differently. His attacks on “liberalism” had a range of different targets (not all of which he treated fairly or accurately): the economic doctrine of laissez-faire; a political theory that endorsed elite-led parliamentary democracy, buttressed by rational or “scientific” bureaucracies; a tendency to view politics as susceptible to norms of reasonableness, disinterested collaboration, and cumulative progress (which he attributed above all to John Dewey); the faith in the power of enlightened conscience and innate benevolence to effect transformative social change that he found in both “Social Gospel” Christianity and Woodrow Wilson's approach to world politics; and the sanctimonious tendency to treat political action as a moral crusade—combined with acceptance of unjust social inequalities—that he believed inhered in all of these variants of liberalism. For Niebuhr, all these positions reflected an underlying doctrine of rationalistic meliorism: a naive faith in the inevitability of gradual progress based on steadily increasing human intelligence and moral virtue; reason and personal morality (as opposed to institutional balances of power and social conflict) would guarantee the achievement of justice.Footnote ¹⁶

Niebuhr's interwar attacks on “liberalism” referred both to this rationalist-meliorist outlook and to a broader political tendency that favored moderate reformism and rejected socialist goals and revolutionary action. In his postwar writings, Niebuhr would continue to identify “liberalism” with reformist politics; but he came to identify liberalism's underlying philosophy more with “liberalism broadly speaking” than with the meliorist assumptions (and bourgeois interests) he had previously attributed to liberalism. Niebuhr also, as we will see, helped to shape and define another variant of liberalism—”Cold War liberalism”—which sought to revise liberalism as a political and philosophical tendency, by sloughing off the perceived errors of meliorist liberalism. Niebuhr's particular version of this postwar liberalism—the “tempered liberalism” of the title—developed in reaction to earlier, meliorist liberalism, may also provide a constructive alternative to more recent theories of liberalism.Footnote ¹⁷

Niebuhr's objections to rationalist-meliorist “liberalism”—particularly his tendency to see its denial of conflict and failure to redress social injustices as irresponsible, hypocritical, and self-indulgent—reflected his response to World War I and to industrial labor in Detroit (where Niebuhr served as a parish minister from 1915 to 1928). Niebuhr regarded the political leaders who had overseen the outbreak and conduct of the war as irresponsibly playing with the lives of their citizens—and then, on the Allied side, cynically exploiting the language of justice to veil vengeance and venality. In Detroit, Niebuhr was struck by the suffering of the workers—and by Henry Ford's pious hypocrisy and overbearing domination, and the self-serving blindness of Ford's customers, who enjoyed the products of Ford's factories without looking at the exploitation and suffering occurring within them.Footnote ¹⁸

That Niebuhr turned his polemical fire on (meliorist) liberalism does not mean that he rejected liberalism wholesale; as he noted, he tended “to be most critical of that in other men to which he is most tempted himself.”Footnote ¹⁹ Even at his most radical, Niebuhr continued to share some liberal aspirations and scruples; some critics have felt both his early and later thought insufficiently critical of liberalism.Footnote ²⁰ Yet the younger Niebuhr's frustrations with the “liberalism” of his day were very real. These frustrations were directed not only against the doctrines but against the ethos which he identified with liberalism. Liberalism, he complained, was “too intellectual and too little emotional” to be “an efficient force in history”; liberals refused to “take a chance and accept a challenge.” Liberalism's “gray spirit of compromise” stifled “the spirit of enthusiasm, not to say fanaticism, which is so necessary to move the world out of its beaten tracks.”Footnote ²¹ Their optimism and aversion to sharp conflicts and hard choices made liberals both passive and eager to find justifications when faced with injustice.Footnote ²²

Niebuhr's critique of (meliorist and reformist) liberalism was thus “ethical” in the sense of being focused on the sort of ethos that marked liberalism and the sort of political action—and actors—that adherence to liberalism fostered. Niebuhr did not go so far as to embrace the ethos of hardness, single-mindedness, and fanaticism advocated by many radical critics of liberalism in the 1930s. But he did suggest that the injection of a degree of enthusiasm—even fanaticism—into politics would better serve the causes of democracy and justice than a liberal ethos of moderation, tolerance, and compromise.

Niebuhr did not merely deplore liberal dispositions and attitudes; he traced them to a deeper ethical outlook, premised on a misguidedly simplistic moral psychology. Liberalism failed to acknowledge “the inevitable tragedy of human existence, the irreducible irrationality of human behavior and the tortuous character of human history.” Its faith in rationality and social “technics” betrayed an assumption that human misery came from a lack of human power. In fact, misery arose from the perversion of the human will, and increases in power did not lessen, but augmented, the human capacity to inflict destruction and suffering.Footnote ²³ The deployment of reason, and indeed of self-justifying appeals to justice and benevolence, readily served the lust for power—particularly among those who already possessed, and sought to guard, their power. Human self-love and self-deception made “the simple distinctions between good and evil, between selfishness and altruism, with which liberal idealism has tried to estimate moral and political facts, invalid,” and the social harmony and justice envisioned by liberal reformers impossible. The freedom that human beings possess through their capacity for imagination and reasoning makes morality and creativity possible. But it is also the root of pride, vanity, and will power. The human potential for good is also limited by inherent partiality: no degree of reason, imagination, or “intelligence” can make an individual see the needs of others as vividly as he sees his own. Each individual is also anxious—both because she realizes that her life is limited, dependent, and fragile, and because the limits and dangers to which she is subject are uncertain. To overcome anxiety, we seek to bring the world under our power. The belief that we can, and may, subject the world around us—including other human beings—to our control is the sin of pride. Yet pride exacerbates rather than relieves anxiety: we live in anxiety that our attempts to overpower others will fail. Thus “every desperate effort to establish security will lead to heightened insecurity.”Footnote ²⁴

Given the inevitability of conflict arising from individual and collective pride and anxiety, communities require some element of coercion to maintain unity and to adjudicate between conflicting interests and attitudes. Whenever peace is achieved, it is “gained by force and is always an uneasy and an unjust one.” Indeed, it is uneasy because it is unjust. Power is needed to secure peace and fight injustice; but the possession and use of power always threatens peace, justice, and freedom. Power is a “poison”; and “the man of power, though humane impulse may awaken in him, always remains something of a beast of prey”; even his generosity is “at once a display of his power and an expression of his pity. His generous impulses freeze within him if his power is challenged or his generosities are accepted without grateful humility.” And since “power in juxtaposition with weakness is bound to cause exploitation,” power must be set against power “until a more balanced equilibrium of power is achieved.”Footnote ²⁵

His perception of injustice and its rationalizations pushed Niebuhr to favor reform; but his analysis of the psychology of domination made him suspicious of reformers. Most of us have a vested interest in the status quo, and so desire change less than we think we do. This self-deception about the degree to which they desired change was particularly marked among liberals (that is, adherents of a reformist, representative-democratic politics). Liberal reformism exhibited “the typical timidity of the middle-class intellectual,” whose fear of anarchy and violence prompted a defense of existing privilege and injustice. Niebuhr found reasons to prefer the vices of the proletariat, in what he saw as “a contest between hypocrisy and brutality, and between sentimentality and cynicism.” In the early 1930s Niebuhr preferred “the devil of vengeance” to “the devil of hypocrisy.” Justice was a higher goal than peace; violence would therefore be justified, if justice could not be achieved without resort to violence: “if a season of violence can establish a just social system and can create the possibilities of its preservation, there is no purely ethical ground upon which violence and revolution can be ruled out.”Footnote ²⁶ His goal in making such pronouncements was not to advocate revolution: he judged that a revolutionary strategy would either provoke a (more powerful) reaction—or, if successful, inaugurate new abuses by new masters. Rather, Niebuhr sought to challenge complacent liberal condemnations of radicals, by pointing to the elements of self-deception and escapism at work in absolute rejection of violence—particularly when doing so meant doing nothing to correct existing injustices, which involved “subtler types of coercion.”Footnote ²⁷

This tendency to aid the status quo was a fault not only of liberal reformists, but of all radicals who embraced an absolute ethic of nonresistance. To his critique of liberalism, Niebuhr added a critique of pacifism, which he accused of exhibiting the ethical flaw of purism, or an ethos marked by strict adherence to an absolutist moral standpoint, and consequent refusal to dirty one's hands. To attempt to avoid moral pollution or guilt entirely, Niebuhr charged, was to flee moral responsibilities to one's fellows. Purity was unattainable; the longing to escape from the impurity of political life was itself an expression of self-absorption; and the (false) belief that one had attained some purity represented a covert spiritual vanity, made all the more dangerous by being clothed in pretenses to virtue.

Purism also represented a failing in ethical practice, in that it could not allow for the balancing and discrimination which are necessary to preserve “some relative decency and justice in society against the tyranny and injustice into which society may fall.” While all governments and individuals are sinful, not all are equally guilty. However much democratic nations may fall short of their ideals, it was “sheer moral perversity” to equate these “inconsistencies” (terrible as they might be) with the “brutalities” of Nazism (and Communism). All “distinctions upon which the fate of civilization has turned in the history of mankind have been just such relative distinctions” between lesser and greater evils; to refuse to make such distinctions was willful “blindness to obvious facts of human experience.”Footnote ²⁸

His concern with dispelling self-exalting confusions around nonviolence led Niebuhr to offer a qualified critique of Gandhi—one which also reveals an important facet of Niebuhr's own approach to the ethics of political action. Gandhi's attempts to combine “the insights of a saint with the necessities of statecraft” qualified the purity of his ethical and religious ideals.Footnote ²⁹ But the impurity of Gandhi's practice made it more admirable politically: Gandhi's strategy was more realistic than his rhetoric—and all the better for it.Footnote ³⁰ Among the most realistic, as well as most ethically sensitive, of Gandhi's insights was his recognition that nonviolence was a matter not merely of actions, but of the spirit in which actions are undertaken. At its best, nonviolent resistance was a technique which expressed a broader temper of goodwill—and a discipline which protected this temper from being eroded by the bitterness bred by violent conflict. The expression of the temper of goodwill through appropriate action was an effective tactic in the struggle for justice, which lessened the resentment of those against whom moral protest was directed: “In every social conflict each party is so obsessed with the wrongs which the other party commits against it, that it is unable to see its own wrongdoing. A nonviolent temper reduces these animosities to a minimum and therefore preserves a certain objectivity in analysing the issues of the dispute.” Nonviolent resistance also undermines the “moral conceit” of those who identify the preservation of their own power with the preservation of peace. It is thus the form of political force which best reconciles the demands of politics and those of morality.Footnote ³¹

While he learned from Gandhi's stress on the importance of cultivating a nonviolent temper, Niebuhr rejected Gandhi's identification between means and ends, whereby only just means can achieve just ends: it was not the case that “the character of immediate consequences guarantees the character of the ultimate end.”Footnote ³² “Dirty hands” were inescapable for political actors: “We use evil in every moment of our existence to hold evil in check.”Footnote ³³ But even if coercion or injustice may be necessary for success, certain sorts of coercion and injustice so infect political and moral life as to undermine the ends at which they aim. Conflict and coercion are intrinsically “dangerous instruments,” “fruitful of the very evils” they sought to extirpate.Footnote ³⁴ Niebuhr trod a path between a crude consequentialism and something more nuanced. A political policy could not be said to be wholly evil “if it can be proved to be an efficacious instrument for the achievement of a morally approved end.” But a policy could not be “wholly good merely because it seems to make for ultimately good consequences. Immediate consequences must be weighed against the ultimate consequences. The destruction of life or the suppression of freedom result in the immediate destruction of moral values.” Whether the ultimate outcome justified violation of moral goods depended on the value of the end aimed at, the intrinsic value of the immediate goods sacrificed for the ultimate one, and the likelihood of to attaining the ultimate goal.Footnote ³⁵

Some proponents of Christian just war theory have attacked Niebuhr for this identification of war as intrinsically evil, even when undertaken in a just cause. Thus, Keith Pavlischek has charged that Niebuhr's stance both promotes an unduly restrictive view of when war is justified (jus ad bellum)—while also, paradoxically, promoting a crudely consequentialist and overly permissive view of acceptable conduct in war (jus in bello).Footnote ³⁶ The latter charge misses the mark: Niebuhr was ready to condemn some tactics (for instance, the first-strike use of nuclear weapons) as intrinsically “morally abhorrent,” suggesting that a victory achieved through such monstrous means would be no victory at all.Footnote ³⁷ Nor did he deny that morality may demand the use of force for the defense of “justice, order and peace.”Footnote ³⁸ Rather, he insisted that the use of force may be both a requirement and an evil—and that the use of evil means should promote a sense of misgiving and contrition. Pavlischek suggests that if an actor's goals and intentions are just, so are the actor's actions—provided they abide by the rules of jus in bello. Niebuhr opposed such a denial of the moral ambiguity and tragedy of destroying life in the name of “charity.” He also opposed the view that we can ever be sure that our actions are justified by our good intent, or will be justified by the achievement of justice. This was an example of a pervasive feature of moral life: that any creative action is also destructive, and the pursuit of (relative) justice inevitably involves us in the commission of injustice. Human intentions were never pure, and their impurity was often reflected in the unintended consequences of the actions they inspired; any use of power for good may easily produce evil, because of both the intrinsic evils of the means (force) and the elements of egoistic will-to-power and moral conceit that infect even sincere attempts to do good.Footnote ³⁹ This was all the more true where human action claims a divine mandate: “The sad experiences of Christian history show how human pride and spiritual arrogance rise to new heights precisely at the point where the claims of sanctity are made without due qualifications.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Therefore, “we must not have an easy conscience about the impurities of politics or they will reach intolerable proportions.”Footnote ⁴¹

Niebuhr would extend such critiques to all forms of self-righteousness—which he identified as “the inevitable fruit of simple moral judgments, placed in the service of moral complacency.”Footnote ⁴² But in the earlier, more “radical” phase of his career he focused his attacks on liberal and pacifist pretension and evasion, by insisting that violence, subordination, and enforced misery were always part of social life—since “it is not possible to build a community without the manipulation of power and. . . it is not possible to use power and remain completely ‘pure.’”Footnote ⁴³ Liberalism—in all its forms—obscured those forms of coercion that sustained existing injustices; both liberalism and pacifism fostered the fantasy that justice could be attained without coercion. To embrace a “realist” view of human nature and politics, combined with a commitment to the ideals of justice that liberalism itself claimed to venerate, meant rejecting liberal evasions in favor of a more radical approach. However, Niebuhr's “realistic” view of human nature and politics also induced doubt about political radicalism itself, pointing to the need to maintain internal or ethical, as well as external or institutional, limits on any agent's inclination to violence. Niebuhr's thought pointed to the self-deception involved in both of these radical approaches, as well as that of liberalism. But throughout the 1930s he remained torn between his radical and “realist” critique of liberalism, and his apprehension of the dangers to which unchecked “realism” led.

II. A (Partial) Return to Liberalism: Niebuhr's Critiques of Utopianism and Fanaticism

Events from the mid-1930s on confirmed Niebuhr's objections to liberalism and mitigated his rejection of it. The ultimate refutation of liberal hopes came from Communism, which sought to realize the liberal promise of freedom and equality through an illiberal use of power. While he continued to reiterate his critique of the sentimentality and rationalism that he attributed to (meliorist) liberalism, Niebuhr also argued that a proper understanding of the causes and consequences of Communism's crimes vindicated central elements of liberal-democratic practice—while revealing the dangers of the radical position to which he had been drawn.

Where liberalism was devoted to an ideal of “a society in which the morally embarrassing factor of power has been pushed under the rug,” Communism proposed “one final, resolute and unscrupulous thrust of power,” which would “purge the world of evil” and “establish a society in which no coercive power will be necessary.”Footnote ⁴⁴ This utopian illusion was premised on the belief that social conflict was the result of particular economic relations: harmony could be achieved through social transformation—of which Communism was the agent. Their identification of themselves with the redemptive cause of history obscured Communist leaders' power-lust, and made them regard themselves as “innocent of any evil.” These illusions were the basis of Communism's moral appeal, and its danger: they allowed Communists to “exploit every moral and political weakness of the civilized world as if they had the conscience of civilization in their keeping,” thus providing a “moral façade for the most unscrupulous political policy.” As a result, the Kremlin's “ruthless power operates behind a screen of pretended ideal ends”—a situation which was both “more dangerous and more evil than pure cynical defiance of moral ends,” since it fed a “fierce self-righteousness” that inspired remorseless ruthlessness.Footnote ⁴⁵

His rejection of utopianism did not, in itself, make Niebuhr a liberal. Both liberalism and Communism, he continued to assert, rested on “utopian” faiths. The difference between the two ideologies was that between “soft” and “hard” utopianism. “Hard utopians” believe that they have achieved perfection, that they “embody the perfect community,” and therefore “feel themselves morally justified in using every instrument of guile or force against those who oppose their assumed perfection.” “Soft utopians” are meliorists, who “expect perfection to emerge out of the ongoing process of history” but do not claim to have achieved it themselves. Belief in their own “innocency,” and in the attainability of utopia, had nourished self-assured fury on the part of “hard” utopians and sanguine passivity on the part of “soft” utopians.Footnote ⁴⁶ But while he remained critical of both types of utopianism, growing knowledge of the horrors of totalitarianism led Niebuhr to see “hard” utopianism as the greater danger. This led him to reaffirm the values and virtues of “liberalism broadly speaking”—particularly its concern with the dangers of unchecked power., and its commitment to toleration, pluralism, and individual freedom. Having previously seen liberalism as complacently wedded to the status quo and liberalism's reformist impulse as hypocritical or self-deceiving, Niebuhr now came to identify liberalism with the cause of victims of the status quo and to see incremental reform as the best means to achieving greater justice.Footnote ⁴⁷

Niebuhr's changing attitude toward “liberalism” reflected larger shifts in the understanding of liberalism. The “Cold War liberalism” that emerged following World War II was defined by more than an opposition to Soviet Communism: it was defined, in the eyes of its exponents, by a rejection of the optimism of earlier liberalism—an optimism reflected both in some “Progressive” liberals' failure to see the dangers of technocratic elitism and the evils of Communism and in the failure of proponents of “classical liberalism” to acknowledge the failures, irrationalities, and injustices of laissez-faire capitalism. “Cold War liberals,” including Niebuhr, identified their liberalism with a democratic reformism and an apprehensive commitment to safeguarding individual rights—and a rejection of all “utopian” aspirations and “dogmatic” pretensions to complete knowledge or perfect virtue.Footnote ⁴⁸

His reconciliation with liberalism and growing anticommunism has fostered a widespread perception that Niebuhr underwent a transformation from radical social critic to an “establishment” defender of mid-century American imperialism.Footnote ⁴⁹ This reflects a larger misapprehension about “Cold War liberalism.”Footnote ⁵⁰ It also neglects both the affinities with “liberalism broadly speaking” of Niebuhr's earlier radicalism, which was always founded on a wariness of unchecked power, and the continuing radical edge of his stance during the Cold War. No simple cheerleader for American power, Niebuhr accused “the so-called free nations” of forgetting “their rather ruthless power politics of the nineteenth century.” These “free nations” preferred to obscure the fact that they had only recently emancipated their colonies—and then only because “postwar weakness and weariness had made continued rule impossible.”Footnote ⁵¹ The “obviously absurd” delusion that America was “the most unselfish of all nations” was refuted by American history, which showed how democratic ideals disguised the quest for dominion.Footnote ⁵² Americans should remember that “the contest with Communism, particularly in Asia and Africa, is conducted against the background of previous ‘imperialism’ by the white nations and. . . our cause is gravely imperiled by residual resentments against. . . the white man's arrogance toward the colored people. Any policy that corrects and expiates past evils is both morally and politically correct and better than undue reliance on military force.”Footnote ⁵³

Indeed, Niebuhr viewed the Cold War as a competition between two “innocent millennial utopias,” both of which presumed to be “world savers.” Surveying the terrors of Communism, Niebuhr had the “uneasy feeling” that “our dreams of managing history might have resulted in similar cruelties,” had they not been limited by democratic practice. And even with democratic procedures in place, Americans must beware the temptation to meet the “foe's self-righteousness with a corresponding fury of our own.” There was a danger that “a frantic anti-communism” might become “so similar in its temper of hatefulness to communism itself, the difference in the respective creeds being unable to prevent the similarity in spirit.” Indeed, “if we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle” because of its ethical failings—its “hatred and vainglory” and “pride and self-righteousness.” In order to take up the global role that events had thrust upon them, Americans had to learn to recognize the moral complexity of the choices which they faced—and to accept the likelihood, frustrating to a nation used to getting its way, that in some situations there could be no happy outcome. To protect against disaster, there was a need to cultivate a “sense of modesty about the virtue, wisdom and power available to us,” and a “sense of contrition about the common human frailties and foibles which lie at the foundation of both the enemy's demonry and our vanities.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Much of Niebuhr's postwar work was concerned, not with Communist wickedness, but with combating the “self-congratulation and complacency to which a rich and powerful nation is tempted.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Niebuhr's anticommunist liberalism thus retained a critical edge in judging applications of American power and boasts of America's virtue. Closely associated with the postwar American political elite, Niebuhr pushed—both in his writings and in communications with policymakers behind the scenes—to combat “the simple contrast between communism and democracy” and the “complacent moralism” that he saw at work in American foreign policy.Footnote ⁵⁶ Accordingly—and after initial ambivalence—he came to sharply condemn the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s.Footnote ⁵⁷ While he diagnosed student radicals as driven by a “combination of self-righteous perfectionism and a sense of impotence,”Footnote ⁵⁸ he also recognized the anger of the New Left as a reaction against a “culture which boasts only of affluence and technical efficiency, but has failed to achieve moral integrity and humanness.”Footnote ⁵⁹ He acknowledged that America's wealth made “our religious anti-Communism particularly odious,” going so far as to wonder if “there is not much to choose between Communist and anti-Communist fanaticism, particularly when the latter, combined with our wealth, has caused us to stumble into the most pointless, costly, and bloody war in our history.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Throughout the period in which he had supposedly become a defender of the status quo, Niebuhr remained repulsed by “the indifference and callousness with which we treat the sufferings and the insecurity of the poor.”Footnote ⁶¹ He was particularly critical of Christian leaders who abandoned their prophetic duty to warn victorious nations and powerful classes against the dangers of vanity. Accordingly, in 1969 he attacked President Nixon, Billy Graham, and J. Edgar Hoover as “high priests in the cult of complacency,” who brought together “religious sanctity and political power” in “a heady mixture for status quo conservatism.”Footnote ⁶²

This late-life adoption of a prophetic voice might appear to represent a departure from Niebuhr's “Christian realist” mission of dispelling “moralistic illusions.”Footnote ⁶³ Such a perception, however, rests on a misunderstanding of Niebuhr's position and his underlying intention. Niebuhr had long warned against a “too consistent political realism,” which, like a too consistent idealism, represented an escape into simplicity, achieved at the cost of neglecting the limited but persistent human capacity to transcend self-love and recognize moral obligations to others. Like “purism,” “realism” failed to grasp the complex “actualities of politics, which represent bewildering mixtures of idealism and self-interest, of the sense of justice and the inclination to injustice.”Footnote ⁶⁴ It was far from clear “whether a cynical reaction to the moral sentimentality of our culture is much more mature” than that sentimentality itself.Footnote ⁶⁵ Excessive “realism” encouraged authoritarianism by suggesting that most men needed to be ruled by unquestionable political authority in order to prevent society from falling into chaos. In doing so, excessive realists placed their hopes—unrealistically—in the ability of rulers whose own fallibility they tended to ignore.Footnote ⁶⁶ Both moral sentimentality and moral pessimism threatened political liberty, the one because it convinces people that there is no need to check the power of government, the second because it believes that only absolute political authority can restrain the anarchy that arises from conflicting interests. And both fostered an unfounded and dangerous complacency, a too easy sense that one had correctly resolved the apparent tensions between politics and morality. Against both tendencies, Niebuhr famously asserted that “man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”Footnote ⁶⁷ This inclination toward injustice necessitated not only a democratic limitation and balance of power, but the exercise of a vigilant ethos that preserved both sober realism and prophetic criticism.

III. Niebuhr on the Importance of Ethos—and an Ethos for Chastened Liberalism

Niebuhr's return to liberalism was linked to a growing appreciation not only of constitutional government, political pluralism, and the protection of individual civil liberties, but of the “spirit” of liberalism, which transcended the bourgeois ideology (with its stress on free markets and property rights) of which he remained critical. In the interwar period, Niebuhr had stressed the importance of checking and balancing power rather than individual character or conscience. “Realism” had seemed to dictate that individual virtue could not be relied upon. In the postwar period he came to believe that a realistic estimation of political experience showed that institutional arrangements were not enough. Human sinfulness threatens to corrupt even the best institutional structures; individual moral effort has the power to partly redeem even the worst institutions. Institutional checks and balances were indispensable; but there was also a need for individual conscience and ethical striving. Niebuhr's wartime and postwar thought was marked not only by a renewed appreciation for the constitutional theory of the early American republic, but by a complementary concern with the role of the personal dispositions, sensibility, and habits of judgment exhibited in political action. Niebuhr continued to insist that personal virtue was insufficient to ensure justice—achieving proximate justice required a focus on achieving a balance of power between competing groups and ideals and designing institutions that might facilitate the achievement and maintenance of balance. But the achievement and preservation of balance also required undertaking political struggles in certain ways—ways defined and guided not only by institutions, but by personal character or temper.Footnote ⁶⁸

His concern with the ethos manifested in political culture and individual action reflected Niebuhr's perceptions of the most urgent dangers facing liberal democracy (that is, a variant of democracy that institutionalized the safeguarding of individual rights). The fact that Nazism and Communism, “so different in ostensible policy yet so similar in temper,” had produced such “identical fruits of cruelty and terror” was a sign that “the temper and integrity with which the political fight is waged is more important for the health of a society than any particular policy.” Not only Fascism and Communism, but McCarthyism, too, shared a “similarity in technique and temper” and “spirit,” marked by “indiscriminate accusation, the identification of any hated foe with any feared treason, the lack of meticulous standards of justice.” McCarthyism threatened “the destruction of the spirit of democratic liberty in the name of devotion to it,” by adopting unscrupulous and oppressive means and a spirit of cynical fanaticism. The health, perhaps the survival, of liberal democracy depended on avoiding these ethical deformations. As Niebuhr warned, “we are almost in greater peril from the foes within than from the foe without. The foes within are the spirits of hysteria, hatred, mistrust, and pride.” To pursue the defense of liberty in such a spirit was to undermine that defense: “History has not yet revealed a deeper irony than the destruction of the spirit of democratic liberty in the name of devotion to it.” The “middle ground” (between Communism and Fascism) on which democracy rested was preserved “not so much by particular policies as by discrimination in judgment and by integrity in observing basic standards of justice.”Footnote ⁶⁹

The main ethical pathology revealed by McCarthyism was Manicheanism—a folly to which idealists were particularly prone (even if McCarthy himself was a mere cynic).Footnote ⁷⁰ Idealists, seeking confirmation of their own virtue or superior moral insight and integrity, were apt to look for “the other person or nation” who is guilty, rather than acknowledge their own involvement in sin; they “add the fury of moral pride to the sin of selfishness,” forgetting that “political controversies are always conflicts between sinners and not between righteous men and sinners,” and that in “tragic” situations, where all alternatives are hazardous and tinged by sin, “equally sincere men will choose courses that will seem abhorrent one to the other.” This tendency led idealists to a premature complacency about their own virtue, which hampered them in the pursuit of genuine improvement and encouraged intolerance and irresponsibility (insofar as responsibility for failure could always be attributed to others).Footnote ⁷¹

Manicheanism was particularly disruptive to parliamentary democracy. Democratic politics required a capacity for “discriminating judgment,” which recognized that “an opponent on one issue is not necessarily an opponent on every other issue.” At the same time, Niebuhr warned against the tendency to opportunistically ally oneself with any potential partner, however reprehensible, in opposition to some supposedly ultimate evil. This folly—characteristic of collaborators with Nazism, Communist fellow-travelers, and the militant liberal anticommunists who made excuses for McCarthyism—actually reflected the same error in outlook as moral purism in politics: a view of the world as divided between ultimate good and ultimate evil, and of unconditional victory as a moral imperative.Footnote ⁷²

Niebuhr's rejection of the cynicism exhibited by both political opportunists and those maximalists who were ready to adopt any means to achieve desirable ends, and his insistence on the importance of integrity and a sense of justice, did not represent a repudiation of realism. But his increased stress on the ethos and ethics of political conduct did shape his understanding of “realism.” Against the errors of doctrinal “realism,” he advocated “realism” understood as a feature of “temper and viewpoint”—a disposition rather than a doctrine.Footnote ⁷³Dispositional realism involves, first, a tendency to “take everything into account,”Footnote ⁷⁴ to study the available evidence carefully, to strive to see all sides of a complex phenomenon, and to balance or integrate them in consideration. Second, dispositional realism is sensitive to the nonrational elements of passion and will in human history. A “realist” sensibility is attuned to the power of “conflicting egoistic wills” in human life.Footnote ⁷⁵ It thus depends on a stringent practice of renouncing and disciplining the proclivity toward wishful thinking.Footnote ⁷⁶ “Realism,” as Andrew Bacevich has written of Niebuhr's view, “implies an obligation to see the world as it actually is, not as we might like to see it.” For Niebuhr, such an effort can never be fully successful: our sight will always be imperfect. To approximate “realism,” or accuracy of vision, we must practice humility and contrition, and guard against (as Bacevich stresses) “hubris” and “sanctimony.”Footnote ⁷⁷ But we must also guard against intellectual extremism or immoderation—including a rejection of discriminate, nuanced judgment in favor of sweeping condemnation. Realism requires a rejection of ideological extremes and of general formulae, and an attempt to balance conflicting values and to adapt policies to the particulars of immediate circumstances.Footnote ⁷⁸

Sustaining liberal democracy—with its limits on political power, protection of individual liberties, promotion of diversity of opinion, and commitment to finding compromises and preserving ongoing, peaceful conflict—required a spirit of tolerance and respect for opponents, and a capacity for self-criticism and generosity in regarding others; guarding liberal democracy against the dangers of tyranny and fanaticism required both dispositional realism and a principled integrity in pursuit of justice. This was a difficult balance to effect. But the ethos that Niebuhr envisioned was not an idealization born of theory. It owed much to the example of extraordinary individuals, ranging from the historical figure of Abraham Lincoln to the clergy and civic activists Niebuhr had encountered early in his career. Foremost among these was the Detroit lawyer Fred M. Butzel, “the most remarkable man I have ever encountered.” Butzel was a philanthropist who could analyze the workings of power with dispassion; he displayed a tough-minded, but not malicious, cynicism about the political process, combined with an unsentimental compassion and “an ethical creed in which charity and integrity were the prime components”—an integrity that avoided the narcissism of moral purism, and a charity that was “free of condescension.”Footnote ⁷⁹

Butzel was a model of how to appreciate humanity while recognizing its shortcomings, and of the wisdom and virtue contained in a sense of humor. Humor was “indispensable” to those engaged in “organizing their fellowmen in common endeavors,” because it “reduces the frictions of life and makes the foibles of men tolerable.” Humor was wise, because it enabled “a nice mixture of mercy and judgment, of censure and forbearance” regarding others—and ourselves. It enabled the distance from self that is necessary for good moral and practical judgment: people with a sense of humor “are able to ‘stand off’ from themselves, see themselves in perspective, and recognize the ludicrous and absurd aspects of their pretensions. All of us ought to be ready to laugh at ourselves because all of us are a little funny in our foibles, conceits and pretensions. What is funny about us is precisely that we take ourselves too seriously.” The less we are able to laugh at ourselves, “the more it becomes necessary and inevitable that others laugh at us.” To meet the “disappointments and frustrations. . . irrationalities and contingencies” of life with laughter is “a high form of wisdom”; while laughter at oneself is a “prelude to the sense of contrition.”Footnote ⁸⁰

But laughter and irreverence may also reflect an “irresponsible” mood, which takes neither the self nor life seriously enough. Niebuhr's injunction not to take oneself too seriously was not permission to treat one's responsibilities lightly. To the contrary, he insisted that, even as we must recognize the flaws that obstruct us from living up to our moral aspirations, we should also recognize our responsibility for our own actions and their effects, and to other human beings with whom we have inescapable relations. Indeed, “the evasion or denial of moral responsibility” was, for Niebuhr, “the essence of immorality.”Footnote ⁸¹

Niebuhr therefore came to lay less stress on humor than on irony. As many have noted, “irony” for Niebuhr referred to situations and dynamics that arise in history: the “apparently fortuitous incongruities” which prove to have a hidden meaning, as when “virtue becomes vice through some hidden defect,” or “wisdom becomes folly because it does not know its own limits.”Footnote ⁸² But beyond this commonly recognized understanding of irony as a feature of history, we may distinguish a sense of irony, which consists in a cultivated, dispositional awareness of such incongruities and an appreciation of the limits of human action.Footnote ⁸³ An ironic “interpretation of life” allows one to at once ridicule human pretensions, sympathize with human aspirations, and sorrow at human failures. It also protects against myopia and complacency, by recognizing that there might always be a larger, more penetrating perspective beyond that available to us.Footnote ⁸⁴ Niebuhr's emphasis on irony was thus not only part of his attempt to understand history—and human limitations—from a “Christian realist” perspective. It was also part of the ethos that he sought to articulate in response to this perspective—an ethos available to those sensitive to the patterns of complexity and incongruity in human life, whether their insight comes from theory or experience. Cultivating a sense of irony requires a detachment which is attainable by few actively engaged participants; it often characterizes observers rather than activists. Yet an ironic disposition is often needed to avoid folly. There is thus a need to combine engagement (which is demanded by a sense of responsibility) with the detachment needed to embrace irony—a demanding requirement. Political participants—and, in a democracy, everyone is potentially a political participant—must be “both in the battle and above it”: they must be ready to “defend a cause against its peril, to protect a nation against its enemies, to strive for truth against error,” while understanding “how imperfect the cause is which we defend” and acknowledging the sins of one's own nation or party.Footnote ⁸⁵

A sense of humor and an ironic perspective were paths to the virtue of humility.Footnote ⁸⁶ Like other Cold War liberals, Niebuhr championed the “spirit of humility,” which rested on a recognition of “the partial and particular character of everyone's interest and the fragmentary character of every human virtue.” Such a spirit was necessary for both leaders and citizens in a liberal democracy, the survival of which depends on maintaining a “spirit of tolerant cooperation.” The fostering of humility was closely tied to a recognition of human weakness and of the tenuousness of human knowledge, which revealed the need “to question the validity of any claim, including our own.”Footnote ⁸⁷ But Niebuhr went beyond many of his peers in stressing not just humility, but contrition: a practice of “rigorous internal analysis” and self-criticism and the cultivation of an actively “uneasy conscience” which recognized the “guilt” that “unrighteous men and nations” accrue, including the guilt of “doing so much evil while we tried to do good.”Footnote ⁸⁸

Niebuhr not only preached but exemplified such self-searching criticism.Footnote ⁸⁹ Throughout his life he was quick to publicly criticize what he regarded as mistakes in his earlier positions, giving living force to his insistence that “political and moral judgments are provisional and tentative.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Niebuhr did not, however, engage in the narcissism of self-castigation: his concern was with the extent and limitations of humanity's moral capacities, not merely his own.Footnote ⁹¹ He spiced charity with irreverence—particularly toward those who claimed authority (whether that authority was political, social, moral, or religious). The combination of self-criticism and irreverence was an important ingredient in the ethos of liberal democracy, which required both moderation and tolerance and a vigilant guarding against the arrogance and encroachment of power.Footnote ⁹²

This picture of humble yet determinedly engaged and questioning citizens seems to undercut the worry that Niebuhr's stress on sinfulness and irony encourage antipolitical withdrawal and resignationFootnote ⁹³—the very charge that Niebuhr himself leveled against any “religious idealism which absolves us of responsibility for finding the best possible means to the highest possible social end.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Such puristic quietism ran counter to “the guiding principle” of Niebuhr's “mature life”: that of “religious responsibility to political affairs”—the responsibility to seek to realize moral ideals of justice in a necessarily imperfect world, even as we know we will fall short: “we have to act even though we know that we are and will be proved by subsequent history to be sinful men in action.”Footnote ⁹⁵ While insisting on the need for contrition, Niebuhr also warned against excessive self-castigation—which reflected unrealistic aspirations toward purity and perfection and clouded the ability to distinguish between greater and lesser evils, between the height of moral excellence and more modest, but necessary, moral standards. Contrition, indeed, carried its own ironic dangers, as Niebuhr had realized early on. An exhibitionistic performance of contrition might be inspired by, and serve to mask, underlying pride—the pride of a self-righteousness that sought to prove itself through self-abasement. There was “no temptation so seductive as the temptation to be humble and proud at the same time.” White Protestant liberals—like himself—were prone to “make a public confession of the bigotries and prejudices of my crowd.” While this seemed to “stamp me as a humble and contrite person,” the “very confession is supposed to impress my hearers with the fact that I do not really belong to my group; that I am superior to it. I would be greatly chagrined if anyone took my confession at its face value. For pride dictates my humble confession.” True contrition required an arduous attempt at sincere self-analysis—and to achieve, as nearly as possible, an objective view of “social facts and problems.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Contrition requires searching oneself, confronting oneself—and getting over oneself.

Acceptance of the responsibility to preserve “some relative decency and justice in society against the tyranny and injustice into which society may fall” pointed to the need for careful practical judgment. A “social ethic” demanded “discriminate judgments” about competing interests and rights, based on careful, fine-grained perception and evaluation which were precluded by the blunt instruments of the absolutist.Footnote ⁹⁷ Such capacity for “discriminate” judgment required cultivating both dispositional realism and dispositions of honesty and charity.Footnote ⁹⁸ Niebuhr thus advocated, against a purism that fostered withdrawal and an extremism which fostered folly, a “responsible attitude”—a “settled disposition to view situations in a certain way, and to choose and to act in ways appropriate to that view.” This view is one that expects human beings and situations to be complex, flawed, and not wholly knowable; it is suspicious of vaunting aspirations and simple solutions. But it also resists paralysis; it grapples with concrete choices of political action, which make “small differences in daily life—a little more or a little less justice, a little more or a little less freedom.”Footnote ⁹⁹ A responsible attitude subjects choices to constant scrutiny, and is prepared to revise them. But it also accepts that choices must be made—and the consequences of those choices, which human power cannot completely control and human wisdom cannot confidently predict, must be grappled with as they come.

For Niebuhr, dispositions of “realism” and responsibility represented an attempt to steer a course between utopianism and “cynicism,” dogmatism and “nihilism,” optimism and despair, a prideful presumption to use power purely for good and an irresponsible abdication of all power for the sake of personal purity. It also represented an alternative to the most dangerous of tendencies—the combination of cynicism and sentimentality which justified ruthless and unscrupulous action on behalf of utopian goals.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Sustaining a poise between unrealistic “hope” and “disillusionment” required a “heroic courage,” one that could sustain the recognition that human virtue will always be fragmentary, human achievements tentative and fragile, and human happiness incomplete. Niebuhr compared those whose political hopes rested on millenarian faith (whether in perfection through steady ameliorative progress or cataclysmic revolution) unfavorably to “those heroes who resisted evil at the risk or price of fortune and life without too much hope of success. Sometimes their very indifference to the issue of success or failure provided the stamina which made success possible.” Such heroism required not only courage, but “patience” and a fortitude that made it possible to withstand disappointment and anxiety and “sustain endeavors without complete certainty of success.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

It may be asked, both how distinctive and useful Niebuhr's emphasis on matters of character and spirit, and how coherent the ethos he articulated, were. The applications of Niebuhr's focus on ethos may be illustrated by a return to the just war theoretical critique of Niebuhr mentioned above. The version of just war theory asserted against Niebuhr by Pavlischek rests on the view that, in determining whether a war is just, one need only determine whether the ends at which it aims are just; to determine whether it is fought justly, one need only determine that it is conducted according to the correct rules. Such a paradigm ignores the ways in which a single-minded focus on upholding absolute rules, or on the justness of ends, can promote a spirit of complacency and moral arrogance, and hinder self-questioning and contrition. Furthermore, the evaluation of both causes and intentions and the application of rules in action depend upon the judgment and dispositions of those who act. Niebuhr was accordingly dubious about the systematic approach of just war theory, its appeal to general principles, and its denial of tragic situations in which individuals must, even as they act to fulfill genuine moral responsibilities, incur guilt.Footnote ¹⁰²

Niebuhr's stress on the importance of ethos may seem, to some, to place him in the camp of virtue ethics.Footnote ¹⁰³ His sense of irony, however, separates him from much conventional virtue ethics. Niebuhr reminds us that, important though human virtues may be, all virtues also contain ironic flaws and dangers—and the more confident of virtue we are, the more we need to worry that our virtues and our ideals might contain such ironically self-undermining dangers: “we cannot find moral peace in any of our virtues even as we can have no security in the ramparts of our boasted civilization. The whole human enterprise is morally more precarious than we realized.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ This points to the tentativeness, and open-endedness, of ethical life, and suggests that we should think of an ethos not as a set of settled dispositions, or virtues, but as an ongoing process, a practice of striving, refining, and correcting our sense of ourselves and of the world, guided by a sense of responsibility and an awareness of the shortcomings and dangers to which we are prone.

Without a coherent, confident account of the unity of the virtues, Niebuhr's praise of ironic detachment and responsibility, humility and irreverence, realism and heroic striving against the odds, may seem to add up to an assembly of attractive bromides suspended in unresolved tension. There is some truth to this impression; but this feature of Niebuhr's work is not necessarily a fault. Like many “Cold War liberals,” Niebuhr was suspicious of the project of systematic theory, which, he charged, obscured the complex, conflicting qualities of human life—going so far as to declare that he “abhor[red] consistency as a matter of general principle.” Attempts to unify experience into a “system of rational coherence” ultimately led to “absurdity,” because they are “untrue to the facts of existence.” Fidelity to the messiness of experience was preferable to the attainment of a contrived coherence: “We preserve our sanity more surely if we do not try to reduce the whole crazy-quilt of events in which we move to a premature and illusory order.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Indeed, “too-strict identification of goodness with coherence” threatens to lead to a condemnation of existence, since existence is marked by conflict: “The only complete harmony in life is in death, whether for individuals or groups.” The health of modern society depended on debates and conflicts between opposed positions remaining “inconclusive.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Such inconclusiveness was positive, because there was an “element of truth in each position” in most debates—an element which “becomes falsehood. . . when it is carried through too consistently.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Tolerance and openness to the perceptions of the other side—and acceptance that no one side will, or should, always prevail in the political process—was necessary to guard against falsehood and folly. Rigid consistency could be self-undermining; a more supple approach was necessary to keep myriad complex commitments in view. Niebuhr accordingly strove to widen and complicate his own and his readers' range of vision.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In pursuit of such a vision, he adopted an approach to thinking and writing that was “dialectical”: starting by identifying inadequate and mistaken views, coming to understand what inspired them and where they went wrong, and moving beyond them. This approach was in keeping with Niebuhr's own account of the self as developing through a set of ongoing dialogues with itself and with others, and his picture of moral judgment as involving a “perpetual internal dialog.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Rejection of systematic coherence and embrace of a continuous dialogue had implications for the content, as well as the manner, of Niebuhr's political thought. The fact that any theory or discipline was unable to “do justice to the tang and flavor of individual uniqueness” was reason to be wary of rule by “philosopher kings” and technocratic experts.Footnote ¹¹⁰ A combination or balance of opposed insights might, however, be beyond attainment by any individual. And so it was important to remain humbly open to the voices of others and resolutely committed to an ongoing, self-correcting dialogue—and to the procedures and the protections of individuals' freedom of thought and expression that allowed for such dialogue. It was the “wisdom of democracy” to guard against dangerous consistency.Footnote ¹¹¹ Yet it required not just institutions, but an ethos that could accept and sustain dialogue, to ensure that the confrontation of conflicting perspectives in public life yielded a dialogue rather than a shouting match among the deaf.

IV. Conclusion: Niebuhr's Contribution to Liberalism

Niebuhr played a major role in reorienting postwar liberalism, centering it around the cultivation of a chastened, even tragic conception of human potential. Yet the appropriation of his thought for liberal theory has always been problematic. This is partly because his position was expressed with greater regard for rhetorical resonance than theoretical precision; and partly because Niebuhr's formulation of his ideas as responses to immediate political questions has made it hard to detach his work from its Cold War context. It is also partly because Niebuhr's thought rested on a theological foundation which many of his admirers did not (and do not) share.

The theological and political roots of Niebuhr's thinking may, however, balance each other out. Niebuhr's rootedness in political experience kept him from relying solely on theological premises—or following these premises in directions that seemed incompatible with human experience. At the same time, his religious vantage point pushed him to look beyond immediate events to recurrent tendencies and experiences of human life: as we have seen, the Cold War was for Niebuhr the latest manifestation of the perennial play of pride and idolatry, translated into ideological conflict.

Important as his “biblical” vantage point was, the insights and prescriptions to which it led Niebuhr did not, in his own view, depend on theological premises for vindication. Even that aspect of Niebuhr's ethical argument that seems hardest to cast in secularized terms—his attack on idolatry for being a denial of human creatureliness—can be appreciated by nonbelievers: for the realities of human finitude and frailty, and the imperfection of all human achievements, which “idolatry” denies, do not require a theological grounding to recognize.

But is Christian faith necessary to sustain Niebuhr's combination of pessimism and hope, activism and resignation? Some certainly think so: thus, Wilfred McClay writes that “the moral tensions on which Niebuhr insists are unbearable in the absence of faith in the redemptive power of Christ.”Footnote ¹¹² Yet other thinkers have insisted on recognizing tragedy, incompleteness, uncertainty, and loss, as well as human responsibility to seek to realize ideals in the face of these insurmountable challenges, without such faith. For all their differences from Niebuhr, this spirit can be found in the works—and lives—of, among others, Max Weber, George Orwell, Albert Camus, and Isaiah Berlin. Each of these thinkers is open to charges of theoretical incompleteness or incoherence; but each seems to have found it possible to sustain tension and tragedy without recourse to faith in a transcendent justice and divine judgment. While emotionally difficult, it is not clear that it is intellectually or psychologically impossible to bear Niebuhr's chastened outlook without religious faith; and it is clear from experience (as Niebuhr himself noted) that many with religious faith have been unable to bear the challenges of such a view—and all too able to complacently and cheerfully evade them.

Niebuhr's account of moral psychology and social ethics does, by drawing on the ethical ideals, as opposed to the theological doctrines, of Christianity, add important elements to the conception of a liberal political ethos typical of more secular-minded Cold War liberals. Niebuhr's Christian realism enriches the ethos typical of other Cold War liberals—marked by calls for tolerance, modesty, fortitude, circumspection, responsibility, skepticism, and sobriety—with elements of contrition, hope, and forgiveness. These elements helped guard against cynicism or despair; while Niebuhr's retention of a “prophetic” assertion of moral ideals and skepticism toward worldly power provided a sharp critical edge, which allowed him to guard against complacency. Running through the stages of Niebuhr's political pilgrimage is a persistent aversion to pride—whether pride took the form of furious self-righteousness or smug self-satisfaction. Niebuhr's migration toward liberalism was motivated, in part, by a growing sense of the danger of furious self-righteousness. But he did not forget the dangers of smugness; and he remained aware that both of these (and other) forms of pride remained temptations for liberals as well as their critics.

The critical, antielitist and antiestablishment instincts reflected in Niebuhr's thought set him apart from some other Cold War liberals. His insistence on the inevitability of tragic conflict and the incompleteness and imperfection of all social orders set him against the optimism that marked many earlier variants of liberal theory—as well as many more recent versions of liberalism (whether these rest on faith in the power of market relations and the pursuit of rational self-interest or in the emergence of an overlapping moral consensus through the operation of public reason and the motivational power of a sense of citizenly reciprocity). His emphasis on ethos, in turn, sets Niebuhr apart from those recent liberal theorists who have tended to focus on institutional arrangements, and on general principles of political justice.Footnote ¹¹³ This neglect of ethos leaves recent liberal theory impoverished, insofar as it is unable to recognize both serious practical dangers facing liberalism and significant moral resources on which liberalism might draw. General principles and rules applying to institutional arrangements are in themselves insufficient to safeguard liberties and uphold justice: individual citizens must be capable of engaging in the sort of thought and conduct necessary to sustain liberal commitments in the thick of everyday political action.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Niebuhr's thought both directs our attention to the sort of ethos appropriate to a liberal political vision, and helps us to understand why attending to ethos is so important. Drawing on the lessons of political experience, Niebuhr teaches that the abandonment of the spirit of a political position for the supposed sake of advancing that position's cause threatens to undermine that position's integrity, efficacy, and claims to allegiance. This argument has applications beyond liberalism (as the disaster of Communism's pursuit of equality through the investure of authoritarian power in an elite cadre suggests). Yet the abandonment of liberalism's spirit in combating antiliberalism poses particular dangers for liberalism. This is partly because, while liberalism has seldom been embraced as a purely nonconsequentialist doctrine, most versions of liberalism stress the importance of adhering to certain procedures and practices—and not just taking the most direct route to desirable end points. It is also because (many versions of) liberalism's commitment to individual freedom and variety, its concern with preventing the subjection of individuals to injustice and suffering, and its resistance to finality and orthodoxy make liberalism particularly incompatible with ruthlessness, extremism, and dogmatism—or make a ruthless, extremist, dogmatic liberalism particularly incongruous.

Is there, however, anything specifically liberal about the ethos Niebuhr prescribed—or his reasons for prescribing it? Niebuhr had articulated many features of this ethos during his semi-Marxist phase; his postwar thought evinced sympathy for Burkean conservatism.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Yet from the 1940s on Niebuhr was concerned both with discerning the ethos necessary to sustain a liberal politics marked by commitment to democracy, individual rights, gradualist reformism, and political pluralism; and with showing why this ethos, and the politics it sustained, represented more satisfactory responses to the ethical challenges of politics than did liberalism's main ideological opponents. He came to believe that it was liberalism, among the available ideological alternatives, that best balanced respect for human beings with recognition of human limitation, and a commitment to justice with an awareness of the dangers of pursuing justice unscrupulously or fanatically. The ethos Niebuhr advocated, with its combination of humility, irony, responsibility, fallibilism, and openess, is tailored to the hallmarks of a liberal politics: the practice of toleration, suspicion and limitation of power, and protection of diversity and flexibility. Arguing for the value of this ethos does not in itself constitute a justification of liberalism. But nonliberals who are convinced by Niebuhr's argument will be drawn toward a more liberal version of whatever rival ideology they favor: their socialism, conservatism, and so forth will come to be a distinctively liberal socialism, conservatism, etc.

His attention to spirit, disposition, and sensibility shaped both Niebuhr's approach to articulating a “realist” view of political ethics and his conception and practice of liberalism. It was also intimately connected to one of Niebuhr's primary goals as a politically engaged public intellectual: to discover the resources necessary to avoid the errors of self-righteous fanaticism, naive optimism, and cynical lack of principle. Niebuhr's thought and practice reveal the power of a liberal ethos marked by both searching realism and ethical integrity to remain at once sober and critically reformist in the face of the competing temptations of purism, sentimentality, resignation, and power. They also offer a warning against liberal complacency. For all his influence on and embrace by political leaders and cultural elites, Niebuhr chafed at the role of court theologian of liberalism, in which critics and admirers alike cast him. This refusal to become a comfortable standard-bearer for liberalism—or to ever rest satisfied with the existing achievements of any liberal movement or regime—may constitute Niebuhr's greatest contribution to liberalism's cause.