Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971)

In ten chapters, Niebuhr argues that “a sharp distinction must be drawn between the moral and social behavior of individuals and social groups, national, racial, and economic.” While individual morality focuses on the heart, on motives, on unselfishness, a social group by necessity finds its highest morality in justice.

This was a very challenging reading experience. Niebuhr is erudite, using large words and long sentences, and was writing and using examples from politics and nations in show more 1932. I had to both wrap my head around the thrust of his argument, try to understand what he was saying, and only then could I maybe take a stab at deciding if I agreed with him or not. In each chapter, he lays out his argument on the ways in which individual morality never quite matches up perfectly with social morality. Rational resources (chapter 2) and religious - particularly Christian - resources (chapter 3) have more of an effect on the individual. As classes, the privileged and the proletarian are opposed, and while the latter have a more sure ethical stance the former are the ones in political power (chapters 5 and 6). We have seen governments attempt justice through revolution (chapter 7) and political force (chapter 8), but neither seems to quite meet that perfect social morality. Then there are non-violent means of impacting social morality (chapter 9). Finally, he returns to his central thesis in chapter 10, that we need to have different standards of morality for an individual than for social groups: “It would therefore seem better to accept a frank dualism in morals than to attempt a harmony between the two methods which threatens the effectiveness of both. Such a dualism…would make a distinction between the moral judgments applied to the self and to others; and it would distinguish between what we expect of individuals and of groups.”

Niebuhr was really incredibly prescient about some aspects of national morality and the way in which non-majority groups can advocate for justice. Writing before World War 2 and the Civil Rights events in the 1960s, he observed: “A technological civilisation makes stability impossible. It changes the circumstances of life too rapidly to incline any one to a reverent acceptance of an ancestral order. Its rapid developments and its almost daily changes in the physical circumstances of life destroy the physical symbols of stability and therefore make for restlessness, even if these movements were not in a direction which imperil the whole human enterprise.” If that were true in 1932, what would he make of this world 90 years later? I think there’s some danger in his conclusion that we need to have a separate morality for an individual than for groups. Sure, I don’t expect a nation to be unselfish, or an individual politician to give up the rights of the people they advocate for in the name of love. But I do expect a standard of decency, justice, and character. Maybe it’s idealistic of me, but I want to see a complicated system of humans made up of people who really are working towards the good of the whole. That’s not too far off from what Niebuhr is arguing, I think, in his insistence that the morality of a group is in striving towards justice (rather than individual love/unselfishness), but I fear that the natural conclusion of a “separate” rather than complementary morality is that we compromise on things that shouldn’t be in the name of peace and “law and order”.

Niebuhr’s influence was wide, and influenced Martin Luther King Jr., John McCain, Barack Obama, Jimmy Carter and more. I’m glad I struggled through the book and gained an appreciation for his ethical thought, but I’m equally glad to leave it behind. show less

This is the book rescued from out-of-print obscurity by Boston University Professor for International Relations Andrew J. Bacevich, who bought a copy for 10¢ at a yard sale, read it, and proclaimed it the most important work in its field. It gained further fame when candidate Obama planted a reporter with the question of who his favorite philosopher was. Add to this the fact that I enjoyed and profited from Niebuhr’s central work, the two-volume Nature and Destiny of Man, it is no show more surprise that I was predisposed to like this. And I did, to a degree.
The book preserves a series of six lectures held a few years after World War 2, bookended by introductory and concluding chapters. It was a time when the United States held greater power, both in absolute and relative terms, than any nation in history. Yet paradoxically, it was confronted by an implacable foe in the form of Soviet communism, whose avowed goal was also world domination. When the lectures were first given, the Nationalist Chinese government had recently fled to Taiwan, and China joined the communist orbit. By the time the lectures were repeated, the Korean War was underway, and the French empire in Southeast Asia was crumbling in the face of a peasant insurgency, also aligned with the communists. This situation gave rise to one of the ironies discerned by Niebuhr: At the zenith of its power, the U.S. felt more insecure than ever.
A mere four decades later, it was the Soviet Union that crumbled, its satellites in Europe aligning with the west. A unified Russian-Chinese axis by that time already belonged to the past. One could argue that this turn of events resulted, in part, from heeding the warnings issued by Niebuhr. So why read this book, when so many other books from the height of the Cold War can be left to gather dust on the shelves, or be deacquisitioned by libraries short of space?
The reasons are well outlined by Bacevich in the introduction he wrote for the reprint edition. Although Niebuhr wrote with the West's conflict with ascendant communism in mind, much of what he wrote applies, mutatis mutandis, to the current struggle with radical Islam.
On the face of it, this is clearly the case, and Bacevich’s advocacy of the book is rooted in his own conviction that four consecutive U.S. administrations, from Reagan through the second coming of the Bush dynasty, ignored the warnings embedded in this book, with consequences that have destabilized the world order and weakened the position of the U.S. in it. Many of the tendencies in U.S. policy Niebuhr decried have again been in even greater evidence in the post-9/11 world. And it is bittersweet to read his confidence that a democracy could not engage in a preventive war.
At times while reading this, I felt it should be added to my short list of books every person should read to understand the U.S., alongside the state papers, the Federalist, two of Lincoln’s immortal speeches, and the observations of non-Americans such as de Tocqueville and Lord Bryce. If I hesitate, it’s because the book is a bit of a slog to read at times. One reason are the repetitions; this probably helped when these texts were delivered as lectures, but now they irritate. Then again, Niebuhr favors the abstract over the concrete. While more specific examples might have dated the text, without these, as well as a certain poetic concretion in the language, the text challenges the mind, but at times failed to engage this reader emotionally. Yet it would have been a mistake not to read on, both for the sake of the argument the author spells out, but also for the nuggets strewn throughout, honed like timeless aphorisms (see the quotes on the right column of the GR screen). So I reluctantly withhold that fifth star, but remain glad to have discovered the book. show less

Astounding in it's prescience. The danger of failing to heed Niebuhr's prophetic words is as great today, if not greater, than when he wrote in the opening years of the Cold War. Like then we are today faced with a fanatical enemy convinced of the eternal rightness of his struggle, the existential threat is an equally self-righteous destructive tendency from within our own ranks, a reflexive hatred from the far Right. His economic analysis of internal dynamics of rich and poor within the show more Western system couldn't be more timely. show less

The final book in a series of theoretical readings I did at the beginning of this year. Niebuhr's thoughts on human moral behavior in groups was challenging both in style and content. Stylistically, the book is very dense, and contains long segments in which the author dwells on a certain idea that's somewhat tangential. Content-wise, the thesis of the book is that humans tend to act selfishly/immorally in groups when interacting with other groups, which contradicts my basic beliefs about show more human nature.

Niebuhr goes toe-to-toe with theorists such as Dewey and Tolstoy, and contends that many humans are too limited in their rational and moral capacity to be 'taught' to be good people, and that it would take more than education to change the basic inequalities that exist within capitalism and the state. Coercion, by means of violent and non-violent (he blurs the two) resistance or through the use of the state apparatus, is what will bring about a better world.

If you disagree with the author's thesis, this can be a challenging book to engage with - it's a philosophical text and not short. However, Niebuhr is a good writer, and argues his points well. It's also fascinating to see socialist and anarchist ideas contended with as serious schools of thought, a sign both of the times and of Niebuhr's own more radical past. A worthwhile read if you're looking for a challenge. show less