When Liberalism Was at Its Best—3

Reinhold Niebuhr’s lessons in American responsibility

A portrait of the American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892 - 1971), United States, mid-20th century. (Photo by Bachrach/Getty Images)

Postwar liberalism was distinctive in its combination of confident resolution with intellectual humility. One of the greatest of these liberals and the subject of the first post in this series, Isaiah Berlin, concluded one of his most famous essays by quoting an observation by political economist Joseph Schumpeter: “To realize the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian.” This is also what distinguished postwar liberals such as Berlin and literary critic Lionel Trilling (the subject of this series’ second post) from just about everyone writing and thinking about politics today.

So far in this series, I’ve focused on political theory in general along with its implications for domestic policy. Though it’s also been my contention from the start that these figures arrived at their distinctive form of liberalism in response to the horrifying carnage of the Second World War. For this final essay, I’m turning to Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, whose political writings focused mainly on the conduct of American foreign policy in the early years of the Cold War.

Niebuhr was extremely prominent in American culture during the 1940s and ’50s—even making it to the cover of Time magazine (at a time when that was a very big deal, and when such a high public profile was imaginable for a theologian). Since then, his thinking about international affairs—a form of Christian realism—has mostly gone into eclipse, despite the brief renewal of interest in him during the opening years of the Obama administration. (The 44th president followed Dean Acheson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Jimmy Carter, in pointing to Niebuhr as an inspiration for how to think about foreign policymaking.)

The neglect is unfortunate. Reading Niebuhr won’t provide any easy answers to the numerous challenges facing the United States today in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, or East Asia. But his work does give us a valuable example of how to think wisely and responsibly about America and its role in the world—an example from which just about all the factions in our fractious politics could find something to learn.

America’s Ironic Situation in the World