GRACE AND GRIEF

...And, in contrast, the American conservative tradition, especially its present neoconservative wing, insists that the free market will automatically bring about the good society to the extent that political authority yields to economic forces...

...But in the early 1930s he came to believe that both liberalism and socialism, both the philosopher John Dewey and the former minister Thomas, failed to appreciate the necessity of force and power in the quest for justice, the sense of "struggle" possessed by the Communists...

...By the time he entered Yale Divinity School he was convinced that religion must be grounded not in supernatural revelation but in human needs and experience...

...For the first time I fear I am ashamed of our beloved country...

...Yet there remains a third perspective on religion that the socialist tradition has scarcely considered, a perspective that goes to the heart of the "human condition" by putting our problematic and paradoxical human nature, and not only "the system" of social institutions, at the center of modern political thought...

...DURING THE WAR YEARS NIEBUHR WROTE one of his most important books, The Nature and Destiny of Man, a two-volume seminal study that brought the history of Christian philosophy to bear on such issues as love and justice and the individual and community...

...Niebuhr never considered turning to the Communist party, but the warning first spelled out in 1934 in Moral Man and Immoral Society— that the sensitive intellectual would shun the use of force and violence to achieve political ends— seemed fully confirmed by the end of the decade when liberal and socialist pacifists had no answer to Hitler and the menace of Nazism...

...President Johnson's escalation of the Vietnam War drove him to despair...

...The control of power, it should be remembered, was one of the great aims of the eighteenthcentury Enlightenment...

...but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary...

...The liberal-pragmatic tradition tries to solve the same problem with the empirical techniques of "intelligent planning" and "social control...

...So is a clash between myself and a gangster...

...Fox's final chapter describing Niebuhr's last days, his death on June 1, 1971, and funeral is poignant, elegiac, a fitting spiritual epiphany for one of the most influential thinkers in modern American intellectual history...

...Hence for the Marxist private property is the instrument of oppression, for the neoconservative the source of liberty...

...This is the radical perspective of Reinhold Niebuhr, radical in the sense of going to the root of things and bringing forth a truer account of the reasons for each individual's fate as an alienated being—original sin...

...On the contrary, Niebuhr warns that man's dual nature, his moral obligation to struggle against oppression and his existential awareness that absolute justice cannot be realized, requires him "to seek after an impossible victory and to adjust himself to an inevitable defeat...

...But Niebuhr revises that heritage by showing that democracy is necessary not because of human reason and goodness but rather because man's disposition to exploit his fellow man remains constant at every stage of history...

...To the noninterventionist radicals who claimed that modern warfare would erase the distinction between liberalism and fascism, Niebuhr lashed out: "The Socialists have a dogma that this war is a clash of rival imperialisms...

...0 526...

...Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible...

...Perhaps Fox's excellent biography will help his generation of the 1960s come to appreciate the moral qualities he so admires in Niebuhr: a sustained assault on complacency and righteousness, a skepticism of all ideologies that claim a superior virtue free of the temptations of power, a tragic sense of life that leads not to resignation but a renewed quest for justice...

...In 1928 he supported Norman Thomas for president and before the Depression he had committed himself to the Socialist cause...

...Beginning in the nineteenth century socialists influenced by Marx's writings tended to regard religion as a species of "false consciousness" that must be extirpated before the working class could become fully aware of its true mission...

...Fox's stance is judicious and his criticisms thoughtful and measured...

...Like George Kennan, however, Niebuhr was less convinced of the wisdom of extending the cold war to Asia...

...He is fully sympathetic toward Niebuhr as a man of greatness and humility, yet somewhat critical of the unstinting pessimism characteristic of Niebuhr's political thought...

...To Niebuhr all such stances are acts of pride that would have us believe power and self-interest can be eliminated from human affairs with proper structural rearrangements...

...A Stevensonian liberal in the 1950s, Niebuhr became a reluctant supporter of JFK in the early 1960s...

...In contact with European social democrats who feared Soviet expansion, he defended the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan, and in 1948 he was featured on the cover of Time's 25th anniversary issue as the crisis theologian for the cold war...

...But in the early 1920s, when many American intellectuals bid farewell to politics, Niebuhr was rapidly radicalized as he discovered the brutal social realities of industrial society when serving as a pastor in Detroit and observing the plight of the autoworkers...

...Because of a stroke, his writing declined in output and originality during the turbulent decade...

...At the war's end there emerged another problem that no one had foreseen in its full dimensions except the small group of American Trotskyists—the problem of Stalinism...

...He also wrote for the American Palestine Committee, defending as a Protestant Zionist the right of Jewish nationhood, a defense greatly appreciated by such British writers as Isaiah Berlin and R. H. S. Crossman...

...Thus Niebuhr's treatise The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness was addressed to Adam Smith as well as Marx, both of whom saw, albeit for different reasons, government thwarting human development rather than restraining the evil tendencies that characterize humankind's fallen condition...

...Yet, like William James, he was aware of Pascal's dictum 525 that genuine religion always meant a struggle between belief and unbelief, and this capacity to doubt the illusions of certainty would remain with him in his political life as well as religious vocation...

...In a decade when the capitalist class claimed Jesus as the first business executive and organization man (Bruce Barton, The Man Nobody Knows, 1925) and Henry Ford became the nation's hero, Niebuhr wrote blistering articles in the Christian Century on the pretensions of America's piety and its culture of consumption...

...Of course they are right...

...He championed the civil rights movement, applauded Pope John's encyclicals on peace and social justice, and preferred the risk of nuclear disarmament to the heightening "game of deterrence...

...Reinhold Niebuhr was born in Wright City, Missouri, in 1892, the son of a German immigrant father who was a rural Protestant minister...

...More recently, in the writings of such Marxist historians as E. P Thompson and the late Herbert Gutman, religion has come to be appreciated as a cultural and spiritual resource that has enabled workers to resist capitalist ideology and to promote the communal values of a "moral economy" based upon provision rather than profit...

...Although many writers would not want to acknowledge it, Niebuhr's legacy remains an embarrassment to almost every position on the political spectrum...

...In one of his most provocative books, The Irony of American History (1952), he castigated both communism and liberalism for assuming that their respective ideologies were innocent of power and bore no responsibility for the terrifying realities of the atomic age...

...The father, Gustav, showed little interest in the Social Gospel movement of the Progressive era, and when Reinhold enrolled in the Eden Seminary at Elmira College, Illinois, he spent much of his school time breaking away from his family's German language and mastering English...

...Niebuhr's first important turn to politics came with the outbreak of World War I. In an interesting anticipation of Hannah Arendt's later thesis, in 1916 Niebuhr wrote an essay on "The Paradox of Patriotism," pointing out that the modern state had dissolved traditional loyalties to religion, region, and class as nationalism demanded the undivided allegiance of its subjects...

...It may be that Niebuhr's pessimism serves as a caution against the disillusionment that infects the activist who starts out by believing that ideals can be fulfilled rather than approximated...

...The radical left has assumed that the solution to the problem of oppression and exploitation begins with the abolition of private property...

...To Niebuhr, who perceives a deep ambiguity in all institutions as well as actions, property can represent power as well as freedom, and to the extent that man's sinful nature leads him to abuse both qualities, property must always be subject to constant surveillance and, if necessary, public control...

...Although Niebuhr recognized that Russia may have had legitimate security reasons for controlling Eastern Europe, he strongly disagreed with Henry Wallace that the Soviets could be conciliated by good faith alone...

...Yet with America's entry into the war, Niebuhr himself participated in the campaign against antiwar "disloyalty" and even his characteristic skepticism toward all forms of idealism succumbed to Woodrow Wilson's evangelical rhetoric...

...and when he advocated abandoning Chiang Kai-shek during the Korean stalemate, the FBI began to keep a file on him— always a good sign...

...RICHARD Fox's RECENT BIOGRAPHY OF NIEBUHR is a prodigious feat of research and analysis...

...Then the Paris Peace Conference left him utterly disillusioned with liberalism and its promise "to save the world...