The New Meaning of Modern War in the Thought of Reinhold Niebuhr

Reinhold Niebuhr was the archetypical American intellectual. A leftist minister in the 1920s and an anti-utopian socialist in the 1930s (his finest book, Moral Man and Immoral Society [1932] attacked technocratic optimism from the left), Niebuhr forsook his modern political visions during World War II for an old-fashioned Protestant doctrine based upon sin. This new pessimism, which he would come to call Christian realism, outlasted the war, and he consequently supported the American decision to confront the Soviet Union in 1945 and 1946. Niebuhr's wholehearted, if guilt-ridden, endorsement of the Cold War decisively affected the course of American intellectual life, especially among Democratic party liberals, for whom Niebuhr's articles in The Nation and in his own Christianity and Crisis had been required reading. Many of these liberals, once eager to maintain amity with the Soviet Union after the war, followed Niebuhr's defection to the Cold War camp. Without this conversion of the American mainstream left, President Truman's decision to wage the Cold War would have riven the Democratic party and prompted a political crisis. Thus was born American War liberalism, a combination of welfare state domestic policy and realist foreign policy. Realists regarded Stalin as a specific global menace, and international politics generally as a nasty business in which America nevertheless had to participate. Realism provided the intellectual basis of the Cold War, and Niebuhr took his place along with George Kennan, Hans Morgenthau, and Walter Lippmann as a leading philosopher of this new American realism and hence as a primary intellectual apologist for the Cold War. Niebuhr naturally incorporated the issue of the atomic bomb into his new philosophy, until the appearance, in the late 1950s, of both Soviet and American

Epistemology · Meaning (existential) · Philosophical and Historical Studies · Philosophy · Religion, Theology, History, Judaism, Christianity · War, Ethics, and Justification

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