Reinhold Niebuhr and International Relations Theory

Realism beyond Thomas Hobbes

Guilherme Marques Pedro

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781032179063
• eBook ISBN: 9781351722735
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This is the first book in international relations theory entirely devoted to the political thought of Reinhold Niebuhr. Focusing on the existential theology which lies at the basis of Reinhold Niebuhr's theory of international politics, it highlights the ways in which Niebuhrian realism was not only profoundly theological, but also constituted a powerful existentialist reconfiguration of the Realist tradition going back to Saint Augustine.

Guilherme Marques Pedro offers an innovative account of Reinhold Niebuhr's eclectic thought, branching out into politics, ethics, history, society and religion and laying out a conceptual framework through which his work, as much as the realist tradition of international political thought as a whole, can be read. The book calls for the need to revisit classic thinkers within IR theory with an eye to their interdisciplinary background and as a way to remind ourselves of the issues that were at stake within the field as it was growing in autonomy and diversity – issues which remain, regardless of its disciplinary development, at the core of IR's concerns.

This book offers an important contribution to IR scholarship, revealing the great historical wealth, intellectual originality but also the limitations and paradoxes of one of the greatest American political thinkers of the twentieth century.

1 ‘The father of us all’

The making of a Christian realist

Could it be that we are most religious partly in consequence of being the most secular culture?¹

(Reinhold Niebuhr 1958)

Niebuhr’s recourse to the ‘realist’ label pervaded his entire work since the publication of his first acclaimed book, Moral Man and Immoral Society, in 1932. The occasional criticism levelled against what he saw as a ‘too consistent political realism’ clearly shows that this was an internal critique, and that he saw himself as a political realist of sorts. His form of realism can only be understood vis-à-vis his broader critique of liberal idealism and, more specifically, in view of his intellectual move against those liberals who sought to extend a particular understanding of the internal functioning of domestic societies onto the world scale, such as the American president Woodrow Wilson (Andersen 2007; Bucklin 2001; Butler 1997; McWilliams 1962). Before that, however, Niebuhrian realism was essentially a theological move against recent American religious thinking which was growing increasingly liberal in its tendency to sanction human action and individual achievement with the sort of divine immanence that progressive liberals felt exceptionally endowed by. In this regard, realism started as a theological movement, internal to American protestant theology. Niebuhr was aligned with the departure that many American theologians felt compelled to embrace against liberal protestantism (Warren 1997: 35–55). The major point of contention between Niebuhr and liberal utopians was the perceived collective self-image which lay at the core of the American liberal tradition. This self-image relied, in Niebuhr’s view, on a deep essentialization and sanctification of the rational capacity of human beings to master their nature and their destiny. The liberal and rationalist idealization of the self thus became the central target of Niebuhr’s criticism and can be read as the point of departure of his Christian-existentialist reconstruction of the realist tradition, with Augustine and Hobbes as its major representatives.

This chapter portrays Niebuhr’s realism essentially as a critique of liberalism – and especially of the liberal internationalism of Woodrow Wilson. Liberalism, in its many incarnations, constituted Niebuhr’s intellectual and political environment, and it was against its backdrop that his thought unfolded in the direction and with the shape which this book is set to recount. As far as Niebuhr’s rhetorical strategy is concerned, I argue that it was by labelling particular forms of liberalism as utopian and idealistic that Niebuhr was able to substantiate the term ‘realism’ in ways that could appeal to his audience without the need to specify what exactly the term referred to. In fact, the notion of realism remains so vague throughout Niebuhr’s writings that he could claim his own assessment of realism to be, in a way, a critique of realism too.

Naturally, in this respect, Niebuhr’s was not an original strategy. But in his particular take on the tradition, the intellectual disposition deemed ‘realistic’, gains greater salience due to its dialectical opposition to liberal rationalists and utopians. This opposition was semantically engineered for purposes of intellectual demarcation, but carried nonetheless the philosophical weight of what it aspired to be and never really became: a substantive signifier with a positive meaning and a clear epistemological jurisdiction. Within this overall strategy, Niebuhr’s critique of Wilsonianism, as well as his departure from Hobbes, was led by his profound belief that in both extremes of the ideational and philosophical spectrum of modern politics – from liberal idealism to realist cynicism – lay a deep, albeit subconscious, sublimation of the human ego and of its modern powers which only the Christian truth could overcome. This idealizing move ran parallel to capitalism as much as to communism, and had, in Niebuhr’s view, to be ‘tamed’ in order to safeguard the possibility of democracy against the backdrop of modern tyrannies and new religions. We will look in particular at Niebuhr’s criticisms of one historical figure who has been more responsible for the political internationalization of liberalism: Woodrow Wilson. From the point of view of Niebuhr’s critique of the liberal discourses which sought to analogize domestic societies with the international realm, an overview of his critique of Wilsonianism seems all the more appropriate given that Wilson was not only an intellectual figure of some repute but, above all, a political protagonist of the greatest impact, both domestically and internationally. Before doing that, however, some biographical note on Reinhold Niebuhr is in order if we want to understand why Niebuhr came to oppose liberalism – in both its internationalist and capitalist variants – in the first place.

Who was Reinhold Niebuhr?

Reinhold Niebuhr was one of the most influential American theologians between the two world wars, perhaps along with his brother Richard Niebuhr (1894–1962). He was born to German parents in 1892 in Wright City, Missouri. His father was a minister of the Evangelical Synod of North America, an interdenominational church that inherited both the Lutheran and Calvinist traditions of Germany, and in which he was educated in the German language. Niebuhr’s early education was strongly protestant. After college, Niebuhr went to Yale Divinity School, an experience which he did not particularly enjoy – apparently he sounded too German and too Midwestern for the likes of the Yale elites (Fox 1985). He decided, after finishing his master’s in theology, not to move up the academic ladder, and most of his life would be spent travelling through America as a protestant preacher, mostly as a pastor in the very industrialized Detroit, between 1915 and 1928. Detroit was a shocking experience – even though he clearly enjoyed being what he called a ‘circuit rider’ as a preacher and later as an academic (Schlesinger 2001: 190). There he became acquainted with the conflicts and miseries of an over-industrialized urban society and what he saw as the frenetic mechanization and moral degeneration of social relations caused by capitalism:

it was the then distant war so much as the social realities in Detroit which undermined my youthful optimism. My first interest was not so much to challenge the reigning laissez-faire philosophy of the community as to ‘debunk’ the moral pretensions of Henry Ford, whose five-dollar-a-day wage gave him a world-wide reputation for generosity. I happened to know that some of his workers had an inadequate annual wage, whatever the pretensions of the daily wage may have been. Many of them lost their homes in the enforced vacations, which became longer and longer until the popular demand for the old Model T suddenly subsided, and forced a layoff of almost a year for ‘retooling’.

(‘Intellectual Autobiography’, Reinhold Niebuhr, Kegley 2001: 5)

As he recounts in his early diary Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic, published as early as 1929, it was in this context that he grew sympathetic to the Social Gospel movement and, for some time, he was a mild supporter of marxism (Bullert 2002). This early publication, as well as his first book, entitled Does Civilization Need Religion? (1927), revealed a strong tension between his social concerns and democratic ideals and a strong hesitation between marxism and liberalism, usually tempered by his Christian beliefs. Later he would join the Union Theological Seminary in New York to teach Christian social ethics, followed by an academic position at Columbia University until 1960 when he retired and his health begun to weaken until his death in 1971. Long before America would face the Great Depression in the early 1930s, Niebuhr had already become very sceptical of the liberal utopia that pervaded American economy, culture and religion:

the war was dissipating the other illusions of the nineteenth century world view which informed American Christianity. But I was influenced in my disillusionment more by local than by international experience. In my parish duties I found that the simple idealism which the classical faith had evaporated was as irrelevant to the crises of personal life as it was the complex social issues of an industrial city.

(‘Intellectual Autobiography’, Reinhold Niebuhr, Kegley 2001: 6)

Politically, as well as internationally, America’s faith in the innate virtue of capitalism was accompanied by the understanding, epitomized in Wilsonianism, that the generosity and solidarity of person-to-person relations could be transposed to relations between countries and communities. This would become a key issue in Niebuhr’s theory of international politics – and one that runs through his entire work, appearing more explicitly in his major works: Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941; 1943) and The Children of Light and The Children of Darkness (1945). In fact, all of Niebuhr’s writings manifest a dualistic approach to various areas of thought and action, from philosophy to politics, theology to ethics, economics to science and technology. His binary frameworks, which were derived mostly from his Augustinianism and from the thought of Soren Kierkegaard, were present in all his titles. In spite of the interesting nuances between his various books and the different stages of his intellectual path, these methodological and intuitive dichotomies were manifest in all of them and marked, in one way or the other, the whole trajectory of Niebuhr’s writings, comprising over twenty books and hundreds of sermons, essays, letters, articles, papers and lectures he authored or co-authored, making him, without any doubt, the most prolific American intellectual of his time and certainly the realist thinker who has written the most in the twentieth century.

These dichotomies, which I will explore further in the present chapter, had to do with three major vectors of his thinking: the opposition between the individual and the group; the separation between the immanent realm of history and the transcendental realm of God – or alternatively between human nature and metaphysical destiny; and the contrast between reality and utopia and hence between the children of light (or idealists) and the children of darkness (romantic cynics or pessimistic realists). Even though his division between individuals and groups seems more relevant in explaining many of his intellectual and political analyses, it was the latter division between realism and idealism which was obviously more appealing for him, for his commentators and even to his critics. Niebuhr’s embrace of realism, turned him into a ‘tamed cynic’, that is, an intellectual adversary of the modern ‘idolatrous religions’ that fed the blind march of capitalism, backed by the theoretical and ethical legacies of the Enlightenment. Clearly, for him, the children of the Enlightenment – among whom he counted Comte, Hegel, Marx, his contemporary John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson himself – had failed to understand both the tragedy of limited action and the historical irony of its tentative overcoming by humans, which the Christian notion of sin alluded to.

Niebuhr thus attempted to recast only those few thinkers that had, like Immanuel Kant, endeavoured to tame rationalism or, like Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, sought to destroy its pretensions to become the dominant philosophical discourse of modernity. His Augustinian view of sin can be meaningfully filtered through these anti-rationalist philosophical systems. The appeal of his imaginative theological jargon was simply meant to warn ‘modern man’ of the ways through which good intentions can easily turn into bad outcomes. Many of his political views, as well as philosophical positions, can be derived from the anti-Enlightenment mood of someone who stood firm in his view that ‘the paramount problem for contemporary study of international relations is to supplant the illusions which we have inherited from the French Enlightenment’ (Niebuhr, ‘The Moral Issue in International Relations’, in Guilhot 2011: 272).

If not carefully dealt with in terms of policies that can realistically manage and contain the increasingly wide gap between experience and expectation, the radical failure or perversion of the best intentions would end up surrendering human virtue to the sort of cynical dismissal of dreams which had for long been the traditional asset of realism, at least since Machiavelli (Niebuhr, ‘The Moral Issue in International Relations’, in Guilhot 2011). Niebuhr was hence led to conclude about the ‘irrelevance of the mild moralistic idealism … to the power realities of our modern technical society’ (‘Intellectual Autobiography’ 2001: 5). In turn, this means that his sources, as much as his own potential to impact the research agenda of IR theory, can be framed, even today, in terms of those IR strands and theoretical schools which have manifestly embraced the ideals and the visions of modernity espoused by ‘the nineteenth-century world view’ as much as by those who remain sceptical about it (‘Intellectual Autobiography’ 2001: 5).

Clearly, for Niebuhr, the Enlightenment represented an important but paradoxical step in the moral development of humankind, as it also consisted of a plunge into the generalized blind belief that technical progress can be left to its own devices and even inform those realms of life which remained, until recently, unfettered by ‘scientific technics’ – such as those of politics, ethics, religion and philosophy (Niebuhr, ‘The Moral Issue in International Relations’, Guilhot 2011: 272). His anti-Enlightenment posture hence allowed for his emergence as a public intellectual and a political thinker of national repute. Indeed, the traditional narratives that are presented about Niebuhr seem to agree on the point that he was everything that an intellectual could be at the time. His anti-intellectualist charm was much derived from what he represented beyond the university and from his popularity outside his academic ivory tower. He was not unaware of what it takes to become a leading scholar known outside of academia, and his critique of rationalism and positivism seemed to be part of a general, albeit not always conscious, strategy to build himself up as a public intellectual who could claim enough social experience and practical engagement with the ‘real world’ as to criticize other intellectuals for being too intellectual and too caught up in theoretical categories that always fail to grasp social realities.²

On the other hand, he had enough philosophical imagination to understand that reality is always symbolically mediated and constructed in ways that seek to provide actors with the necessary tools to cope with the world – and he was also convinced that, most of the time, this coping operates by means of a symbolic power held by only a few. The attention he paid to meaning, revelation, faith and truth attest to his critical awareness of the fact that reality is about perception and that since perception is mediated by a language emerging from power relations, the power of words becomes hard to control, manipulate or even scrutinize in any simple or definite way. Language and symbolic power thus featured as core aspects of any political construct or ideal and in this sense Niebuhr expected neither too much nor too little from the human capacity to mould events through discourse or to change the fate of the world through communicative action or scientific analysis.

Indeed, as I show in Chapter 4, he was quite assertive of the view that because reality already appears to us as articulated in some way, language and speech end up in the same paradoxical situation of existence itself: at once shaping reality and becoming overwhelmed by it. Therefore, the agential reserve of human beings lies not in their capacity to articulate reality through language but in knowing that the symbolic power of language is, in a way, much more real and effective, than whatever material capabilities actors may hold. The transcendental power of speech which human beings have must hence be seen as a source of trust in the possibility of social change as much as a motif for scepticism towards any simple change, given its capacity to dominate and manipulate behaviour in covert and hidden ways.

Niebuhr’s concern for social change and the impact of transformative ideals – indeed, his direct engagement with the social crises of his parish as much as of America in general – led him to adopt an existentialism akin to a sort of social activism that finds parallels in other known existentialist thinkers. Hence, I portray existentialism, along with liberalism and the realist and Christian traditions, as one of the central philosophical traditions of Niebuhrian realism, and arguably the richest source of Niebuhr’s theoretical creativity – apart from that of realism, which meaning deserves a more substantial discussion in the present chapter.

The influence of existentialism in Niebuhr’s political realism was first acknowledged by Paul Ramsey in what he designated as a ‘theological’ or ‘deistic existentialism’ (2001: 145). I also claim that it is this particular aspect which allows us to understand both his politically driven re-conceptualization of God as both transcendental and ‘critical’ and to link it with those contemporary debates in IR which call for the need to question the ontological assumptions of major theories. Even though existentialism refers to a specific philosophical current which gained its climax with Jean-Paul Sartre’s appropriation of Martin Heidegger’s thinking and although, as Paul Ramsey rightly points out, Niebuhr was a major critic of Sartre, his views can still be said to be akin to some sort of existentialism in different ways (Kroner 2001). Hence, I follow Paul Ramsey’s claim that even though Niebuhr rejected many of the claims of secular and atheist existentialists, he adopted what Ramsey calls a ‘deistic existentialism’ or an ‘existential deism’ in which experience and existence are valued on the grounds that they constitute the gateways to the revelation of God as transcendent and yet critical of human behaviour (Ramsey 2001).

But Niebuhr’s existentialism was also in his style. As Crouter remarks, his ‘approach as a writer resembles the insight of early German romantics that rational systems of thought can never catch up with the unfolding mystery...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 ‘The father of us all’: the making of a Christian realist
• 2 Against the pagans: Christian realism as a critique of political idolatry
• 3 Fear God: human nature redefined
• 4 The existential turn in the realist tradition: Niebuhr‘s political ‘ontology of possibility’
• 5 The anarchical community and the impossible possibilities of a ‘fallen world’1
• Epilogue: Jusnaturalism for postmodern times? The poverty of IR’s liberal-realist consensus
• Bibliography
• Index