By Willem Boerma

Between idealism and realism
Reinhold Niebuhr is widely acknowledged as the founder of Christian Realism, a tradition within the scientific discipline of International Relations, that does not deny the possibility of moral decisions in (international) politics, but at the same time sees little room for it. Murray summarises the position of Christian Realism well in the title of his work ’between power and cosmopolitan ethics’.[1] Niebuhr’s thought is strongly influenced by the two World Wars, the Interwar period and the start of the Cold War. Influenced by these periods in world history, he abandoned his originally pacifist mindset for the position of Christian Realism. He acknowledges that idealism is a grave danger in international politics. According to Niebuhr the two World Wars have amply demonstrated that evil cannot be banned out by human efforts. At the same time he also criticises the political realism of Thomas Hobbes and Nicollò Machiavelli. Such realism leads to a situation of continuous war and tension, for an important adage of this realism is: si vis pacem, para bellum (if you want peace, prepare for war). With his Christian Realism Niebuhr tries to occupy the middle ground between idealism and realism: on account of his Christian conviction and on account of ‘hard-won political wisdom’.[2] This tension between idealism and realism can be observed first and foremost in his view of man and in his worldview.

View of man: freedom and sinfulness
Niebuhr’s description of man as ‘both creature of time and creator of history in time’ shows the range of his view of man.[3] He sees a big role for human freedom, while he acknowledges that this freedom is limited by the fact that man is a created and sinful being. This explains why Niebuhr has been characterised as a ‘pessimistic optimist’.[4] In his view of man he continuously emphasises the ambivalence of human nature: By means of reason, man can transcend himself above every historical situation. At the same time the self is to big to comprehend itself and to make its self its goal. “The twofold possibility of creativity and destruction of human freedom, accounts for the growth of both good and evil through the extension of human powers.”[5] According to Niebuhr this ambivalence can be traced back to the Fall of man: the flawed use of the human will marks the end of man as imago dei. The possibility of a good use of reason, the discoveries of natural science, the increasing knowledge of foreign languages and cultures and the increasing interdependence can be means to somewhat moderate the egoistic impulses of individuals and national states. Even though they will never suffice to undo the consequences of sin.

World view: Battle between God and man
Regarding Niebuhr’s view of world history, his basic principle is clear: God is the reason, the ultimate purpose and the perfection of our existence. History forms the scene of the battle between God and man. Niebuhr emphasises that it is about the battle between sinful people and God: on the basis of this reality there can be no discrimination between respective persons or respective peoples. He furthermore sees history as a continuous attempt of people to deny the sovereignty of God and to aspire being gods themselves. The individual and collective will-to-power continue to play an important role. This leads to (potential) conflict, tension and abuse of power in relations between individuals and also between states or other collectives.
Niebuhr sees the metaphysical meaning of history in the person of Christ. Man, being an enigma to himself, is not capable of reconciling himself with God. He is to limited due to his human and sinful nature. Christ has, through his death on the cross, established this reconciliation between God and man. Thus God is the ultimate goal of history.
Summarising: Niebuhr sees a great measure of freedom for the humane itself. He pairs this freedom with responsibility and limits it by pointing to the fact that man is created and sinful. Moral ambiguity is the reality than man has to live with after the fall. But what consequences does this have for government and politics?

Government: Might ánd Morality
Niebuhr sees the aspiration to power as one of the most important motivations of human action. He sees this as a perversion of the original situation: the will-to-live has changed in and because of the fall of man into a will-to-power. Niebuhr distinguishes several kinds of power: physical (economic and military) power, intellectual power and spiritual power. The most important task of the state is to establish and maintain a balance of power. For Niebuhr this balance exists in a “wise apprehension of concurrent interests, rather than by a ‘sacrifice’ of the ‘lower’ to the ‘highest’ interests.”[6] The political virtue of shaping this balance of power is prudence. The balance thus created is not static but dynamic, nor is this balance of power a goal in itself: it is to him a precondition to come to some form of social justice.

Power per se has need of morality for its legitimacy. The intrinsic need of man for ‘the transcendent’ and for the ‘vestiges’ of the original justice make that power has need of a legitimisation outside of itself to be effective. Niebuhr is convinced that power does not merely require a material but also an immaterial basis: this recalls the fact that man is moral being. In another place (criticising the rigorous division Luther establishes between church and state) he says it like this: “justice degenerates into mere order without justice if the pull of love is not upon it.”[7] So power can only be effective in the long term when it appeals to immaterial values. This is why Niebuhr criticises for example Realism, in which the national interest of a state is defined exclusively in terms of power and interests. This is to limited: “a narrow definition of the interest of the nation leads to the defeat of that interest.”[8] The job description of a political authority in searching for a good balance of might and morality is described strikingly by Niebuhr: “politics is an effort to establish tolerable community, the sinfulness of men presupposed.”[9] Our expectations of what can be achieved by political means should not be to high. To realise this the distinction between individual and collective morality is crucial.

Opposed to political thinking in terms of progress
From his early works on, Niebuhr emphasised the distinction between individual and collective morality. It is clear to him for example that (religious) idealists have made individual morality a norm for social and political action. This becomes visible mainly in their linear understanding of history: rational man is ever more capable of controlling his egoistic impulses and letting rational thinking, justice and universal values prevail. Thus the will-to-power becomes an artefact from the past. Niebuhr refutes this naïve position on principled as well as pragmatic grounds. In the love (agape) of Christ for man Niebuhr sees the definitive norm for the self as ‘free spirit’. Agape is source and goal of all mutual relations in the human existence. At the same time it is clear to him that love as norm of action can mainly apply on the individual level. For social justice this ‘perfectionist ethic’[10] is irrelevant. He even goes as far as saying that the individual self can suffer under the ‘collective self’ because it knows higher standards. For in a social unity a balance has to be found between different interests and standards. This leads to a balance of power on the basis of calculation and/or force: “all social cooperation on a larger scale than the most intimate social group requires a measure of coercion.”[11] The result is that social justice is always of a lower order than individual justice, and it should be.

Another reason Niebuhr provides to demonstrate the difference between individual and collective morality is also interesting: namely the possibility of self-criticism. The individual is an integral unity of body and spirit. Being an integral unity allows for self-reflection and self-criticism. This possibility decreases as the scale of a social organisation (for example a state) increases: the integral unity disappears. The moral life of a state is therefore of a lower level than that of an individual.
At the same time Niebuhr does not want to strip love (to God and fellow man) as moral standard of all of its socio-political significance; something that would in any way be an impossibility. Interesting is for example his idea of a form of iustitia originalis. He points to the fact that the three virtues of faith, hope and love are an integral part of humanity, they were not lost in the Fall, although they have been perverted. The value of these three virtues, and therewith of the double commandment of love, lies in the religious and moral interpretation. Thus Niebuhr wants to point out that what before the fall was automatically in agreement with the being of man, has in the sinful reality taken the shape of laws and rules. This change places laws and rules on a lower moral order than the ‘law of love’ in its original form: love as transcendence of the law, righteousness as rationalisation of this law of love. At the same time this presence of a form and reminder of justice offers the opportunity to come to social justice on the basis of laws and not on the basis of power alone. The remaining form of justice offers the opportunity to rise above the direct self-interest.

The state as juggler
For Niebuhr egoism and the will-to-power dominate the social process of state formation. These motives are present on the individual level; on the level of a group, a society or a state these shortcomings return enlarged. For within a group there is less self-criticism. Niebuhr is therefore realistic enough to conclude that a society is mainly held together by power: “a nation is a corporate unity, held together much more by force and emotion, than by mind.”[12] At the same time power alone is not enough: a society has to share certain values or refer to values that appeal to the remaining sense of justice of people. It is an important task of the state (government) to continuously seek this balance between order and justice. The state has as an important mission to take on the organisation of the different powers that are at work in its own society and in the relations between states. Herein a balance of power, implying order, is eventually more important than the contents of this order.
In his concept of state, Niebuhr turns against the so-called contract-theorists. In his view the state is the result of a historic and organic process, not of a contract between the people and the rulers. This is related to Niebuhr’s idea that every social entity, including the state, is eventually of temporary nature. At that moment in history (the first half of the twentieth century) a state seems to Niebuhr to be the most appropriate form of rule, but it is not a constant. He sees the battle between God and man wanting to become god as the only constant in history. Remarkable is Niebuhr’s conclusion that the most important moral characteristic of the state is its hypocrisy. In claiming loyalty (devotion of its own citizens) and viewing community as a part of a universal community of values ‘dishonesty of nations’ is ‘a necessity of political policy’.

Conclusion
Niebuhr is constantly searching for a balance between might and morality. To him a balance is not only the most realistic option, but form his Christian conviction also the only right one. Negation of fall of man forms as great a danger to society as negation of the vestiges of justice.

Willem Boerma MA works as an adviser to the Provincial Legislature of Flevoland. Besides this he has worked on a thesis on Niebuhr and Elshtain’s reception of the works of St. Augustin. This article was published in Dutch in ‘Denkwijzer’ (2/2009), magazine of the Scientific Institute of the Christian Union party of the Netherlands. Translation by Jonathan van Tongeren

[1] Alisdair H. Murray (1997), Reconstructing Realism. Between power and cosmopolitan ethics.

[2] Paul Foreman (2002), The neo-orthodox theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, http://www.leaderu.com/isot/docs/niehbr3.html, 2; A typical quote in this context is: “it is a terrible heresy to suggest that, because the world is sinful, we have the right to construct a Machiavellian politics or a Darwinian sociology as normative for Christians.”, in: Robert MacAfee Brown ed. (1986) The essential Reinhold Niebuhr: selected essays and addresses, New Haven: Yale University Press, 215

[3] Reinhold Niebuhr (1949) Faith and History, 55

[4] Brown (1986), The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr, 146/147

[5] Ibid., 139, cf.: ibid., 105

[6] Reinhold Niebuhr (1965), Man’s nature and his communities. Essays on the dynamics and enigmas of man’s personal and social existence, New York; Charles Scribner’s sons, 90

[7] Niebuhr, Faith and history, 210

[8] Niebuhr, Human destiny, 79

[9] Niebuhr, Human nature, 216

[10] Niebuhr, The self and the dramas of history, 202

[11] Niebuhr, Moral man and immoral society, 3

[12] Niebuhr, Moral man and immoral society, 88