Bookish (or wannabe bookish) conservatives love their intellectual heroes. Throw a stone near them and you hit a decontextualized Burke quote or an Adam Smith tie or a Murray Rothbard t-shirt or an online course on the thought of C. S. Lewis. Quite often, though, these heroes have to a greater or lesser extent been appropriated by the right. It’s certainly the case with Reinhold Niebuhr. For his entire life, Niebuhr was a socialist and then a liberal in good standing. Although Niebuhr was a sharp critic of liberalism, it came from within the tradition. He had no brief for conservatism: he criticized it sharply and made no common cause with conservatives. Nevertheless, he produced Right Deviationists who sought to claim him. The appropriation efforts began while Niebuhr was alive – and he resisted them.
In the early 1950s, Niebuhr’s stock was incredibly high. Life magazine, that benchmark of mainstream culture, intoned in an article on Morningside Heights that Niebuhr’s “stern-minded ‘neo-orthodox’ philosophy has made him America’s leading Protestant theologian.” National magazines routinely presented him as such. He matched the national mood of worrying about the bomb, hungering for a moment of global peace, and maybe thinking there was something larger that gave it meaning. “Mankind is living in a Lenten age,” Life quoted him in another editorial. The age is “so replete with evidences of human helplessness,” Life continued, paraphrasing Niebuhr, “that our civilization cannot explain it without the most serious acknowledgement, not just that we have sinned, but that we are still vehicles of original sin.”
It’s the re-emphasis on the theological concept of original sin that Niebuhr may be best known for. Original sin is the doctrine that teaches that humankind, far from being innocent at birth and corrupted over time, are in fact marked from birth with the sinful nature of humanity. Sin is in our bones, and only Christian grace frees us. Niebuhr and has followers (including agnostics like Arthur Schlesinger Jr) found this intuition compelling; and Niebuhr unpacked the political implications of it and other theological insights.
Another, less influential, intellectual set who fit the national mood, at least for a moment, found Niebuhr’s resurrection of original sin especially compelling. The circle of moderate academics and writers who came to be called the New Conservatives saw original sin – or a secularized understanding of it – as one of the core planks of their project. One, John Hallowell, told Niebuhr directly that “as you can readily see, I have been greatly influenced by your own thinking.” Another, in sketching the New Conservatism (maybe presciently) suggested one of Niebuhr’s books “might have been received as a veritable manifesto of philosophic conservatism and which, indeed, may still become such.” Others listed Niebuhr among the “Burkeans or new conservatives.”
The events of the twentieth century had taught the New Conservatives that society – and Western civilization – were tentative things, easily lost in the era of mass politics. Like Schlesinger, they saw America – and really the democratic West – as the vital center between competing totalitarianisms. Human frailty as conceptualized by original sin showed the vulnerability of it all, and so it was both rational and wise to conserve it. This meant a moderate form of political and cultural conservatism was the necessary bulwark for gentle liberalism. But The New Conservatives under-learned Niebuhr’s lesson. They took his emphasis on original sin, and used it to undergird their cautious framework. They didn’t draw out the implications of original sin that Niebuhr did.
In Moral Man and Immoral Society, published in 1932, Niebuhr argued that while individual people may be moral – perhaps even holy – in the aggregate, our sinful nature comes to the fore, and taints all human endeavors. Our many individual failings combine, and are baked into the social structures we as humans construct. The social order cannot be held up as a manifestation of the wisdom of the ancients or the democracy of the dead or even as a spontaneous order. Society is necessarily complicit in the worst aspects of our humanity – indeed, worse than individual sinners by fact of addition.
Surely, confronted with this recognition of sin’s pervasiveness, our response should be to find and overturn those oppressions and inequalities – the elevated status that “dominant and privileged groups” defend with an array of arguments born of “universal self-deception and hypocrisy.”
Yes, says Niebuhr, but, even in attacking the products of social sin, we must be constantly alert that ameliorist efforts have – as products of humans – in themselves a sinful impulse to self-aggrandizement or whatever else that must be constantly guarded against.
With this insight regarding the pervasiveness of sin, Niebuhr’s endorsement of anything could only ever be, “Yes, but…” Niebuhr was not one of the New York intellectuals, but he became an intellectual and he lived in New York, and his thought suited and no doubt shaped the scene. Toughened by the Second World War, sometimes including active service, and the grim bipolarity of the Cold War, the intellectuals of the era often prized hard-headed truths about human nature, but also reveled in paradox and ambiguity. A prophet for an ironic age, Niebuhr fit the times well. As John P. Diggins writes, “History could now be seen as paradoxical rather than progressive, ironical rather than logical (it could also be seen as dialectical, but without Hegel’s redemptive telos).”
The New Conservatives were themselves in conflict with and ultimately defeated by the “movement conservatives” who congregated around National Review. Movement conservatives have had a more ambivalent relationship to Niebuhr, but one that became appropriative. In the 1950s and early 1960s, they dealt with him in three main ways.
First, as a public theologian who – alongside his colleague Paul Tillich – had made theology relevant and respectable among mainstream intellectuals. In this respect, they especially admired his emphasis on original sin, a doctrine conservatives appreciated but had been downplayed by theological liberals. At the same time, theological conservatives and Catholics sometimes took exception to his Neo-orthodox positions and his political liberalism. Neal McCaffrey reviewing June Bingham’s biography depicted Niebuhr as a peculiar Christian who “sallies forth to do battle against the Resurrection and the Virgin Birth” and corrects Christ.
Second, conservatives would dismiss Niebuhr as a typical ADA stooge and supporter of Adlai Stevenson who laundered liberalism through thin Christian theology. “Oh, that Reiny. What a swinger,” smirked an editorial about liberals’, including Niebuhr’s, support for Lenny Bruce.
Niebuhr reciprocated this antipathy. In 1960, in response to some ad presumably naming him (I could not determine what the ad was, despite trying pretty hard), Niebuhr told Bingham, “I did not worry about the National Review ad because they are so foolish that everybody simply laughs at them.”
The third response, though, sought, like the New Conservatives, to portray Niebuhr as a Burkean conservative himself.
For example, in his (disappointing) sequel to The Conservative Mind, Russell Kirk (who was himself lumped in with the New Conservatives) wrote about the need for liberals to “go to school with Reinhold Niebuhr” to learn human limits. He suggested Niebuhr had moved, even, toward “forthright social conservatism.” A student of Hallowell’s complained that in Kirk, “by a curious transvaluation and oversimplification, Reinhold Niebuhr, whose mind is really complex, has strangely been transformed into an inverted Condorcet for the 1950s.”
The real driver of this conservative claim over Niebuhr was Will Herberg.
Herberg was a Jewish existentialist, a former Marxist, a pioneering sociologist, and a fabricator. As Herberg made his way out of communism, his encounter with Niebuhr shaped him profoundly. "What I owe to Reinhold Niebuhr in the formation of my general theological outlook, every page of this book bears witness,” he once wrote. Herberg and Niebuhr became friends. Niebuhr described him to a third party as “quite a person in every way.”
And as Herberg moved further and further to the right, he sought to bring Niebuhr with him. In 1955, while reviewing Niebuhr’s The Self and Dramas of History for The New Republic, Herberg claimed that the theologian, “for all his involvement in liberal politics - or perhaps precisely because of his involvement - is to be counted among the 'neo-conservatives' of our time who own kinship with Edmund Burke, rather than among the liberals, who draw their inspiration from Tom Paine and the French Enlightenment.”
Having read the remarks, Niebuhr wrote to June Bingham to say, “I am sorry that Will Herberg persists in linking me with conservatism.” He had written his own essay for TNR, and he hoped it would show “the error of equating realism with conservatism just because the thought of the French Enlightenment was both liberal and illusory.”
It’s not clear to me his essay, titled “Liberalism: Illusions and Realities,” published shortly after Herbergs, was effective on that front. In it, Niebuhr fought some old battles against unreconstructed progressive liberals, both political and theological. He gave a short history of liberalism that bifurcated into left and right branches. It came to represent political and economic freedom, yes, but also a larger belief in the perfectibility of man and of historical progress. The last “two ideas were basic to all the political miscalculations of the Enlightenment and were the source of its errors.” Music to conservatives’ ears.
You can see where Kirk and Herberg and the New Conservatives are coming from when Niebuhr says:
“Liberalism” acquired a special connotation as a philosophy of life which did not take the factors of interest and power seriously, which expected all parochial loyalties to be dissolved in more universal loyalties; and which was indifferent to organically or historically established loyalties and rights under the illusion that it would be simple for rational man to devise more ideal communities and rights. The liberalism of the French Enlightenment was thus based upon illusions as to the nature of man and of history. It was quasi-anarchistic and pacifistic in its attitude toward the coercions which are a necessary part of communal cohesion and toward the conflicts of interest which always take place between communities.
People who hold such a critical view of liberalism are often called conservatives, Niebuhr allowed. Yet, they were not. “Such persons would be more accurately defined as ‘realistics.’” While there may be truth “imbedded in a conservative tradition,” it must be freed from the errors which are also transmitted in the conservative tradition.” And so it was that a liberalism shorn of its naiveté is the only philosophy that leaves the way to the future open.
Despite his desire to shut out the right, Niebuhr gave conservatives plenty to work with in this essay. So, undeterred, in 1961, Herberg, now religious editor for National Review, explicitly claimed Niebuhr as a “Burkean conservative.” “Niebuhr is a conservative in the proper sense of the word,” Herberg claimed, and “he is a conservative precisely by virtue of his theological position.”
Niebuhr, Herberg pointed out, is critical of the French Enlightenment origins of totalitarianism. “The Enlightenment spawned every illusion which produced despotism in the name of liberty, civil war in the name of fraternity, and superstitious politics in the name of reason.” He sees society as organic and historically informed. He thinks within Burke’s lines, and acknowledges a debt to him. He is skeptical of elements of democracy: against mandate theory of representation; suspicious of direct democracy; and so on. And while it’s true Niebuhr is involved with liberal causes, per Burke, the standard of a statesman is “a disposition to preserve and an ability to improve.” It all came down to Niebuhr’s (and Burke’s) anthropology. Ultimately, both see humankind “realistically,” it its “heights” and “depths,” “grandeur,” and “misery,” “possibilities,” and limitations.” Very conservative indeed.
Not all agreed with Herberg’s thesis. One fundamentalist reader of National Review cited JB Matthews to ring alarm bells about Niebuhr’s Marxist influence over young Protestant clergy and conservatism.
Meanwhile, Jeffrey Hart, an erstwhile Niebuhr fan and (at that stage) a professor at Columbia drew out disagreements between Niebuhr and Burke. Niebuhr’s Protestant and Neo-orthodox focus on revealed religion placed him in stark contrast with Burke’s implied belief in Natural Law. The austere Niebuhr had no obvious interest in the role of beauty. Burke meanwhile was an aesthetician and ignoring this aspect of his thought was a mistake. Burke thought in terms of localities, while Niebuhr appeared not to. And on political specifics, Niebuhr simply was a liberal. On confronting evil (the Jacobin French or Communist Russia), “Burke’s awareness of complexity and moral ambiguity became a motive for recommending intervention against simplicity; Niebuhr’s awareness of complexity and moral ambiguity tends to inhibit action.” Connecting the two, Hart seemed to argue, caricatured them both.
Still undeterred, Herberg persisted. In 1965, for example, writing about the Watts Riots, he enlisted Niebuhr and other Augustinians to criticize both the rioters and Martin Luther King Jr. Internal security is the first order of every society, Herberg insisted. Without order, there can be no justice: “This fundamental truth, well understood by political philosophers and theologians, from Plato and Augustine on, was recently reiterated with great force by that later-day Augustinian, Reinhold Niebuhr.” So “They are the guilty ones, these apostles of 'non-violence'" for teaching that law can be broken and custom maligned. There is simply no way to reconcile Herberg’s reading with Moral Man and Immoral Society. In that book, Niebuhr is clear that while there is value in society, it is inherently compromised.
In 1962, Niebuhr reviewed No Substitute for Victory, for The New Leader. The book was written by a naval intelligence officer and later Goldwater speechwriter, and published by the conservative Henry Regnery Co. Maybe some of Niebuhr’s frustration at being associated with the right came out in the review, titled “History as seen from the Radical Right.” Accustomed to irony and ambiguity, he dismissed the simplistic claims of the book as cutting “contemporary history down to size” making” it tolerable to tender imaginations” of “retired admirals and retired millionaires.” The Cold War was not "a battle between free enterprise and the hosts of evil,” and a winnable nuclear war was the fantasy of the “radical right.” The review stung, and Henry Regnery complained to William F. Buckley Jr – National Review’s editor. Buckley replied that he “wondered how it is possible that someone with so fine a mind as RN can write such political drivel?” Herberg hadn’t fully convinced the boss.
Another example of conservative appropriation: Michael Novak – who, like Herberg, had his own ideological peregrinations from left to right, and also made his bones writing sociologically – called Niebuhr the “father of neoconservatives.” (Neocons here meaning not quite the same thing as the War in Iraq – Freedom Agenda boosters of 2001.) He may not be entirely wrong here. Irving Kristol once claimed, “The two intellectual godfathers of my neo-ism were Lionel Trilling and Reinhold Niebuhr.”
Novak admitted Niebuhr “always was and wanted to be a man of the left.” But a historical irony emerged as conservatives and neoconservatives cited him, even attributing their rightward shifts to him. Novak went so far as to suggest Niebuhr didn’t follow through the logic of his own insights. In his own case, Novak claimed to fill the space Niebuhr left regarding the economic implications of his thought: “Precisely in Niebuhr's neglect, I found my own vocation.” In reality, Novak may have been right that men like Kristol and other neoconservatives moved from Niebuhr’s Cold War liberalism to neoconservatism, but his essay claiming Niebuhr for neoconservatism falls flat. Novak descended into banal complaints about the contemporary left. He lamented there was little prophetic courage in arguing from the left today, because the left controls the cultural centers of power and is “unusually abusive in its style of argument.”
His summary of Niebuhr’s political thought as “The necessity of the free market, the limited priority of politics over economics, and the primacy of the spirit,” deliberately played up the connections to neoconservatism. At the same time, it flattened Niebuhr beyond recognition. The most compelling point he made was that Right Niebuhrians could plumb some depth not available to the left. The could be a necessary corrective to Left Niebuhrians. Who knows? Perhaps, given Niebuhr’s interest in dialectic and paradox, there was something to this. Novak’s essay represented a poor example of what he recommended though.
A lot has been said recently about Cold War liberalism. Samuel Moyn has done more than anyone to depict it not just as historically located, but an intellectual cul-de-sac that drew the boundaries of liberalism so pessimistically as to make contemporary liberalism self-defeating. Some have felt the thesis to be more germane than ever: the lowered horizons of the Democratic Party after Obama (himself a self-professed latter-day Niebuhrian) offer nothing to voters exhausted by the status quo. Moyn misses - or thinks dangerous - the wise but also clear-eyed approach to injustice Niebuhr employed.
Moyn (who doesn’t directly address Niebuhr) is almost certainly informed by the effect Niebuhr had on his right-wing successors. It’s true that neoconservatism emerged from Cold War liberalism – although not alone. We’ve already heard from Irving Kristol about Niebuhr. He specifically praised Niebuhr not only for opening the world of theology to him, but also creating a permission structure to “to reject liberal metaphysics while remaining, to some degree and in some way, politically liberal.” I guess we all know how that turned out. Kristol himself said, “The following decades were to reveal to me how utterly impossible it was.”
As with Novak and the other conservative interpreters of Niebuhr discussed here, Kristol takes Niebuhr’s criticism of liberalism, but doesn’t go with him all the way. Niebuhr, like Garry Wills from another Christian tradition, retained his prophetic Christian challenge to society and to its privileged classes: the Augustinian spirit that seeks injustice. Niebuhr never rested on his critique of liberalism; it was always, Yes, but…”
In researching this essay, I came across a short article by the prototypical New Conservative: the sad-eyed Peter Viereck. He pled for both the left and right to read Niebuhr as he really was. Conservatives claiming Niebuhr without engaging him deeply “forget that a conservatism overinflated by misleading half-truths degenerates into mere success-hunting and thereby into the most transient of fads.” Viereck had a clear interest in advancing his brand of conservatism, but his warning was perceptive. Paladins of conservatism – not just the New Conservatism – do go success-hunting. They cherry pick intellectual heroes to justify their arguments in defense of entrenched privilege. It seems to me they have less confidence in their mission than liberals and the left – to which, no doubt, conservatives say “good.” But they need to justify their claims somehow, and intellectual lights are part of this justificatory matrix. Conservatives crave the justification of the endorsement of the wise elders. Note Will Herberg citing Plato, Augustine and Niebuhr for good measure in his criticism of the Watts rioters. “I don’t have any great confidence in saints, Catholic or otherwise,” the Protestant Niebuhr wrote in a letter. Conservatives, on the other hand, do.
I don’t think Niebuhr was a conservative; I think that’s pretty clear. It’s also clear at least some conservatives are drawn to him, for his name, but also for his criticism of a naïve liberalism. That’s fine, I suppose. I just wish they were more Niebuhrian. As Viereck suggested, It’s illegitimate and insufficient to crib from Niebuhr simply to bolster conservative priors. But if engagement with his thought leads to a less naïve conservatism – one that recognized the value, but especially the injustice in social structures, then all the better. A conservatism alert to the ironies of its own actions and principles, which lived in the ambiguous spaces: that would be a real Right Niebuhrianism.
Conservatives treated George Orwell's work similarly, at least while the Soviet Union was a going concern. They accurately focused on his hatred for Communism and his vague Tory cultural leanings, the better to ignore his socialism.
See Gary Dorrien's new autobiography, "Over from Union Road: My Christian-Left-Intellectual Life" (Baylor U.P., 2024, p.131) on his friendship with Russell Kirk: "...we compared notes on authors that he and I treasured, and we fixed on...Reinhold Niebuhr. Russell said he had radar for people who were more conservative than they realized, and Niebuhr was a good example, on his view, and so was I...He was committed to the view that the formerly almost-Marxist Niebuhr progressed almost all the way to...Edmund Burke. We stayed in touch, in 1993 I wrote a book on neoconservatism, and Russell wrote a vintage-Russell blurb for it." At the time, Dorrien chaired the religion department at Kalamazoo College. In 2005 he became Reinhold Niebuhr professor of social ethics at Union Theological Seminary in NYC.