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The irony of American history
written by Reinhold Niebuhr
Studio : Scribner
by Scribner
Publisher : Scribner
Released : 1952-01-01
Availability : This Item is currently Not Available
Avg. Customer Rating: (based on 7 reviews)
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Product Description |
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“[Niebuhr] is one of my favorite philosophers. I take away [from his works] the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away . . . the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard.”—Senator Barack Obama Forged during the tumultuous but triumphant postwar years when America came of age as a world power, The Irony of American History is more relevant now than ever before. Cited by politicians as diverse as Hillary Clinton and John McCain, Niebuhr’s masterpiece on the incongruity between personal ideals and political reality is both an indictment of American moral complacency and a warning against the arrogance of virtue. Impassioned, eloquent, and deeply perceptive, Niebuhr’s wisdom will cause readers to rethink their assumptions about right and wrong, war and peace.
“The supreme American theologian of the twentieth century.”—Arthur Schlesinger Jr., New York Times
“Niebuhr is important for the left today precisely because he warned about America’s tendency—including the left’s tendency—to do bad things in the name of idealism. His thought offers a much better understanding of where the Bush administration went wrong in Iraq.”—Kevin Mattson, The Good Society
“Irony provides the master key to understanding the myths and delusions that underpin American statecraft. . . . The most important book ever written on US foreign policy.”—Andrew J. Bacevich, from the Introduction |
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Must reading for any person wishing to be informed on life |
The "useful" rating I have received for all of my reviews to date is about 47%--now I know how John McCain feels! In an effort to raise my rating to an Obama-like 53% I have undertaken to review a book that has been republished for this election year.
Whenever a book by someone now deceased is re-published one should ask why, and when that author has written several books the additional question becomes why now. In the case of The Irony of American History by Reinhold Niebuhr the answers are clear from reading the back cover. There you will find Barack Obama saying that Niebuhr "is one of my favorite philosophers," (which is akin to a chocoholic saying, "Herseys is one of my favorite candy bars.") There is also a reference that the book has been cited by "politicians as diverse as Hilary Clinton and John McCain." So it's re-publication is about making a buck in this presidential year. Still it is well worth reading.
Niebuhr has some important things to say in this book, but not what people such as Andrew Bacevich, who wrote the Introduction for the book, claim. It is not, as Bacevich boldly states, "the most important book ever written on U.S, foreign policy." It is not even a book, in the sense that, as Niebuhr himself writes in the Preface, the substance of the book consists of two series of lectures given in 1949 and 1951. Also it is not about American foreign policy, or for that matter even about the irony of American history. What the book is really about is a critical examination of the differences between Communism, as it existed at that time and the Western political and economic system and values with which it was in conflict.
Niebuhr begins by calling attention to the idea of American exceptionalism. The founders of this country regarded themselves as God's new chosen people and set out to be different from, and better than, their European counterparts. Niebuhr expounds on two ideas, Calvinism that was predominate in New England, and Jeffersonian values that prevailed in Virginia. He also refers to Max Weber and the idea of a "Protestant Ethic." What developed was a "cult of prosperity" and eventually a reliance on technology to solve our problems. "The irony of America's quest for happiness," Niebuhr writes on page 63, "lies in the fact that she succeeded more obviously than any other nation in making life more `comfortable,' only finally to run into larger incongruities of human destiny by the same achievements by which it (sic) escaped the smaller ones."
Niebuhr devotes much of the middle of the book to an analysis of Communism. He notes that Communism developed primarily in those countries that were feudal, agrarian static societies (Russia, China and Southeast Asia). Even in Europe it made the most inroads in those countries--France and Italy--that retained the remnants of feudalism. He also castigates both Communism and Capitalism for taking too simplistic a view of reality. Communism assumes that the differences in wealth in the world are due to the manipulations of the owner class and if class differences can be removed everyone will live in a utopian world. In this view it overlooks the fluidity of the capitalist system in which people can readily move from a low economic status to a high one (the essence of the American Dream). Capitalism, on the other hand, assumes that the differences are due solely to differences in abilities, access to resources and personal ambition, ignoring in the process the effects of prejudice and efforts of the rich and powerful to control others and consolidate their power.
We have to remember that Niebuhr was writing at a time just after China became Communist and during the Korean War. Thus he shows what now we can call an undue concern for the spread of Communism in Asia. He also fails to foresee the collapse of Communism which occurred some 40 years later, the rise of Islam and the role that globalization has played in transforming the world.
A second important aspect of the book is Niebuhr's comments on values. For example the following quote is from page 63: "Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint; therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness." This statement is as good a recipe for how to live as any I have ever read and by itself makes the book worth reading.
I have rated this book as five stars because I think it is vital reading for any thinking person, even given its somewhat dated ideas. But the book should be read slowly and carefully and even several times to get the full meaning.
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Great Book |
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Andrew Bacevich probably was able to get the publisher to re-issue this out of print book. Bacevich writes the forward. Great. |
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Tread lightly, America |
Neibuhr makes a strong case that America's history has in some ways worked against us, and brought us to a perspective that we, and we alone, have the best world view and the best way of doing things. The book is not a response to our invasion of Iraq, but our culture as he saw it during the Cold War era in which it was written.
Beginning with the attitudes which developed as a result of our being on an incredibly rick continent, and able to thrive in relative isolation from European wars, our prosperity led us into kind of an echo chamber of self-confirming blessedness: of course we (and our way of life) must be superior, or why would God have given us such a continent to live on?
Among the ironies which Neibhur focuses on is how our strength has actually put us in a position of weakness; because of our strength, we have a responsibility to use that strength very carefully (kind of a weakness, since we can't use the strength willy nilly).
Secondly, the confidence we have in the righteousness of our views is a confidence which communism also has, although Neibhur is explicit in labeling Communism as tyrannical.
It's a fine book, and I can't begin to do justice to his arguments here. But I highly recommend it, and in case you're wondering, it's not at all a "hate America first" book. |
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The Irony of American History |
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I first heard of this book on NPR where they reviewed it as timely today as it was in the 50s when first published. In this election year and the significance of the religious element in politics "The Irony of American History" explains America's Puritan and Calvinistic thinking that has shaped our nation. |
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Niebuhr's warning to America |
"Simply put, [this] is the most important book ever written on American foreign policy." Thus writes Andrew Bacevich in his introduction to the newly reissued book written by Reinhold Niebuhr in 1952. Bacevich is a Niebuhr scholar and author of the just published book, "The Limits of Power". He was largely responsible for getting "Irony" reissued.
The timing of this book becoming available, as well as of Bacevich's own book, couldn't be better. Niebuhr was a pastor, teacher, activist, moral theologian and prolific author. He was a towering presence in American intellectual life from the 1930's through the 1960's. He was, at various points in his career, a Christian Socialist, a pacifist, an advocate of U.S. intervention in World War II, a staunch anti-communist, an architect of Cold War liberalism, and a sharp critic of the Vietnam War.
The Irony of American History traces the course of American idealism and exceptionalism from its very beginnings in the providential thinking of the Pilgrims who settled Massachusetts. Written early in the Cold War, Niebuhr devotes much of his analysis to comparing and contrasting Marxian communism and the "bourgeois" liberalism, or liberal democracy of America. While he clearly argues that the liberal project of democracy offers more to the "common good" of the community than does Marxism, both have the seeds of their destruction in the illusions they hold. So-called "Niebuhrian realism" is the ability to see through such illusions as a condition for avoiding the worst pitfalls they carry.
Alas, one of the greatest of these pitfalls is the American tendency to suppose that we can manage history. As Niebuhr writes: "The illusions about the possibility of managing historical destiny from any particular standpoint in history, always involves, as already noted, miscalculations about both the power and the wisdom of the managers and of the weakness and the manageability of the historical 'stuff' which is to be managed." He goes on to point out that "In the liberal versions of the dream of managing history, the problem of power is never fully elaborated. ...On the whole, [American government] is expected to gain its ends by moral attraction and limitation. Only occasionally does an hysterical statesman suggest that we must increase our power and use it in order to gain the ideal ends, of which providence has made us the trustees."
Is it not painfully evident that we reached one of those "occasional moments" after 9/11 when "hysterical statesmen" - Bush and Cheney, et al - argued for a profound increase in the power to gain the "ideal ends" of bringing "freedom" to Iraq and the Middle East since we are the obvious "trustees" of this freedom?
Herein lies the element of "irony", the philosophical and spiritual core of Niebuhr's arguments. The first element of irony, Niebuhr points out, "is the fact that our nation has, without particularly seeking it, acquired a greater degree of power than any other nation of history" and we "have created a 'global' political situation in which the responsible use of this power has become a condition of survival of the free world."
He continues: "But the second element of irony lies in the fact that a strong America is less completely master of its own destiny than was a comparatively weak America, rocking in the cradle of its continental security and serene in its infant innocence. The same strength which has extended our power beyond a continent has also interwoven our destiny with the destiny of many peoples and brought us into a vast web of history in which other wills, running in oblique or contrasting directions to our own, inevitably hinder or contradict what we most fervently desire. We cannot simply have our way, not even when we believe our way to have the 'happiness of mankind' as its promise."
In Iraq we have met the enemy and "it is us". Not enough of us understood that "we cannot simply have our way" in the exercise of American power, which is thought to be essentially military power, to head off the folly in which we are buried and the prospect of a war without end.
Writing all this in 1952 with the cataclysmic dangers of the Cold War becoming a hot war, Niebuhr foresaw the increasing globalization of the world and the danger of not recognizing and accepting the limits of our power to bring freedom and happiness to the rest of the world, especially through military means.
This slender book of 173 pages is loaded with these prescient observations warning us clearly of the catastrophic dangers that can follow from a failure to understand the limits of our power of our exceptionalism and of the illusion that we can manage all this history to accomplish our supposedly moral and "good" ends for other nations.
When you finish reading this book you will then want to read Bacevich's book, "The Limits of Power", in which he essentially channels Niebuhr's understanding and traces the history of the last 60 years in which the Bush-Cheney foreign policy has become simply an extension of the direction American foreign policy has taken, primarily from the Reagan administration onward. |
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