Father of neoconservatives: nowadays, the truest disciples of the liberal theologian Reinhold Niebuhr are conservatives.

This is the one-hundredth year (centesimus annus) since the birth of Reinhold Niebuhr. There is no one on the Christian Left who fills his shoes today. Indeed, a significant number of Christians who have become disillusioned with the Left (as Niebuhr was with "liberals" in his time) call him their father. Others may regard them as illegitimate children (may perhaps state their view even more pungently). The fact is, neoconservatives cite Niebuhr at least as often as those on the Left do.

Why do so many conservatives, especially neoconservatives, regard Reinhold Niebuhr as their teacher? Consider these words of Will Herberg, written in 1956 about a time "in the later 1930s": "I was then at a most crucial moment in my life . . . left without any ground to stand on, deprived of the commitment and understanding that alone had made life livable." At this point, Herberg came upon Moral Man and Immoral Society. Herberg stified: . . . the meeting" with Niebuhr's thought-I did not yet know him personally-quite literally changed my mind and life. Humanly speaking, it 'converted" me, for in some manner I cannot describe, I felt my whole being, and not merely my thinking, shifted to a new center.

Not nearly so dramatic, but on a similar level, was my own first encounter with Niebuhr's work-in my case, Beyond Tragedy-in about 1956. 1 was at the time an undergraduate studying Thomistic philosophy. Niebuhr's book struck classical Aristotelian chords in me; his sense of contingency and irony rang true. Three years later I wrote one of the most favorable reviews a Niebuhr book ever received from a Catholic author.

Still, let us be clear about one thing. Reinhold Niebuhr always was and wanted to be a man of the Left. In the years of his vigor, indeed, it would have been hard to imagine what "an intellectual giant of the Republican Party" would even have looked like; the phrase would have sounded oxymoronic. So it must be one of the ironies of history, of a sort in which he took pleasure, that so many who read him not only became conservatives or neoconservatives but attributed their conversion in this direction to him. They had been Marxists or liberals or social democrats, until his criticisms of sentimental, idealistic, and rational liberalism liberated them. More than that, Niebuhr also taught them how to be conservatives in a new way-fresh, future-oriented, alert to factors of power and interest. It seemed to some of them that Niebuhr never followed the full logic of his own insights. Hear again Will Herberg:

As far back as 1944, in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, signs of the essentially "conservative" cast of mind of this leading "liberal" could be discerned, for what is The Children of Light but a truly conservative" defense of American democracy? . . . Nor should we be surprised to see his earlier "prophetic" radicalism culminate in the "new conservatism"; there is an inner connection between the two, and no real reversal is involved. For the "prophetic" radicalism implied a radical relativization of all political programs, institutions, and movements, and therefore a thoroughgoing rejection of every form of political rationalism. Add to this a renewed emphasis on the historic continuities of social life, and Niebuhr's brand of 'conservatism" emerges. It is manifestly not the conservatism of those who are called conservatives in American public life [in 1956], but it is enough apparently to establish a kinship with Burke and give Niebuhr a prominent place in all recent histories and anthologies of the "new conservatism." [Italics added.]

Quite naturally, Niebuhrians of the Left want to keep Niebuhr pristinely "theirs." They are quite correct to do so, insofar as an historical account of Niebuhr's own public commitments demands it; consider, for example, his highly visible commitment to Americans for Democratic Action. Left-wing Niebuhrians, however, fail to dwell on two further considerations. First, many new conservatives of the 1950s, neoconservatives of a later generation, and assorted Aristotelians, Burkeans, Churchillians, Reaganites, and Thatcherites broke with the Left in some measure because of the arguments they learned from Niebuhr.

Second, they do not recognize the tremendous shift in the balance of cultural power since Niebuhr's death in 1971. Whereas in 1960 the media were for the most part on the Right, and even in the universities those on the Left felt themselves to be a pusillus grex, from at least the time of Richard Nixon both journalism and the universities have moved overwhelmingly to the moderate Left. In those circles today it takes little "prophetic" courage to stand with the Left, whereas opposing the Left does take stamina.

Ronald Preston, in an interesting essay "Reinhold Niebuhr and the New Right," takes it as a "fact that relative justice is likely to be with the radical Left because the Right has more power, as well as the force of inertia, on its side." But Preston fails to distinguish cultural power from political and economic power. In recent years the Left has been humbled in the political and economic spheres, but in the cultural sphere it is still the regnant power. This basic shift gives to the more conservative Niebuhrians the sweet elixir of practicing the "prophetic" role in the sphere of culture, against what David Halberstam in his book on the media called The Powers That Be.

Niebuhr himself, of course, was accustomed to doing battle with the Left. Like a theological Stonewall Jackson, he led many a punishing cavalry charge against sentimental and idealistic liberals, hard and soft utopians, Marxists, pacifists, and unthinking anti-Americans. In return, he took heavy fire from his left. Thus, it is easy to understand why left-wing Niebuhrians so dislike being attacked, in Niebuhr's name, from their right. Ronald Preston's way of getting round this is to call the views of the New Right "unnuanced," a criticism he borrows from John Bennett. One looks eagerly, therefore, to Preston for nuance.

Alas, many on the Right do lump together everyone to their left, without differentiation. And many on the Left manifest the same indifference regarding the Right. Thus, Professor Preston lists Russell Kirk as a "neoconservative," having no idea how much heartburn that will cause in Mecosta, Michigan. He demonstrates no instinct whatever for the mally ways in which neoconservatives distinguish themselves both from conservatives and from libertarians. Nor does he even faintly suggest the enormous differences between the New Right in Britain (which is itself a movement of many important intellectual differences) and the cultural conservatives in the United States. Nuance indeed.

Moreover, considerably more nuance would be needed to use the word "capitalism" intelligently today. Under this heading, Preston lumps together Adam Smith, social Darwinism, "possessive individualism," libertarianism, and laissez-faire. With the confidence of a man who doesn't see how thin the ice is under his feet, Preston asserts that "the economic views of the new Right contain nothing new. They are the resurrection of notions which were current in the 1920s, and falsified following the years of the Wall Street crash of 1929. Since we know what Niebuhr said of them before, it is not hard to see what he would say of them now." One averts one's eyes in pity from this ignorance of massive changes in fact and theory that have affected the rebirth of capitalist conviction in this century.

To cite but one example, since about 1960 evidence has been pouring in for an important empirical proposition; viz., that capitalism is a necessary but not sufficient condition for democracy. As a good empirical sociologist, Peter Berger has put in place all the necessary "nuances" of that proposition in The Capitalist Revolution (1987). The essential points had already been sketched in my Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (1982), and indeed by Niebuhr himself, who wrote, in The Irony of American History (1952):

There are elements of truth in classical economies which remain a permanent treasure of a free society, since some forms of a "free market" are essential to democracy. The alternative is the regulation of economic process through bureaucratic political decisions. Such regulation, too consistently applied, involves the final peril of combining political and economic power.

In interpreting this sentence, Preston singles out the phrase "some forms of a free market,"' claiming that this phrase "hides all the problems at issue in the struggle to find in the area of social democracy and democratic socialism an economic order which is both efficient and humane." But in my mind an entirely different phrase ht up like neon: "the final peril of combining political and economic power." That phrase flashed a red warning fight about the root danger inherent in social democracy and democratic socialism, and diagnosed the reason why neither is likely to lead to a society at once humane and efficient. On Niebuhr's own radical suspicion of unchecked power, the combination of political and economic power in the hands of a new administrative class could not but be inhumane. Social democracy by its very inner constitution is bound to empower the educated and highly organized middle class, at the expense of the disorganized poor. This is exactly what is happening in all social democracies today, as the more astute social democrats (especially in Britain) are beginning to concede.

Here again, Niebuhr-living in a different time, amid a different constellation of powers-Aid not follow the logic of his own insight. This is not surprising, since Niebuhr did not give much attention to economic issues. Precisely in Niebuhr's neglect, I found my own vocation. Surely, I thought, the next generation of Niebuhrians ought to push some of Niebuhr's deeper insights into the one major area he neglected. Moreover, since most of the Niebuhrians were, and are, tilted toward the Left, the Niebuhrian principle of countervailing intellectual power demanded that some of his students, at least, should push inquiry in other directions. It seemed to me further that the deepest insights of Niebuhr concerning social order demanded a threefold division of systems and powers.

Needed. A Third System

Niebuhr thought it utterly essential to separate political and economic power and to prevent their unchecked combination. But Niebuhr's sustained criticism of economic liberalism shed light on the need to identify yet a third system, viz., the moral and cultural system. This third factor becomes particularly clear in the maturing Niebuhr's dissatisfactions with both the liberalism and the conservatism of his time, as he set them forth in Chapter 5 of Christian Realism and Political Problems. Such discussions set me on the search for the three-sided system of countervailing powers that became the backbone of The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. Indeed, one passage in Niebuhr's chapter defines the need for such a system quite clearly. It also helps to explain why former businessmen such as Secretary of State James Baker find themselves baffled by ethnicity, nationalism, Islamic fundamentalism, and other such moral and cultural realities:

Unfortunately the businessman, as a man of affairs, fails us in the complexities of politics, because his experience is limited to a type of fairly simple collective endeavor in which the economic motive is isolated from other lusts and ambitions of men.... These facts dispose the commercial classes to that puzzling alternation between a pacifism, which obscures the factors of power [as in the 1930s, which Niebuhr never forgot], and an assertion of power, which is heedless of all the moral and cultural factors in an international situation.

Note that as Niebuhr here lampoons the blindness of businessmen to two of these systems, his students may on the same ground lampoon the blindness of political activists to the two other systems, and the blindness of clergymen, academics, and journalists, as well. "In God we trust" meant to Niebuhr: "In no one else."

From Niebuhr, in any case, neoconservatives in the United States have taken a great many lessons. Like him, most of us are Biblical in our vision of human nature and destiny. Most of us, as it happens, are Catholics and Jews, although not a few (and the numbers keep growing as people learn the "nuances") are Protestant, both mainline and evangelical. Like Niebuhr, we see "some forms of a `free market'" as "a permanent treasure of the free society." Like Niebuhr, we reject social Darwinism, "possessive individualism," the abstraction "economic man," and the conceptual purity of libertarianism. We accept the need for the welfare state, although we have many criticisms of its current destructive practices, and many proposals for its reform. Like him, we are forward-looking, not backward-looking. We contest with the Left the direction in which true social progress lies.

Like Niebuhr, neoconservatives do not accept "the market" as a universal tool for every human need. For that matter, we do not accept democracy," either, as a universal tool for every human need; like the American Framers, we are aware of the "diseases to which democracies have ever been prey." Like Niebuhr, we hold that both capitalism and the democratic republic depend on the primacy of certain claims of the Creator and Judge.

The necessity of the free market; the limited priority of politics over economics; and the primacy of the spirit-that is a fairly good summary of the neoconservative position, as outlined in Irving Kristol's Reflections of a Neoconservative (1984). Corrected for its inherent tendency to tilt toward the state, we think that social democracy is an acceptable variant of democratic capitalism. Otherwise, without this corrective, social democracy is quite dangerous, because of its class bias and its concentrations of power. In particular, we fear that social democracy rushes the world toward that "new soft despotism" which Tocqueville glimpsed as the terminus of egalitarian democracy. Nonetheless, in the name of countervailing powers, we welcome social democrats to the debate concerning which path to take in particular circumstances.

For the last decade or so, conservative Niebuhrians have read "the signs of the times" with considerably greater accuracy than their left-wing counterparts, though given our convictions about human nature we don't expect the latter to admit it. Nonetheless, the Left has done far better than the Right on one thing. Since about 1968, it has swung to its side most of the literati, professors of humanities and social science, higher clergy, editors and publishers, reporters, rock stars, and filmmakers-that is, most of the cultured despisers of conservatism in all its forms. Since these dominate the media, the seminaries, and the universities, left-wing Niebuhrians like to think that they control the mainstream. It is to the advantage of conservative Niebuhrians that they continue to believe this.