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The Irony of American History
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Review
“[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.” (Barack Obama New York Times)“A blessing of this time of liberation and hope is that serious works of political analysis and philosophy may contribute to the new administration's approach to its daunting agenda of global and national problems. That Barack Obama has made clear his admiration for . . . Niebuhr's The Irony of American History is in itself reassuring. . . . It would be hard to think of another book from the 1950s that retains, nearly sixty years later, both its compulsive readability and so much of its relevance. The elegance, strength, and charm of Niebuhr's writing invite quotation at every turn. . . . It is impossible to summarize a book so strong and yet so subtle, in which every word has meaning.” (Brian Urquhart New York Review of Books 2009-03-26)“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 the new Foreword)
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About the Author
Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971)taught for many years at Union Theological Seminary, in New York City, as well as lecturing and preaching all over the country. The recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964, he is the author of many books, including The Nature and Destiny of Man.
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Product details
Paperback: 200 pages
Publisher: University of Chicago Press; Reprint edition edition (May 1, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0226583996
ISBN-13: 978-0226583990
ASIN: 0226583988
Product Dimensions:
5.2 x 0.5 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 10.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.4 out of 5 stars
55 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#71,998 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Written almost 70 years ago, the prescience of this work only becomes more remarkable with age. Although some of the specifics are dated, it is easy to forget this was the product of a Cold War environment; it is at least as relevant and insightful today as it was at the time of its composition. A sharp disdain for communist philosophy is evident throughout, but failures of this approach have piled up in his wake, only solidifying his central thesis. Perhaps most compelling in Niebuhr's work is his commentary on the factors that could lay low democracy. Informed by Christian theology, his consideration of how moral and political systems interact is particularly engaging, and may make the subject matter more interesting for some who would otherwise find it a bit dry.
Mr. Niebuhr's writing style includes frequent long, convoluted sentences that are difficult to parse and often include mysterious phrases. Here's one example:"Among us, as well as among communists, an excessive voluntarism which finally brings human history under the control of the human will is in tentative, but not in final, contradiction to a determinism which finds historical destiny favorable at some particular point to man’s assumption of mastery over that destiny."What does it mean to find "historical destiny favorable at some particular point to man’s assumption of mastery over that destiny." I dunno.Here's another:"But if the mind or the will which pretends to control historical destiny is more 'historical' than is realized in one sense of the word, the lives and persons, the forces and emotions, the hopes and fears which are to be managed and controlled are more 'historical' in another sense of the word."What are these two senses of "historical"? I couldn't find any clues in the context. And what does it mean to be "more 'historical' than is realized"? Just how "historical" was I supposed to realize that the "mind or ... will" was? I guess I need to know this so that I can judge whether the mind or will is more or less "historical" than I realized. My head is swimming in confusion...Here are a couple mysterious phrases packed into one short sentence:"Unique human freedom, in even the simplest peasant, transfigures nature’s immediate necessities."What is "unique" human freedom, and how does it differ from "regular" ("non-unique") human freedom? Or is the author simply talking about "human freedom," period? Or is he talking about just plain old "freedom" (for monkeys or whales or flies or people)? And what does it mean to "transfigure nature's immediate necessities?" What exactly are "nature's immediate necessities," anyway? And in what way are they "transfigured" by "unique human freedom"? Beats me.Niebuhr also spends way too many words in a seemingly trivial discussion of the differences between irony, tragedy, and pathos. I guess the reason he included this was because he put the word "irony" in the book’s title.But what really disappointed me in this book is that after wading through all this verbose and convoluted prose, there seemed to be only a few ideas presented, all of which seemed obvious to me -- although evidently not as obvious to our world leaders as they ought to be:1. Power corrupts. A powerful nation may be sincerely convinced that it is doing something for the benefit of all mankind, but it cannot escape the tendency to favor its own interests in its actions.2. We're not as smart as we think we are. Leaders of powerful nations need to learn that human events are complex and actions have unintended consequences. For actions we take today, we may not see the full results during our lifetime. Leaders of powerful nations need to view their actions from the point of view of the different culture and history of the weaker nation that they may be trying to help. For example, developed nations like to point to their superior wealth and high standard of living as "proof" that their way is "best" and ought to be emulated. But in many cultures this wealth inequality is taken as prima facie evidence that the developed nation has engaged in nothing more than exploitation of its weaker neighbors.3. Communism is bad news (the book was written in the early years of the Cold War), but democracy is not necessarily the answer for every country because some lack the traditions and civic infrastructure required for a well-functioning democratic society.4. Friction between nations is unavoidable. Realistically, the best possible outcome of history is a quasistatic equilibrium in which war is held at bay because there exists effective mechanisms to mitigate the wealth inequalities between nations and adjudicate international disputes.
I'm not a scholar so I must confess that I read this book with a dictionary close at hand and in some instances read paragraphs several times to understand what the author is trying to say. The book was written during the Cold War and America's confrontation with communism. But much of this book can be applied to the America of today. Well worth the read.
"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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