Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics

By Reinhold Niebuhr and Cornel West

One of the theological classics of the twentieth century, Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society argues that using moral persuasion and shaming to affect the behavior of such collectives as corporations and nation states is fruitless, as these groups will inevitably seek to promote only their self-interest. He calls for a realistic assessment of group behavior and enumerates how individual morality can mitigate social immorality.

This edition includes a foreword by Cornel West that explores the continued interest in Niebuhr’s thought and its contemporary relevance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Release date: Jan 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781646980376

Reinhold Niebuhr

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) was an American theologian, ethicist, public intellectual, political commentator, and professor at Union Theological Seminary.

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Introduction

by Langdon B. Gilkey

A contemporary work needs no introduction. The appropriate reader is, presumably, aware of the political, social, and intellectual context of the work; after all, the reader lives in that context, feels the problems the work addresses, and so understands deeply the answers the work seeks to provide. Thus the work speaks directly to the reader. Obviously, however, this is not the case with the republication of a past work, even if it be of a recognized classic—and especially if, as is the case here, the work appeared almost three score years ago. The major historical crises are not the same, the major political and social problems become vastly different, and hence the questions facing the thinkers and intellectuals are different—as are, naturally, their answers. Thus that context must be supplied, as best it can, by an introduction, clarifying the role of both the work itself and its author and presenting a summary of the work itself, intelligible in the contemporary context, if the message of a classic is to be appreciated in a different age.

That Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man, also published in The Library of Theological Ethics, represents a twentieth-century theological classic, there has been little question since its publication in the early forties. Yet Niebuhr’s corpus as a whole represents, I think it fair to say, the most significant theological response in America to the tumultuous historical events of the century. Correspondingly, Niebuhr’s work became important to the younger generation who came to maturity during those years of crisis and who became in subsequent decades participants in American theological and moral thought, political theory, and ethical, social, and historical reflection. If the latter generation produced few classics, at least they possessed a splendid inheritance to pass along. In this introduction I hope to situate the book before you, Moral Man and Immoral Society, within the tumult of the century and the developments in Niebuhr’s thought.

If one had asked in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s who was the best known and most respected theologian in America, the answer would almost certainly have been Reinhold Niebuhr, professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York. In the middle of the 1950s he suffered a serious stroke, and inevitably his influence waned—and, incidentally, it was then that his friend and colleague, Paul Tillich, became the leading theological voice. Both of them had in those years a very wide influence on American culture. In fact, for two decades they were perhaps the leading reflective figures—philosophy had, so to speak, opted out of cultural affairs—Tillich in art, psychotherapy, and philosophy; Niebuhr in political theory, ethics, and social affairs. Each, especially Niebuhr, had enthusiastic secular followers, most of whom sought to appropriate the obvious wisdom of these theologians without their (to me) essential religious dimension. The reason for Niebuhr’s secular prominence was that he was a brilliant social and political analyst, and also a very influential political activist. He established and edited the liberal journal, Christianity and Society, and in 1946 he helped to found the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a liberal yet noncommunist group which was very important politically for the next twenty-five years. I began my own theological studies in 1945 as a student of these two transcendent figures in both our theological and our cultural lives. Most of us expected that this wide and important cultural role—in art or in politics—was perfectly possible for any good theologian. Little did we realize until later, when we tried it, how exceedingly rare it was!

Niebuhr had become prominent in the early 1930s with the publication in 1932 of Moral Man and Immoral Society, offered now in The Library of Theological Ethics, and in 1934 of Reflections on the End of an Era. These were books largely of social and political analysis, with hardly any theological content. Nevertheless, they had an amazing impact in American social thought and on liberal religion. I can recall in 1932—I was thirteen—my father coming out of his office waving a copy of Moral Man and Immoral Society and saying Reinie’s gone crazy!—and most liberal, social-gospel ministers like my father felt the same way, though by the end of the decade they had come to agree with him. Why did this book have such a profound and disturbing impact?

Most of liberal culture in America in the 1930s—secular, academic, and religious alike—was still deeply optimistic about society and so about history. As in Europe before World War I, they believed thoroughly in historical progress: as science, technology, and industry had developed or evolved, so correspondingly had legal, political, and social institutions—from autocratic and despotic governments to democracy, from religious and racial intolerance to tolerance, from authoritarian and dogmatic religion to liberal, congregational religion. Social customs, laws, and values were surely getting better, evolving as species had done into higher forms. Accordingly, people were becoming more moral, society was becoming almost Christian, and the task of the churches was building the Kingdom of God on earth. Now, it was precisely this fundamental faith that Niebuhr challenged in these books. Karl Barth had done just that in Europe after World War I; Niebuhr did it in America and in England in the early 1930s. His challenge, however, was not by appeal to the Bible, though that came later, but rather by empirical argument, by pointing to the actual character of contemporary capitalistic, racial, and international life. If you read Moral Man and Immoral Society, you will see that he proved his case, as, of course, was the entire course of history to do at the end of the decade!

In order to understand the importance of Niebuhr’s early writings, it is necessary, I think, to recall their historical context. Despite the residual optimism I have described, the 1930s was a period of intense turmoil, suffering, and increasing anxiety in America and in Europe alike. It was, first of all, the period of the Great Depression, when large sections of the population were out of work, incomes were vastly reduced, and economic activity was almost at a standstill. Much as after the collapse of Russian Communism in 1989, socialism came to be seen by most observers as having revealed its inadequacy; so after the Depression of 1929 most observers agreed that capitalism was deeply flawed, if not on the way out of history. In any case, it was becoming clear to all that a quite unfettered and uncontrolled capitalism was causing much of the population immense suffering, and so, to many, capitalism was in the process of self-destruction. This was one part of the historical context within which Niebuhr wrote his early political works, volumes which uncovered with startling clarity the ruthless character of modern economic society.

As is well known, during the same decade, and partly because of this economic upheaval, radical political changes occurred in several powerful societies around the globe: first in Japan, then in Italy, and finally in Germany. The Japanese government became dominated by the military, and Japan moved aggressively into Manchuria in 1931 and into North China proper in 1936. Concurrently, Mussolini declared his determination to reestablish the Roman Empire and began invading helpless Ethiopia. Finally, during 1933–1934 in Germany, dismembered and beaten down by a vengeful Versailles treaty, a radically nationalistic and militaristic Nazi regime seized power and began the process of thorough persecution of its Jewish citizens and of the military and political expansion that led at the end of the decade to World War II. In each of these cases, civil liberties were demolished, minorities increasingly repressed and persecuted, and dissenters imprisoned. At the end of the decade, history itself seemed to have become engulfed in evil. Science, technology, and industrial capacity may well have steadily improved. But, far from progressing, society itself had, on the contrary, descended into a kind of nightmare inconceivable in the optimistic nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

It was at the end of this tumultuous decade that the two volumes of The Nature and Destiny of Man were written, delivered as lectures, and published. It is little wonder that in this historical context Niebuhr sought in this work to reinterpret in a modern fashion—in the light of modern scientific and historical understanding—the old and somewhat abandoned symbols of sin and even of original sin (Vol. II). Just as our epoch is acutely aware of the problem of nature, because we have, since about 1970, sensed the acute vulnerability of nature to human expansion, so for good reason his age was baffled and unnerved by the picture of chaos and suffering in history which their surrounding world presented.

Now let us turn to what Niebuhr actually said in his early political writings at the beginning of the decade of the 1930s, paradigmatically seen in Moral Man and Immoral Society. He did not deny that social institutions and even moral customs and laws had progressed; later, he was to formulate this more clearly. But, he said, within these new modes of social relations—in modern nation-states, in democratic politics, and especially in the commercial relations of a capitalistic society—self-concern or self-interest, the grasping for power, wealth, status, and security, remained as predominant as ever. And this natural impulse, as he then called it, creates now as in the past the same devastating suffering for those who were its victims. In a social struggle, classes may claim they are acting for universal values: the owners for order and stability, the workers and underprivileged for justice. But in fact each class is acting for its own power and wealth, the one to preserve them, the other to gain them. Nations always contend they are struggling for justice and peace; but in fact even the peace-loving nations (as we called ourselves in World War II!) were acting from their own self-interest in wealth and security.

For this reason, Niebuhr insisted, no group will ever be dislodged from power solely by persuasion, by arguments, however academically or legally elegant those arguments may be: Reason is the servant of impulse before it is its master. Thus, only power opposed to ruling groups, challenging them, and even forcing them—a political, economic, or, in the last resort, military power—will dislodge them and create a more just situation. Clearly justice is on the side of those with less power and less wealth; but the justice of the powerless victim’s cause does not, said Niebuhr, imply that victim’s greater virtue. When the proletariat gain supreme power, they may well dominate as the nobility and the bourgeoisie did once. Russia’s communism showed he was right.

The second main point of Moral Man and Immoral Society is captured in its title. There is a notable difference between the moral behavior of individuals—where there is some real possibility of self-sacrifice for others, though it is rare enough!—and the behavior of groups—families, clans, classes, races, genders, states, or nations. With communities, the self-interest of the group is inevitably the predominant factor; and many things an individual will not do, a group will do together to further its fortunes and, of course, those of its members. It is, therefore, perfectly possible for the same persons to act quite morally, or respectably, according to the customs and values of their society, and yet, in relation to persons in other groups and particularly to the other groups themselves, to act very unethically. Hence there can be, without contradiction, the pious slave-owner, the respectable member of a ruling class or aggressive nation, the moral member of an oppressive race. In all these cases, while these persons may appear to be moral as individuals, nonetheless they join with others of their group and act with exceeding self-concern, with oppressive ruthlessness, and with devastating destruction.

Patriotism, says Niebuhr, is particularly enlightening on this point. The patriotic individual sacrifices himself or herself for the group and is thus one of the highest symbols of morality. It is this sacrifice of an individual for a group that most social scientists call altruism. But the action which the group does by means of the altruistic loyalty of the patriot may well be very immoral indeed, in fact evil—as in an unjust social situation or an aggressive war. It is for this strange reason that the very highest level of the moral, real altruism, may be represented by the challenge to what the group does, and so ultimately by the self-sacrifice of the individual in opposing the morality of the group, as in the rare but illuminating cases of Socrates and Jesus. In any case, Niebuhr insists that because, in the relatively stable historical situation of modern life (before 1939!), individuals act with seeming morality, this does not mean that as members of their social groups—in class, racial, economic, or political matters—they in any way escape doing and supporting injustice. Group relations in the twentieth century remain as self-interested and often brutal as in the less moral days of the past. Needless to say, this view, shocking as it was in the early 1930s, was thoroughly validated by the events in the following decade.

The final point of Niebuhr’s early book seemed even more radical to secular and religious optimists. This was that reason—scientific, economic, and political intelligence—and religion, even liberal religion, were as ambiguous as was the rest of culture. For the secular and academic communities, reason, especially scientific and empirical reason, represented the trustworthy principles of objectivity and impartiality in human affairs. Here, in principle, prejudice and self-interest were eliminated, and hence an informed intelligence, as John Dewey stated, is the primary means of improvement in social life. Correspondingly, religious liberals agreed that while dogmatic and authoritarian religion had done much harm in the past, a nondogmatic religion, tolerant of other points of view and committed to social justice, could nonetheless provide a basis for salvation in social history. Niebuhr did not deny either point. But, he said, such objectivity in a social crisis, as opposed to a laboratory or a Sunday school, is a very rare moral achievement. Both the highest reason and the most advanced religion can provide, and frequently have provided, justification for a group selfishness even more than they have provided challenges to it. The union of science and the military in all recent modern history, during World War II, and, as one more example, in present Indian-Pakistan relations, shows the first; and the almost universal support of their nations by the religious groups of the twentieth century validates the second. Without denying Niebuhr’s point, I might add that, nonetheless, during that period the churches of Japan, Germany, England, and the United States had a better record challenging the evils of the state than did the academic faculties, the scientific laboratories, or the educational administrations in those same communities.

These affirmations represented the main points of Niebuhr’s early political works. They are clearly seen in the little classic Moral Man and Immoral Society. As is evident, there is little theology here, and even less reference to the biblical view. In fact his interpretations of these insights retain many of the older, liberal assumptions. Although these insights are fascinating, one cannot help but wonder what sort of theological perspective might be implied in them. This theological perspective began to appear in the second half of the decade. First came Beyond Tragedy in 1936, a series of sermons setting these insights into a so-called neo-orthodox interpretation of the Bible. Niebuhr had begun to discover the biblical and theological grounds for his empirical analysis of social affairs. Then, of course, came the classics of his mature work: Volume I, on the Nature of Man, published in 1941, and Volume II, on the Destiny of Man, in 1943. In these books the developed theology congruent with his political insights, what Niebuhr called biblical faith or the biblical view, was fully elaborated. Granting the impact and importance of Moral Man and Immoral Society, the rest of my remarks will be devoted to describing in part the theological viewpoint represented in these later volumes. This is necessary not only to understand the full compass of Niebuhr’s moral and political thought but also to show points of continuity and discontinuity in his work.

Despite Niebuhr’s well-known emphasis on the reality and universality of sin, he thoroughly believed in the creativity, artistic and intellectual power, and moral possibilities of the human spirit—what made each human unique and valuable, history full of novel creations and events, and community a locus of justice and of love. Niebuhr is surely best known for his sharp critique of modern optimism, for it is, to him, naive belief in social and moral progress. That point was already made in Moral Man and Immoral Society. Nevertheless—as he was possibly not so well aware—he accepted much of modernity’s understanding of the human: its capacity for creating the new, for enacting novelty in history, and its capacity for creative progress in knowledge, in understanding, and even in moral principles. Because of this human capacity, he said, history is constantly changing and full of indeterminate possibilities for development. Niebuhr identified this creative spiritual power as the imago Dei, the image of God in human beings. He described it as the capacity for self-transcendence. Self-transcendence is the essential ability of each human being to look at herself, to recall the past and to project into the future, to see far outward into space and even up to infinity. Humans can thus transcend themselves, their time and space, and the structure of nature and of the world around them. This self-transcendence is the seat of freedom, as it is of imagination, reason and judgment, and moral possibility. For humans are free in their spirits of their own particular spatio-temporal locus, and thus are capable of the new—and thereby forced in each next moment to decide their path.

The human spirit thus towers over all that is earthly; it reaches toward God and, as Augustine said, realizes itself truly only in God. This is why man can be moral in a way society cannot. Nonetheless, this human self-transcendence is, says Niebuhr, creaturely and not divine. It never loses its finite seat in a particular self, community, culture, nationality, race, or gender. However lofty its imaginations, thoughts, and projects, these latter are never absolute but relative; they invariably reflect their particular locus. The human spirit is capable of the universal, of transcending its time, place, and culture; but it always shares the particular and finite perspective of its origin. My theology remains basically American, male, white, mid-twentieth century—and I had best remember this.

To express this ineradicable finitude and particularity of each human and of all human creations, Niebuhr uses another biblical category: the creatureliness of all life, including human life. Thus each creature is born and dies, appears in a particular temporal and spatial context, is dependent on all else around her or him—on family, community, nature, and world alike—and each remains dependent and mortal throughout her life, whatever heights her political, artistic, intellectual, or moral accomplishments may reach. We note that death, mortality, is for Niebuhr—as for many of his theological contemporaries—a natural part of the God-given creatureliness of women and men, and not the result of sin. It is an aspect of a good creation, of the goodness of natural life, whose dependencies, like its creativity, we share. Thus, like all other life, human existence is vulnerable and brief, with the continual possibility of suffering. However, says Niebuhr, with faith and hope for the future in God’s providence, these contingencies can be surmounted in courage and creative action.

We are and remain creatures. Relativity and finitude, embodying only one perspective among many, thus infect all human creations: art, thought, imagination, morals, and religion alike. Each remains creaturely and not divine. There is no way, therefore, that reason can attain the universality that it seeks and often claims, or the moral will, the objective judgment of which it so frequently boasts. On the contrary, each person can approach universality only insofar as each is willing to recognize the partial character of all she or he represents. Despite the infinite creativity of the human spirit, there are no ultimates in history, either secular or religious. This emphasis on relativity and finitude is, we note, also thoroughly modern, as was the emphasis on creativity and development. Niebuhr assumed these characteristic emphases of modernity and always argued, with some justice, that ultimately both were biblical and dependent finally for their cogency on a biblical faith. In this respect, there are lines of continuity but also points of discontinuity between the early Moral Man and Immoral Society and The Nature and Destiny of Man.

It is, continues Niebuhr, out of the situation given us by our Creator, of finiteness and creatureliness on the one hand and of self-transcendence on the other, of necessity and freedom, as he often puts it, that both the creativity and the sin of humans arise. We have discussed his understanding of creativity as self-transcendence. Let us now consider the analysis of sin for which he is best known.

As creatures, humans are like all life—dependent and vulnerable, dependent on their natural environment, on other persons and groups, and on the events of the history in which they live. They can prosper through their creative ingenuity; but they can also die, as does all life—and ultimately they will. But, being self-transcendent, remembering the past and foreseeing the future, humans are aware of all this. Alone among creatures, humans know that they are mortal, that there may be an enemy over the next hill, a rival at the court, next door, or at the office, that there is the risk of want for next winter. Not only are human beings driven by self-interest, the preferred language of Moral Man and Immoral Society, but more radically, human beings are anxious: in their freedom, their freedom itself is disturbed, their spirits troubled. The language of anxiety dominates The Nature and Destiny of Man. Goaded by anxiety, people seek to secure themselves against these threats. They make themselves the center of their world, as if they were that center. Anxiety grounds self-interest. In biblical language, they practice idolatry; that is, they replace God with themselves, or take the place of God. Or, as Niebuhr also puts this, they exhibit pride. And in the process, they are violent, cruel, and destructive toward others. Pride begets self-concern, and self-centeredness breeds injustice; the cycle of sin, violence, and destruction begins. There is no necessity here; in principle this creaturely anxiety, fed by spirit, can be resolved by spirit, by faith in God’s providence and care. Thus we are each responsible, and we know that we are responsible. The inevitable consequences in each of us, namely the uneasy conscience and an awareness of guilt, following self-centeredness and injustice, reveal the central role of our freedom and so our own responsibility in all our sin. The earliest of religions, the latest pop-novel, and, not to mention, every courtroom are witness to this universal presence of the awareness, yes knowledge, of our responsibility, of the guilt, and so of the participation of our freedom in all our dealings with one another.

We are anxious, however, not only about security and power; for we are also artistic, intellectual, moral, and religious beings. We seek after truth, but our truth is partial and creaturely; uneasily we are aware of this, too—and of the radical void with which this relativity of our viewpoint and principles faces us. Hence we claim our truth to be ultimate. We make moral judgments, and we must; but they too are relative, reflective of our own partial customs and traditions. Hence again, anxious about our moral status, we claim that our values, and so our moral judgments, are absolute, in effect God’s judgments. Incidentally, such judgments always declare us to be righteous and our opponents wrong—as most personal altercations and all international ones show. Finally, the most serious sin of all, we claim our spirits to represent the divine, and our religion to be God’s religion. The ultimate sin, therefore, is to claim to be or to represent directly God, a claim religion has illustrated throughout history.

As a consequence, true religion, facing the divine transcendence, knows first of all its own partiality and so the falsity of its spiritual pride—and repents. Without an initial repentance in the encounter with the divine judgment, religious commitment become the acme of spiritual pride. As we noted, Niebuhr calls all these claims of ultimacy—of truth, of morals, and of religion—pride, the pride of the creature taking the place of its Creator. Such pride or idolatry defies God and results in injustice. Here for Niebuhr is the true source of history’s tragedy, suffering and despair thus despite the evident development of institutions, legal codes, and moral norms in history; this sin in all its forms of power, intelligence, morals, and religion remains as a most significant dynamic force in history, the major cause of injustice.

As Niebuhr once remarked, it was only an unusual individual who could feel his own power or his wisdom to be such that they could claim to be the center of the world. As a consequence, most of us make this claim together, through the community of which we are a part: a tribe, family, religion, nation, race, gender, profession, or church. Serious sins are mostly communal sins. The insight of Moral Man and Immoral Society about the moral limits on social self-transcendence remains and is deepened. We make the interests of our relevant group central to our thought and action, and hence we give ourselves with all our loyalty and power to our group, to its security and success, and to its conquest and domination of competing groups. Thus result the social, group sins of historical life: sins of class, race, religion, nation, and gender. These communities support, defend, and secure the individuals within them—as the social power of men over women aids each man in his domination of women. Thus the pride of communities—make an idol of themselves which idol each member then proceeds to worship—represents the major form of sin in history, and not just immoralities. It is thus that people who individually may be good can, as we saw, unconsciously yet also consciously sin through the pride and cruelty of their group. And in each small community and home, as well as in the largest groups, the same pride can show itself and the same injustice result.

One final point: No individual or community can face squarely the fact that they do make themselves the center of their universe; this idolatry is too devastating for any of us freely to admit. Hence, says Niebuhr, we deceive ourselves that what we do is right, in fact our moral or religious obligation. Anxiety is the engine of deception and self-interest. Nations and peoples go to war mainly for self-interest; and though that be the fundamental ground, they will argue that they are really defending God, their sacred tradition, or, in our secular day, peace, order, and democracy.

Reviews for Moral Man and Immoral Society

[lukeasrodgers_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Moral Man and Immoral Society is interesting and occasionally thought-provoking, but rather too long. Its central thesis and Niebuhr's arguments in support of it could have been adequately expressed in a forty to fifty pages. Part of the reason for this is that much of what he offers as "argument" is simply assertion or reiteration.

[le.vert.galant · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Niebuhr's central insight is that personal morality and group mentality are incompatible and that the latter will always trump the former. This means that social change can only be achieved through political means and by economic coercion. Ethics and education may change individual minds but they will never overwhelm the inherent selfishness of the collective will. Thus, patriotism is used to justify evil ends, making the individual feel part of a select and morally exempt group.

It's a pessimistic view of the world, but he makes his case eloquently, even if some of his examples are dated (it's hard to share his outrage over the Spanish-American War) and his equation of the proletariat with the working class had more resonance the 1930s than it does now. On the other hand, his discussion of non-violence as practiced by Gandhi and its applicability to the position of African-Americans almost surely inspired the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement.

[hadriantheblind · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Very interesting and skeptical view of individual vs. group morality, and would be very useful for one attempting to enact positive change in society.

[glennbell_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I had a really hard time understanding the author. His verbiage is at times vague and difficult. This is a rare case in which I decided to stop at halfway through the book and not waste anymore of my time.

[deusvitae · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A discussion of politics and ethics, both of the individual and the state. The author does well at showing how men can be moral persons yet how societies tend to be inherently immoral. He seeks to see equal justice as the direction toward which societies should go, ideally through non-violent coercive methods. \n\nMany good thoughts are presented in the book, and Niebuhr provides many matters upon which to think. Things did not turn out exactly like he posits, but many things that he speaks of resonate even today.