360
PARTISAN REVIEW
IN POWER BEGINS CURIOSITY
THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY.
By
Reinhold Niebuhr. Scribners.
$2.50
In
the second century B.C., the historian Polybius felt that it
was more than time that the growth of the Roman republic became
a matter of interest to the cultivated and reflective mind of his day,
and he set himself the task of studying it as a mainstream rather than
as a provincial backwater. He had good reason, which he expressed
forthrightly: "Who is so poor-spirited and indolent as not to wish to
know by what means, and thanks to what sort of constitution, the
Romans subdued the world in something less than fifty-three years?"
What strikes the modern reader most sharply is the contentment and
assurance with which this conquered Greek tells the Roman story.
Rome was great because it was powerful ; it could not have become
powerful without having been great; the duty of the historian is to
edify men-particularly statesmen, present and potential-in the direc–
tion of greatness and power.
Like Polybius, Reinhold Niebuhr scans events to catch a moral.
Living at the juncture of the American republic and the American
impervum,
he too feels the impulse to remove American history from
the realm of the trivial and boring to that of the large and ex'Citing,
In
power begins curiosity-but with what a difference! Though him–
self an American, living in an American century, Niebuhr is uneasy,
feverishly self-conscious, and aims to edify toward a humility that
would temper greatness. This is doubtless the result, at least in part,
of his being a Christian instead of a pagan; but it is probably as much
a consequence of the late and fairly common intuition that history
has ceased to have any inner relation to time, that in an age when
technology makes it possible for cities to be destroyed and rebuilt with
near instantaneousness, the rewards of history are tentative, often ac–
cidental, and metaphysically pointless.
The Iron'Y of American History,
the body of which is made of
two series of lectures, deals "with the position of our nation in the
present world situation, as interpreted from the standpoint of the
Christian faith." However, the categories into which the elements of
this situation are sorted are more familiar to literary critics than to
theologians. They are: ( 1) the pathetic, which arises from natural
catastrophe and arbitrary mishap, eliciting pity but not contrition or
admiration; (2) the tragic, which arises from the conscious choice of
