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about man's power to help himself has deepened; Niebuhr has
learned things about man and society which were not previously
encapsulated in the view of man he inherited from Augustine and
Paul. That view
is
consistent with a variety of political positions, and
it's absurd to suppose that Niebuhr only recently began to wake up
to "implications" that he should have seen in his salad days. Niebuhr
saw Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco in operation, and this,
more than any theological speculation about man, must have brought
home to him the dangers of limiting political freedom. In this respect
he is like Dewey and all human beings who learn by experience. It
is therefore absurd to say that while Niebuhr has a theory which
permits him to see that man is not perfect, Dewey is tied to a
philosophy preventing him from seeing the same obvious fact. The
difference between Niebuhr and Dewey must be put in more con–
crete terms and once we put it in this way we shall be leaving rela–
tively empty "theories of human nature" for the solid ground of
politics.
The contemporary liberal's fascination with Niebuhr, I suggest,
comes less from Niebuhr's dark theory of human nature and more
from his actual political pronouncements, from the fact that he is a
shrewd, courageous, and right-minded man on many political ques–
tions. Those who applaud his politics are too liable to turn then to
his theory of human nature and praise it as the philosophical instru–
ment of Niebuhr's political agreement with themselves. But very
few of those whom I have elsewhere called "atheists for Niebuhr,"
follow this inverted logic to its conclusion: they don't move from
praise of Niebuhr's theory of human nature to praise of its theological
ground. We may admire them for drawing the line somewhere, but
certainly not for their consistency.
4.
Historical Inevitability and Original Sin.
Precisely because
of the emergence of Niebuhr as an influence on so many distinguished
liberals of the present generation, there is a greater need for some
of Dewey's methodological exhortations. Dewey is committed to the
use of empirical methods in discovering what man is or
is
not likely
to achieve, while Niebuhr is, in the last analysis, a devotee of the a
priori road that begins with a theology based on faith. Furthermore,
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