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as well as to reactionary and fanatical anti-communism. Niebuhr had
been a radical pacifist, but he developed a realistic sense of history, and
it induced him to become a leading critic of pacifism in order that free
peoples could resist with force the imperialism of Hitler. As early as
1932 he had prophetically suggested, however, that nonviolent resis–
tance would be the most effective method for the liberation of the Negro
in America, as Martin Luther King, Jr. proved in practice twenty-five
years later. Niebuhr's favorite American example of a political hero was
Abraham Lincoln for his political realism about slavery and his religious
sense of America being under judgment for its crimes. "I might have
been an historian," he once told an interviewer, but his daughter had
reminded him that he was "not enough of an empiricist to be a good
historian." In Niebuhr's book
The Irony of American History
(1952)
there is much dialectical theologizing of irony as his mode of cultural
criticism, but his demythologizing of American exceptionalism and lais–
sez-faire optimism in economic matters is tempered by his recognition
of the political realism embedded in the theory of checks and balances,
which the framers of the American Constitution had outlined in
The
Federalist Papers.
There is a current revival of pragmatism, which has already had aca–
demic conferences to celebrate it; but it is filtered through Richard
Rorty's strange blend of Dewey'S progressivism with the skepticism of
Nietzsche and French deconstructionists. Rorty has the ambition to be
a public philosopher as well as a specia li zed professional, but in either
role he has not yet made the kind of difference that either James or
Dewey made. Radically skeptica l of a ll metaphysics and aggressively
athe istic, Rorty has no room for Niebuhr and relegates James to the
role of precursor to Dewey. Rorty is in sympathy with the literary post–
modernists, but the great public literary critics in the past, like George
Orwell, Edmund Wilson, and Lionel Trilling, have no counterparts on
the contemporary scene. One of Rorty's a llies, Cornel West, writing in
an antho logy,
Pragmatism: From Progressivism to Postmodernism,
declares that "the loss of Paul de Man, his authori zing and legitimizing
intellectual presence, intensified the crisis of vocation among humanis–
tic intellectuals." The discovery of de Man's yout hful role as a propa–
gandist for the fascist occupiers of hi s country was a literary scandal
that attracted much publicity; but the notion that this arcane, obscure,
and detached ironist, for whom all attempts to control meaning are
self-undermining, was an icon for humanist intellectuals in general sug–
gests that literary theorists in recent years have indulged themselves in
delusions of grandeur. They have also contributed to the fragmented
