Reinhold Niebuhr: The Racial Liberal as Burkean
The Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was among the most influential thinkers in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s. In a series of books published during the period, including The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941), The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (1944), and The Irony of American History (1952), as well as numerous shorter pieces, Niebuhr challenged Americans to develop a more complex and profound view of their history and political life. His major thesis was that individual pride and self-love, which he called “original sin,” were the chief source of conflict and injustice in human society. Neither mass education, enlightened social policy, or worker revolution could change the basic fact of human nature: people were driven by a need to wield power over others and were too often tempted to pursue evil over good in order to attain power. Although humans were capable of positive actions, even these contained within them the seeds of destructive ego-force.