Abstract
Isaiah Berlin and Reinhold Niebuhr were, in their day, influential exponents of “Cold War liberalism”—and are now widely regarded as emblematic of this movement and its historical moment. For critics, their “Cold War liberalism” represents a deplorable detour for liberalism, or for Western political thought and politics—either (or both) because liberalism became rigid and militant in its (overblown) opposition to the perceived threat of Communism, and/or because the hopeful energies and ambitions of earlier progressive politics were displaced by a mixture of pessimism and complacency. Such views hardly do justice to Berlin’s and Niebuhr’s re-casting of liberalism. For both, liberalism was defined by a spirit of self-critical questioning, humility, and vigilant opposition to both complacency and militancy, conformism and dogmatism. Their conception of liberalism was distinctive not only in its political content, and the philosophical bases to which they appealed, but in the sort of intellectual project their liberalism represented: an ethical project, which tied liberalism to the cultivation of a particular sensibility and temper, or “ethos.” This chapter discusses the intellectual relationship and similarities between Berlin and Niebuhr more broadly, before focusing on the ways in which each conceived of and contributed to this ethical project of Cold War liberalism.
I am indebted to Eric Beerbohm, George Crowder, Stefan Eich, Graeme Garrard, Henry Hardy, Jose Harris, Jacob Remes, Michael Rosen, Nancy Rosenblum, George Scialabba, Steven Smith, and Richard Tuck for questions and suggestions; and to Laura Hartmann and Jan-Werner Müller for their comments on an earlier version of this chapter. Because many assertions made here summarize claims explicated more fully in A Mind and Its Time: The Development of Isaiah Berlin’s Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), I have frequently cited the relevant passages of that work; I hope the reader will forgive this self-referential practice.
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Notes
- 1.
Then-candidate Barack Obama identified Niebuhr as his “favorite” political thinker—a remark which was taken up and touted by the columnist David Brooks (Brooks, “Obama, Gospel and Verse”, in: New York Times, 26 April 2007, at: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/26/opinion/26brooks.html?_r=0 [last accessed 31 July 2014]). On recent attempts to appropriate Niebuhr’s legacy, see Paul Elie, “A Man for All Reasons”, The Atlantic, 1 November 2007, at: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/11/a-man-for-all-reasons/306337/ [last accessed 31 July 2014].
- 2.
Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 163; idem., Prophetic Fragments (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1988), 144; and see ibid., 145–54.
- 3.
For a critique of Niebuhr along these lines, see (in addition to West, above) Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America, 1889–1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type (New York: Norton 1997[1965]), 289–90, 299–303. On Berlin as a Cold Warrior whose work supported the capitalist, imperialist status quo, see e.g. Christopher Hitchens, “Moderation or Death”, The London Review of Books, vol. 20, no. 32 (1998), 3–11; George Scialabba, “Agonizing”, in idem., What Are Intellectuals Good For? (Boston: Pressed Wafer, 2009), 107–14; on Berlin’s account of liberty as a “reactionary and neocolonial” ideological intervention directed against more “progressive” and “pluralistic” liberalism, James Tully, “Two Concepts of Liberty in Context”, in: Isaiah Berlin and the Politics of Freedom: “Two Concepts of Liberty” Fifty Years Later, ed. Bruce Baum and David Nichols (London: Routledge, 2012), 23–51. Its title notwithstanding, Tully’s interpretation is based almost exclusively on a (tendentious) textual analysis of “Two Concepts of Liberty”; there is little attention to the development of Berlin’s ideas on liberty over time, or apparent curiosity about what Berlin was actually reading and responding to. For a fairer and more incisive account of what Berlin was doing with “Two Concepts” within the ideological context of the Cold War, see Judith N. Shklar, “Positive Liberty, Negative Liberty in the United States”, in: Redeeming American Political Thought, ed. Stanley Hoffmann and Dennis F. Thompson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 113–16. I have attempted to provide a more truly contextual reconstruction of Berlin’s account of liberty in Cherniss, A Mind and Its Time; while Arie Dubnov, Isaiah Berlin’ The Journey of a Jewish Liberal (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) attempts to challenge the tendency to read Berlin through a “Cold War Liberal” paradigm; David Caute offers an extensive discussion of Berlin’s views on the Cold War in Isaac and Isaiah: The Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). For the charge that Cold War liberalism’s sin lay in its turning of mainstream liberalism away from a robust conception of the good toward a pose of “neutrality”, see David Cieply, Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). Distinctive features of Cold War liberalism have been delineated more sympathetically in Kevin Mattson, When America Was Great: The Fighting Faith of Postwar Liberalism (New York: Routledge, 2004) and Jan-Werner Müller, “Fear and Freedom: On ‘Cold War Liberalism’”, in: European Journal of Political Theory, vol. 7, no. 1 (2008), 45–64.
- 4.
Leo Strauss, “Relativism”, in: Relativism and the Study of Man, ed. Helmut Schoeck and James W. Wiggins (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1961), 138.
- 5.
“Cold War liberalism” as understood here excludes “hard-line” anti-Communists, who favored a more aggressive foreign policy and more repressive policies directed at domestic “subversives” (and, accordingly, a disregard of norms of legality and respect for personal civil liberties); as well as those whose political principles and agendas were defined by a commitment to free-market economics, and a policy of laissez-faire, as against the “mixed economy” favored by most Cold War liberals. This stipulated “ideological” definition of Cold War liberalism largely (though imperfectly) overlaps with an “institutional” basis of labeling, which identifies as Cold War liberals those intellectuals who were involved in the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), and contributed to CCF-backed periodicals such as Encounter (U.K.), Preuves (France), Der Monat (Germany), and Tempo Presente (Italy).
- 6.
Berlin, undated letter to unknown correspondent [July 1992], Berlin Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford, Box 228/250.
- 7.
See e.g. Schlesinger, The Vital Center (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), 45, 147, 166, 170.
- 8.
Ibid., 168.
- 9.
Schlesinger wrote to Berlin “You will find little new in the book. I only wish I had written it after last winter rather than before, since I could then have plagiarized you more” (Schlesinger to Berlin, 2 October 1949; Berlin Papers, Box 278/2).
- 10.
Berlin to Philip Graham, 21 June 1947, in Berlin, Enlightening: Letters 1946–1960, ed. Henry Hardy and Jennifer Holmes (London: Chatto and Windus, 2009), 28.
- 11.
Berlin to Schlesinger, 21 October 1949, Enlightening, 134.
- 12.
Ibid., 133; Berlin to Katherine Graham, 11 January 1950; Enlightening, 167–68.
- 13.
This, and much of the following, summarize claims made in Cherniss, A Mind and Its Time, 67–86.
- 14.
See e.g. Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society [MMIS] (New York: Scribners, 1932); The Nature and Destiny of Man [NDM] (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1964 [1941]); and The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defenders [CLCD] (New York: Scribners, 1944).
- 15.
Berlin, undated letter, [July 1992], Berlin Papers Box 228/250; see also Berlin to Ursula Niebuhr, 30 October 1952, Enlightening, 28.
- 16.
See e.g. Berlin, “John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life”, in: idem., Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 241.
- 17.
See e.g. “Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth-Century European Thought”, in: The Crooked Timber of Humanity, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998 [1990]), 70–90; “The Pursuit of the Ideal”, ibid., 11.
- 18.
See e.g. Berlin, Political Ideas in the Romantic Age, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 10, 260–65.
- 19.
“European Unity and Its Vicissitudes”, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, 203–04. Similarly, in his final summation of his views, he asserted that human values were “objective, part of the essence of humanity rather than arbitrary creations of men’s subjective fantasy” (Berlin, “My Intellectual Path”, in: The Power of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000], 12).
- 20.
For an attempt to render Berlin’s position clear and consistent, see Jonathan Riley’s contribution to this volume.
- 21.
See Berlin and Beata Polanowska-Sygulska, Unfinished Dialogue (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006), 39–40.
- 22.
“Herzen and Bakunin on Individual Liberty”, in: Berlin, Russian Thinkers ed. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (London: Penguin, 2008), 128. See also Political Ideas in the Romantic Age, 150–51, 203–07; For explication of this point see Cherniss, “Isaiah Berlin’s Political Ideas: From the Twentieth Century to the Romantic Age”, included in ibid., xlii–xlvi; idem., A Mind and Its Time, 190–92, 201–02.
- 23.
There is an extensive literature elaborating on Berlin’s position; see e.g. George Crowder, Isaiah Berlin: Liberty and Pluralism (Cambridge: Polity, 2004); William Galston, Liberal Pluralism: The Implications of Value Pluralism for Political Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); John Gray, Isaiah Berlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Steven Lukes, Liberals and Cannibals: The Implications of Diversity (London: Verso, 2003), 63–116; Jonathan Riley, “Defending Cultural Pluralism within Liberal Limits”, in: Political Theory, vol. 30, no.1 (2002), 68–97.
- 24.
Niebuhr, The Irony of American History [IAH] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 107, 157; Kenneth W. Thompson, “The Political Philosophy of Reinhold Niebuhr”, in: Charles W. Kegley, ed. Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious, Social, and Political Thought (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1984), 248–49.
- 25.
Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty”, 213–14.
- 26.
The former phrase comes from H.A.L. Fisher, who, as Warden of New College in the 1930s, was a mentor to Berlin; the assertion that “history has no libretto” came from Berlin’s hero Herzen.
- 27.
Niebuhr, Christian Realism and Political Problems [CRPP] (New York: Scribners, 1953), 36–38; IAH, 3, 20–22, 65.
- 28.
Berlin, “A Letter to George Kennan”, Liberty, 343.
- 29.
Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of History (New York: Scribners, 1937).
- 30.
See IAH, 155, 167–68; NDM II, particularly 2–6, 299–321.
- 31.
Herzen quoted in Berlin, “Herzen and Bakunin on Individual Liberty”, Russian Thinkers, 104–05.
- 32.
Schlesinger, The Vital Center, 254.
- 33.
Berlin, “The Pursuit of the Ideal”, 19. For Niebuhr’s formulation of a “Sisyphean” outlook, see e.g. MMIS, 230, 234, 256; IAH, 144–45.
- 34.
Berlin, “Fathers and Children: Turgenev and the Liberal Predicament”, Russian Thinkers, 346.
- 35.
Burnham, Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism (New York: John Day, 1964), 140, 228–29, 280–81, 292, 297–98.
- 36.
Niebuhr, “The Twilight of Liberalism”, The New Republic, 14 June 1919, 218.
- 37.
IAH, 138–39.
- 38.
Niebuhr, “Beria and McCarthy”, The New Leader, 4 January 1954, 4 (italics added).
- 39.
“Two Concepts of Liberty”, 214; cf. “The Pursuit of the Ideal”, 15–16.
- 40.
“Alexander Herzen”, Russian Thinkers, 227–28.
- 41.
Niebuhr, “Beria and McCarthy”, op. cit.; cf. IAH, 158.
- 42.
Mattson, When America Was Great, 67–72.
- 43.
Cf. Müller, “Fear and Freedom”.
- 44.
Waldemar Gurian, “Totalitarian Religions”, Review of Politics, vol. 14, no. 1 (1952), 3–14, quoted in Müller, ibid., 51.
- 45.
See Berlin to Herbert Elliston, 30 December 1952, Enlightening, 349–51; idem. to Alan Dudley, March 1948, ibid., 44–48. In the latter case, after initial demurral Berlin did offer a statement of liberal-democratic values—but with so many qualifications and skeptical or ironic asides that one of the Foreign Office officials who had sought his help remarked “there are large numbers of people in Europe, by no means necessarily unintelligent, who as a result of economic and intellectual stress and turmoil have turned to the dogmas of Marxism because they provide a plausible and authoritative creed unquestioned by their adherents… These people do not want intellectual freedom.” (Geoffrey Aldington, quoted ibid., 48 n. 4.)
- 46.
Berlin to Elliston, op. cit.
- 47.
Berlin to Talmon, 9 May 1960, Isaiah Berlin Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford, Box 286/30.
- 48.
Berlin to Jean Floud, 7 July 1968, in: Berlin, Building: Letters 1960–1975, ed. Henry Hardy and Mark Pottle (London: Chatto and Windus, 2013), 355.
- 49.
Berlin, The Intellectual Life of American Universities” (1949), Enlightening, 750; “Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century”, Liberty, 92.
- 50.
Berlin, “Author’s Preface”, Russian Thinkers, x.
- 51.
Berlin, “Calling America to Greatness”, Sunday Times, 5 December 1954, 6.
- 52.
IAH, 3, 19–20, 170, 173–74.
- 53.
Niebuhr, “‘Favorable’ Environments”, in: Messenger, 18 August 1953, 6. See also IAH, 69, 134, 146, 160, 169, 172–73.
- 54.
Niebuhr, “Editorial Notes”, in: Christianity and Crisis, vol. 6, no. 5 (1946), 2.
- 55.
Niebuhr, Reflections on the End of an Era (Scribners, 1954), 296.
- 56.
MMIS, 60.
- 57.
Berlin, “Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century”, Liberty, 92; “A Revolutionary without Fanaticism”, in: idem., The Power of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 99–100.
- 58.
Niebuhr, “Humour and Faith”, in: The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays and Addresses, ed. Robert McAfee Brown (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 51–57, 60.
- 59.
Niebuhr, “In the Battle and Above It”, in: Christianity and Society, vol. 7, no. 4 (1942), 3.
- 60.
CLCD, 151–52; CRPP, 103; “Reply”, in Kegley, op. cit. 443 (italics added).
- 61.
Robert McAfee Brown, “Reinhold Niebuhr: A Study in Humanity and Humility”, in: The Legacy of Reinhold Niebuhr, ed. Nathan Scott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 1.
- 62.
See e.g. “Alexander Herzen”, 197, 219; “Philosophy and Government Repression”, Berlin, The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and Their History, ed. Henry Hardy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), 54.
- 63.
See e.g. Schlesinger, The Vital Center; Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals [1955], trans. Terence Kilmartin (London: Secker and Warburg, 1957); Judith N. Shklar, After Utopia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956); Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962).
- 64.
Quotes from Niebuhr, Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, ed. D.B. Robertson (Westminster Press, 1957), 248; The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr, 57, 222; Beyond Tragedy, 210; “The Validity and Certainty of Religious Knowledge” (1914), Niebuhr Papers, Box 24/21, quoted in Martin Halliwell, The Constant Dialog: Reinhold Niebuhr and American Intellectual Culture (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 36.
- 65.
CRPP, 184; “The Jew and the World”, in: The Nation, 4 July 1936, 27; “Democracy and the Party Spirit”, op. cit., 4.
- 66.
Berlin and Polanowska-Sygulska, Unfinished Dialogue, 124–25; in Berlin, The Sense of Reality, 1–39.
- 67.
See e.g. Alan Ryan, “A Glamorous Salon: Isaiah Berlin’s Disparate Gifts”, in: Encounter, vol. 43, no. 4 (1974), 67–72; Jason Ferrel, “Isaiah Berlin as Essayist”, in: Political Theory, vol. 40, no. 5 (2012), 602–28.
- 68.
Niebuhr performed this operation on both the morally idealistic liberal theology to which he adhered in his youth, and the “realism” he later articulated, using what he regarded as valid insights from each to point to failings of the other—and also pointing to the way in which both idealism and realism tended to contradict themselves and need correction.
- 69.
IAH, 83; Niebuhr, The Self and the Dramas of History (Scribner’s, 1955), passim.
- 70.
IAH, 107.
- 71.
Niebuhr, “Roosevelt and Johnson: A Contrast in Foreign Policy”, New Leader, vol. 48, no. 15 (1965), 7; letter to Joe Rauh, 6 November 1967, quoted Halliwell, The Constant Dialog, 213.
- 72.
See Berlin, contribution to Cecil Woolf and John Bagguley, eds., Authors Take Sides on Vietnam (Simon and Schuster, 1967), 20–21.
- 73.
For Berlin’s views on Cold War strategy see Cherniss, A Mind and Its Time, 81–86.
- 74.
Berlin to Arthur Schlesinger, 30 May 1953; to Alice James, 6 June 1953, Enlightening, 370 & n. 2.
- 75.
See Ignatieff, op. cit. 199.
- 76.
See Peter Finn and Petra Couvée, The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book (New York: Pantheon 2014), 98.
- 77.
Berlin, “Introduction”, Liberty, 44.
- 78.
Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear”, in: Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. Nancy L. Rosenblum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 21–38; Jonathan Allen, “The Place of Negative Morality in Political Theory”, in: Political Theory, vol. 29, no. 3 (2001), 337–63.
- 79.
Thus, Berlin asserted that the justification of all movements “that one can respect … does not lie in these maximal programmes, but in the fact that they wish to right an intolerable wrong…” Political action should aim at promoting a situation in which there is “the least degree of injustice”, the “least suffering, least humiliation, least misery and squalor.” (Berlin to Noam Chomsky, 18 December 1969, in Berlin, Building: Letters 1960–1975, ed. Henry Hardy and Mark Pottle [London: Chatto and Windus, 2013], 405; to Omar Haliq, 17 April 1972, ibid., 488).
- 80.
It was also free-standing from the particular political-institutional and economic policies they favored—though it did rule out some positions, such as the entrusting of unchecked power to any single entity, or the dogmatic embrace of either statist or laissez-faire economic policies.
- 81.
See e.g., Peter Beinart, The Good Fight: Why Liberals—And Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again (New York: HarperCollins, 2006); and Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: Norton, 2004).
- 82.
Cf. Müller, “Fear and Freedom”, 45–46.
- 83.
Hermann Müller (Social-Democratic Chancellor of Germany in 1920 and 1928–1930), quoted in Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York: Vintage, 2000), 23.
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Cherniss, J.L. (2019). Isaiah Berlin and Reinhold Niebuhr: Cold War Liberalism as an Intellectual Ethos. In: Müller, JW. (eds) Isaiah Berlin’s Cold War Liberalism. Asan-Palgrave Macmillan Series. Palgrave Pivot, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2793-3_2
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