Abstract
Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness is one of the key English-language texts in the post-war settlement literature of the early 1940s. This article analyses the book on three interconnected levels: the nature of the argument made by Niebuhr in the book, its place in the broader post-war settlement literature of the early 1940s, and its relevance to the current problems of right-wing populism and the climate crisis. While the main theme of the book is the necessity and impossibility of democracy, it shares with the work of Isaiah Bowman and David Mitrany a concern for the tension between the state and interdependence. The deepening of this tension since has helped keep Niebuhr relevant, although his initial distinction between the children of light and the children of darkness has been complicated by both populism and the climate crisis.
I first read Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness over a decade ago. Re-reading it in the wake of the climate emergency and the rise of a new right-wing populism has been instructive for me. Although I am not unaware of how particular epochs, each with their own Zeitgeist, read past works differently, the difference between what I took away from it then and what I see in it now is instructive. No clearer indication is needed of the tendency of a classic text to be a living and ever-changing document as its audience changes.
Except that, for me, there were two on-going influences that changed how I read the book. When I first Read Children from cover to cover it was before I had done an in-depth study of the 1940s post-war settlement literature on both sides of the Atlantic. In my current reading there were two contexts that had not been there before. While the first was the very recent concern over whether the rise of reactionary populism represented a threat to liberal democracy, the second was a greater understanding of the intellectual context that Niebuhr was in conversation with when he first gave the initial lectures at Palo Alto California in January 1944. While Children is part of the post-war settlement literature of the war years, it is also quite distinct from others in the genre in being rooted in a particular Lutheran theology. As a result, it does not share the problem-solving ethos found across the post-war settlement literature. Its emphasis is, instead, on a diagnosis of the problem that ultimately puts its faith in God’s grace. Niebuhr’s criticisms of the illusions of self-love in bourgeois democracy puts him at odds with key post-war planners such as Isaiah Bowman. Interestingly, and despite other differences, Niebuhr’s pessimism about secular solutions does lead to some important crossovers with the (equally pessimistic) approach taken by David Mitrany. Mitrany’s unknowable endpoint of human development leads to some similar points of reference with Niebuhr. The irony here is that Bowman shared Niebuhr’s Protestantism, while Mitrany was clearly a secular thinker.
This article has three sections. In the first I adumbrate the argument of Children, laying out some of its novel arguments alongside an appreciation of the theology behind the argument. The emphasis here is on his view of the decline of bourgeois civilisation, the necessity but impossibility of democracy given human nature, the place of property, and how he links this to the problem of international governance. The second section looks at Niebuhr’s contemporaries, and discusses where he does and does not engage with their concerns. To a certain extent Niebuhr complements and critiques Isaiah Bowman’s ideas about an American-led post-war world, and he also replicates the sense of tragedy found in contemporary classical realists.
There are silences, though. Many of the problems he comes across as potentially irreconcilable differences are dealt with and transcended by the functionalist approach of David Mitrany. Later Niebuhr would come close to Mitrany’s argument (although not as thoroughly as other classical realists like Hans J Morgenthau) in his discussion of ‘organic forces of cohesion’ (see Scheuerman, 2010: 261–264). In Children, however, he does not. This is unfortunate as the very conundrum that Niebuhr sets up at the end of the book is one that Mitrany had wrestled with from a secular point of view a year before through a paradigm shift in international thinking. In this sense, Children remains in a theological logic that on the surface seems alien to Mitrany. Yet, the relationship between Niebuhr and Mitrany’s analysis of the postwar settlement is more complicated than that. At another level they also come to similar conclusions, but reaching these from very different directions. Both Niebuhr and Mitrany reject solutions based on reason, and both reject a utopian endpoint in favour of a politics that (in the secular realm at least) emphasises process.
The final section looks at the book from the point of view of current crises in liberal democracy, and draws parallels between Niebuhr’s concerns and current perceptions of crisis. In a way, many of the issues Niebuhr discusses were not resolved in the 1940s, but rather put on hold by the post-war world. In that sense it might be possible to argue that the relevance of Niebuhr’s argument to today is a product of a reopening of controversies that had never been fully resolved. Many of these problems are the product of the unravelling of the post-war geopolitical order that Bowman and others had championed for the American-led global order. Yet, they fit into Niebuhr’s concerns about the flaws in the intellectual arguments of the Children of Light, and about the illusions of self-love underpinning their secular form.
That said, there are limits to Niebuhr’s usefulness. Not least in the extent that the rapid changes to the world since 1950 – often called The Great Acceleration – have refocused global politics. While it may be fair to say that Niebuhr’s antimony between the state and interdependence still carries relevance today, the morphing of the antimony into a trinity that now also includes ecological/environmental stresses puts limits on Niebuhr’s usefulness. Yet, looked at from another angle, Niebuhr likely prepares us better for the Anthropocene than Bowman through his demonstration of the limits of a rational secular world that has brought us to our current crisis.
In short, the three sections look at Children from three different angles. The first provides a close reading of the text. The second looks at the book as a contribution to the post-war settlement literature, and draws out insights through comparisons with Bowman and Mitrany. The third takes the insights from the first two and apply them to the current crises around populism and the ecological crisis
Niebuhr and the Perils of optimism
There is one aspect of Children that is likely a virtue for the theologian, but frustrating for a social scientist. The argument has no final earthly resolution. To understand why this is, and how Niebuhr can still have relevance to the question of human governance, we have to first understand the Lutheran theology that influences Niebuhr, as well as the particular twist that his own experiences gave to his interpretation of his faith. As William Bain has recently pointed out, a common misperception in treatments of Lutheranism is to see it as separating the spheres of religion and politics, allowing politics to speak ‘with its own voice’ (Bain, 2020: 82). In Lutheranism the secular actually remains dependent on religion. The secular realm, using reason, is needed both because scripture does not tell us how to govern and because, in a world in which sin is present, coercion is needed to keep the wicked in check. The spiritual realm, on the other hand, is were faith reveals divine will. While reason in the secular world shows that good must be promoted in a world rife with sin and wickedness, it is faith that tells us the difference between good and evil (Bain, 2020: 88–99). Thus, while politics is a realm in which we apply reason to construct good governance, success here for the Lutheran is reliant on knowledge of the divine will through faith.
While this is the theological starting point for Niebuhr, his approach was mediated through his own journey that included both a disillusionment with liberalism and an acceptance of the necessity of action in the service of justice. From this came an obligation ‘to strive for an ideal’. This obligation was informed by a knowledge of sin, which in turn prevents us from mistaking our ‘limited and defective accomplishments for the ideal’ (O’Connor, 1961: 196). While consistent with the Lutheran ethic of a rational political life informed by the faith of the divine, Niebuhr’s interpretation of Lutheranism is influenced by a need to act against injustice, which in turn is tempered by a theological caution about the hubris of human self-love that would lead our belief in the goodness of our actions into a sinful self-deification and lust for power. It is this theological approach that is at the root of the tensions in Children. At times it is a call to action that makes it feel like the same kind of hunt to solve problems that we find in other contemporary works seeking to build a new post-war order. Yet, this problem-solving is reined in by a diagnosis of the human condition that is unsolvable without faith in the divine.
Children takes us on a warts and all exploration of the wonderful and horrible nature of humans and their communities, and by the end Niebuhr leaves us with the hope of earthly solutions that may take eons to come to fruition. Instead of giving us a glimpse of this new City of Man, Niebuhr marches us to God’s throne in the City of God, and dumps all our hopes at the feet of the Divine:
The world community, toward which all historical forces seem to be driving us, is mankind’s final possibility and impossibility. The task of achieving it must be interpreted from the standpoint of a faith which understands the fragmentary and broken character of all historical achievements and yet has confidence in their meaning because it knows their completion to be in the hands of a Divine Power, whose resources are greater than those of men, and whose suffering love can overcome the corruption of man’s achievements, without negating the significance of our striving. (Niebuhr, 1944: 189–190)
This turn to faith and the ultimate compassion of God comes at the end of a series of, on the face of it, difficult to almost impossible to resolve antimonies that come to define the argument of the book. While God stands at one end of the argument as a possible resolution of these antimonies, Democracy stands at the other end of the book as the City of Man’s attempt to resolve antimonies. ‘Man’s capacity for justice’, he argues in the preface ‘makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes it necessary’ (Niebuhr, 1944: xi). Democracy’s value comes in its superiority over the unrestrained injustice of tyranny, as well as its ability to deal with the plurality of human communities, but the problem for Niebuhr is that the traditional arguments for democracy are deeply flawed. The root of the flawed defence of democracy lies in the bourgeois origins of modern conceptions of democracy. ‘The social and historical optimism of democratic life’, he argued ‘represents the typical illusion of an advancing class which mistook its own progress for the progress of the world’ (Niebuhr, 1944: 2). This bourgeois outlook, that confused its own self-interest for the general welfare of society, in its defence of democracy assumed an easy harmony between groups in society and between the individual and the community. While Niebuhr is sympathetic to the Marxist criticism of this bourgeois complacency, he argues that the Marxists fall for the same delusion when they assume that the achievement of socialism will naturally lead to harmony in society. For Niebuhr it is the constant presence of disharmony and clashing interests that marked human communities. While democracy could be used to contain those disharmonies, to defend it as a means of eradicating conflicts was a dangerous illusion (Niebuhr, 1944: 7, 60). This, for Niebuhr, is where the defenders of democracy have inadvertently let democracy down through poor argument.
The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness in the title refer to a common trope in early 20th century IR. For Niebuhr the Children of Light are those who believe that self-interest should be brought under the discipline of a higher law, while the Children of Darkness see no law beyond their will or interest. It is the Children of Light who have built democracy and now defend it. The problem is that the Children of Light are foolish because they assume that self-interest is easily controlled. While the Children of Darkness are evil by virtue of knowing no law beyond self-interest, they are also wise because they fully grasp the power of self-interest. Niebuhr (1944) hopes to arm the Children of Light with the wisdom of the Children of Darkness (pp. 9–11, 41). Despite its nod in the direction of theology, this division was little different from Halford Mackinder’s 1919 division of policy makers into organisers and idealists. Much like the Children of Darkness, Mackinder’s organisers were wise through their professional expertise. Yet, they lacked what the idealists had, which was a broader moral understanding. Just as Niebuhr hoped to arm the Children of Light with the wisdom of the Children of Darkness, Mackinder hoped to teach the organiser’s expertise to the idealists (Mackinder, 1919: ch. 2). In a modified form, this same division would show up in Carr’s Twenty Years’ Crisis.
The problem with the approach of the Children of Light towards democracy, according to Niebuhr, was that democracy rested on an unstable antimony that promoted both individual liberty and the well-being of the community. ‘An ideal democratic order’ he argued ‘seeks unity within the conditions of freedom; and maintains freedom within the framework of order’ (Niebuhr, 1944: 3). Yet, the boundless optimism of the bourgeois Children of Light had blinded them to the power of factional class differences and self-interests within their communities. The existence of these interests, linked to egotistical drives, introduced another antimony: that these facts of human nature made democracy simultaneously less likely, but more necessary. Even as the act of assertion of bourgeois individuality over the community grew, it led to a specialisation amongst individuals that made the support of services from an ever-growing community more necessary (Niebuhr, 1944: 54–55).
This tension between individuality and community was amplified by the problem of property. Bourgeois notions of property suffered from two errors. First it tied property to its concept of the individual, and second it assumed that property was a defensive power that the individual could employ, and that it could not be used aggressively (Niebuhr, 1944: 98–99). Marxism, on the other hand, had correctly surmised that property had a social function, but then made the equal and opposite error of assuming that socialised property could not also be used for the purposes of aggressive power. What liberalism and Marxism had failed to realise was that property is power, and that both individual and collective property rights can be used as instruments of injustice (Niebuhr, 1944: 104–110). At the base of the problem of property remained the ubiquitous problem of human egotism. Since all property is power it followed that the property question, like all questions of power in society, was a perennial problem that needed constant debate and adjustment within democratic society. It could not merely be transcended by either the community or the individual. Here we get a taste of Niebuhr the classical realist, where all aspects of the struggle for power between egotistical humans can be managed, but never transcended.
What emerges here is a sense of democratic government being a constantly negotiated and inherently unstable undertaking. ‘Chaos is a perennial peril of freedom’ (Niebuhr, 1944: 122). That said, though, it offered the possibility of a negotiated peace between different religious, ethnic, and economic groups. In this sense democracy was both a product and a producer of a social pluralism that allowed very different groups to live together while also expressing themselves. This for Niebuhr was the superiority of democracy over fascism. The later attempted to restore a primitive unity via coerced sadistic cruelties. For Niebuhr (1944) pluralistic democracy was forward looking because there was no going back to the homogeneity that fascist nostalgia craved (pp. 122–124). Indeed, democracy offered lessons for what Niebuhr saw as the great challenge facing human civilisation in the 20th century: the need to extend the concept of community to the global level. It is here that Niebuhr’s work becomes part of the growing post-war settlement literature.
Central to Niebuhr’s discussion of the global level was the idea that the development of what he called our ‘technical civilisation’ had burst the bounds of our national communities. Developments in production, transportation, and communications had increased interdependence, and were rapidly leading humanity towards a truly global community. These new complex and global inter-relations could only be ordered by the extension of the community to the global level (Niebuhr, 1944: 153–158). Thus, the development of a global community was a necessity. The problem with the move from national communities to a global one is that it would not just be a matter of degree (as other earlier increases in the size of communities had been). Rather this would entail a new global arrangement. Three things concerned Niebuhr, and they were all linked to the problem of human egotism. First, the ‘pride of nations’ would likely resist the dominion of a universal principle. Second, the universal principle itself might be used as a weapon for particular interests, who would then use it to justify global conquests. Third, the other option of a coalescence of great powers to manage interdependence would be an unstable balance of power without the threat (as in the current war) of a common foe (Niebuhr, 1944: 160–173). Thus the most likely immediate result of growing interdependence was not a push towards the solution of a global plural community, but rather international anarchy between communities upholding traditional loyalties. Even the realist school’s answer that we could not rise above a balance of power was flawed, since no participant in a balance is satisfied, and they naturally tend towards anarchy (Niebuhr, 1944: 174–176). Here Niebuhr mirrored Morgenthau’s concern about the failings and ultimate insufficiency of the balance of power (Morgenthau, 1948: ch. XII. Ch. 14 in later editions).
Despite this pessimism in the short term, Niebuhr is optimistic in the longer term that the spirit of pluralist democracy will triumph at the global level in the end. There may be decades or even centuries of international anarchy, though, before this world community is realised. In order to do this the Children of Light will need to harness and deflect self-interest with justice. The best sign that morality and power are interacting will be the presence of hypocrisy, demonstrating the centrality of justice even as people attempt to get around it. The ultimate world community then, remained the final possibility and impossibility of human life (Niebuhr, 1944: 162, 184, 186–187).
It is at this point, with the hope that we will achieve a world community and that the Children of Light may be able to combine wisdom with justice in a global pluralist democracy, that Niebuhr leaves the power to achieve all this in God’s hands. All the antimonies that had dogged his argument – individual/community; justice/egotism; interest/unity; bourgeois/Marxist; morality/wisdom; particular/universal; state/interdependence – seem to require some divine intervention to resolve them. This is perhaps the sharpest contrast between Niebuhr and the other classical realists. While Hans Morgenthau has his representatives of nations ‘meeting under an empty sky from which the gods have departed’ (1948: 249), Niebuhr believes there is a divine will, and therefore a divine plan. A plan that might seem impossible to human eyes is made possible by divine will. Underlying this is Niebuhr’s recognition of the political economic and technological changes that have created the antimony between state egotism and interdependence. It is this state/interdependence antimony that forms the subject matter of both the emerging field of International Relations and the related wartime discussions of the nature of the post-war settlement.
Niebuhr’s contemporaries: The search for a post-war settlement
While Niebuhr’s theological approach could be satisfied by the reversion to the divine, it left him with little concrete to say on the policies needed for the post-war settlement, other than to adumbrate its desired parameters. That said, his work fits in to this broader genre, and Children was meant as a contribution towards the building of the coming peace. The emphasis on democracy and interdependence make this clear. There were two approaches to the post-war settlement that were in the air at the time that Niebuhr first presented his argument. The first, often associated with the work of the geographer and adviser to Roosevelt Isaiah Bowman, advocated the establishment of an American-led system of free trade and free mobility of labour that would create an interdependent world of independent nation states associated together in a single global economy. The second was the functional approach associated with David Mitrany – and also Carr (1942, 1945) in his later IR works and even championed later by Morgenthau (1966) – that advocated the subversion of the nation-state system by a web of functional links. Both were responses to interdependence, and both also championed the spread of democracy. In this sense Niebuhr, Bowman, and Mitrany were part of the same conversation on interdependence and the future of democracy.
Like Niebuhr, Bowman recognised that naturally there was a tendency towards human conflicts over self-interest. The two differences were: (1) that Bowman interpreted the natural state of humans not in terms of a knowable human nature, as Niebuhr had, but in terms of human interests related towards the material world of physical geography, specifically in relation to raw material needs for industry; and (2) Bowman posited a way out based on these material interests. 1 For Bowman – as for Friedrich Ratzel and the later geopolitical thinkers, including Ellen Churchill Semple’s ground breaking 1911 book that influenced Bowman (Semple, 1911) – all societies seek to expand. If that expansion was based on the state and nationalist economics then international affairs would naturally gravitate to conflict between states over access to raw materials and space for colonisation. However, Bowman argued, humans had the choice to reframe the international order in such a way that the desire for expansion could be channelled down less violent and more socially useful routes. Bowman advocated the widespread adoption of free trade and free movement of labour (Bowman, 1942). Thus societies would have access to raw materials and could expand without disturbing national boundaries via the global spread of goods, finance and labour. While benefiting the world as a whole, this, for Bowman, had the added advantage of benefiting the spread of American capitalism and of American ideas of democracy. Not for nothing did Bowman’s intellectual biographer Neil Smith refer to these ideas as an American Lebensraum (Smith, 2003: 319).
At one level Bowman and Niebuhr share a common view on the selfishness of the state, even as they diverge on the benefits of transcending conflict between states. Both regard the state as inherently egotistical. The difference is the source of that egotism, and thus of the consequent solution. For Bowman that selfishness is based on material factors that were capable of being redirected, for Niebuhr the failing is moral, and ultimately is left to God. Both also see the need for human society to conform to the realities of interdependence, but do not try to move beyond the state as the basis of world organisation. In this sense Bowman does not resolve the antimony between state and interdependence, but rather assumes that state selfishness will be channelled.
A Rather different line is taken by David Mitrany. Again there is convergence with Niebuhr on the problem of getting around the state. Indeed Mitrany shares both Niebuhr’s pessimism on the possibilities of states reforming themselves and Niebuhr’s attachment to the principle of pluralism. Both also interpreted the move towards a global community as not a matter of degree, but of a substantial change. Mitrany adds to Niebuhr’s pessimism by seeing (as Bowman did) the growing interdependence of states as a source of further conflict between states. The more states interacted with each other because of interdependence the more areas and opportunities for conflict exist (Mitrany, 1937). While Mitrany shares Bowman’s materialism, the structure of his argument conforms more to Niebuhr. Both Mitrany and Niebuhr begin from the pessimistic premise that states on their own were unlikely to organise themselves out of existence. This was the basis of Mitrany’s criticism of the naivety of federalists (Mitrany, 1948). From this (and again in contrast to the goal orientated federalists) Mitrany and Niebuhr were unclear about what the end-point would be, both focused on the process and path that needed to be followed. While Niebuhr was more detailed on the initial pessimism about states, and Mitrany had a more fully developed discussion of the process, the lines of argument were similar. Indeed, this similarity between the arguments of Mitrany and Niebuhr can be found more generally in the strong family resemblances between Mitrany’s arguments on the prospects of world order and those of classical realists more generally (Ashworth, 2017).
The big difference between Niebuhr and Mitrany over process was that, while Niebuhr turned to God after adumbrating the necessary route, Mitrany in his functional approach laid out a more detailed process for how global governance in the age of interdependence needed to go (Mitrany, 1943). The basis of Mitrany’s position was that historically each time the ‘social life’ of a society burst the bounds of its security structures the result was always a new form of government. In the newly globalised world of the 20th century the trend of the times would be to move from overarching state structures and boundaries towards networks of functions that operated on the level where they were most efficient (Mitrany, 1933-4). Since Mitrany saw no possibility of directly challenging the nation-state, it would be through transnational function-specific organisations that a new peaceful and democratic society would develop. Like Niebuhr, Mitrany saw this as a growing trend, but one that would take time. In this sense both differed from Bowman’s plan for a common post-war free trade world. Both Mitrany and Niebuhr saw interdependence as leading to a qualitatively different politics, while it is less clear that Bowman did.
While looked at from one direction Mitrany’s solution could be seen by Niebuhr as as much a naïve ‘after the revolution’ attitude that he saw as a common failing in liberals and Marxists. Though, given that Mitrany’s detailed discussion of the process built upon a shared pessimism, we could look at it in a different way. Niebuhr’s final argument left the unstoppable force of interdependence up against the immoveable object of human egotism. Under these circumstances the only alternative is some form of transcendence. Niebuhr chooses the route of divine grace, but Mitrany’s solution is also a transcendence. Unlike the liberals and Marxists Mitrany does not conceive of this transcendence as leading to a goal where human behaviour is changed for the better. Rather, he agrees with Niebuhr that the requirements of interdependence and the egotism of the state are in direct conflict. This does not mean that Niebuhr would later agree with Mitrany, indeed in later works he is interested but sceptical (Scheuerman, 2010: 261–264). What it does mean, though, is that Niebuhr’s view of the future of democracy relied on a transcendental solution that both required an interventionist God in the realm of religion and faith, and a human plan (like Mitrany’s) that harnessed human selfishness for another direction in the secular realm. Here, also, Mitrany’s reliance on need as an organising principle was the product of a sceptism about reason that he shared with Niebuhr.
In the immediate aftermath of the war it was Bowman’s view that gained more traction than either Niebuhr’s or Mitrany’s, although until the 1990s the US-led global order only covered part of the globe. The resulting post-war settlement gave a larger role to the state, especially in the Cold War showdown between the United States and the Soviet Union, but it remained a hybrid system that combined both the diplomatic interactions between states and the unceasing logic of interdependence. Indeed, after 1980 the neoliberal renewal of Bowman’s American-led system saw states negotiating greater interdependence in the name of prosperity. A crucial point here, though, was that despite the logic of interdependence, states remained the visible incarnation of human communities. In this sense Bowman’s victorious system represented a suspension of the tension between the state and interdependence that all three authors had identified as at the root of future developments and conflicts. All three writers remain relevant to our own current state of affairs because of the continued existence of this antimony. What this also means is that the central problem that concerned Niebuhr – the defence of democracy in a world in which a new community was made necessary by interdependence – is still relevant today. The question remains, though, what is the extent (and where are the limits) of this relevance?
Niebuhr in an age of populism and environmental crisis
The photograph had gone viral after being posted on an account run for the German Chancellor. A gruff looking American President sits with arms crossed, while the German Chancellor leans across the table with a look of serious disappointment across her face. The other G-7 leaders and their delegates look on. Because photographs, unlike paintings, take a snapshot of a moment that is more likely to be ripped out of context, we cannot be sure what was really going on from the picture alone. What is interesting is how the photograph has channelled people’s concerns into their interpretation of the frozen moment.
If there is a western leader who represents the current form of the egotism of the state it is President Donald Trump. His slogan of ‘Make America Great Again’ in the 2016 Presidential election was a clear nod in the direction of the idea of the state as above any other form of order. This has been reinforced by the Trump White House’s foreign policy, which has questioned the idea of the US as part of a wider community in favour of unilateral action designed to benefit the national community primarily. They have not been alone in this. The views of Brexit coming out of the Vote Leave organisation and the caucus of strict Brexit supporters in the House of Commons has been premised on the idea that the UK can only be truly independent if it is able to act unilaterally for its interests only. The Brexit slogan ‘take back control’ has proved to be a powerful mobilising tool. Similar forms of the argument appear in the rhetoric of ruling parties in Hungary, Poland, Brazil and India, although in the cases of the EU members Hungary and Poland the idea of economic sovereignty takes a back seat. All of these represent a restatement of the interests of the state against the effects of interdependence, and fit into Niebuhr’s own assessment of the antimony between them. It is also clear in hindsight that the post-war settlement associated with Bowman, and remodelled by neoliberals in the 1980s, had fudged the question of the tensions between state and interdependence, and that the current wave of populism can be seen as an attempt to harness the egotism of the state to resentments about how interdependence has been managed. In this sense the neoliberals had been typical naïve Children of Light in the same mould as their bourgeois forebears. They had allowed property to be used aggressively by its owners, and had mistaken their own global class interests for the wider interests of humanity with disastrous consequences (see Slobodian, 2018). The populist counter-blast was to merge state self-interest with an anti-elitist rhetoric seemingly directed at neoliberalism. Here the ‘wisdom’ of the Children of Darkness was not the expertise of the organiser in Mackinder’s framing, but rather the wisdom of reading the popular mood and the growing levels of resentment.
To a certain degree there is a link between the fascism of Niebuhr’s Children and 21st century rightist populism. Both aim to impose a primitive unity over the realities of pluralism. This is particularly stark in such fringe groups as the identitarians in Europe or white nationalists in North America, but is also present in the assumptions found in more electorally successful conservative populism and its conceptions of a traditional (sometimes white) working class, the idea of a uniform people in opposition to elites, and the use of phrases such as ‘old stock’ or ‘indigenous’. Both, in that sense, assume the existence of a recognisable demos that is seen as both a requirement for a real political community and a goal to return to in order to escape the complexities of plurality and multiculturalism. Yet, despite this apparent link, the analogy very quickly breaks down. Niebuhr and his contemporaries had witnessed a fascism that was willing to use force and totalitarian control in order to impose uniformity. This political will thankfully rarely surfaces in 21st century right wing populism, and indeed the use of democracy as a trope to justify populist bigotry blunts anti-pluralism. By using electoral success as a justification for their right to be heard, modern populists equally have to accept the validity of voices opposed to them. Indeed, the frequently repeated trope of free speech and the importance of hearing all voices is central to many rightist populist politicians, so their right to be heard ultimately rests on a support for pluralism that is in conflict with their calls for unity.
There is also a sense, from Niebuhr’s perspective, that the right-wing populism that has challenged neoliberalism is also naïve. While neoliberalism failed to recognise that individual property is not only defensive in nature, populists have made the same assumption in their push for tax cuts in the United States and for a deregulated shell-state in the UK. Rather than fully rejecting neoliberalism, aspects of the populist right have sought to combine neoliberal libertarianism with exclusionary nationalism, and even racism (Slobodian, 2019). This has meant that the same naiveties over property and interests have also been inherited. As the inability to grasp basic realities of the global trade regime amongst populist backers of both Brexit and Trump show, the bulk of the populist side seems to be closer to naïve Children of Light working in thrall to general principles that seem divorced from a wider reality. Rather than a full-blown state egotism, modern populism seems wedded to a semi-mystical notion of the state combined with notions of bourgeois personal freedom that comes closer to Niebuhr’s concept of hypocrisy. The exceptions here seem to be many of the key agent provocateurs such as Boris Johnson or Vladimir Putin, whose commitments to a specific populist ideology often seem instrumental and self-serving, and thus linked to a narrow personal self-interest. The Children of Darkness are not associated within a particular group, but often act as catalysts that ride the populist tiger. In this context, it is difficult to identify the reassertion of state egotism in the 21st century with the full-blown Children of Darkness of 1940s fascism.
On balance, though, it looks as though Niebuhr’s three fears about human egotism have come about. The pride of nations is being used as a recruiting tool, universal principles were used as a weapon by particular interests before the 2007 clash, and an emerging unstable balance of power among the major international actors has made some inroads into international affairs. That said, the replay of national egotism, despite the attention given to it, is still an anaemic affair. For all the talk of the collapse of global institutions states still find themselves constrained, not least because those global institutions have the force of interdependence behind them. The egotism of the Trump White House has found itself limited by the strong pluralism of the global system (even if that pluralism is limited to a select group of stronger interests). Similarly, at the national level attempts to create a faux unity by populists that contrast the true people with the self-interest of ‘metropolitan’ or ‘coastal’ elites have only had limited success against the entrenched pluralism central to most liberal democracies around the world. In India, for example, populist Prime Minister Modi has run up against serious popular unrest and opposition to his new citizenship law. Niebuhr’s warning about the ignoring of other interests (especially class interests) still resonates, but the political field is still contested, and the major problem still appears to be the naivety of different cadres of the Children of Light. Each side seems to reflect the hypocrisy that comes out of an attempt to maintain the antimony of universal goals with sectional self-interest. The advocates of pure power are few, and they do not often have the ear of rulers, populist or not.
And it is here that a complication arises on applying Niebuhr’s antimony between interdependence and egotistical state. When Niebuhr, Bowman, and Mitrany wrote in the early 1940s they did so with the common understanding that they lived in times that were made unprecedented by the rapid industrialisation of, especially, the second industrial revolution of the second half of the 19th century. The permanence of the interdependence created by industrialisation, despite the autarkic backlashes of the early 20th century, were a theme – explicit or implicit – in all three of their works. Industrialisation had created the tension between interdependence and the life worlds of states that was in turn responsible for the tragedies that motived the three of them to write about international affairs. Indeed, it was this antimony between a new industrial interdependence (including imperial dependence) and the power of states that had been the catalyst for the growth of the study of international thought in the early 20th century.
Yet, however dramatic and unprecedented the effects of industrial growth had been, another game changing development that would make industrialisation look like sedate managed growth was less than a decade away when Niebuhr wrote. From 1950 the global economy took another quantum leap that saw rapid changes to wealth and technology. Referred to as The Great Acceleration, this new stage of growth not only fed into a new phase of what Arvind Subramanian and Martin Kessler have called hyper-globalisation, (Subramanian and Kessler, 2013) it also put pressure on the natural ecology of the Earth through the rapid consumption of natural resources beyond replenishment rates. The Great Acceleration was manifest across numerous socio-economic and Earth system categories – with global population tripling, the global economy growing by a factor of six, and deforestation the largest land use change – but the sum of these changes was that human activity intervened and tinkered with the biogeochemical cycles of the Earth (McNeill and Engelke, 2014: 41, 89, 128, 205). While these interventions have been unplanned, they have resulted in humans becoming a force of nature, changing the Earth’s ecology in rapid and often irreversible ways, with climate change due to greenhouse gas emissions threatening to destabilise human global civilisation before the end of the century (Lewis and Maslin, 2018). As a consequence the antimony of state and interdependence has been complicated by the addition of environmental hazard. The challenge for humanity has been how to control these anthropogenic changes, and by implication adopt a conscious stewardship of Earth systems. In a way this mirrors 20th century attempts to create the institutional machinery to consciously limit the unintended negative consequences of the growing interdependence of industrial society.
Yet, we never did resolve the antimony between state and interdependence at the core of Niebuhr’s work, and the addition of the ecological crisis creates separate antimonies with both. Thus, the processes involved with interdependence, which became hyper-globalisation after the 1980s, has increased practices such as hydrocarbon use that threaten to destabilise Earth systems. Similarly, the state and state system has made coordinated human action even more difficult over environmental management as it did with the problems of interdependence. Despite some notable successes, such as the Montreal Protocol controlling ozone-destroying chemicals, diplomacy between states has been notable for its failure in several key areas, including and especially the slowing down of greenhouse gas emissions. Here Mitrany’s assessment of the growing failure of the state to deal with a social realm that has burst the confines of state borders remains relevant.
The problem with any application of Niebuhr to global crises of democracy – whether we are talking about the 1940s or the 2000s – is that while he is strong on the plurality of interests and underlying trends, his theology leads to a weakness on what the response should be, and assumes a long process of change that under present conditions is unhelpful. This is compounded by the addition of human interventions in Earth systems on top of the continuing state-interdependence antimony. What is more, his neat dichotomy between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, that fitted in so neatly to the Zeitgeist of the time, also breaks down with the ecological crisis. I had already mentioned that the Children of Darkness seem to be reduced to the role of agent provocateurs in the age of populism. Under the threat of climate change, and the need for collective action in the face of civilisational collapse the cleverness of the Children of Darkness in realising the power of self-interest actually reverses and becomes a form of unintelligent buffoonery. The incarnation of narrow self-interest appears in the figure of Scott Morrison – Australia’s beleaguered Prime Minister, who put local economic development ahead of concerted global action – desperately grabbing unwilling hands for forced handshakes in an area devastated by climate change induced bush fires. Rather, the 21st century Children of Darkness are ignorant and too hampered by their narrow specialisms to ever fully understand the world they inhabit.
That said, there is a sense in which Niebuhr’s approach is relevant to the environmental crisis. An overarching antimony in Niebuhr’s approach to politics centres on our need to both pursue an ideal, while also guarding against our lapse into a dangerous self-love that mistakes our limited and defective accomplishments for that ideal. The idea that we are now living in the new geological epoch of the Anthropocene forces us to accept humanity as a force of nature capable of dramatically altering the physical Earth system. This sets up an irresolvable Niebuhr-style antimony. On the one hand our ecology itself undermines our over-weening self-love by turning our abuse of the natural world into a threat to our existence. On the other the answer to this capricious god-like changing of natural process by humanity is for us to accept (as a force of nature) a stewardship role towards our ecology. Yet, if that stewardship is to work, it has to be approached with a humility towards our capacity to create unintended consequences, and therefore needs to avoid the self-love that caused the problem in the first place. We have to accept a godlike stewardship, but must avoid the hubris that goes with that acceptance. This is a theological question that is part of the underlying argument of Niebuhr’s Children.
Equally, there is some crossover here with Mitrany’s thought. Mitrany’s privileging of process over goals represents a secular equivalent to Niebuhr’s theological humility in the face of sin. Recently Dryzek and Pickering have argued that the politics of the Anthropocene will have to deal with a new unstable ecology that will throw up increasingly unpredictable problems (Dryzek and Pickering, 2019). This will mean that governance based on process will need to replace more rationalist goal-orientated government. This process-over-goals approach is central to Mitrany’s contribution to the post-war settlement genre, and it is also compatible with Niebuhr’s call for humility in his approach to the post-war settlement. In this sense, while the specifics of Niebuhr’s contribution to the post-war settlement literature may have limited relevance, the ethos underlying it still has much to offer.
Conclusion
Niebuhr’s Children, with its discussions of the nature/future of democracy and the crisis of the antimony between state and interdependence, is part of the wider post-war settlement genre of political works that flourished in the early 1940s. While its theological content distinguishes it from the rest of the genre, that tends towards the secular and materialist, this does not stop Children sharing much with other works. I have concentrated on the contributions of Bowman and Mitrany, both as representatives of two different materialist/secular approaches, and as writers who have important elements in common with Niebuhr. A detailed analysis of Children, and a comparison with Bowman and Mitrany, brings out the centrality of the state/interdependence antimony, and also some unlikely crossovers between Niebuhr and Mitrany.
Both Niebuhr and Mitrany had recognised, as Bowman had not, that the realities of interdependence could not be solved merely by a scaling up of democracy and the state to a global level. Niebuhr’s realisation that this new interdependence would require a qualitatively different arrangement, if we were to avoid the triple threat of the pride of nations, the dominance of particular interests or an unstable balance of power, places him closer to Mitrany than Bowman. While Niebuhr never articulates what this qualitatively different global governance should be, this is something that Mitrany does investigate. Ultimately, the post-war settlement came to resemble Bowman’s vision, but the ultimate effect of this was to postpone dealing with the problems that both Niebuhr and Mitrany had outlined. In this sense many of the problems outlined by Niebuhr and Mitrany in 1943 and 1944 remain. While Mitrany’s functional approach has been partially realised across global politics, it never fully supplanted the state/interdependence dichotomy. The functional world of international organisations, non-governmental organisations, diasporas, civil society groups, company ownership and supply chains, and epistemic communities lives in an uneasy parallel existence with a system of territorial states, and does not full resolve the antimony.
There are, though, more specific points raised by Niebuhr in his discussion of democracy within the state/interdependence antimony that still have resonance. The importance of property as not just a defensive right, but also a source of aggressive class or state self-assertion, is a lesson that has not been learnt. This is particularly true of the neoliberal order that emerged from the 1980s with its assumption that wealth creation would lift all boats and that inequalities of wealth would not threaten democracy. Indeed, Niebuhr’s discussion of the role of property demonstrates how poverty and inequality are political concerns, and go to the heart of the question of whether a democracy can function effectively or not. In turn, this also affects the antimony between justice and self-interest, where the interests of propertied elites (like the self-interest of states globally) undermines the justice necessary for the proper function of democratic institutions.
Yet, this ‘impossibility’ of democracy due to self-interest is matched by the necessity of democracy as a response to the pluralism of society. Niebuhr’s notion of the unavoidable pluralism of society, both national and international, acts as a refutation of those branches of populism that seek to discover and promote a single will of the people. Democracy is made necessary, in Niebuhr’s formulations, by the realities of pluralism, and those realities only multiply as the logic of interdependence makes a global spread of democratic values an imperative. Populism’s weakness remains its failure to recognise the realities of pluralism, especially pluralism across borders. The way that plans for Brexit have, for example, blundered into the pluralist realities of the Irish border under the Good Friday Agreement, the 3 million EU27 citizens living in the UK, the 1 million UK citizens living in the EU27, and the constitutional plurality of the UK (especially in relation to Scotland), show how Niebuhr’s view of the realities of plurality have only continued to erode the possibilities of state egotism. There is just no room left for wise Children of Darkness.
While parallels between Niebuhr’s discussion of democracy and the current state of democracy in an age of resurgent right-wing populism abound, Niebuhr’s distinction between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness makes less sense in an age of insurgent populism and climate crisis. While populism often shares ideas of national self-interest with Niebuhr’s Children of Darkness, in its common right wing forms it also shares a naïve faith in the defensiveness of property with the Children of Light. For all its pretensions to taking back control populism seems unable or unwilling to challenge the hyperglobalisation of modern interdependence. Equally, the climate crisis is rapidly reformulating self-interest, and the appeals to economic self-interest by both deniers and climate delayers lacks the intelligent cunning that Niebuhr associates with the Children of Darkness. Naivety has eclipsed the cunning of self-interest as the crisis of 21st century global governance unfolds.
It is when we move from populism and the crisis of interdependence to the environmental crisis that questions of the relevance of Children become more acute. This is not necessarily a criticism of Niebuhr, since the Great Acceleration from 1950 has been a game changing process, and it is understandable that Niebuhr would not have predicted its ramifications. Yet, even while we move to a crisis where ecological and physical limits play an increasingly central role in global governance, there remains a distinctly human problem at the core of our response to this crisis that can be found underlying Niebuhr’s argument in Children. While the consequences of our unbridled growth have punctured our pretensions about our invincibility as a global society, the solutions to that false pride – acceptance that we are a force of nature, and the need for human stewardship – contains within it the potential to become another dangerous form of self-love leading to a lust for power. The crises that we face now may leave much of the post-war settlement literature, including Children, on the cutting room floor, but there is enough rhyming to make a reread worthwhile.
