conceivable society.' " Political life could not become a realm of moral perfection; but that did not mean, as Barth seemed to imply, that it was therefore exempt from discriminating moral judgments. Prophetic religion, according to Niebuhr, maintained an "intolerable tension" between the absolute and the contingent. Neo-orthodoxy dissolved this tension in its blanket condemnation of political life as a struggle for power unredeemed by any higher purpose. But the social gospel, in its attempt to historicize the Kingdom of God, also dissolved the tension between the universal and the particular. It mistook Christian ethics, with their absolute injunction against violence, as a blueprint for social reform, overlooking the need for violence and coercion in politics and relying on the "pious hope that people might be good and loving, in which case all the nasty business of politics could be dispensed with." Since people were not good and loving—not at least in their dealings with each other as members of "collectives, whether races, classes or nations"—politics and morality would always collide.

In Moral Man and Immoral Society, Niebuhr traced the "immorality" of political life to the intractable particularism of groups. The opposition announced in the title attracted so much attention, in the ensuing controversies between Niebuhr and exponents of the social gospel, that most readers missed his contention that particularism remained a source of "virtue" as well as "demonic fervor." In his Christian Ethics, he spoke of "those virtuous attitudes of natural man in which natural sympathy is inevitably compounded with natural egoism." Liberals denounced "narrow loyalties" and "circumscribed sympathy," but Niebuhr saw their positive side, just as he saw the positive side of fanaticism. "It is natural enough to love one's own family more than other families and no amount of education will ever eliminate the inverse ratio between the potency of love and the breadth and expansion in which it is applied." The value of mythology consisted, in part, of its "understanding for the organic aspects of life which rationalistic morality frequently fails to appreciate." Liberals and socialists made the mistake of dismissing the "organic unities of family, race, and nation as irrational idiosyncrasies which a more perfect rationality will destroy." Thus John Strachey took the position that "separate national cultures, separate languages, and the like" would have no place in a "fully developed world communism." People would "tire of the inconvenient idiosyncrasies of locality" and "wish to pool the cultural heritage of the human race into a world synthesis." It was diffi

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