The standard interpretation of Niebuhr's career, which treats him simply as a critic of the social gospel and of its exaggerated faith in public opinion, overlooks his criticism of the political "realism" that reduces politics to a struggle for power and thus precludes any public life at all. Niebuhr himself, it must be said, was partly responsible for this misunderstanding. In his political writings of the thirties and forties—in his journalistic polemics against Christian pacifism as well as in his books— he devoted far more attention to the illusions of the social gospel than to the dangers of an excessively hard-boiled political realism. He ridiculed liberals for their trust in human nature and the power of good intentions. With considerable relish, he set out to disabuse them of their fantasy of painless social change and to expose the moral insincerity that made it so easy for the rich and powerful to condemn the resort to violence on the part of the poor. The dominant classes, he argued, could easily proscribe violence because they had more effective means of coercion at their disposal.

No doubt the more naive exponents of the social gospel deserved this rebuke, but Niebuhr's invective against pacifism gave undue emphasis to such matters. Eager to make the point that "sentimentality is a poor weapon against cynicism," he said too much about sentimentality and too little about cynicism. In any case, Christian socialists like Walter Rauschenbusch expressly repudiated the views attributed by Niebuhr to the social gospel. "Moral suasion is strangely feeble," Rauschenbusch wrote in 1912, "where the sources of a man's income are concerned." History offered no "precedent for an altruistic self-effacement of a whole class." For this reason, "intellectual persuasion and moral conviction ... would never by themselves overcome the resistance of selfishness and conservatism." It is true that Rauschenbusch disparaged violence, but he did not close his eyes to the need for pressure and force. "Christian idealists," he said, "must not make the mistake of trying to hold the working class down to the use of moral suasion only"—an eminently Niebuhrian statement. He disavowed the principle that the "use of force against oppres

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