own resources. Improvements in "economics, ethics, and religion" would catch up with technological improvements as soon as men learned "to discard the superstitions and dogmatisms of the past and give themselves without reserve to the study of the facts of history, psychology, and society." The historical record showed that the "human race moves slowly onward and upward," and a "black fog of pessimism" was no more defensible than "rosy clouds of optimism."

By directing so much of his attention to the "utopianism" of the social gospel, leaving its belief in progress largely uncriticized, Niebuhr made things unnecessarily easy for his opponents and enabled his followers to ignore the deeper implications of his work. In the late thirties and forties, his polemic against "sentimentality" became increasingly one-sided. He gave so much attention to the first of the interlocking propositions announced in Moral Man and Immoral Society—the impossibility of politics without coercion—that he effectively authorized his followers to overlook the second, that "coercion is impossible without the creation of social injustice." Thus Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., invoked Niebuhr on behalf of his own distinction between "utopian" liberalism and "pragmatic" liberalism. In The Vital Center (1948), Schlesinger argued that Niebuhr's theology exposed the former's "soft and shallow conception of human nature." By calling attention to the "dimension of anxiety, guilt, and corruption," Niebuhr demolished the utopian illusion that "man can be reformed by argument" and that "the good in man will be liberated by a change in economic institutions." Elsewhere, Schlesinger asserted that Niebuhr had made it impossible to believe, as Rauschenbusch had believed, that the "simple moralism of the gospels would resolve the complex issues of industrial society," that the "Kingdom of God could be realized on earth," or that the "commandment of love" was "directly applicable to social and political questions."

In the forties and fifties, "pragmatic" liberals thus came to agree that

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