self-interest. He argued that the egoism of groups originated not only in their determination to advance their economic interests but in the ethnocentrism that converted partial loyalties into absolute loyalties and thus generated utopian movements designed to achieve political "salvation."

Here was another respect in which his position became increasingly one-sided. His earlier works had considered particularism a source of constructive moral energy as well as a source of "demonic fervor." After the mid-thirties, he tended to stress its destructive aspect alone. He forgot that the trouble with the kind of liberalism represented by the social gospel was not just that it underestimated the "egoism" of groups. It also undervalued "natural sympathy," as Niebuhr called it. Liberals could not see that parochial attachments called forth an intensity of conviction unmatched by an abstract attachment to humanity as a whole. If liberalism lacked "fervor" and "fanaticism," as Niebuhr complained in 1919, it was largely because it condemned all forms of tribalism as backward and unprogressive, demanding that they give way to more and more inclusive (and necessarily attenuated) allegiances. With mounting impatience, Niebuhr criticized liberals for thinking that moral suasion and organized "intelligence" could overcome the egoism of groups. But he said too little about the underlying assumption that intensively focused loyalties were unambiguously undesirable.

Political realism thus came to be identified with a grudging acknowledgment of the tenacity of particularism, coupled with the hope that secularization would at least weaken its crusading fervor, if not eliminate it altogether. In the thirties, Niebuhr had cited Strachey's forecast of the coming "world synthesis" as an example of the modern illusion that reason would eventually master all the irrational forces in nature, including the force of natural sympathy, as Niebuhr called it. By the sixties, even a Christian realist like Harvey Cox, described by one of his admirers as a "post-Barthian" thinker who had absorbed neo-orthodox insights and thereby overcome Rauschenbusch's "easy optimism," could argue that the growth of the "secular city" undermined tribal idolatries and made possible a higher form of religious life. ^* The disenchantment of the

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*	Critics of The Secular City argued that Cox had merely restated Rauschenbusch's position, with all the usual objections to which it was open. Neither side in the heated

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