"Who Might Make a New Party?" New Republic, I April 1931, 177-79; "Social Science and Social Control," New Republic, 29 July 1931, 276-77; and "Intelligence and Power," New Republic, 25 April 1934, 306-7. James W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (1989), finds Dewey's Public and Its Problems "maddeningly obscure"—a judgment few readers are likely to question—but extracts from it a more powerful reply to Lippmann than my own account of this exchange would indicate. The heart of Dewey's argument, Carey maintains, is his "espousal of the metaphor of hearing over that of seeing." Dewey believes that "language is not a system of representations but a form of activity" and that "speech captures this action better than the more static images of the printed page." The trouble with the press, accordingly, is not "its failure to represent" events objectively and impartially, as Lippmann thought, but its failure to see itself "as an agency for carrying on the conversation of our culture." Lippmann's "spectator theory of knowledge" misses the point that "we lack not only an effective press but certain vital habits: the ability to follow an argument, grasp the point of view of another, expand the boundaries of understanding, debate the alternative purposes that might be pursued." If this is what Dewey meant—and Carey's gloss is quite consistent with the general direction of Dewey's philosophy—it is too bad he did not say so, in this particular book, more clearly and emphatically. On his exchange with Lippmann, see also Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (1991).

Of the voluminous writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, the ones most directly relevant to my purposes are "The Twilight of Liberalism," New Republic, 14 June 1919, 218; "War and Christian Ethics," New Republic, 22 Feb. 1922, 372; Does Civilization Need Religion? (1926); Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932); "A Footnote on Religion," Nation, 26 Sept. 1934, 358-59 (a review of Dewey's A Common Faith); An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (1935); The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941, 1943); and The Irony of American History (1952). Important works on Niebuhr include Donald B. Meyer, The Protestant Search for Political Realism (1960); June Bingham, Courage to Change: An Introduction to the Life and Thought of Reinhold Niebubr (1975); and Richard Wightman Fox, Reinhold Niebubr (1985); see also Fox's article, "The Niebuhr Brothers and the Liberal Protestant Heritage," in Michael Lacey, ed., Religion and Twentieth-Century American Intellectual Life (1989).

The controversies between Niebuhr and Christian pacifists and the highly selective absorption of his thought by liberal Protestants can be followed in his articles "Must We Do Nothing?" Christian Century 49 (23 March 1932): 415-17; "Is Peace or Justice the Goal?" World Tomorrow 15 (21 Sept. 1932): 395-97; "The Blindness of Liberalism," Radical Religion (fall 1936): 4-5; "The Return to Primitive Religion," Christendom 3 (winter 1938): I-8; and in the following responses provoked either directly or indirectly by his attack on liberal religion: "The Political

-556-