Re-reading Niebuhr’s The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: The crisis of democracy in an interdependent world then and now
| Author | Lucian M Ashworth |
| Published date | 01 June 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1755088220979728 |
| Date | 01 June 2021 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1755088220979728
Journal of International Political Theory
2021, Vol. 17(2) 123 –138
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1755088220979728
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Re-reading Niebuhr’s The
Children of Light and the
Children of Darkness: The
crisis of democracy in an
interdependent world
then and now
Lucian M Ashworth
Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada
Abstract
Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness is one of the key
English-language texts in the post-war settlement literature of the early 1940s. This
article analyses the book on three interconnected levels: the nature of the argument
made by Niebuhr in the book, its place in the broader post-war settlement literature of
the early 1940s, and its relevance to the current problems of right-wing populism and
the climate crisis. While the main theme of the book is the necessity and impossibility
of democracy, it shares with the work of Isaiah Bowman and David Mitrany a concern
for the tension between the state and interdependence. The deepening of this tension
since has helped keep Niebuhr relevant, although his initial distinction between the
children of light and the children of darkness has been complicated by both populism
and the climate crisis.
Keywords
Climate crisis, David Mitrany, democracy, Isaiah Bowman, populism, Reinhold Niebuhr
I first read Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness over
a decade ago. Re-reading it in the wake of the climate emergency and the rise of a new
right-wing populism has been instructive for me. Although I am not unaware of how
particular epochs, each with their own Zeitgeist, read past works differently, the
Corresponding author:
Lucian M Ashworth, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Saint John’s, NL A1C 5S7, Canada.
Email: lashworth@mun.ca
979728IPT0010.1177/1755088220979728Journal of International Political TheoryAshworth
research-article2020
Article
124 Journal of International Political Theory 17(2)
difference between what I took away from it then and what I see in it now is instructive.
No clearer indication is needed of the tendency of a classic text to be a living and ever-
changing document as its audience changes.
Except that, for me, there were two on-going influences that changed how I read the
book. When I first Read Children from cover to cover it was before I had done an in-
depth study of the 1940s post-war settlement literature on both sides of the Atlantic. In
my current reading there were two contexts that had not been there before. While the first
was the very recent concern over whether the rise of reactionary populism represented a
threat to liberal democracy, the second was a greater understanding of the intellectual
context that Niebuhr was in conversation with when he first gave the initial lectures at
Palo Alto California in January 1944. While Children is part of the post-war settlement
literature of the war years, it is also quite distinct from others in the genre in being rooted
in a particular Lutheran theology. As a result, it does not share the problem-solving ethos
found across the post-war settlement literature. Its emphasis is, instead, on a diagnosis of
the problem that ultimately puts its faith in God’s grace. Niebuhr’s criticisms of the illu-
sions of self-love in bourgeois democracy puts him at odds with key post-war planners
such as Isaiah Bowman. Interestingly, and despite other differences, Niebuhr’s pessi-
mism about secular solutions does lead to some important crossovers with the (equally
pessimistic) approach taken by David Mitrany. Mitrany’s unknowable endpoint of
human development leads to some similar points of reference with Niebuhr. The irony
here is that Bowman shared Niebuhr’s Protestantism, while Mitrany was clearly a secu-
lar thinker.
This article has three sections. In the first I adumbrate the argument of Children, lay-
ing out some of its novel arguments alongside an appreciation of the theology behind the
argument. The emphasis here is on his view of the decline of bourgeois civilisation, the
necessity but impossibility of democracy given human nature, the place of property, and
how he links this to the problem of international governance. The second section looks
at Niebuhr’s contemporaries, and discusses where he does and does not engage with their
concerns. To a certain extent Niebuhr complements and critiques Isaiah Bowman’s ideas
about an American-led post-war world, and he also replicates the sense of tragedy found
in contemporary classical realists.
There are silences, though. Many of the problems he comes across as potentially
irreconcilable differences are dealt with and transcended by the functionalist approach of
David Mitrany. Later Niebuhr would come close to Mitrany’s argument (although not as
thoroughly as other classical realists like Hans J Morgenthau) in his discussion of
‘organic forces of cohesion’ (see Scheuerman, 2010: 261–264). In Children, however, he
does not. This is unfortunate as the very conundrum that Niebuhr sets up at the end of the
book is one that Mitrany had wrestled with from a secular point of view a year before
through a paradigm shift in international thinking. In this sense, Children remains in a
theological logic that on the surface seems alien to Mitrany. Yet, the relationship between
Niebuhr and Mitrany’s analysis of the postwar settlement is more complicated than that.
At another level they also come to similar conclusions, but reaching these from very dif-
ferent directions. Both Niebuhr and Mitrany reject solutions based on reason, and both
reject a utopian endpoint in favour of a politics that (in the secular realm at least) empha-
sises process.
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