Niebuhr began his career as a pacifist, horrified by the carnage of World War I. But as he watched the rise of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in the 1930s, he realized that "doing nothing" was its own kind of moral failure.
Niebuhr’s story is the birth of , a framework that transformed how we think about power and nations. The Great Awakening Reinhold Niebuhr and International Relations Th...
In the late 1930s, as the shadow of war lengthened across Europe, a tall, intense man named stood at a pulpit in Edinburgh to deliver the prestigious Gifford Lectures . He wasn't there to offer easy comfort. Instead, he came to dismantle the popular "idealism" of the time—the belief that human reason and international law alone could banish war forever. Niebuhr began his career as a pacifist, horrified