『共通の信仰』 と 『道徳的人間と非道徳的社会』

Abstract

In Moral Man and Immoral Society, Reinhold Niebuhr dismissed John Dewey as a naïve moralist who, not seeing the irrational character of the behavior of all human collectives, overestimated rational experimentation, and identified God and the world, the ideal and the real. Niebuhr asserted that the responsible Christian had to accept the use of force. However, he refused to regard politics only as a struggle for power. He tried to find a way out of the “endless cycle of social conflict.” Niebuhr stressed that the experience of grace would “create the attitudes which transcend social conflict and mitigate its cruelties.” In Common Faith, Dewey defined the religious as the unification of the self and of the self and the universe. For Dewey, democracy embodies the religious. It is religious because it bases on faith in the ability of human nature to achieve freedom for individuals accompanied with social stability built on cohesion instead of coercion. Despite their differences in political orientation, Dewey and Niebuhr relied on the nature and destiny of man who could create their own world.