Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics

Moral Man and Immoral Society has been rated by Christianity Today to be the 10th most important Christian book of the last 100 years. Published in 1932 (during the great depression)it is perhaps the most historically influential work on the subject of Ethics. Niebuhr says, "The inferiority of the morality of groups to that of individuals is due in part to the difficulty of establishing a rational social force which is powerful enough to cope with the natural impulses by which society achieves its cohesion....," So, Individuals seem to be moral, but when they are a part of a group, religious or political, they become influenced by their own self-interest and desire to see their group maintain dominance - injustice follows. Niebuhr says that reason and religion are not enough to keep a society moral because as groups we become irrational and self-protecting. A group's power must be met with a dissenting group's power in order to keep society more just and moral.

The book is very much worth reading. However, the book that I received was used, with extensive marking in pen throughout.

Niebuhr is a very prominent name among many different historical figures including MLK. Here Niebuhr puts forward his thoughts on why individuals are often good but society is often bad. This book has to be taken during its historical context. It was written during the terrible racial divides in this country and Europe and tries to make some sense of it. The book raises some interesting questions even if I do not agree with many of the things that Niebuhr talks about. The book is fairly easy to read and is not too long. It covers a lot of different topics, but overall it is ok.

I am ashamed to admit, I had never paid attention to writings of Niebuhr. After reading this book, I find myself quoting him regularly. It has provided insight into some fundamental queries I have carried for years regarding Christianity and American’s history.

In this book one finds a rare mind in a rare discussion nowadays. America suffers from an absence of moral language to diagnose some of our social ills. Not an overbearing self righteous moral vocabulary employed by the religious (or secular) zealots but a cool, calm rational voice that takes careful measure of our moral resources, opportunities and limits. This book offers the latter. Masterfully written and articulated - sentence by sentence, argument by argument.