SOURCE: "Jacob Burckhardt: Force and Freedom: Reflections on History," in A Reinhold Niebuhr Reader: Selected Essays, Articles, and Book Reviews, edited by Charles C. Brown, Trinity Press International, 1992, pp. 138-40.

Niebuhr, considered one of the most important and influential Protestant theologians in twentieth-century America, is the author of The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (1944) and Christian Realism and Political Problems (1953). In the following excerpt from a review originally published in the Nation in 1943, Niebuhr summarizes Burckhardt's philosophy as an historian and its significance to the modern world.

As a philosopher of history Burckhardt accepted neither the idea of progress which the French Enlightenment had popularized nor yet the cyclical interpretation of history which German romanticism had borrowed from classicism and which is best known to us in the thought of that late romantic, Oswald Spengler. On the whole he belonged in the tradition of Ranke...