ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the particular elements of Augustine's political thought Niebuhr chose to mobilize through his modern existentialist lenses were decisive for his realism, as well as for the departure from Hobbesianism. It focuses on the particular understanding of selfhood that Niebuhr was targeting when attempting to dissuade modern utopianism from its intellectual naiveté, prone as it was to the sort of political idolatry that Niebuhr critiqued in Wilson and other idealists. Despite the inexorability of self-love for social and political order, Niebuhr did not rest content with the dominant conceptions of collective subjectivity, political community and self-immunity which the Enlightenment had championed. The chapter further discusses Augustine's classical critique of paganism as a starting point for the understanding of Niebuhr's dualistic approach to politics, the structure of which was already implicit in the title of Augustine's most important work: Concerning the City of God against the Pagans.
