ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the problematic of the world community embodies all the challenges, paradoxes and anxieties of Niebuhr's own intellectual trajectory, and also reveals a hidden dimension of the realist tradition which contemporary realists have overlooked and which has to do with the role that utopia plays in his political thought as well as in the realist tradition as a whole. By looking at Niebuhr's understanding of the world community in all its implications, ontological and epistemological, ethical and political the chapter revisits the key aspects of the book, adding to them Niebuhr's formulation of the problematic of the world community, a theme which Augustine had championed and which would, after Niebuhr, be reshaped, transformed and redeveloped by E. H. Carr, one of his most acclaimed followers within the field. Niebuhr's overlap between political ontology and Christian ethics becomes clearer when read in parallel with Kierkegaard's philosophical system.
