ABSTRACT
This chapter starts by recasting Niebuhr's affinity with Nietzsche and with what the German philosopher described as the 'will-to-power' which Niebuhr employs in his study of the relation between power struggles and normative in international politics. It then discusses the key implications of Niebuhr's reformulation of the fear of death in terms of anxiety, which is the cornerstone of his contribution to the realist tradition, and which is indebted almost in full to the father of existentialism: Soren Kierkegaard. The chapter concludes that the combination of Kierkegaardian and Nietzchean legacies in Niebuhr's writings constitute the threshold of his account of human nature which in turn grounds his IR theory. Niebuhr's existentialist and realist focus on the theme of Love as both determining and transcending human reason hence represented a move away from Augustine's neoplatonic praise of the mind.
