Abstract

The Dissertation title presages the tripartite emphasis of the study. First of all, the project entails a new look at Reinhold Niebuhr's political writings from the post 1989--91 vantage point. That there is ever anything written that has a further application beyond its immediate surroundings depends on how plausibly a writer/thinker can be reinterpreted in a differing context. This hold for Niebuhr as well. Taking into consideration the aforementioned principle of extrapolation, Niebuhr's oeuvre is long overdue for some serious rethinking. Far too many---for whatever reason---caricature him as Cold Warrior par excellence while choosing to ignore his Depression era statism or for that matter the late, albeit nascent, libertarian strand in his intellectual development. Be this as it may, the task at hand will be to consider Niebuhr from the standpoint of post cold war American and multinational hegemony; a Weltanschauung which undoubtedly bids us to revisit his earlier writings in earnest. Militating against the aforementioned amalgamationist euphoria within the culture at-large, the so-called 'end-of-history,' is a cautionary strand running throughout the Niebuhrian corpus, i.e., the impassability of group dynamics. This emphasis provides his work with a cohesiveness that would otherwise be lacking. Further relevance for our purposes has to do with certain contemporaneous ideological visions. Whether it be the new Right which seems intent on forcibly imposing an unequivocal moral standard on all or the new liberalism which would albeit in a different sense also 'force us to be free,' Niebuhr provides a much needed antidote. The incessant drive towards eviscerating group differences is still alive and well---all the more reason to revisit Niebuhr. The irony here, though, is that even those who might be sympathetic to Niebuhr's contribution to the discussion almost invariably miss the positive upshot of his thinking vis-a-vis groups. An attempt will be made to sort this out as well