Realist Strategies of Republican Peace - Niebuhr, Morgenthau, and the Politics of Patriotic Dissent

This book's central claim is that although Niebuhr and Morgenthau were critics of what they referred to as utopian thought, the core of their criticism constituted an attack on the inability of utopianism to produce politically stimulating and democratically mobilizing utopias. In their minds utopianism was rhetorically barren and imaginatively sterile as a political narrative, the inability of which to move and dedicate its citizenry ultimately led to conformity and homogeneity. Arguing that the same sterility is present in current visions of democracy-traditional as well as radical-the book seeks to render Niebuhr and Morgenthau's attempt at re-opening the democratic imagination relevant for contemporary purposes as well.