The Structure of Nations and Empires

In this relatively brief but ambitious and wide-ranging study Dr. Niebuhr seeks, through an inquiry into certain perennial patterns and problems of political communities, to enlarge our understanding of the challenges we are encountering in Communism and the nuclear stalemate. As always the author is acutely aware of the "limits of human striving" and the fact that "historically creative positions are taken not from some absolute perspective but under the promptings of very tangential historical causes."