Abstract
The great theme that occupied Gerhart Niemeyer’s reflection over the whole of his career was political order. It was the subject of his early work in the theory of international law that culminated in Law Without Force and it was the subject of his later theoretical reflection on the nature of political ideologies and the "total critique of society"" that culminated in Between Nothingness and Paradise. Indeed, one can see those two works as the two peaks of his thought, around which are ordered his numerous articles and essays, as well as his more practical books on communist political thought and practice. The great question that moved him concerned the source of political order and the possibilities and strategies for its recovery in the time of troubles that was the twentieth century.
