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This analysis of Voegelin s legal and political writings during the 1920s and 1930s opens with Voegelin s efforts, following the trauma of defeat in World War I, at understanding the relation of law and the study of law (Staatslehre) to what he then called sociohistorical reality. Cooper examines Voegelin s The Authoritarian State (1936), which argues that Austria was more an administrative unit than a body politic. As a final point, Cooper deals with the concept of political religions that Voegelin developed in the 1938 book of that name. The crisis resulting in World War II led Voegelin to develop ever-more-comprehensive accounts of the disorder and political convulsions of the day. The quest of the title of this study continued until Voegelin s death. ... Read more

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Consciousness is at once the most obvious and mysterious feature of the human mind. Kenneth Keulman seeks a better understanding of its many dimensions through interpretations of the ideas of the twentieth-century philosopher Eric Voegelin, who viewed the complexity of modern consciousness as the result of a distinctive form of evolution combining genetic change with cultural history.Voegelin's unique contribution to political theory, Keulman shows, comes from his development of an approach to history rooted in a study of the symbolisms of the history of order. It is because the problems of order in society arise from the order of consciousness that the theory of consciousness can be placed at the center of political theory.Keulman's interpretation encompasses not only Voegelin's published writings but also a substantial body of unpublished material to which Voegelin gave him access before his death in 1985, including portions of what was to become Volume V of Order and History. ... Read more

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A search by ten authors for Voegelin's theological identity. It includes a general introduction with a review of the critical literature on Voegelin's work and nine essays that deal with various aspects of his thought. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from The Review of Metaphysics, published by Philosophy Education Society, Inc. on March 1, 1997. The length of the article is 641 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Revolt Against Modernity: Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and the Search for a Postliberal Order.
Author: Scott P. Richert
Publication: The Review of Metaphysics (Refereed)
Date: March 1, 1997
Publisher: Philosophy Education Society, Inc.
Volume: v50Issue: n3Page: p675(2)

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

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Camus called the transition from Hellenism to Christianitythe true and only turning point in history.For Camus, modernity was not fully comprehensible without an examination of the aspirations that were first articulated in antiquity and that later received their clearest expression in Christianity. These aspirations amounted to a fundamental reorientation of human life in politics, religion, science, and philosophy. This work marks his first attempt to understand the relationship between Greek philosophy and Christianity as he charted the movement from the Gospels through Gnosticism and Plotinus to what he calls Augustine ssecond revelationof the Christian faith. Srigley s translation retains a great degree of literalness, and his annotations include nearly all of Camusoriginal citations. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

THE REDIRECTION OF AN INFLUENTIAL (BUT UNFINISHED) PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) is one of the most well-known of modern political philosophers and theorists, but his massive five-volume series "Order and History," as well as the posthumously published eight-volume History of Political Ideas (Volume 8): Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man (Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 26), put forward a coherent and somewhat influential philosophy of history. In the Preface to Volume II, Voegelin says, "Order and History is a philosophical inquiry concerning the principal types of order of human existence in society and history as well as the corresponding symbolic forms."

This volume (published in 1974, after a 17-year gap from volume III) represents a complete reordering of Voegelin's project.In the "Introduction," Voegelin explains, "The present volume ... breaks with the program I have developed for `Order and History' in the Preface to Volume I of the series.I shall, therefore, recall the program and indicate both the nature and the cause of the break... History was conceived as a process of increasingly differentiated insight into the order of being in which man participates by his existence.Such order as can be discerned in the process, including digressions and regressions from the increasing differentiation, would emerge, if the principal types of man's existence in society, as well as the corresponding symbolisms of order, were presented in their historical succession... The study could not be brought to the projected conclusion.As the work on the second sequence of volumes progressed, the structures that emerged from the historical orders and their symbolization proved more complicated than I had anticipated.They were so refractory indeed that the projected volumes could not accommodate the results of analysis as they accumulated...What ultimately broke the project, however, was the impossibility of aligning the empirical types in any time sequence at all that would permit the structures actually found to emerge from a history conceived as a `course.' ... Still, the conception was untenable because it had not taken proper account of the important lines of meaning in history that did not run along lines of time."

He concludes that "The present volume ... presents the genesis of the ecumenic problem and its complications.The next and last volume ... will study the contemporary problems which have motivated the search for order in history."

Here are some representative quotations from the fourth volume:

"The question is rather what causes Gnosticism to appear, and to become influential, precisely at the time when the consciousness of a pneumatic Beyond becomes intensely luminous in the various movements radiating from the epiphany of Christ, as well as in such manifestations of a pagan Gnosis as the Poimandres."
"I am inclined to recognize in the epiphany of Christ the great catalyst that made eschatological consciousness an historical force, both in forming and deforming humanity."
"Gnosticism, whether ancient or modern, is a dead end."
"The relation between the concupiscential and the spiritual exodus is the great issue of the Ecumenic Age."
"There are indeed two ecumenic ages, a Western and a Far Eastern, both unfolding parallel in time.From the fact the ecumenic ages occur in the plural, there arises the question whether there are two mankinds, each having a history of its own and each developing an Ecumenic Age."
"the Ecumenic Age is the time in which the symbolisms of the `eras' and `periods' were created.When history comes into view as universally human, it is discovered to be characterized by epochal advances of insight into its structure."
"History, it appears, has a long breath."

(Read my reviews of Voegelin's other volumes.) ... Read more

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This book offers a radical reconsideration of the origins, nature, and role of rights in public life, interweaving perspectives of leading scholars in history, political science, philosophy, and law. An initial group of essays retraces the origins and historical development of rights in the West, assessing the influence of such thinkers as Locke, Burke, and the authors of the Declaration of Independence. A second group addresses the need to rethink our understanding of the nature of existence if we are to understand rights and their place in any decent life, examining the ontological basis of rights, the influence of custom on rights, the social nature of the human person, and the importance of institutional rights. ... Read more