Order and History

Order and History
Author: Eric Voegelin
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2000
Genre: History
ISBN: 0826263909

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Annotation In Search of Order brings to a conclusion Eric Voegelin's masterwork, Order and History. Voegelin conceived Order and History as "a philosophical inquiry concerning the principal types of order of human existence in society and history as well as the corresponding symbolic forms." In previous volumes, Voegelin discussed the imperial organizations of the ancient Near East and their existence in the form of the cosmological myth; the revelatory form of existence in history, developed by Moses and the prophets of the Chosen People; the polis, the Hellenic myth, and the development of philosophy as the symbolism of order; and the evolution of the great religions, especially Christianity. This final volume of Order and History is devoted to the elucidation of the experience of transcendence that Voegelin discussed in earlier volumes. He aspires to show in a theoretically acute manner the exact nature of transcendental experiences. Voegelin's philosophical inquiry unfolds in the historical context of the great symbolic enterprise of restating man's humanity under the horizon of the modern sciences and in resistance to the manifold forces of our age that deform human existence. His stature as one of the major philosophical forces of the twentieth century clearly emerges from these concluding pages. In Search of Order deepens and clarifies the meditative movement that Voegelin, now in reflective distance to his own work, sees as having been operative throughout his search. Because of Voegelin's death, on January 19, 1985, In Search of Order is briefer than it otherwise might have been; however, the theoretical presentation that he had set for himself is essentially completed here. Just as this volume serves Voegelin well in his striking analyses of Hegel, Hesiod, and Plato, it will serve as a model for the reader's own efforts in search of order.

Revolt Against Modernity

Revolt Against Modernity
Author: Ted V. McAllister
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Total Pages: 339
Release: 1996-01-22
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0700608737

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Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss are two of the most provocative and durable political philosophers of this century. Ted McAllister's superbly written study provides the first comprehensive comparison of their thought and its profound influence on contemporary American conservatism. Since the appearance in the 1950s of Strauss's Natural Right and History and Voegelin's Order and History, conservatives like Russell Kirk, Irving Kristol, and Allan Bloom have increasingly turned to these thinkers to support their attacks on liberalism and the modernist mindset. Like so many conservatives, Strauss and Voegelin rebelled against modernity' amorality-personified by Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche-and its promotion of individualism and materialism over communal and spiritual responsibility. While both disdained the reductionist "conservative" label, conservatives nevertheless appropriated their philosophy, in part because it restored theology and classical tradition to the moral core of civil society. For both men, modernity's debilitating disorder revealed surprising and disturbing relations among liberal, communist, and Nazi ideologies. In their eyes, modernity's insidious virus, so apparent in the Nazi and communist regimes, lies incubating within liberal democracy itself. McAllister's thorough reevaluation of Strauss and Voegelin expands our understanding of their thought and restores balance to a literature that has been dominated by political theorists and disciples of Strauss and Voegelin. Neither reverential nor dismissive, he reveals the social, historical, political, and philosophical foundations of their work and effectively decodes their frequently opaque or esoteric thinking. Well written and persuasively argued, McAllister's study will appeal to anyone engaged in the volatile debates over liberalism's demise and conservatism's rise.

Eric Voegelin

Eric Voegelin
Author: Michael P. Federici
Publisher: ISI Books
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2002
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

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"Readers intimidated or puzzled by Voegelin's often daunting prose will find Federici's volume, the fourth entry in ISI's Library of Modern Thinkers series, an invaluable guide to one of the twentieth century's most imposing - and most impressive - philosophical minds."--BOOK JACKET.

The Nature of the Law and Related Legal Writings

The Nature of the Law and Related Legal Writings
Author: Eric Voegelin
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
Total Pages: 154
Release: 1991
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9780807116739

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During the course of his lifelong, wide-ranging reflections on history and philosophy, Eric Voegelin naturally was drawn to speculate on the nature of law. This volume consists of many of Voegelin's significant writings in this area, most notably the previously unpublished The Nature of the Law. Voegelin completed The Nature of the Law in 1957 while he was a member of the political science faculty of Louisiana State University and teaching a course in jurisprudence at the university's law school. In it he undertakes a philosophical analysis of the law to determine its nature, or essence, and comes to the conclusion that the law does not exist as a discrete entity but instead constitutes the structure of a society. The law, as Voegelin's analysis reveals, is not simply the command of a Leviathan handed down to others. Nor is it simply the result of a social compact among autonomous individuals or the expressed will of a majority securing its own self-defined, immediate worldly interest. It is rather a part of the order that a society discovers and specifies for itself in the effort to secure the common good. Thus laws and legal order have an integral relation with the society that declares them, for in declaring laws the society in some sense structures itself. Also included in this volume is Voegelin's detailed outline for the jurisprudence course he taught at LSU from 1954 to 1957. The outline was distributed to Voegelin's students but otherwise has not been published. In this outline Voegelin is concerned more with the criteria for legal order than he is with the nature of law. Voegelin also prepared for his jurisprudence course supplementary notes that are essentially a compact statement of his views on the law, and the editors have included those notes here. Finally, the book contains reviews, written by Voegelin in 1941 and 1942, of four books on legal science and legal philosophy.

Anamnesis

Anamnesis
Author: Eric Voegelin
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
Total Pages: 252
Release: 1990
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780826207371

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Volume 6 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin offers the first translation of the full German text of Anamnesis published in 1966. The previous English edition, translated by Gerhart Niemeyer, focused largely on the sections of Anamnesis dealing directly with Voegelin's philosophy of consciousness. It omitted some of the extensive historical studies on which the philosophy of consciousness was based. To properly understand Voegelin's work, however, it is essential to give equal weight to the empirical as well as the philosophical aspects. This complete version of Anamnesis captures the full integrity of his vision. It is at once scientific, in the sense of fidelity to the demands of historiographic scholarship, and philosophical, in exploring the significance of the texts for the meaning of human existence in society and history. Anamnesis is a pivotal work within Voegelin's intellectual odyssey. Alone among Voegelin's books, it reveals an author looking back and taking stock of his growth rather than customarily forging ahead into new regions and new problems. This critical work is both a recollection of Voegelin's own development, reaching back even to his infant memories, and a demonstration of the anamnetic method as applied to a wide range of historically remembered materials. Written as more than just a collection of essays, Anamnesis is the volume in which Voegelin works out for himself the reconceptualization of what Order and History, and by definition his central philosophical approach, is going to be. By revisiting his previous work--a departure from Voegelin's usual scholarly habits--he found at last the literary form for the kind of empirical philosophical meditation that had long absorbed his labors. Parts I and III contain biographical and meditative reflections written by Voegelin in 1943 and 1965, respectively. The first part details the breakthrough by which Voegelin recovered consciousness from the current theories of consciousness. Part III begins as a rethinking of the Aristotelian exegesis of consciousness, and then expands into new areas of awareness that had not come within the knowledge of classic philosophy. Between these two meditative selections are eight studies that demonstrate how the historical phenomena of order gave rise to the type of analysis which culminates in the meditative exploration of consciousness.

Transcendence and History

Transcendence and History
Author: Glenn Hughes
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2003-05-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0826262767

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Transcendence and History is an analysis of what philosopher Eric Voegelin described as “the decisive problem of philosophy”: the dilemma of the discovery of transcendent meaning and the impact of this discovery on human self-understanding. The world’s major religious and wisdom traditions are built upon the recognition of transcendent meaning, and our own cultural and linguistic heritage has long since absorbed the postcosmological division of reality into the two dimensions of “transcendence” and “immanence.” But the last three centuries in the West have seen a growing resistance to the idea of transcendent meaning; contemporary and “postmodern” interpretations of the human situation—both popular and intellectual—indicate a widespread eclipse of confidence in the truth of transcendence. In Transcendence and History, Glenn Hughes contributes to the understanding of transcendent meaning and the problems associated with it, assisting in the philosophical recovery of the legitimacy of the notion of transcendence. Depending primarily on the treatments of transcendence found in the writings of twentieth-century philosophers Eric Voegelin and Bernard Lonergan, Hughes explores the historical discovery of transcendent meaning and then examines what it indicates about the structure of history. Hughes’s main focus, however, is on clarifying the problem of transcendence in relation to historical existence. Addressing both layreaders and scholars, Hughes applies the insights and analyses of Voegelin and Lonergan to considerable advantage. Transcendence and History will be of particular value to those who have grappled with the notion of transcendence in the study of philosophy, comparative religion, political theory, history, philosophical anthropology, and art or poetry. By examining transcendent meaning as the key factor in the search for ultimate meaning from ancient societies to the present, the book demonstrates how “the decisive problem of philosophy” both illuminates and presents a vital challenge to contemporary intellectual discourse.

On the Form of the American Mind

On the Form of the American Mind
Author: Eric Voegelin
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
Total Pages: 466
Release: 1995
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780807118269

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In 1924, not quite two years after receiving his doctorate from the University of Vienna, Eric Voegelin was named a Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fellow and thus given the opportunity to pursue postdoctoral studies in the United States. For the next twenty-four months, Voegelin worked with some of the most creative scholars in America and at several of the country's great universities, an experience that undoubtedly influenced his scholarly and personal perspectives throughout his life. A more immediate result was the publication in 1928 of On the Form of the American Mind, the young philosopher's first major work, in which his acute perceptions and analyses combine with a conceptual vocabulary struggling to find its own coherence and form. Voegelin begins his inquiry into the form of the American mind with a complex discussion of the concepts of time and existence in European and American philosophy and continues with an extended interpretation of George Santayana, a study of the Puritan mystic Jonathan Edwards, a presentation on Anglo-American jurisprudence, and a consideration of the historian, economist, and political scientist John R. Commons (Voegelin was particularly interested in Commons' views on the mental, political, social, and economic aspects of democracy in modern urban and industrial America). Although admitting that this diversity of themes seems only loosely connected," Voegelin demonstrates the actual overall unity of these various subjects: each concerns linguistic expressions of a theoretical nature. Analysis of On the Form of the American Mind indicates that Voegelin integrated the approaches of Lebensphilosophie into what Georg Misch called the "philosophical combination of anthropology and history," which characterized contemporary trends within the discourse of the Geisteswissenschaften and finally resulted in a theoretical paradigm of philosophical anthropology. Jürgen Gebhardt and Barry Cooper provide access to this brilliant study with their two-part introduction. The first part considers On the Form of the American Mind in the context of methodological debates ongoing in Germany at the time Voegelin was writing the book; the second describes Voegelin's American experience and compares his work with similar studies written during the post-World War I period.