Eric Voegelin (January 2, 1901 – January 19, 1985) was born in Germany and lived there until he fled to the United States with his wife during the Nazi invasion. He spent much of his career at Louisiana State University, the University of Munich, and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He wrote many books including Science, Politics, and Gnosticism (1968), The Science of New Politics (1952) and his great 5 volume work entitled Order and History.

The Whole Story: Eric Voegelin on the Song of Hesiod

By |2019-10-03T15:11:55-05:00November 25th, 2015|Categories: Christopher Morrissey, Eric Voegelin, History, Poetry, Science|

According to the philosopher Eric Voegelin, there are no more than four fundamental modes of theoretical speculation. Voegelin identifies these four fundamental modes as: cosmogony, anthropogony, theogony, and historiogenesis. These modes speak, respectively, of the genesis of the universe, the genesis of human beings, the genesis of the divine, and the genesis of society. Unsurprisingly, [...]

Eric Voegelin, Leo Strauss, and American Conservatism

By |2018-07-10T00:41:05-05:00April 11th, 2015|Categories: Conservatism, Eric Voegelin, Featured, Leo Strauss|

Eric Voegelin For more than fifty years, American conservatives have treated Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss as fellow travellers. But for various reasons, that relationship and its contemporary legacy has been fraught with problems. What, then, are the points of continuity and discontinuity between the American conservative movement and these two political philosophers? [...]

The Philosophy of War and Peace

By |2019-08-13T17:50:51-05:00January 29th, 2015|Categories: Books, Christianity, Eric Voegelin, Featured, Robert Cheeks|

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. William Butler Yeats, Second Coming Jenny Teichman, a Cambridge philosophy professor, in her new book, The Philosophy of War and Peace, takes upon herself the challenging task of providing her readership with a concise and abbreviated disquisition on the philosophical foundation of war and peace. The success of the [...]

Voegelin: Modernity and Gnosticism

By |2014-01-10T19:15:39-06:00October 14th, 2013|Categories: Eric Voegelin, Modernity|Tags: , |

Photo by Felipe Vanancio Eric Voegelin (1901-85) is often portrayed as one of the severest critics of modernity–its belief in human reason’s ability to understand and convey the fundamental structures of reality and its dismissal of transcendent teleologies as private and suspect beliefs. For Voegelin, modernity was a “Gnostic revolt” against reality: the [...]

A Meditation on Malick’s Tree of Life & Voegelin’s Philosophy of Consciousness

By |2014-04-13T10:45:55-05:00May 28th, 2013|Categories: Eric Voegelin, Film|Tags: , |

Terrence Malick’s film, The Tree of Life (2011), is a significant cultural achievement, not only cinematically but also philosophically. Back in 1969, the philosophically inclined Malick produced a bilingual edition of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s The Essence of Reasons, supplying the English translation. With The Tree of Life, the meditative practices visible in his previous films–Badlands (1973), Days of [...]

Eric Voegelin’s Philosophy & the Drama of Mankind

By |2016-06-14T09:09:05-05:00April 16th, 2013|Categories: Christianity, Eric Voegelin, Gerhart Niemeyer, Philosophy|Tags: |

Eric Voegelin Nearly two decades ago there appeared the first three volumes of Eric Voegelin’s exemplary quest for a theoretically intelligible order of history (Vol. I, Israel and Revelation; Vol. II, The World of the Polis; Vol. III, Plato and Aristotle). The plan projected three more volumes: Empire and Christianity, The Protestant Centuries, and The Crisis [...]

Eric Voegelin on the Death of Plato

By |2020-08-12T16:26:09-05:00March 31st, 2013|Categories: Books, Christianity, Classics, Eric Voegelin, Fr. James Schall, Plato, Socrates|

Eric Voegelin was charmed by the death of Plato. Philosophy, Voegelin thought, had fled to the Academy—Plato’s Academy not ours—wherein poetry and the pleasure of music are received back no longer tainted by the polis using them for its own purposes. “But there is another sort of old age too: the tranquil and serene evening [...]

The Restoration of Tradition

By |2019-06-27T11:40:10-05:00March 1st, 2013|Categories: Eric Voegelin, History, Tradition|Tags: |

A guide to the paths that remain open when “tradition falls out of existence.”  The position this paper will attempt to illustrate, if not demonstrate, is that once lost or weakened the tradition of a society can be restored only by a creative and even radical reconstruction of the tradition itself. The problem to which [...]

Teaching in an Age of Ideology: Gerhart Niemeyer

By |2019-02-19T16:19:51-06:00February 13th, 2013|Categories: Christianity, Education, Eric Voegelin, Gerhart Niemeyer, Liberal Learning|Tags: |

Gerhart Niemeyer In my previous essays about teaching in an age of ideology, I had looked at two teachers–Eric Voegelin and Ellis Sandoz–who sought to clear the ideological rubble in the modern academia so students could study the true, the beautiful, and the good. In his accessible lectures about complicated philosophical topics, Eric [...]

Teaching in an Age of Ideology: Eric Voegelin

By |2019-11-07T12:08:44-06:00January 6th, 2013|Categories: Education, Eric Voegelin, Ideology|Tags: |

In my last post about teaching in an age of ideology, I proposed that one needs to illuminate to students about how to live according to the true, the beautiful, and the good. Now what exactly constitutes these goods has elicited an array of different responses from some of the most prominent thinkers as teachers in this [...]

The Death of the Spirit is the Price of Progress

By |2016-11-26T09:52:17-06:00March 17th, 2012|Categories: Eric Voegelin, Quotation|Tags: |

The death of the spirit is the price of progress. Nietzsche revealed this mystery of the Western apocalypse when he announced that God was dead and that He had been murdered. This Gnostic murder is constantly committed by the men who sacrificed God to civilization. The more fervently all human energies are thrown into the [...]

Know Your Gnostics: Eric Voegelin diagnosed the Neoconservatives’ disease

By |2013-12-30T16:10:02-06:00March 10th, 2012|Categories: Eric Voegelin, Politics|Tags: |

Eric Voegelin Eric Voegelin often is regarded as a major figure in 20th-century conservative thought—one of his concepts inspired what has been a popular catchphrase on the right for decades, “don’t immanentize the eschaton”—but he rejected ideological labels. In his youth, in Vienna, he attended the famous Mises Circle seminars, where he developed [...]

Eric Voegelin: Prophet to the Modern Academy

By |2017-06-28T21:45:20-05:00February 20th, 2012|Categories: Eric Voegelin, Liberal Learning, Robert M. Woods|

Eric Voegelin Eric Voegelin (1901–1985) penned an essay entitled On Classical Studies (1973)–an essay that was shaped by the Classical west and the Christian faith and is philosophically opposed to the distortions of Enlightenment rationalism. Reading Voegelin is akin to reading Amos or Joel. But instead of ancient Israel, it is the modern [...]

On Classical Studies: Eric Voegelin

By |2015-04-29T07:52:18-05:00February 10th, 2012|Categories: Classical Education, Classics, Eric Voegelin, Liberal Learning|Tags: |

Eric Voegelin A reflection on classical studies, their purpose and prospects, will properly start from Wolf’s definition of classic philology as the study of man’s nature as it has become manifest in the Greeks.[1] The conception sounds strangely anachronistic today, because it has been overtaken by the two closely related processes of the [...]

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