Eric Voegelin Today

Commentary on the work of Eric Voegelin has grown enormously since his death in 1985. This excellent collection of essays and analyses of Voegelin’s work published during the late 1950s and early 1960s adds greatly to our understanding of the development of his thought during this period and of its applicability to currently political realities. That it was written chiefly by younger scholars is further evidence of the enduring appeal of Voegelin’s political science. -- Barry Cooper, University of Calgary
Between 1940 and 1960 while he was working out his general theory of politics and history, Eric Voegelin also wrote a series of essays with a more pragmatic focus on democratization, empire, the “good society,” industrialization, science, and the possibility of moral communication in mass society. During this time he also moved to Munich in an effort to render socially effective the life of noetic reason in post-war Germany. Thus these essays are also examples of scholarly statecraft. The contributors to this volume follow his cues by considering those mid-career essays and reflecting pragmatically on contemporary political problems, including the current state of liberalism and progressivism, transhumanism, radical Islamism, and the state of the American polity. They admirably follow in Voegelin’s footsteps in bringing about “clarity of awareness” for scholar and citizen alike. -- John von Heyking, Professor of Political Science, University of Lethbridge
The essays in this volume furnish a superb account of Voegelin’s mature interventions as a public intellectual. His return to Germany resulted in more invitations to speak on matters of broad public interest and his concern with the ideological cleavages of the day provoked him to offer the fruits of his historical meditation in a more contemporary setting. The contributors to this collection have rightly grasped the continuing relevance of Voegelin’s thought in the increasingly ideological climate of our own time. Eric Voegelin for Today is both a work of philosophic retrieval and a work of civic remediation that is sorely needed. -- David Walsh, Catholic University of America