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THE GROWTH OF THE LIBERAL SOUL
by David Walsh
Chapter One: The Crisis of Liberal Politics
Part 4
David Walsh is professor of politics at Catholic University of America. He is the author or editor of many books; he is editor of three volumes of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. His Guarded by Mystery has been serialized here at VoegelinView in its entirety. His most recent book is The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. The Growth of the Liberal Soul is available from the University of Missouri Press and appears here with permission. "Crisis of Liberal Politics" appears here in five parts.
Tumbling Liberal Defense
An awareness of the depth of the critique ranged against liberal theory is what has inspired its late flowering in our own time. Viewed in a wider historical perspective, it is astonishing to see the revival of concepts and modes of thought that received opinion had long declaimed as outré. Even ideas that in liberal circles had not had much play since the eighteenth century, such as the social contract, began to assume a new prominence. A rediscovered pride in the liberal understanding of individual rights, especially by contrast with the dismal record of individual protection within any more expansive construction of rights, led to a new appreciation of the centrality of liberal political order. Protections for the individual and, limitations on the power of government became the currency of political discussion. Even liberal political economy, so long disdained as laissez faire, acquired new respect and influence. The political counterpart is found in the universal embrace of liberal democracy as the only legitimate political model around the globe.
Yet there has been something enormously brittle about this liberal rejuvenation, a brittleness that ultimately is the source of the sense of crisis that has reached into public consciousness.
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from The Northern Lights
The Geneology of Salafism
Part 1
by Barry Cooper
Professor Cooper is the author of numerous books and essays in political science. He is the editor of several volumes of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. This essay appears as Chapter 3 in New Political Religions, or An Analysis of Modern Terrorism, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, 2004. This is published with permission of the publisher and will appear in five parts.
There are major differences between the way that the political implications of Islam have been worked out historically and the political order of liberal, constitutional democracy. It is as important not to ignore those differences as it is to begin from the self-evident consideration that, although Islam broadly considered does not provide a threat to Western liberal democracy, militant jihadist Islam, what we have been calling Islamism, most certainly does. That, quite simply, was the meaning, the significance, and the message of September 11, 2001.9
Let us begin to consider this problem with the commonsense observation of Max Weber: "Neither religions nor men are open books. They have been historical rather than logical or even psychological constructions without contradiction. Often they have borne within themselves a series of motives, each of which, if separately and consistently followed through, would have stood in the way of the others or run against them head-on. In religious matters consistency has been the exception and not the rule."10 With respect to Islam, understood in as wide a sense as possible, we should not expect consistency between the pious traditional Muslim who seeks in his or her religion only to learn how to live in accord with God's will, and the fanatic who is clear that he knows God's will and that God's will demands that he attack the Great Satan by flying airplanes into buildings or by other murderous deeds.
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from The Collected Works

The Pauline Vision of the Resurrected — Part 2
§3. Death and Transfiguration
Such assurance met with skepticism among the recipients of the message, and Paul felt compelled to answer pertinent questions concerning the source of his assurance. In I Corinthians 15:12-19, he established the connection between his prediction (kerygma) of resurrection and his vision of the Resurrected. "If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; if Christ has not been raised, then your faith is vain (mataia)" (16-17). "If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is empty (kenon) and your faith is empty" (14). The argument closes with the revealing sentence: "If we have no more than hope in Christ in this life, then we are of all men the most pitiful" (19). This sentence is the key to the understanding of Paul's experience of reality—or so at least it appears to me. Hope in this life, in our existence in the Metaxy, not only is not enough, it is worse than nothing, unless this hope is embedded in the assurance that derives from the vision.
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The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Skepticism - Part 2
by Elizabeth Campbell Corey
Elizabeth Campbell Corey is Assistant Professor of Politics in the Honors Program at Baylor University. More information is available at her department website. She is the author of Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics, 2006, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, from which the following excerpts are taken. This appears with permission and is the second of two parts.
The Politics of Individuality
In a series of lectures Oakeshott gave at Harvard in 1958, now published as Morality and Politics in Modern Europe, he casts the faith/skepticism distinction in the terms of collectivism versus individuality, even going so far as to call these categories (as he does faith and skepticism) "the poles of the modern European political character." Collectivism postulates a common good that is chosen by government for the individuals who compose a society. This good is "preferred above all other possible conditions of human circumstance" and is believed "to be at least the emblem of a 'perfect' manner of human existence."22 In other words, it is the politics of faith.
The politics of individuality, on the other hand, springs from an entirely different conception of the role of government. Indeed, it has no "vision of another, different and better, world," but takes its bearings from observation of "the self-government practiced . . . by men of passion in the conduct of their enterprises." It calls not for great concentrations of power, but for an authoritative "ritual" that can minimize the chances for great collisions between individuals. The government is thus merely "custodian" of this ritual, called "law." Government's functions, on this reading, are to minimize circumstances in which violent collisions of interest are likely to occur. It provides redress for those who have been wronged, maintains sufficient power to carry out its functions, and protects itself and its subjects from foreign threat.23 But unlike collectivism, the government of individuality is not in the business of generating grand visions that would guide an entire people.
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