Tag Archives: Modernity

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Political theorists, like literary and social theorists, occupy a kind of twilight zone in relation to philosophy. Their disciplines are at once empirical and philosophical, an indeterminate status compared to the strictly autonomous unfolding of philosophy. Yet it is by virtue of this difference of perspective that they may have something to contribute to philosophy. The problem, however, is that…

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 belief that human beings can transform the nature of reality through…

The Theological Origins of Modernity. Michael Allen Gillespie. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
 
Seeking to clarify what we mean by “modernity,” Michael Gillespie provides an intellectual history of the subject by reaching back to the late Middle Ages. Contrary to the accounts that present modernity as a radical break with the past based on reason, Gillespie provides a perspective that…

In view of an unfolding global modernity, Voegelin  proposed “the empirical thesis that the philosophical investigation of the realm of phenomena has always drawn  its dynamism  from contemporary conflict situations. If today's horizon of the phenomena in question is truly global, it is because the entire globe has become  a contemporary field of tensions.” As a result, philosophical investigation must…

Part 2: Rebooting the Leviathan
In the first part of this essay we looked at the phenomenon of the “alt right”. In this second piece we turn to discussions of neo-reactionary philosophy. A common story goes that the intellectual flagship, the act of legitimation for reanimating reaction as a culture, began at the end of last decade with a rather peculiar…

The Crisis of Modernity. Augusto Del Noce with Carlo Lancellotti, ed. and trans. Montreal-Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2014.
 
An important book has been published. Let us use the occasion of this short review to justify this importance and to explain why the book deserves to be widely read by philosophers and political and social theorists – and by anyone trying to…

In 1968, Eric Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics was published in Italian by Borla, translated by Renato Pavetto, and with an introduction authored by Catholic philosopher Augusto Del Noce (1910-1989) titled "Eric Voegelin e la critica dell’idea di modernità" ["Eric Voegelin and the Critique of the Idea of Modernity"].[1] The aim of The New Science of Politics, Del Noce…

The Modern Age. James V. Schall, S.J. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2011.
 
Most readers will need little introduction to James V. Schall, S.J. Father Schall is Professor of Government at Georgetown University where, for the last 35 years, he has become one of the most prominent Catholic political theorists in the United States. The author of more than thirty…