Out of the Crooked Wood: How Eric Voegelin Read Immanuel Kant
To start with the premise that the philosopher is entirely free–the governing assumption of . . . all analytic philosophy–might only end with the assertion that what…
Political Corruption
In the present context we have to concentrate on the existential enmity between Callicles and Socrates-Plato and on the critical analysis of political corruption. Above all, Socrates…
Voegelin and the Troubled Greatness of Hegel
It would challenge credulity to claim that, contrary to appearances, Voegelin's relationship with G.W.F. Hegel is positive. The tone Voegelin adopts toward modern thinkers in general, and…
Socrates Confronts the Smug Insider
[There is more] to the resistance of Callicles than the fear of a Socratic popular success. The situation of the dialogue is not that of an assembly…
Proust and the Truth of the Novel
Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature. Life in this sense dwells within all ordinary people…
The Paradoxes of Participatory Reality
Although neither Eric Voegelin nor Jacques Derrida had ever written about each other's works, both thinkers were engaged in the same project of creating and sustaining an…
Nature of Pathos
The violent reaction comes from the activist, from Callicles, the enlightened politician. He has followed the course of the debate with increasing astonishment and wrath and now…
Eric Voegelin and Continental Philosophy: Diagnosing Modernity
Eric Voegelin and the Continental Tradition: Explorations in Modern Political Thought. Lee Trepanier and Steven F. McGuire, eds. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2011. I…
Bound by the Errors of Our Time?
This excerpt is from a conversation between Eric Voegelin and graduate students following a lecture at St. Thomas More Institute in Montreal. The participants are Richard Jacobsen,…
The First Mystics? Some Recent Accounts of Neolithic Shamanism (Part I)
Remember that it is not you who sustain the root; the root sustains you. -Roman 11:18 Voegelin, Mysticism, and the Stone Age Before discussing the evidence…
The Life of Eric Voegelin: An Entertainment for the Soul
Voegelin Recollected: Conversations on a Life. Barry Cooper and Jodi Bruhn, eds. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2008. Conversations is a telling account of the…
Eric Voegelin and the Problem of Christian Political Order
Eric Voegelin and the Problem of Christian Political Order. Jeffrey C. Herndon. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2007. Jeffrey Herndon notes in his introduction to…
Hans Blumenberg: The Legitimacy of the Modern Age
To ask the question concerning "legitimacy of the modern age" represents an act characteristic of post-modernity, i.e. of a modernity which is suspicious of its own foundations.…
Doctrine, Deculturation, and Renewal
This excerpt is from a conversation between Eric Voegelin and graduate students following a lecture at St. Thomas More Institute in Montreal. His interlocutor was Father Eric…
Voegelin and His Contemporaries
It would take a very fat volume or two to do justice to the subject of Voegelin and his contemporaries. I would like to begin by indicating…