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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
Within History of Political Ideas, an eight-volume series within The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, readers will discover a new representation of Eric Voegelin that immediately recalls his personal presence as teacher, tutor, and lecturer. This is not one of the more familiar representations that Voegelin and his works have inspired to date. For a small, devoted but diminishing group of personal friends and former colleagues, Voegelin was unquestionably one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century, a sage and mystic, an uncompromised academic exemplar, and a serious person who embodied the love, intellect and habits for reading, thinking, and writing that are essential to the scholarly life. For a still small but presently growing number of commentators, Voegelin stands as a paragon of the Western tradition of learning and knowing. There are other familiar representations of Voegelin: the antipositivist critic who condemned the shadowy methodologies of American political science long before it became acceptable or fashionable; the European scholar refugee who narrowly escaped the Nazi regime and who, with others, subsequently transformed American intellectual and university life; the ceaseless critic of modern gnosticism; and the marginalized academic who weathered the trials of immigration, uncertain employment, and appointments at second-tier American universities and colleges and still produced a massive body of world-class scholarship that will require several generations to absorb fully. For many if not most others today, Eric Voegelin and his works remain a great enigma: embarrassingly prodigious, thoughtful, and enduring by present standards, and yet by convention conveniently ignored and dismissed as unreadable and unteachable.
1 Review of Politics 2 (1940): 283–317CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This article is remarkable for its genealogy of the race and body idea and the clear demolition of race as a worthy political idea. The bibliography reveals Voegelin knowledge of American nativism which he undoubted acquired from John Commons and others when Voegelin was in America in the 1920s. The long length and peculiar bibliographical format indicate that the article was more an essay/lecture than a tightly argued case. Its erudition makes what was published in political science of the era seem like thin gruel. Voegelin's range and reach are sweeping and forecast the materials found in History of Political Ideas.
2 “In the study of creature one should not exercise a vain and perishing curiosity, but ascend toward what is immortal and everlasting”.
3 See Petropulos, William, “The Person as Imago Dei: Augustine and Max Scheler in Eric Voegelin's Herrschaftslehre and Political Religions” in The Politics of the Soul: Eric Voegelin on Religious Experience, ed. Hughes, Glenn (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999).Google Scholar
4 History of Political Ideas, vol. 1, Appendix A, “Voegelin's Introduction to History of Political Ideas”, p. 225.
5 ibid.
6 History of Political Ideas, vol. 2, Introduction, p. 17.