Political Theory

Glenn Hughes has edited a collection of ten essays dedicated to the thought of Eric Voegelin (1901–1985) on religion. His introductory essay claims that Voegelin’s work went beyond the confines of political science or even political philosophy to create ‘a philosophy of history on a grand scale’ in which the pivotal event was the self-conscious recognition in ancient Greece, specifically in the works of Plato, of existence as a ‘process of human-divine interaction’. Thereafter the volume is divided into three parts. The first deals with ‘Religious Experience and the Human Condition’, the second discusses ‘The Priority of Meditation’ as a transcendental means of access to the philosophical appreciation of Voegelin’s view of existence, and the third ‘Spiritual Sources of Order and Disorder’, for Voegelin, like all speculative philosophers of history, was in the end concerned with the past for the sake of the present. Like his mid-century contemporaries Heidegger and Strauss, Voegelin believed that modernity was experiencing a crisis both caused and exacerbated by the loss of the fruits of classical knowledge and experience. The contributors offer sophisticated exposition of Voegelin’s ameliorative project of a revived Platonic-Aristotelean science fused with Christian revelation, without seriously challenging any of his ideas.