Voegelin’s fame stemmed mostly from his many books and the laudatory review articles published in response to them, but he was “preeminently an essayist,” as Sandoz observes.
Voegelin’s thought continued to develop at a rapid pace during the last two decades of his life, and as Ellis Sandoz has written, his work found “not only its final but its most profound expression” during this period. What will impress scholars most about this collection is the provocative dialogue created between Voegelin and other major thinkers of postmodernism that addresses the issue of establishing foundations without foundationalism.Įric Voegelin (1901–1985) is widely regarded as one of the greatest political philosophers of the 20th century, yet adequate understanding of his writings stands as a challenge for current and future generations. Each essay rests on the underlying question: is it possible or desirable to construct or discover political foundations without resorting to metaphysical or essentialist constructs? The introduction focuses on the two nineteenth-century thinkers, Nietzsche and Husserl, who have framed the debate about modernity and postmodernity thereafter, the book examines Voegelin's ideas as compared to those of other twentieth-century thinkers.ĭiscussed within the volume are Levinas and the precedence of ethics, Ricoeur's theory of narrative representation, Deleuze and the philosophy of immanence, Voegelin's relationship to a speech- dimension theory of human behavior, and Patocka's theory of pre- metaphysical transcendence in Socrates.
This collection of essays endeavors to generate a dialogue between Eric Voegelin and other prominent twentieth-century thinkers and explore some of the more perplexing issues in contemporary political theory.
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