Eric Voegelin

This important new work is a major analysis of the foundation of Eric Voegelin's political science. Barry Cooper maintains that the writings Voegelin undertook in the 1940s provide the groundwork for the brilliant book that is one of his best known, The New Science of Politics. At the time of that book's publication, however, few were aware of the enormous knowledge & accomplished scholarship that lay behind its illuminating, although sometimes baffling, formulations. By focusing on several of the key chapters in Voegelin's eight-volume History of Political Ideas, especially the studies of Bodin, Vico, & Schelling, Cooper shows how those studies provide the basis for Voegelin's thought. Investigating Voegelin's study of oriental influences on Western political "ideas," especially Mongol constitutional law, & his study of Toynbee, Cooper seeks to demonstrate the vast range of materials Voegelin used. Cooper contends that, as with other great thinkers, political crisis, specifically the world war of 1939-1945, stimulated Voegelin's intellectual & spiritual achievement. He provides an analysis of Voegelin's immediate concern with the course of World War II, his ability to understand those dramatic events in a large context, & his ability to provide an insightful account of the causes, the significance, & the consequences of the spiritual & political disorder that was evident all around him. In Eric Voegelin & the Foundations of Modern Political Science, Cooper makes the connection between Voegelin's political writings of the 1940s & the meditative interpretations that began to appear with the publication of Anamnesis & with the later volumes of Order & History much more intelligible than does any existing discussion of Voegelin. Scholars in intellectual history & political science will benefit enormously from this valuable new addition to Voegelin studies.

This book reconstructs and brings together the work of a number of social and political theorists in order to gain new insight on the emergence and character of modern Western society. It examines the intersection point of social theory and historical sociology in a new theoretical approach called "reflexive historical sociology". There is analysis of the works of Max Weber, Michel Foucault, Norbert Elias, Eric Voegelin and a number of others. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 examines the works of Eric Voegelin, Norbert Elias, Lewis Mumford and Franz Borkenau. Part 2 is concerned with the major conceptual tools such as experience, liminality, process, symbolisation, figuration, order, dramatisation and reflexivity, and themes such as the history of forms of thought, subjectivity, knowledge and closed space and regulated time. Finally the most important insights of the thinkers discussed, concerning the historical processes that led to modernity, are examined.

In this important new work, Day brings to light the need for an extensive reinterpretation of the mature philosophy of Eric Voegelin, based on Voegelin's published and unpublished appreciation for 19th-century German philosopher F.W.J. Schelling.