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25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Masterful Synthesis, September 21, 2002
This review is from: The New Science of Politics (Walgreen Foundation Lectures) (Paperback)
Eric Voegelin, who died in 1985, is one of the giants of intellectual history and political philosophy. Unfortunately, he is far less well-recognized outside of a small scholarly community than some of the poseurs who foist quack theories on the public under the guise of "political philosophy." The New Science of Politics, based on Voegelin's Walgreen Lectures, can be read as a theoretical companion to his magisterial Order and History, a five-volume elaboration of the theories presented here. Voegelin provides an examination of political community and its representations through symbolic appropriation and the underlying basis of political order throughout history. Equally, Voegelin deals with misappropriation of symbols in the form of Gnosticism, which emerged at the dawn of the middle ages. His diagnostic exercise leads to an examination of modernity, which is characterized by advance and decline, the nature of of our own times. Modernist movements such as Nazism and Communism embody gnostic misappropriation of the symbolization of order. Writing in the immediate postwar period as an Austrian refugee from Hitler, with a command of ancient and modern philosophy and history and access to documentation in a dozen languages, Voegelin both lays the foundation for a return to the Aristotelean tradition of political philosophy and analysis and provides the personal witness of a research physician who has examined the patient at close hand. There is no better short book in our times for accomplishing Dr. Johnson's admonition to clear your mind of cant, or providing a sound basis for recognizing the corruption of intellectual and personal standards in current politics and scholarship, or the infection of scholarship by extremist politics. Voegelin has a number of brilliant students carrying on his work. However, unlike acolytes of Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom and their neo-conservative entourage, who represent a very different and self-referential strain in modern political analysis, Voegelin's students have not populated the high offices of government. Given the power of Voegelin's model presented in The New Science of Politics, I expect and hope that his long-term influence will weigh decisively in the war on modernity and its pernicious supporting social science-based infrastructure. To understand the contours of the problem, The New Science of Politics is an indispensible guide and a model of elegant anlysis and writing.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Great Intro to Voegelin, April 27, 2007
This review is from: The New Science of Politics (Walgreen Foundation Lectures) (Paperback)
This was the first of Voegelin's works that I ever read, and I think it is a great intro to his thought. First of all, "The New Science of Politics" is one of his more important works. His construction of modern gnosticism within this piece is a very significant challenge to the foundation values that are the hallmark of modernity.
If this is the first of Voegelin's works that you will be reading, and if you're anything like me, this will be a very hard book to get through. The writing is very hard, and that is compounded by the fact that the concepts being discussed are so profound. If you get a vague idea of what Voegelin is trying to say after reading this book then you are doing just fine. I read this book first, and then read Modernity Without Restraint: The Political Religions, The New Science of Politics, and Science, Politics, and Gnosticism (Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 5), which includes this book along with two others related to modern gnosticism. I learned a lot more and understood Voegelin a lot more clearly the second time I read this work; so if you find yourself confused, keep on going and you'll get there...
A couple other of Voegelin's collected works that deal with the topic of modern gnosticism are: Published Essays: 1940-1952 (Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 10); Published Essays: 1953-1965 (The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 11); and Published Essays: 1966-1985 (The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 12). The last of those three deals with modern gnosticism the least, so start with the first two if you're looking for addition material.
Voegelin is a great thinker and his work is very challenging. Yet I think his ideas contain profound truths that moderns like us would do well to consider. Five stars for a classic piece of conservative political philosophy.
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18 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not perfect, but still brilliant, September 10, 2001
This review is from: The New Science of Politics (Walgreen Foundation Lectures) (Paperback)
"The New Science of Politics" is the best short work in the oeurve of the great philosopher and political scientist Eric Voegelin. In it he describes, among other things, an effective methodology for studying the political experiences of peoples; the philosophical errors at the roots of scientism and positive social sciences, which seek to apply an irrelevant mathematical method to human behavior, which can only be comprehended on it's own terms; the existential underpinnings of virutally every revolutionary ideology the West has ever known in a spiritual revolt against the nature of human existence; and the dynamics of the kinds of political movements that arise from such experiences. This is nothing less that an attempt to ground human political life in an existential philosophy and to contruct from that understanding a method for rigourously and accurately studying those patterns of life. Voegelin's book is a milestone in human thought and a light in the abyssal darkness of Modernity. Still, it is not without it's flaws. Voegelin persistently and completely misread Nietzsche, taking him to be an enemy of reality, when in fact Nietzsche rejected so mush of the Western tradition because he found in it a nihilist hatred for reality and existence that Voegelin also opposes. Likewise, Voegelin seems to take Christianity as either a sui generis phenomenon or a development out of Greek philosophy, when in fact it is neither. Christianity is the product of an evolution within the boundaries (and thus the experiences) of ancient Judaism. In order to understand Christianity as itself, it must be taken for the organic outgrowth from that background that it was. Voegelin thus persistently misunderstands the essence of Christianity, which he seems to confuse with semi-Platonic Augustinianism. Finally, Voegelin never seeks to analyze the metaphysical truthfulness of the existential experiences that he finds undergirding political life. He just takes it for granted that the quasi-Platonic cosmology that he adheres to is the true order of reality. This leaves him open to metaphysical criticism. Nonetheless, this is a brilliant introduction to Voegelin's work and to the demented nature of modern ideology and it's roots in spiritual revolt.
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