The Eric Voegelin Reader: Politics, History, Consciousness, Selected and Edited by Charles R. Embry and Glenn Hughes

Abstract

After an abbreviated biography of Voegelin, the essay unfolds the six ‘key elements’ the Reader’s editors focus on. There’s Voegelin’s grounded rejection of positivism in human inquiry, his labor to recover the wisdom of the past, along with a theoretical attempt to articulate a philosophy of the conscious experiences underlying a philosophical anthropology. He explored the equivalent differentiations of this human consciousness in terms of mythic, classic philosophic, and Judeo-Christian formulations. This led him to characterize much of modernity as an attempt to immanentize the transcendent in this world rather than beyond. And underlying all of these elements was his understanding of philosophy as a participation in the eschatological movement of history,’ in conformation ‘to the Platonic-Aristotelian practice of dying.’