A German émigré, Eric Voegelin was an influential philosophical historian and political theorist in the twentieth century. He taught for an extended period of time at both Louisiana State University and University of Munich and he served as scholar and lecturer at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University until his death in 1985. After a brief flirtation with Marxism, Voegelin sustained a powerful critique of modernity throughout his intellectual career. His most significant work is the five volume, Order and History (LSU Press, 1956, 1957, 1957, 1974, 1987), which Voegelin took over thirty years to complete. In the preface of the first volume, Voegelin describes his work as "an inquiry into the order of man, society, and history to the extent to which it has become accessible to science." In elaborating on social order, Voegelin sees himself as recovering political theory as classically practiced by Plato and Aristotle. Voegelin believes that it is crucial for human beings to understand the times in which we live and to do this, he argues, we must embark upon a journey of history's great ideas "not as an attempt to explore curiosities of a dead past, but as an inquiry into the structure of the order in which we live presently." Writing in Saturday Review, Roger Shinn called Order and History "one of the great intellectual works of our generation. . . . A masterful combination of scientific scholarship with theological and poetic insight." And Russell Kirk said it is "the most important historical work of our century, not to be ignored by anyone seriously concerned with our time of troubles." The magnitude of Order and History, however, may invite readers to start with his more concise work, The New Science of Politics (Chicago, 1952), which serves as a precursor to the ideas in Order and History. Of great concern to Voegelin in this work is the "positivist" character of modern political science, that is, the tendency of political science to be too scientific, "value-free," without acknowledging the philosophical and metaphysical assumptions that underlie the discipline. "Human society is not merely a fact, or an event, in the external world to be studied by an observer like a natural phenomenon," Voegelin writes in The New Science of Politics. "Though it has externality as one of its important components, it is as a whole a little world, a cosmion, illuminated with meaning from within by the human beings who continuously create and bear it as the mode and condition of their self-realization." Voegelin goes on to describe what he believes to be a superior method of studying politics, one that restores civilization and spirituality to human life. Voegelin is also the author of Anamnesis (English edition, Notre Dame, 1978), Science, Politics, and Gnosticism (Henry Regnery, 1968), Autobiographical Reflections (LSU, 1989), and more than 100 articles written in both English and German. Of utmost significance in Voegelin's thinking is gnosticism, a theme that permeates his writing. Gnosticism for Voegelin is a belief in the power of indubitable knowledge to transform reality and instill human perfection on earth. "The gnostic elite," writes Voegelin scholar Dante Germino, "claims to have the recipe for overcoming the gulf between essence and existence, immanence and transcendence, by creating a new man and a new order of being which will be a marvelous improvement over the old order." But what gnosticism ignores and what Voegelin finds scorned among modern life is a concern for the spiritual element of reality. Gnosticism, for Voegelin, suppresses "the truth of the soul" and shirks "the problem of existence." "The answer will not help the man who has lost the question," writes Voegelin, "and the predicament of the present age is characterized by the loss of the question rather than of the answer." Because modern man continues to ignore the metaphysical reality of transcendence, he will not be able to satisfy his quest for knowledge. For a thorough analysis on how Voegelin understands the modern spiritual disorder, see Michael Franz, Eric Voegelin and the Politics of Spiritual Revolt (LSU, 1992). Ted McAllister discussed some of Voegelin's ideas on MARS HILL AUDIO Journal 23. McAllister's book Revolt Against Modernity (Kansas, 1996) compares the critiques of liberalism offered by Voegelin and another critic of modernity, Leo Strauss. McAllister explains that for Voegelin, losing life's spiritual core amounts to losing "a socially dominant conception of the individual and social relationship to the whole or divine that is made real or useful through myth or other symbolizations." Voegelin feared that modern citizens would subconsciously embrace the claims of gnosticism, which are salient in the liberal academy, and would ultimately champion the individual good above all else. While Voegelin is admired by many politically and theologically conservatives, he avoided the "conservative" label as a simplistic reduction of his thought. Dante Germino writes that "critics who label The New Science of Politics a 'conservative' book might do well to read the work more carefully." And Voegelin was certainly not a Christian in any orthodox understanding of the term. His religious commitments are a matter of some dispute, but theology professor Michael P. Morrissey sheds some light on the theological implications of Voegelin's thought in his book Consciousness and Transcendence: The Theology of Eric Voegelin (Notre Dame, 1995). Ellis Sandoz, professor at Louisiana State University, has written extensively on Eric Voegelin and is the director of the Eric Voegelin Institute, a research institute at LSU that promotes the study of great books. Sandoz has edited a number of volumes about Voegelin, among them Eric Voegelin's Thought: A Critical Appraisal (Duke, 1982) and Eric Voegelin's Significance for the Modern Mind (LSU, 1991). Sandoz is the author of The Voegelinian Revolution: A Biographical Introduction (LSU, 1981), now in its second edition. This is a helpful book that seeks to introduce Voegelin's challenging ideas to a general, nonprofessional audience. Other introductions to Voegelin's thought are Barry Cooper's The Political Theory of Eric Voegelin (Edwin Mellen, 1986) and Glenn Hughes's Mystery and Myth in the Philosophy of Eric Voegelin (Missouri, 1993). Voegelin's ubiquitous neologisms and technical precision make his works difficult to understand. Bill McClain maintains a website that is a helpful guide to Voegelin's work and includes a glossary of Voegelin's terms and advice on how to understand his thought. Fritz Wagner maintains a website dedicated to Eric Voegelin that includes a biographical sketch, excerpts from Voegelin's important works, and complete indexes and tables of contents for all of Voegelin's published works. An on-line journal called Voegelin Research News covers recent scholarship about Voegelin; see also Geoffrey L. Price's bibliography in International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Eric Voegelin, eds. S. McKnight and G. Price (Missouri, 1997). [Posted July 2003, PAR]		Ted McAllister, on Revolt Against Modernity: Leo Strauss, Eric Voeglin, and the Search for a Postliberal Order (MARS HILL AUDIO Journal, ) MHT-023.1.3