Published Essays 1966 1985

"Published Essays, 1966-1985 includes some of the most trenchant and compelling of Eric Voegelin's work and is an indispensable companion to his Anamnesis and to the fourth and fifth volumes of Order and History, which were prepared for publication during the same period, the last two decades of the author's life. These essays are quintessential Voegelin.Voegelin was an essayist at heart, and the pieces gathered here bear on almost every aspect of his philosophy. They range in subject matter and tone from a scalding critique of the German intellectual establishment during the Hitler period and a satire upon contemporary vulgarian culture to magisterial analyses of immortality, reason, and consciousness. The essays also embrace Voegelin's elaboration of the theory of equivalent experiences and symbolizations over human history and his meditation upon the lure of extremes in the rebellion of magic against reason in various modernist attacks on culture. The scope of Voegelin's work is magnified by the collection's final essay, a touching and profound deathbed reflection on God". --

The period covered by the material published in this volume marks the transition in Eric Voegelin's career from Louisiana to Munich. After twenty years in the United States, in 1958 Voegelin accepted an invitation to fill the political science chair at Ludwig Maximilian University, a position left vacant throughout the Nazi period and last occupied by the famous Max Weber, who had died in 1920. The themes most prominent in the fourteen items reprinted here reflect the concerns of a transition, not only in a scholar's career, and in the momentous shifts in world politics taking place around him, but also in the development of his understanding of the stratification of reality and the attendant demands for a science of human affairs adequate to the challenges posed by the persistent crisis of the West in its latest configurations and by contemporary philosophy. Several of the items herein originated as talks to a specific organization on problems facing German democratization and the development of a market economy amid the ruins of a fragmented culture and infrastructure in a society without historically evolved institutional supports for a satisfactory social and political order. Accordingly, pragmatic matters occupy a central place in a number of these pieces, especially the overriding question of how Germany could move from an illiberal and ideological political order into a modern liberal democratic one. Those accustomed to the theoretical profundity of Voegelin's writings may find welcome relief in the down-to-earth, commonsensical drift of this material addressed, often, to laymen and businessmen. But, of course, the philosophical subject matter lurks everywhere. It finds full expression in several instances as the controlling context of even the least pretentious presentations. One of the attractions of these essays is what the author brings forward as serviceable elementary guideposts under adverse conditions of intellectual disarray, social decay, and turmoil.

Annotation In this collection of essays, which covers the years from 1934 to 1939, we see Eric Voegelin in the role of both scholar and public intellectual in Vienna until he was forced to flee the Nazi terror that descended on Austria in 1938. These essays encompass a broad spectrum of topics, ranging from Austrian politics, Austrian constitutional history, and European racism, to questions of the formation and expression of public opinion, theories of administrative law, and the role of political science in public university education. Several essays serve as useful commentaries on, elaborations of, or synopses of arguments Voegelin made in the four books he had published between 1928 and 1936. These essays will be of interest to a wide range of scholars, including constitutional historians, historians of political science, political theorists, and students of Voegelin's later work.

Glenn Alexander Magee's book argues that Hegel was decisively influenced by the Hermetic tradition, a body of thought with roots in Greco-Roman Egypt. In the Middle Ages and modern period, the Hermetic tradition became entwined with such mystical strands of thought as alchemy, Kabbalism, Millenarianism, Rosicrucianism, and theosophy. Recent scholarship has drawn connections between the Hermetic "counter-tradition" and many modern thinkers, including Leibniz and Newton.