Eric Voegelin (1901–1985) was one of the most original philosophers of our time, working throughout his life to account for the endemic political violence of the twentieth century, in an effort variously referred to as a philosophy of politics, history, or consciousness. Drawing from the University of Missouri Press’s thirty-four-volume edition of his collected works, Charles Embry and Glenn Hughes have assembled a selection of Voegelin’s representative writings, satisfying the need for a single volume that can serve as a general introduction to his philosophy. The selection demonstrates the range and creativity of Voegelin’s thought, including writings that show his thinking as it developed historically in his long search for order in human society. The Eric Voegelin Reader will be welcomed by students of political philosophy, political science, philosophy of history, theology, and other fields, including those who are unfamiliar with Voegelin’s difficult, but exciting and stimulating, thought. The editors have provided a short introduction and situate each selection in the context of Voegelin’s overall work.

The essays in this collection honor Professor Ellis Sandoz, Hermann Moyse, Jr., Distinguished Professor of Political Science and founding director of the Eric Voegelin Institute for American Renaissance Studies, an institute at Louisiana State University devoted to research and publication in the fields of political philosophy and constitutionalism. Sandoz was one of Eric Voegelin's early students and his very first American doctoral candidate. Without the dauntless efforts of Sandoz - both academic and economic - the thirty-four volumes of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin would never have neared completion within only twenty years of Voegelin's death. Each essay was written especially for this volume and addresses a subject of interest to Sandoz from a Voegelinian approach. Grouped into the disciplines of philosophy, literature, and politics, the essays range freely and broadly across these subjects, exploring works of Eric Voegelin, Xenophon, Freud, George Santayana, Robert Penn Warren, and Peter Nadas. Other pieces focus on the Velvet Revolution, the nature of Law, modern philosophy, human dignity, and related ideas. Philosophy, Literature, and Politics is a fitting tribute to a man whose lifework has been the continuation of the study of Voegelin and political philosophy. The essays break new theoretical and philosophical ground and provide food for thought for any scholar of English literature, philosophy, or political science eager to tackle new subjects and reconsider old ones.

Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu-In Search of Lost Time-is one of the most important and influential novels of the modern era. In recent decades, Proust has enjoyed a new surge of critical attention, as well as a sustained growth in readership-well beyond that of other prose masters of twentieth century modernism such as Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, and Beckett. The MLA Bibliography presently lists over 3,000 citations to scholarly works devoted to Proust's novel, and if one Googles "Proust," the number of hits exceeds 2,000,000. The temporal nature of human existence and consciousness is one of the many themes explored in In Search of Lost Time, and it is this dimension of Proust's work that unifies this collection of essays that grew from a roundtable discussion entitled "The Timelessness of Proust" conducted at the 31st annual meeting of the Eric Voegelin Society. The collection includes the following essays: "In Search of Lost Time: Biographies of Consciousness," Charles R. Embry "Proust, Transcendence, and Metaxic Existence," Glenn Hughes "The Normative Flow of Consciousness and the Self: A Philosophical Meditation on Proust's In Search of Lost Time," Thomas J. McPartland; "Imprisonment and Freedom: Resisting and Embracing the Tension of Existence in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time," Paulette Kidder; "Proust's Luminous Memory and L'Homme Eternel: The Quest for Limitless Meaning," Michael Henry "Unsought Revelations of Eternal Reality in Eliot's Four Quartets and Proust's In Search of Lost Time," Glenn Hughes Persons who are interested not only in the philosophical importance of literary masterworks and in how the philosophical thought of Eric Voegelin may illuminate them, but also in letting Proust serve as a guide in the exploration and understanding of their own lives, will find these essays to be of lasting interest and value.

This volume explores the role of some of the most prominent twentieth-century philosophers and political thinkers as teachers. It examines how these teachers conveyed truth to their students against the ideological influences found in the university and society. Philosophers from Edmund Husserl and Hannah Arendt to political thinkers like Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss, and their students such as Ellis Sandoz, Stanley Rosen, and Harvey Mansfield, are in this volume as teachers who analyze, denounce, and attempt to transcend ideology for a more authentic way of thinking. What the reader will discover is that teaching is not merely a matter of holding concepts together, but a way of existing or living in the world. The thinkers in this volume represent this form of teaching as the philosophical search for truth in a world deformed by ideology.

This volume explores the role of some of the most prominent twentieth-century philosophers and political thinkers as teachers. It examines how these teachers conveyed truth to their students against the ideological influences found in the university and society. Philosophers from Edmund Husserl and Hannah Arendt to political thinkers like Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss, and their students such as Ellis Sandoz, Stanley Rosen, and Harvey Mansfield, are in this volume as teachers who analyze, denounce, and attempt to transcend ideology for a more authentic way of thinking. What the reader will discover is that teaching is not merely a matter of holding concepts together, but a way of existing or living in the world. The thinkers in this volume represent this form of teaching as the philosophical search for truth in a world deformed by ideology.

The work of renowned thinker Eric Voegelin is largely rooted in his literary sensibility. Voegelin's contributions to the field of philosophy grew from the depths of his knowledge of history's most important texts, from ancient to modern times. Many of the concepts he emphasized, such as participatory experience and symbolization in philosophy, have long been significant to literary criticism as well as philosophical study. Voegelin himself even ventured into the field of criticism, publishing a critical examination of Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw" in 1971. Since it is so strongly influenced by the written record of man's search for meaning, Voegelinian thought makes an ideal framework for the study of twentieth-century literature. For "Voegelinian Readings of Modern Literature, "scholar Charles R. Embry has collected essays that consider particular pieces of literature in light of the philosopher's work. These essays supply a theoretical grounding for the reading of novels, poems, and plays and reveal how the Voegelinian perspective exposes the existential and philosophical dimensions of the literary works themselves. As a unit, this collection of essays shows how modern pieces of literature can symbolize their creators' participation in the human search for the truth of existence--just as myths, philosophical works, and religious texts always have. Voegelin's primary concern as a philosopher was to expose the roots of the disturbances of the modern era--religious conflict, imperialism, war--so that the sources of order leading to meaning are revealed. The openness of Voegelinian thought and the many ways he considered the levels of reality generate intriguing themes for literary criticism. In these essays, noted Voegelin scholars focus on American and European literary artists from the 1700s through the late twentieth century, including Emily Dickinson, Henrik Ibsen, Thomas Carlyle, D. H. Lawrence, Marcel Proust, and Hermann Broch. While the intersection of the work of Eric Voegelin and literature has been a part of Voegelin scholarship for decades, this book explores that relationship in an extended form. Through a broad collection of thoughtful essays, "Voegelinian Readings of Modern Literature "reveals how much Voegelin did to break down the barriers between literature and philosophy and makes an engaging contribution to Voegelin scholarship.

Throughout his philosophical career, Eric Voegelin had much to say about literature in both his published work and his private letters. Many of his most trenchant comments regarding the analysis of literature appear in his correspondence with critic Robert Heilman, and, through his familiarity with that exchange, Charles Embry has gained extraordinary insight into Voegelin's literary views. The Philosopher and the Storyteller is the first book-length study of the literary dimensions of Voegelin's philosophy-and the first to use his philosophy to read specific novels. Bringing to bear a thorough familiarity with both Voegelin and great literature, Embry shows that novels-like myths, philosophy, and religious texts-participate in the human search for the truth of existence, and that reading literature within a Voegelinian framework exposes the existential and philosophical dimensions of those works. Embry focuses on two key elements of Voegelin's philosophy as important for reading literature: metaxy, the in-between of human consciousness, and metalepsis, human participation in the community of being. He shows how Voegelin's philosophy in general is rooted in literary-symbolic interpretation and, therefore, provides a foundation for the interpretation of literature. And finally he explores Voegelin's insistence that the soundness of literary criticism lies in the consciousness of the reader. Embry then offers Voegelinian readings that vividly illustrate the principles of this approach. First he considers Graham Swift's Waterland as an example of the human search for meaning in the modern world, then he explores the deformation and recovery of reality in Heimito von Doderer's long and complex novel The Demons, and finally he examines how Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away mythically expresses the flux of divine presence in what Voegelin calls the Time of the Tale. The Philosopher and the Storyteller unites fiction and philosophy in the common quest to understand our nature, our world, and our cosmos. A groundbreaking exploration of the connection between Voegelin and twentieth-century literature, this book opens a new window on the philosopher's thought and will motivate readers to study other novels in light of this approach.