Between 1933 and 1938, Eric Voegelin published four books that brought him into increasingly open opposition to the Hitler regime in Germany. As a result, he was forced to leave Austria in 1938, narrowly escaping arrest by the Gestapo as he fled to Switzerland and later to the United States. Twenty years later, he was invited to return to Germany as director of the new Institute of Political Science at Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich.

In 1964, Voegelin gave a series of memorable lectures on what he considered "the central German experiential problem" of his time: Adolf Hitler's rise to power, the reasons for it, and its consequences for post-Nazi Germany. For Voegelin, these issues demanded a scrutiny of the mentality of individual Germans and of the order of German society during and after the Nazi period. "Hitler and the Germans" offers Voegelin's most extensive and detailed critique of the Hitler era.

While most of the lectures deal with what Voegelin called Germany's "descent into the depths" of the moral and spiritual abyss of Nazism and its aftermath, they also point toward a restoration of order. His lecture "The Greatness of Max Weber" shows how Weber, while affected by the culture within which Hitler came to power, had already gone beyond it through his anguished recovery of the experience of transcendence.

"Hitler and the Germans" provides a profound alternative approach to the topic of the individual German's entanglement in the Hitler regime and its continuing implications. This comprehensive critique of the Nazi period has yet to be matched.

"Thirty-five years ago few could have predicted that "The New Science of Politics" would be a best-seller by political theory standards. Compressed within the Draconian economy of the six Walgreen lectures is a complete theory of man, society, and history, presented at the most profound and intellectual level. . . . Voegelin's work] stands out in bold relief from much of what has passed under the name of political science in recent decades. . . . The New Science is aptly titled, for Voegelin makes clear at the outset that a 'return to the specific content' of premodern political theory is out of the question. . . . The subtitle of the book, An Introduction, clearly indicates that The New Science of Politics is an invitation to join the search for the recovery of our full humanity."--From the new Foreword by Dante Germino
"This book must be considered one of the most enlightening essays on the character of European politics that has appeared in half a century. . . . This is a book powerful and vivid enough to make agreement or disagreement with even its main thesis relatively unimportant."--"Times Literary Supplement "
"Voegelin . . . is one of the most distinguished interpreters to Americans of the non-liberal streams of European thought. . . . He brings a remarkable breadth of knowledge, and a historical imagination that ranges frequently into brilliant insights and generalizations."--Francis G. Wilson, "American Political Science Review "
"This book is beautifully constructed . . . his erudition constantly brings a startling illumination."--Martin Wright, "International Affairs "
"A ledestar to thinking men who seek a restoration of political science on the classic and Christian basis . . . a significant accomplishment in the retheorization of our age."--Anthony Harrigan, "Christian Century "

Philosopher C.S. Morrissey adapts Hesiod's two great works, "Theogony" and "Works and Days," taking into account the poet's essential meditative insights that paved the way for the subsequent achievements of Greek philosophy, most notably of Plato, and thereby gave a distinctive shape to all of Western philosophy. "Theogony" recounts the genesis of the first generations of the Greek gods and recollects how Zeus used both force and persuasion to establish his cosmic reign of justice. "Works and Days" tells the story of the origin and ordination of human beings within this cosmos and their perennial struggle to win order from disorder in a world overwhelmed by harsh sorrows and injustice.

In the wake of personal adversity and suffering, Hesiod was inspired by the Muses to sing out against the untruth of society and to disclose the truth about justice in the cosmos. "Theogony," which won him his laurels in a poetic competition, begins by telling of how the Muses chose him as an individual vessel of inspiration, to be a rival to Homer and the old myths with a newer vision of the struggle for justice among the gods. In "Works and Days," Hesiod includes these autobiographical details within a reflection on the two-fold role of competition in life: "the bad strife" is visible everywhere in the manifold forms of universal disorder, although "the good strife" is part of the struggle to maintain order in the wake of chaos and the primeval void.

These new translations are contextualized with a foreword by distinguished philosopher Roger Scruton and text by the late philosopher and historian Eric Voegelin, who argues the magnitude of Hesiod's influence on Greek philosophy and Western history, and how his sublime contribution to literature has formed a signal bridge between myth and metaphysics.

In The Later Middle Ages, the third volume of his monumental History of Political Ideas, Eric Voegelin continues his exploration of one of the most crucial periods in the history of political thought. Illuminating the great figures of the high Middle Ages, Voegelin traces the historical momentum of our modern world in the core evocative symbols that constituted medieval civilization. These symbols revolved around the enduring aspiration for the sacrum imperium, the one order capable of embracing the transcendent and immanent, the ecclesiastical and political, the divine and human. The story of the later Middle Ages is that of the "civilizational schism" -- the movement in which not only the reality of but the aspiration for the sacrum imperium gradually disappeared.

His recognition of this civilizational schism provides Voegelin with a unique perspective on medieval society. William of Ockham, Dante, Giles of Rome, and Marsilius of Padua all emerge in Voegelin's study as predecessors to modern thought; each turns to personal authority and intellectual analysis in an attempt to comprehend the loss of the sacrum imperium.

Yet the story of the later Middle Ages does not merely revolve around disintegration. Voegelin recognizes the emergence of the constitutional political tradition as the most positive development of this period. His study of the English political pattern is matched only by his unique perspective on the German imperial zone.

The Later Middle Ages is at once a brilliant examination of medieval society and a remarkable predecessor to Voegelin's study of the modern world, beginning with the Renaissance and the Reformation.

In 1924, not quite two years after receiving his doctorate from the University of Vienna, Eric Voegelin was named a Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fellow and thus given the opportunity to pursue postdoctoral studies in the United States. For the next twenty-four months, Voegelin worked with some of the most creative scholars in America and at several of the country's great universities, an experience that undoubtedly influenced his scholarly and personal perspectives throughout his life. A more immediate result was the publication in 1928 of "On the Form of the American Mind, " the young philosopher's first major work, in which his acute perceptions and analyses combine with a conceptual vocabulary struggling to find its own coherence and form.Voegelin begins his inquiry into the form of the American mind with a complex discussion of the concepts of time and existence in European and American philosophy and continues with an extended interpretation of George Santayana, a study of the Puritan mystic Jonathan Edwards, a presentation on Anglo-American jurisprudence, and a consideration of the historian, economist, and political scientist John R. Commons (Voegelin was particularly interested in Commons' views on the mental, political, social, and economic aspects of democracy in modern urban and industrial America). Although admitting that this diversity of themes seems only loosely connected," Voegelin demonstrates the actual overall unity of these various subjects: each concerns linguistic expressions of a theoretical nature.

Analysis of "On the Form of the American Mind" indicates that Voegelin integrated the approaches of "Lebensphilosophie" into what Georg Misch called the "philosophical combination of anthropology and history," which characterized contemporary trends within the discourse of the "Geisteswissenschaften" and finally resulted in a theoretical paradigm of philosophical anthropology.

Jurgen Gebhardt and Barry Cooper provide access to this brilliant study with their two-part introduction. The first part considers "On the Form of the American Mind" in the context of methodological debates ongoing in Germany at the time Voegelin was writing the book; the second describes Voegelin's American experience and compares his work with similar studies written during the post-World War I period.

Race and State is the second of five books that Eric Voegehn wrote before his emigration to the United States from Austria in 1938. First published in Germany in 1933, the year Hitler came to power, the study was prompted in part by the rise of national socialism during the preceding year. Yet Voegelin neither descended to the level of contemporary debates on race nor dismissed these debates by way of value judgments. Although still young when he wrote this book, Voegelin already demonstrates his singular analytical capacity as well as his ability to put political phenomena into a new perspective. In Part I Voegelin analyzes contemporary race theories by placing the question of race in the context of the more comprehensive philoiophical problem of the interrelationships of body, mind, and soul. He demonstrates the intellectual shortcomings and theoretical fallacies of current theories; more important, he contributes to the development of a modern philosophical anthropology that aims, as Helmuth Plessner put it in a review of Race and State, "at a concept of the human being that does justice to its multilayered existence as a physical, vital, psychic, and intellectual being, without making one of these layers the measure and explanatory basis for the others." In Part II Voegelin deals with race ideas, which he distinguishes from race theories. Race ideas, like other political ideas, form a part of political reality itself, contributing to the formation of social groups and societies. Voegelin shows that the modern race idea is just one "body ideal" among others, such as the tribal state and the Kingdom of Christ, each offering a different symbolic image of community. He traces the rise of the modem race idea, analyzes its function to structure community, and offers an answer to the question of why race ideas became successful in Germany. Voegelin's meticulous sifting of all the Nazi race literature finally arrives at this blunt statement regarding its overall validity: "In order to preclude even the slightest possibility of a misunderstanding, let us again point out emphatically that the contrasting descriptions of the Semitic and the Aryan, the Jewish and the German character . . . contain little that is true about the nature of Jewishness.