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.

This volume contains selected correspondence written by Eric Voegelin during the period 1924 to 1949.The Editorial Board of the "Collected Works of Eric Voegelin" agreed from the beginning that a representative number of Voegelin's letters should complete the edition in an attempt to provide the reader with insights into Voegelin's intellectual life and into the fundamental experiences that went into shaping the growth of his personality. It was the board's aim to select material in accordance with the guidelines that Voegelin himself laid down as fundamental to a hermeneutical understanding of spiritual reality. Voegelin wrote that, in studying a thinker, one must try to elucidate the biographical ""radices "of philosophizing." He said that one must penetrate to the "experiences that impel him] toward reflection, and do so because they have excited consciousness to the 'awe' of existence." Voegelin made these remarks on the occasion of conducting anamnetic experiments, which reveal the motivational center of his own life. At the core of Voegelin's concept of political science is a noetic interpretation of man, society, and history that confronts the conception of order prevalent in the surrounding society with the criteria of the critical knowledge of order. From the 1930s onward, Voegelin labored to find a satisfactory self-reflexive explication of the principles of a contemplative understanding of human reality, one grounded in the spiritual experience of reason. Naturally, it is the published word that determines a thinker's scholarly stature. But Voegelin's letters also grant insight into the development of his thought; document the author's struggle with himself, the "telos "of his scholarship; and reveal an often involuntary conflict with his life-world. These letters shed light on an ongoing and open-ended thought process from which a multifaceted, sometimes apparently contradictory, work emerged. Because of the enormous number of letters that Voegelin wrote in his later years--now published in the second volume of the "Selected Correspondence "(Volume 30 of the" Collected Works")-- the editors agreed that these bookswould contain only letters "from" Eric Voegelin. While such a selection of letters cannot provide the completeness that the publication of both dialogue partners would provide, nevertheless they reveal Voegelin's ongoing reflection on human affairs. They reveal patterns of thought and their development in the atmosphere of intimate communication that personal and intellectual "elective affinities" produce, and they also disclose the silences that accompany such discourse. This volume is certain to interest all readers concerned with political theory and with better understanding of Voegelin's intellectual pilgrimage from his earliest academic years to his emergence as one of the most significant philosophers of our time.

In "The New Order and Last Orientation, " Eric Voegelin explores two distinctly different yet equally important aspects of modernity. He begins by offering a vivid account of the political situation in seventeenth-century Europe after the decline of the church and the passing of the empire. Voegelin shows how the intellectual and political disorder of the period was met by such seemingly disparate responses as Grotius's theory of natural right, Hobbes's "Leviathan, " the role of the Fronde in the formation of the French national state, Spinoza's "Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, " and Locke's "Second Treatise, " the blueprint of a modern middle-class society. By putting these responses and the thought of Montesquieu, Hume, and others in the context of the birth pains of the national state and the emergence of a new self-understanding of man, Voegelin achieves a brilliant mixture of political history and profound philosophical analysis.

Voegelin's verdict of modernity is pronounced most powerfully in the opening part of "Last Orientation," in the chapter entitled "Phenomenalism." His discussion of the intellectual confusion underlying the modern project of scientistic phenomenalism is the most original criticism leveled against modernity to date. It is at the same time the first step toward a recovery of reality through philosophy conceived as a science of substance in the spirit of Giordano Bruno. Voegelin's first example of such an effort at recovering reality is the chapter on Schelling, one of the spiritual realists who has not been affected by the prevailing rationalist or reductionist creeds that are part of the modern disorder. Schelling's indirect yet powerful influence on Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud more than justifies Voegelin's interest in his philosophy and character, even though Voegelin would later distance himself from some of Schelling's positions.

The volume's concluding chapter, "Nietzsche and Pascal," applies the understanding gained from the study of Schelling to the thought of the most powerful critic of the age, Nietzsche. Nietzsche's self-avowed affinity with Pascal provides the key to an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of his thought and reaffirms the connection that links the beginning of modernity with its most recent crises and the efforts to overcome them.