Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss are two of the most provocative and durable political philosophers of this century. Ted Mc Allister’s superbly written study provides the first comprehensive comparison of their thought and its profound influence on contemporary American conservatism.
Since the appearance in the 1950s of Strauss’s Natural Right and History and Voegelin’s Order and History, conservatives like Russell Kirk, Irving Kristol, and Allan Bloom have increasingly turned to these thinkers to support their attacks on liberalism and the modernist mindset.
Like so many conservatives, Strauss and Voegelin rebelled against modernity’s amorality—personified by Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche—and its promotion of individualism and materialism over communal and spiritual responsibility. While both disdained the reductionist “conservative” label, conservatives nevertheless appropriated their philosophy, in part because it restored theology and classical tradition to the moral core of civil society.
For both men, modernity’s debilitating disorder revealed surprising and disturbing relations among liberal, communist, and Nazi ideologies. In their eyes, modernity’s insidious virus, so apparent in the Nazi and communist regimes, lies incubating within liberal democracy itself.
Mc Allister’s thorough reevaluation of Strauss and Voegelin expands our understanding of their thought and restores balance to a literature that has been dominated by political theorists and disciples of Strauss and Voegelin. Neither reverential nor dismissive, he reveals the social, historical, political, and philosophical foundations of their work and effectively decodes their frequently opaque or esoteric thinking.
Well written and persuasively argued, Mc Allister’s study will appeal to anyone engaged in the volatile debates over liberalism’s demise and conservatism’s rise.
Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program.
Tabella dei contenuti
Preface
Abbreviations
Prologue
1. Labels, Definitions, and Other Forms of Coercion
-Labels
-The Meanings of Modernity
-Eric Voegelin
-Leo Strauss
2. Liberal American and Its Discontents
-The Problem of Totalitarianism
-American and the Liberal Tradition
-Liberalism and the Modern World
3. From Philosophy to Positivism
4. The Nature of Modernity
-Machiavelli and Chiron
-Hegel and the Egophanic Revolt
5. The Crisis of Modernity
-The End of Modernity
-The Problem with Liberalism: Leo Strauss
-The Problem with Liberalism: Eric Voegelin
6. The Philosopher
-Plato in Search of Jerusalem
-Nature and Natural Right
7. The Mystic
-The Discovery of Consciousness
-The Structure of Consciousness
-A Story Told by God
-Philosophy of Politics
8. Strauss, Voegelin, and the Conservative Imagination
-The Charms of Strauss and Voegelin
-The Conservative Imagination
-Strauss, Voegelin, and the Conservatives
-The Conservative Predicament
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Circa l’autore
Ted V. Mc Allister is Edward L. Gaylord Chair and associate professor of public policy at Pepperdine University. An intellectual historian, he has lectured frequently on the nature and future of American conservatism and is one of the series editors for Rowman & Littlefield’s book series, American Intellectual Culture.Altri ebook dello stesso autore / Editore
116.787 Ebook in questa categoria
