Eric Voegelin is one of those thinkers many have heard of but few have closely read. That's understandable; reading certain passages of the German professor can clog the brain, leaving you wondering if you even understand yourself. To make matters worse, he coined nearly ten pages worth of neologisms in Greek, according to Eugene Webb's Eric Voegelin: Philosophy of History, each representing Voegelin's attempt to get to the core of what philosophy and religious seeking really are. But this means he's also sane. Voegelin wants to know the truth about God and man. Fogginess comes with that territory.
Notwithstanding his obscurity today, the ideas of this 20th-century political philosopher have been a staple in diagnosing the problems with utopian political thinking, and for good reason. After spending some time with the excellent and just-released Eric Voegelin Reader, I want to argue that he may be even more prescient now as liberal democracies in the West face a different, mostly internal set of threats. Voegelin has much to tell us about our existences as self-governing peoples.
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