The Collapse and Retrieval of Meaning

Extract

Voegelin wrote the History of Political Ideas with the clear intent that it would become his entry ticket into the American political science profession. The posthumous publication of the eight volumes explains only partly why he never succeeded in becoming a recognized figure in the discipline. After all, he published from 1940 onwards a series of articles that were chapters of the History. His first American book, The New Science of Politics (1952), and, beginning in 1956, the volumes of Order and History grew also out of the massive work of the History and continued some of the themes of its rigorous inquiry into the origins of the meaning narratives of Western civilization. Though he arrived in the United States in 1938 as a refugee from Nazi-annexed Austria, unlike most other refugee social scientists he was already familiar with American intellectual and academic life. He had spent the years from 1924 to 1926 as a Rockefeller scholar in New York and Wisconsin and published his first book in 1928 in Tübingen (Germany) on American philosophical and cultural developments from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Still, neither the earlier American years nor the obvious need for him to establish his professional credentials in the new environment made him adjust the emerging scope and outline for the project of the History.