The LSU Department of Political Science, the Eric Voegelin Institute for American Renaissance Studies, and a vast community of scholars from the United States and Canada to Europe and beyond, lament the passing of G. Ellis Sandoz. He died peacefully on September 19, 2023, after an extended illness. Ellis, as he was known to all, was a Louisiana native, born in 1931. He earned BA and MA degrees from LSU, studying history, philosophy, and political science, the latter under the tutelage of LSU’s first Boyd Professor, Dr. Eric Voegelin. One of the prominent political philosophers of the twentieth century, Dr. Voegelin, and his wife, escaped from Austria after the Nazi Anschluss in 1938 and joined the LSU political science faculty in 1942, where he remained until moving back to Germany in 1958 to create the Institut für Politische Wissenschaft at the University of Munich. Meanwhile, after a brief foray as a Capitol Hill Policeman for the United States House of Representatives, and three years of service in the United States Marine Corp, wherein he rose to the rank of First Lieutenant, Ellis followed Dr. Voegelin to Munich and eventually earned his doctorate (Dr. oec. Publ.) under Voegelin’s direction in 1965, the only American student to have done so.
Ellis’ first academic appointments were at Louisiana Tech University (1958-68) and East Texas State University (1968-78). He joined the LSU political science faculty in 1978 and stayed until his retirement in 2015. His major administrative achievement, by his own estimation, was the founding of the Eric Voegelin Institute in 1987, which he directed until his retirement. Through the Institute, Ellis served as General Editor of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (LSU Press, 1989-1999, and U. of Missouri Press, 1999-2012), 34 volumes. As another part of his endeavor to see that Voegelin’s ideas and writings would be available to a larger community of scholars, Ellis founded and served as long-time President-Secretary of the Eric Voegelin Society, which gathers scholars from around the world to discuss political theory at American Political Science Association annual meetings. Dr. David Walsh, current President of the Voegelin Society, has commented in his Voegelin View In Memoriam, “The written word is not the only way of preserving memory, as Plato reminds us, for it can only become a living force when the spark of understanding leaps from one soul to another. Thinking, Ellis understood, is not a solitary activity but something that is best done in company with others.”
Ellis was a prolific scholar. In addition to the monumental task of directing the publication of Voegelin’s writings, he authored, co-authored, or edited twenty books, countless articles, and an extraordinary number of invited lectures all over the world. Ellis was the first political scientist to be recognized as a Distinguished Research Master at LSU. He was chosen as a Fulbright 40th Anniversary Distinguished American Scholar and appointed by President Reagan to a term of six years on the National Council of the Humanities. He was elected President of the Philadelphia Society in 2000, delivered invitational lectures in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Norway, Guatemala, and Genoa, and lectured widely across the United States and Canada. He received the University Medal from Palacky University Olomous, in the Czech Republic, and was appointed to the endowed Herman Moyse Jr. Distinguished Professorship of Political Science at LSU, a professorship that was specifically created for him. Throughout, Ellis taught the classical writings of political theory to thousands of undergraduate students and a host of doctoral students at LSU.
Of the many books and essays that Ellis authored, four books and one essay stand out as examples of the scope and breadth of his scholarly interests. The first began as his dissertation, Political Apocalypse: A Study of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. Not only is this work a testament to the importance of literature in the study of political theory; it is also a significant commentary on modern nihilism. A second work, Conceived in Liberty: American Individual Rights Today, was written for use in American Government courses at East Texas State University but also adopted by Harvard University, occasioning Ellis’s comment: “Commerce [as in Commerce, Texas] enlightening Cambridge appeals to the underdog in me.” A third important work is The Voegelinian Revolution: A Biographical Introduction, still the standard exploration of Voegelin’s corpus, in which special attention is given to Voegelin’s theory of consciousness. Finally, Ellis produced a two-volume collection of Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, which should be considered in accompaniment with his last published essay on “The Philosopher’s Vocation: The Voegelinian Paradigm,” in The Review of Politics. Here Ellis reveals his affection for the prophetic voice and its relevance to a disordered world. Both works emphasize the importance of recognizing human existence, in all its individual and social forms, as living in the middle, and, thereby, seeking the intersections of transcendence and immanence. In “The Philosopher’s Vocation,” Ellis quotes Voegelin’s statement of the equivalences of experience, of the constancy of human consciousness seeking out the gods, in whatever form they may appear:
As far as my own vocabulary is concerned, I am very conscious of not relying on the language of doctrine, but I am equally conscious of not going beyond the orbit of Christianity when I prefer the experiential symbol “divine reality” to the God of the Creed, … I am very much aware that my inquiry into the history of experience and symbolization generalizes the Anselmian fides quaerens intellectum [faith seeking understanding] so as to include every fides, not only the Christian, in the quest for understanding by reason. In practice this means that one has to recognize, and make intelligible, the presence of Christ in a Babylonian hymn, or a Taoist speculation, or a Platonic dialogue, just as much as in a Gospel.Footnote 1
Ellis concludes his own essay with a comment on this statement and what it meant for Voegelin, as well as what it meant for himself:
Perhaps as clearly as any other text, this remarkable statement captures the revolutionary thrust of Voegelin’s work. It is a set of claims to be pondered by anyone devoted to the study of order and disorders in human experience in its broadest amplitude, in service to Truth and in resistance against deformation and evil. This is the philosopher’s vocation. Footnote 2
Clearly, it was the vocation of that collection of preachers for liberty and justice that Ellis compiled so lovingly, just as it was Voegelin’s vocation; and just as clearly it is the vocation Ellis chose for himself, or, perhaps, one that chose him.
