The New Science of Politics by {author}: summary and why it matters

What it argues

Voegelin, an Austrian refugee from the Nazis, said political science had become a study of methods rather than of order and truth. He proposed instead to recover how societies interpret themselves through symbols that relate them to the transcendent.

His most famous claim is that the modern revolutionary movements, from progressive utopianism to communism and National Socialism, are versions of ancient Gnosticism. They believe the world is wrongly made, that special knowledge can show how to fix it, and that human beings can bring about a paradise. He argued that the effort to immanentize the eschaton, to build heaven on earth, results in terror because reality does not conform.

The book is compressed, drawn from a lecture series, and ranges across Hobbes, the medieval church, Joachim of Fiore and Marx.

Why it matters

Voegelin's phrase and thesis influenced William F. Buckley, Russell Kirk and many conservative critics of utopianism. Scholars dispute the Gnostic label, and it is wise to read it as a provocative interpretation rather than settled history.

About the author

Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) was born in Cologne and studied at the University of Vienna. He left Austria after the Nazi annexation in 1938 and later taught at Louisiana State University and then at the University of Munich. The New Science of Politics grew out of the Walgreen Lectures he delivered at the University of Chicago in 1951, and led into his multivolume work Order and History.

Who should read it

Advanced readers comfortable with dense argument. It makes a good counterpart to Hayek and Oakeshott.