Eric Voegelin 1901 – 1985

Eric Voegelin was a German-American political philosopher whose work ranged from political theology to a vast philosophy of history. After the publication of his Political Religions in 1938 made his position in Vienna untenable, he fled to the United States and spent most of his career at Louisiana State University and at Notre Dame. His unfinished five-volume Order and History traced the experiences of order in Mesopotamian, Israelite, Greek, and modern history as a long differentiation of the human relation to the divine ground. His diagnosis of modern political ideologies as forms of immanentized eschatology has exercised wide influence.