Where There Is Vision

The second and third volumes of Eric Voegelin’s monumental Order and History (The World of the Polis and Plato and Aristotle, Louisiana State University, $6.00 each) continue the grand development of his theme which was introduced in the first volume, Israel and Revelation (reviewed, NR, 3/2/57). Order and History is a theory of history as the continuing and recurring struggle of men to realize their free being under God. But it is more than a theory of history; it is projected “not as an attempt to explore curiosities of a dead past, but as an inquiry into the structure of the order in which we live presently,” as “one of the means of establishing islands of order in the disorder of the age.”

Professor Voegelin. has no less a goal than to controvert the two related theories of history which have created the world view that dominates our age: Marxism and the Liberal theory of progress. Both of them he sees arising from a rejection of the finite conditions of human life— ideologies which would substitute for the truly human end of “the love of being through love of divine Being as the source of . . . order,” a Utopian drive to redesign the world in the image of a pattern of “perfection,” distorted in its shape and hideous in its consequences because of the finite limitations of the human designer.

FS

About the Author

Frank S. Meyer

Frank S. Meyer was a senior editor of National Review.

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The second and third volumes of Eric Voegelin’s monumental Order and History (The World of the Polis and Plato and Aristotle, Louisiana State University, $6.00 each) continue the grand development of his theme which was introduced in the first volume, Israel and Revelation (reviewed, NR, 3/2/57). Order and History is a theory of history as the continuing and recurring struggle of men to realize their free being under God. But it is more than a theory of history; it is projected “not as an attempt to explore curiosities of a dead past, but as an inquiry into the structure of the order in which we live presently,” as “one of the means of establishing islands of order in the disorder of the age.”

Professor Voegelin. has no less a goal than to controvert the two related theories of history which have created the world view that dominates our age: Marxism and the Liberal theory of progress. Both of them he sees arising from a rejection of the finite conditions of human life— ideologies which would substitute for the truly human end of “the love of being through love of divine Being as the source of . . . order,” a Utopian drive to redesign the world in the image of a pattern of “perfection,” distorted in its shape and hideous in its consequences because of the finite limitations of the human designer.