Broadened Identity: Eric Voegelin and Therapeutic Knowledge of Political Science

Abstract

Against the tendency of his times, Eric Voegelin revisited the question of political science in the deepest reaches of the Being. His recovery in the social sciences of issues dealt with in metaphysics involved the idea of politics as a science of order, with a transcendental vector that offered a triple representation of the notion of truth (psychic, political and cosmic). In both metaphysics and the problem of truth, Voegelin discerned the complexity of the challenge of symbiosis with omnipotence as a political datum of human existence. The trajectories of the Jewish and Greek civilizations offered two key points of differentiation of Western conscience and identity, two parallel political paths that provided differing conceptions of reason, humanity and power.