Metanoia from the Extreme
Walk Away: When the Political Left Turns Right. Lee Trepanier and Grant Havers, eds. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019. Perhaps not since the Cold War have public…
Eric Voegelin’s Normative Labor
In healthy reaction to the enemies of the permanent things in politics, a considerable body of serious political and historical scholarship has appeared in recent years. Some…
Pathologizing Ideology, Epistemic Modesty and Instrumental Rationality
I: Preamble Epistemic conservatism in its most generic form is the idea that a belief has some presumption of rationality merely because it is held (Quine). Cognitive…
Dominium v. Auctoritas: Nihilism and the Political Community
Anamnesis is a remembering or recollection of the orienting truths of existence that ought never to be forgotten. Mircea Eliade, in his Myth and Reality, wrote that…
War, Progress, and Sociology in the Age of Ideology
In the preface to The Quest for Community, Robert Nisbet explained the theme of his work: “I have chosen to deal with the political cause of the…
The Denial of Being: Ideology as False Metaphysics
Ideology is a highly misunderstood concept. People use it all the time to describe what, or more precisely, how they think despite the fact that they may…
Teaching in an Age of Ideology: Concluding Thoughts
In the past several essays, I have reviewed some of the twentieth and twentieth-first century great thinkers as teachers: Eric Voegelin, Ellis Sandoz, Gerhart Niemeyer, John H.…
Teaching in an Age of Ideology: Stanley Rosen
In the past couple of essays, I have looked at Leo Strauss and Harvey Mansfield as teachers in a climate of positivism, relativism, and academic mediocrity. In…
Teaching in an Age of Ideology: Harvey Mansfield
In my last essay, I wrote about Leo Strauss’ defense of liberal education as a possible antidote to the narrowness of specialization of knowledge and the moral…
Teaching in an Age of Ideology: Leo Strauss
So far I have examined a set of thinkers that could be classified in the same school of thought as “Voegelinian”: Eric Voegelin, Ellis Sandoz, Gerhart Niemeyer,…
Teaching in an Age of Ideology: John H. Hallowell
In my last essay I wrote about Gerhart Niemeyer who sought to avoid indoctrinating his students in order for them to pursue the true, the beautiful, and…
Teaching in an Age of Ideology: Gerhart Niemeyer
In my previous essays about teaching in an age of ideology, I had looked at two teachers – Eric Voegelin and Ellis Sandoz – who sought to…
Ellis Sandoz as Master Teacher
Professor Ellis Sandoz, the Hermann Moyse, Jr., Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Louisiana State University and Director of the Eric Voegelin Institute for American Renaissance Studies,…
Teaching in an Age of Ideology: Ellis Sandoz
In my previous essay about Eric Voegelin, I wrote how Voegelin became a model of thinking devoid of ideological rant in the student’s quest for the true,…
Teaching in an Age of Ideology: Eric Voegelin
In my last essay about teaching in an age of ideology, I proposed that one needs to illuminate to students about how to live according to the…