Eric Voegelin

And they seem very strange to us frequently.

So I've got the quote from a political scientist.

I got this from Sir Roger Scruton's Dictionary of Political Thought, a reference book.

But I get lots of good matter out of this.

And they were asking questions about human nature, about the ends that man was made for, what the good life looks like, what is true, what does a loving relationship look like.

These are all very fundamental concerns first introduced into our literature by people like Plato and Aristotle.

And this left... great Western political scientist, Eric Vogelin.

He wrote The New Science of Politics and several other great works.

The claim is, again, not that Russians are religious, church attendance there is statistically abysmal.

The claim is that, you know, the Russian political system, all this, that it runs on... focus on religion rather than the government and that if you analyze it as a government you'll be wrong in very very predictable ways every single time and by the way i'm not the first to say this there is a lot of academia behind this and uh well those those who send me angry emails about what i do here and that i'm too gonzo and not professional enough they should really go and read some nice literature because this time i'm bringing some because really i've uh heard some things Erik Vogelin wrote about political religions back in 1938, watching the mass movements of his own country and his own century sacralizing politics.

Mikhail Chernovsky traced the myth of Holy Russia and the Sacred Tsar in Tsar and People in 1961.

Yeah, so there's that, and the doctrine itself, by the way, is older than all of them.

So what I hope, too, is like at least, again, maybe it will be a successful attempt, but I want in our conversation at least try to attempt to talk about the questions of geopolitics, power, story, history, still as a whole, not separating it from our general metaphysical commitments, metaphysical understanding, metaphysical view.

And yes, like we talked about behind the closed doors about both of us, read Eric Vogelin, New Science of Politics.

Well, I don't like the word science, but you can definitely say we are supposed to discover some form of eternal language of political or some sort of it.

We're supposed to rediscover a language that Holy Fathers actually had and prophets had.

Well, I wouldn't call them arrogant and obnoxious.

Someone like Eric Vogelin, who probably knew more languages than C.S. Lewis actually, he's very hard to read.

He's incredibly hard to read.

Yeah.

Gerhard Niemeyer, who was a great thinker at Notre Dame.

Vogelinian, he's sort of the greatest Christian interpreter of Eric Vogelin, was here for a weekend.

Russell Hittinger, who was a great natural law thinker and philosopher, was here talking about Dawson.

Peter Stanliss, who was one of the great Burke scholars.

There's a man named David Whitney who writes for Vogelin View.

Eric Vogelin was a German-American philosopher who grasped this concept.

And there's a few people that grasped it.

C.S. Lewis wrote about scientism.