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Description

Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss are two of the most provocative and durable political philosophers of this century. Ted McAllister's superbly written study provides the first comprehensive comparison of their thought and its profound influence on contemporary American conservatism. Since the appearance in the 1950s of Strauss's Natural Right and History and Voegelin's Order and History, conservatives like Russell Kirk, Irving Kristol, and Allan Bloom have increasingly turned to these thinkers to support their attacks on liberalism and the modernist mindset. Like so many conservatives, Strauss and Voegelin rebelled against modernity' amorality—personified by Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche—and its promotion of individualism and materialism over communal and spiritual responsibility. While both disdained the reductionist "conservative" label, conservatives nevertheless appropriated their philosophy, in part because it restored theology and classical tradition to the moral core of civil society. For both men, modernity's debilitating disorder revealed surprising and disturbing relations among liberal, communist, and Nazi ideologies. In their eyes, modernity's insidious virus, so apparent in the Nazi and communist regimes, lies incubating within liberal democracy itself. McAllister's thorough reevaluation of Strauss and Voegelin expands our understanding of their thought and restores balance to a literature that has been dominated by political theorists and disciples of Strauss and Voegelin. Neither reverential nor dismissive, he reveals the social, historical, political, and philosophical foundations of their work and effectively decodes their frequently opaque or esoteric thinking. Well written and persuasively argued, McAllister's study will appeal to anyone engaged in the volatile debates over liberalism's demise and conservatism's rise. Description Ted V. McAllister is Edward L. Gaylord Chair and associate professor of public policy at Pepperdine University. An intellectual historian, he has lectured frequently on the nature and future of American conservatism and is one of the series editors for Rowman & Littlefield’s book series, American Intellectual Culture. This Kansas Open Books title is funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program.

ISBN

978-0-7006-3108-7

Publication Date

1-22-1996

Publisher

University Press of Kansas

Format

xvi, 324 pp.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1p2gjfq

Rights Statement

© 1995 by the University Press of Kansas. All rights reserved. The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License.

Rights Status

Open Access

Revolt Against Modernity: Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and the Search for a Post-Liberal Order
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