Sir John Fortescue
Securing Liberty Through Law –Part 1

by Ellis Sandoz

Government both Political and Royal

The greatest English political thinker of the fifteenth century, Sir John Fortescue (ca. 1394-ca. 1477), served as a member of Parliament in eight Parliaments, as chief justice of King's Bench for nearly two decades, and as Lord Chancellor of England to Henry VI, the last of the Lancastrian kings.

He is chiefly known for the in­structional dialogue he composed for the young heir apparent to the throne, Prince Edward, titled In Praise of the Laws of England.¹

The fame attaching to that work arises mainly from its prominence in the dispute two centuries later over the nature of the English monarchy and constitution conducted between the first Stuart kings (James I and Charles I) and Sir Edward Coke, John Selden, and Parliament leading up to the Petition of Right (1628) and the subsequent civil war.

A Pattern of Timeless Moments
T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets –Part 4

by Glenn Hughes

Glenn Hughes is Professor of Philosophy at St. Mary’s University, San Antonio. The present essay, "A Pattern of Timeless Moments," is taken from his latest book, A More Beautiful Question. This excerpt appears with permission and is presented here in four parts.

Transcending Christian Symbolism

Beyond their Christian dimension of symbolization, the poems of the Quartets draw explicitly from Buddhist, Hindu, and Platonic or Neoplatonist traditions and language, and their evocations of mystical and meditative ex­periences are clearly intended to suggest a global range of references.

What seems obvious is that Eliot wanted to speak in the Quartets to the universal experience of human existence as situated in the in-between of time and timeless meaning and knew that he could do so only through a poetic language that both avoided a deliberately liturgical use of Christian language and employed a universal range of symbolic articulations of human-divine encounter.

He is writing of every person's existence and participation in his­tory. Therefore he must establish the poem on the basis of experiences rec­ognizable to any open mind and then show, through the employment and correlation of symbols and phrases from a multitude of religious traditions, how these speak to and illuminate such experiences.

Richard Rorty and the Core of Progressivism

  by  Scott Segrest

Scott Segrest is Instructor in Political Philosophy at  University of Alaska, Anchorage. He is the author of America and the Political Philosophy of Common Sense, University of Missouri Press, excerpts from which have appeared here at VoegelinView. He is also an editor at VoegelinView.This essay appears with permission.

The Religious Character of American Progressivism

The analysis of progressivism given by Eric Voegelin six decades ago in his New Science of Politics remains illuminating even today.  The animating center of progressivism, he said, is the Christian idea of history gutted of spiritual substance and turned from its original destination.

The original idea, classically articulated by St. Augustine, was that the human history that really counts–the history of those who love and follow God–is a pilgrim’s progress to a perfect city, a journey with no map and no guide but God himself to a mysterious place not of this world. 

The great modern ideological formations, Voegelin said –progressivism, utopianism, and revolutionary activism–are all moved by a similar vision, but God has dropped out of the picture, and the process has become a quest for political perfection in this world, to be achieved not by God’s but human hands. 

from The Collected Works

Montesquieu
The Elements of Political Liberty

The Climate in 18th Century England and France

The French revolt paralleling Hume's critique of reason came through Montesquieu [Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu–ed] (1689-1755).

Again a new set of problems was opened that could not be covered by the Myth of Reason or the contract theory of government. But here the parallel ends, for the approach of Montesquieu differs as widely from that of Hume as the French political situation differed from the English.

Hume was the philosopher of a settled society that had passed through a revolution. A splenetic humor is creeping up, tempered in Hume by a natural complacency; but through the veneer of his conformism and skepticism one can sense other possibilities: the century of Hume is the century of Beckford and his Vathek.

The France of Montesquieu is full of unrest presaging a revolution; the expectancy of movement, the smell of unknown horizons, is as characteristic of Montesquieu as a certain musty smell of stagnation is peculiar to Hume.

Hunting the Devils

Simone Weil and Eric Voegelin–Two Paths to the Same Truth–Part 2

by Sylvie Courtine-Denamy 

Sylvie Courtine-Denamy is the author of books on Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil, among them being Three Women in Dark Times: Edith Stein, Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil and her most recent book, Simone Weil. La Quête de racines célestes . She is also a translator of philosophical works into French, including those of Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin. This essay appears here in three parts.

The Cure for Uprootedness

The disease of uprootedness is in fact, for Weil, a spiritual one. “We suffer from a lack of balance, due to a purely material development of technical science. This lack of balance can only be remedied by a spiritual development in the same sphere, that is, in the sphere of work.”³³

This imbalance is, moreover, the result of our failure to understand the “Needs of the Soul,” which is the title of the opening chapter of The Need for Roots. For Weil, we may discover what these needs are by analogy with the needs of our bodies and they, too, must be satisfied in order that the soul should not die.

These needs are “sacred” inasmuch as they are those of a human being. To each of these needs corresponds an obligation which testifies indirectly to the bond which unites man “with a reality.”³⁴