The argument of the book is that Voegelin moved beyond a legal approach to political realities (within which he had been extensively schooled) to a direct encounter and analysis of the mass political movements of the 1930s and of the language by which they expressed themselves. For readers familiar with his later work, and especially for readers familiar onlywith his later work, the insights reached by Voegelin in, say, 1939, will have become familiar starting points for further reflection. To understand the origin of that achievement is not simply to indulge in nostalgic antiquarianism inasmuch as the achievement was actualized in the face of the resistance thrown up, inevitably, by intellectual conventions as well as by the uncongenial political realities of the day.

In recent years the interest of scholars, particularly young German scholars, has turned towards Voegelin’s early writings.² This does not mean there is a consensus regarding the importance of, for instance, Max Weber or Othmar Spann, Hans Kelsen or Carl Schmitt, on Voegelin’s understanding of contemporary issues or how they are to be studied. There is, however, widespread agreement that The Political Religions  (1938) was both the result of his quest during the 1920s and 1930s and that it marks the closing of a chapter or phase of his work, a closing made more poignant by his forced emigration to America the same year it was published. For this reason, I organized the book around the major steps Voegelin took between 1922 and 1938, many of which were marked by a significant publication or occasionally an extensive piece of work that remained unpublished at the time.

A final preliminary consideration can be introduced by a letter Thomas Mann wrote to Voegelin in response to The Political Religions. The book, he said, was a “stimulating work” that brings together a lot of material in a concise way. The disadvantage of this approach, however, was that Voegelin’s “objectivity” was likely to give a positive accent to the National Socialist problem or even to be mistaken for an apology for it. He lamented Voegelin’s lack of “moral resistance” and expressed his preference for a stronger ethical stance as, for example Hermann Rauschning provided in The Revolution of Nihilism.³ In the preface to the second edition of The Political Religions, Voegelin explained why science is not in the business of supplying moral denunciations. But neither did it aspire to being “value-neutral” or “value-free” description, along the lines of a familiar (but simplified) version of Max Weber’s reflections on method.