Eric Voegelin's Dialogue with the Postmoderns: Searching for
Foundations. Edited by Peter A. Petrakis and Cecil L. Eubanks.
Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004. 200p. $37.50.
This book is a collection of five essays placed between an
introduction and an epilogue that are helpful in pulling such an eclectic
group together. The epilogue includes material not covered in the essays
that points the reader to possible ways in which the Voegelin-postmodern
connection can be developed. An index is helpful in locating the various
postmodern thinkers and ideas spread throughout the essays. The
editors' intent is to offer an invitation to scholars interested in
either Eric Voegelin or postmodernism to explore the common ground shared
by a major twentieth-century political theorist and a fashionable school
of thought. The implication is that Voegelin's work will be more
widely considered if postmoderns see its merits, and likewise,
postmodernism will benefit from Voegelin's rejection of modernity
without abandoning ethical foundations. The primary postmodern thinkers
discussed in the essays include Paul Ricoeur, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel
Levinas, Edmund Husserl, and Jan Patočka.