History of Political Ideas, Vol. 2: The Middle Ages to Aquinas. Eric Voegelin , Peter von Sivers , Ellis Sandoz

1999 ◽  
Vol 79 (2) ◽  
pp. 291-292
Author(s):  
Thomas Heilke
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
History Of ◽  
Eric Voegelin ◽  
The Middle Ages

scholarly journals Eric Voegelin's History of political ideas. The bones of contention of the political animal

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-112
Author(s):  
Mendo Castro-Henriques
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Modern Human ◽  
End Of History ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Eric Voegelin ◽  
Christian Understanding ◽  
First World

The History of Political Ideas by the German-American philosopher Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) is a monumental work of around 2,600 pages. It remained unpublished during his lifetime, and it came to light through the American edition (1997-1999) and the now completed Portuguese edition (2012-2018). Being the author of the first world edition of an abridged version of the History of Political Ideas ; the translator of the first three volumes of the 2012-2018 Portuguese edition; and the author of The civil philosophy of Eric Voegelin (my 1990 Ph. D diss.) I consider that the History of Political Ideas challenges the present climate of opinion: it subverts the dominant corrosive forces of moral relativism, intolerant neo-positivism, end-of-history obsessions, postmodernist deconstructions, agnosticism, nihilism, new age religions, and the all-pervasive ideology of money. Eric Voegelin achieves all this leading his readers from Antiquity to Modern Age. His monumental work begins with the “spiritual disintegration” of the Greek world, after the peak of Plato and Aristotle, a disintegration that ushered a long process of transition in the self-understanding of man in the Mediterranean world. The series goes through Middle Ages , R enaissance and Reformation as Voegelin analyzes the collapse of imperial Christianity, which led to the rise of autonomous reason and sectarian revolts that reached full development in later centuries. A new form of modern human consciousness replaced the Christian understanding of a divinely created closed cosmos. The collection ends - in a suspensive way - with “The Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man” focused on thinkers such as Comte, Bakunine and Marx; although they experienced true epiphanies, they become self-obsessed to the detriment of the world to which they refer. Such “Apocalypse of Man” must now be challenged, albeit with methodologies and hermeneutic principles other than those that Voegelin himself abandoned some decades ago.

BARTOLUS OF SASSOFERRATO AND FREE CITIES

2000 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 65-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Magnus Ryan
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Full Scale ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Scale Analysis ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
History Of ◽  
Free People ◽  
The Middle Ages

Abstract‘Well are ye called the Free People.' – BagheeraBARTOLUS of Sassoferrato (1314–1357) is as famous to legal historians and specialists in the history of political ideas as he is unkown outside those areas of research. His obscurity is owed not to his mind but to his genre: the commentary on Justinian'sCorpus Iuris Civilis, and the occasional monograph of more systematic yet still legalistic lineaments. Of the thousands of lawyers who studied, taught and applied Roman law from its rediscovery in the late eleventh century to the end of the middle ages, there are perhaps three or four who command universal respect, some of whom we shall encounter in what follows. Only Bartolus radiates the nimbus of genius. In the realm of political ideas, he has – perversely, perhaps – best been served by Anglophone historiography, beginning with the classic study published in 1913 by C.N.S. Woolf, continuing by way of Walter Ullmann's numerous articles and most recently subjected to a full-scale analysis by Joseph Canning in his study of the ideas of Bartolus' most famous pupil, Baldus de Ubaldis (d. 1400).

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