Eric Voegelin (1901-1985)

In the first half of the twentieth century, the attention paid by Lamprecht, Spengler, Toynbee and Jaspers to the plurality of civilizations allowed the narrow horizon of Western history to be broken through. The related theory of civilizational cycles led to a crisis of the concept of human history, ultimately traceable to Augustine's historia sacra. In Order and History Eric Voegelin confronted these challenges and proposed a new solution: the theory of the forms of the experience of order and their symbolic expressions. The essay aims at a concise but comprehensive reconstruction of this theory. At its origin lies a comparison with some theories of Nietzsche, Husserl and Weber. Its outcome is an ultimately metaphysical perspective, which allows us to compare civilizations distant not only in space but also in time, since in the forms of experience we find those features that unite, or distinguish, some civilizations from others.