Revolt against modernity: Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin and the search for a post-liberal order

In the 1950s a conservative intellectual movement emerged in the United States complete with a sense of continuity with past conservatives (provided mainly by Russell Kirk's very influential book, The Conservative Mind) and with a heightened fear of the unprecedented danger posed by the hegemony of liberals and liberal ideals. Two European emigres, both refugees from Hitler's Europe, became the philosophers for this movement. Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss brought to the American right the concerns and fears of continental philosophers. As a result they helped place the issues of Anglo-American conservatives in a wider context--the so-called "crisis of the West."In this dissertation I examine the reaction and the response of Voegelin and Strauss to the philosophical problems of "modernity." More particularly I ask what issues, attitudes, beliefs, and objectives constituted "modernity" for these two thinkers and on what grounds did they consider these threatening to order in a "liberal" America. Moreover, in this dissertation I chart their response to what they considered the failure of the modern project. Finally, I examine their work in the context of a larger debate in America about the problems of "liberalism."By "modernity" Strauss and Voegelin meant the process by which human designs became unconnected from a normative order. All non-human paradigms of order became suspect, thereby elevating humans to the status of creators. Consequently, the traditional pursuit of philosophy--understood as the quest for universal and timeless truths--lost influence in a universe increasingly understood as unhinged from a normative order. Strauss and Voegelin, in their very different ways, considered the reawakening of the philosophical quest as the best hope for western civilization. The search for transhuman standards has the benefit of casting into doubt the dreams of ideologues who claim apodictic knowledge even as it works against those who emphasize the human freedom to create whatever order people desire. For Strauss and Voegelin, philosophy was central to long-term social and political order.