Prefazione all'edizione italiana

[Autom. eng. transl.] The introductory essay to the complete Italian edition of Order and History by Eric Voegelin proposes a clarification of the title and purpose of the work considering its genesis and theoretical structure, and by reflecting the reasons for its laborious reception. They consist largely in the fact that Voegelin, in close polemical dialogue with thinkers such as Weber, Husserl and Toynbee, rejected some of the most typical conceptions of contemporary philosophical anthropology, such as emotionalism, the epistemological shrinkage of the transcendental ego, historicism as relativizing reading of the different civilizations. At the same time, through a documentary examination of the meaning structures found in the ancient Eastern civilizations, in Israel and in classical and Hellenistic Greece, he came to define his own conception of ethics and politics as sciences that investigate the rational order of existence, and of man as an animal symbolicum which expresses its basic consciousness of co-belonging to being in different historical ways.