Einleitung

The Introduction to VSY 1 sheds light upon Voegelin's effort to display in "The New Science of Politics" a new foundation of political science, and detects the different criticisms raised on it by contemporary readers. Opposing many well spread tendencies of forging the object according to the method applied to its analysis, Voegelin aims at recovering the object itself of political science: "the central problem of a theory of politics" is representation. This is yet a semantically complex concept. Voegelin analysis of the many implications of the different meanings of Representation on the political level is followed by an historical phenomenology of their different realizations. Voegelin's approach in this book strongly lays upon a Platonic conception of "representation" understood as "representing an ideal model", and upon a Platonic-aristotelian conception of political science (politike episteme) as a form of true knowledge opposed to opinion (doxa).