Steven Johnson believes in progress— not the “progress” promised by shallow politicians offering quick fixes through “hope and change,” military surges, or fast-tracked powerful new legislation, but rather progress in the sense that human existence has been getting better bit-by-bit in slow, steady increments “since at least the dawn of industrialization.” (xxii) Progress defined, that is, to some extent as Burke, Hegel, and others have used it. His book Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age makes the case for his belief, arguing that the future of this progress—and indeed of all human progress of any kind whatsoever—is bound up in personal connections (facilitated by technology) rather than in the traditional categories that have locked us in stagnant and moribund patterns.

During the past four decades, Eric Voegelin has received ever wider acknowledgement as one of the greatest political thinkers of the twentieth century. . . . Access to Voegelin’s oeuvre is also complicated by two remarkable “breaks” in his program and a number of less dramatic shifts in emphasis over the course of his career. The first of the breaks occurred in the early 1950s when Voegelin abandoned the 4,000 page manuscript for his History of Political Ideas after “it dawned on [him] that a conception of a history of ideas was an ideological deformation of reality.”8 A new program, outlined in The New Science of Politics and carried halfway to completion in the first three volumes of Order and History, was in turn abandoned.9 . . . Thus we are left with a body of work that is not only intrinsically difficult but also internally divided. Since Voegelin was more inclined to drive his explorations forward than to detail precisely what could or could not be salvaged from earlier works, those who wish to invoke his authority are, in my view, obliged to do this themselves. . . . This situation has served as a stimulus for secondary interpretations, as most of Voegelin’s admirers recognize, if only implicitly, that they cannot legitimately attribute views to him while treating his writings as an undifferentiated, seamless whole.

Allen Tate’s contribution to I’ll Take My Stand poses a challenge. He concludes his “Remarks on Southern Religion” by stating that the way the Southerner can “take hold of his tradition” is by violence. In a group of essays that has eschewed a direct, political solution to the damaging cultural effects of industrialism, Tate challenges his confederates to be activists. He writes at the end of his essay: “Since he cannot bore from within, he has left the sole alternative of boring from without. This method is political, active, and, in the nature of the case, violent and revolutionary.”1 How are we to interpret Tate’s surprising conclusion?

In 1971, Notre Dame University held a conference to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Voegelin’s Walgren Lectures given at the University of Chicago and published the following year as The New Science of Politics. The purpose of the conference was both to pay tribute to Voegelin’s contribution to the restoration of political science and to discuss the key theoretical and methodological issues confronting political science twenty years after the publication of The New Science of Politics. Voegelin attended all the presentations by other scholars and then gave the final lecture. His address responded to a request by the planners of the conference for Voegelin to reflect on the state of political science and his own work as it had evolved over the intervening twenty years.

John Courtney Murray is remembered today primarily for the essays gathered in We Hold These Truths exploring the nature of the American experiment in self-government and religious pluralism, its compatibility with Catholicism, and contemporary America’s quest for a public philosophy.1 As important as these essays have proven to be, however they do not reflect the primary focus of Murray’s work. As George Weigel has suggested, Murray’s life’s work is best seen as a series of “concentric circles,” the innermost of which concerned Catholic teaching on Church-state relations and the nature and scope of religious freedom.

Michael Polanyi regarded his contribution to the theory of knowledge as “primarily an enquiry into the nature and justification of scientific knowledge.”1 Nevertheless, he was aware that what he established in this area “leads on to a wide range of questions outside science.”2 This was not merely a possibility which he acknowledged, but an insight into the nature of his epistemology which he pursued in many directions and with a passion. Polanyi’s extra-scientific concerns drew him in many directions. He wrote about politics and economics, about myth and art, about psychology and metaphor, to name but a few. He also wrote about theology and worship...