Dan's Reviews > The World of the Polis

The World of the Polis, Volume 2 of this series of five, is a very well done analysis of the thinking and circumstances in Greece from Homer to Plato. Vogelin sees the unfolding of historical process as explorations for better civil order, and he makes the case. I read it mainly for the history. Voegelin does get into the weeds of philosophy for a few dozen pages that interested me not at all, but those are easily skimmed.

You get a taste of Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides (and others), and you may thereby be tempted to try those three if you haven't already. Touched on are the Minoans, Mycenaeans, the Bronze Age collapse, the Trojan War, the Persian War, and the Peloponnesian Wars.

His first volume, Israel and Revelation, also was excellent. The third volume is Plato and Aristotle. Archiv.org has all volumes and much else by Voegelin for free.

From his Wikipedia entry: "According to Ellis Sandoz, Voegelin may well be America's leading philosopher, and is rightly compared with the premier minds of our century and, perhaps, of the millennia. Thomas Altizer has said that Order and History 'may someday be perceived as the most important work of Old Testament scholarship ever written in the United States,' adding that it is noteworthy that it was written by a political scientist and philosopher."