Ellis Sandoz

A government of laws : political theory, religion, and the American founding

This treatise re-evaluates the traditional understanding of the philosophic and intellectual background of the American founding in light of an assessment of Renaissance, medieval and ancient political philosophy. It shows that the Founding Fathers were consciously seeking to create a political order that would meet the demands of human nature and society. This analysis of their sources of political and constitutional theory hopes to initiate an original approach to American thought and experience.

Philosophical Anthropology and Dostoevsky's “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor”

The political thought of Fyodor Dostoevsky grows out of his opposition to nihilism, atheistic humanism, and socialism in much the same way as the philosophy of Plato grew out of his opposition to the sophists. Indeed, the parallel of Dostoevskys thought with that of Plato is to be seen in some further aspects of this fundamental opposition. Both the Russian master of the novel and the Hellenic founder of political science confronted adversaries for whom “Man is the measure of all things” and each based his opposition on the principle “God is the Measure,” to use Platos formulation. This declaration, echoing like a thunderclap across more than twenty centuries of history, found consummate expression in the last great work of each writer: the Laws and The Brothers Karamazov.

The Philosopher's Vocation: The Voegelinian Paradigm

The philosopher is first and foremost a human being whose humanity must be served by his academic profession if it is not to be irremediably pretentious, farcical, and corrupt. This is the Voegelinian paradigm. The present essay argues that anybody who is seriously interested in understanding Eric Voegelin as he understood himself is obliged to come to grips with the issues evoked by the perspectives this statement suggests. It is further argued that several general consequences follow: (a) underlining the loving tension toward divine Reality in open existence as central; (b) abandoning doctrinal fixation of separating faith and reason as supernatural and natural, respectively; (c) discarding as egophany the arrogant pretense of autonomous reason as its originator in self-sufficient human speculators; and (d) constantly remembering that devotion to the discipline and conventions of inquiry and of society must ever defer to devotion to the truth of existence.

The National Endowment for the Humanities and Political Science After 25 Years

When it started out in 1965, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) was viewed with high expectations by the political science fraternity in the United States. Those expectations have been amply fulfilled over the past quarter of a century. NEH has become today an important source of external funding for political scientists with a wide range of interests and for political science-related programs, teaching and research. Over

Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 1730-1805

14 million were devoted to such projects during the 1980s when a crescendo came with the Bicentennial of the Constitution.