This is an outline of Order and History vol 2: The World of the Polis by Eric Voegelin, published in 1957.
The bold headings are from the Table of Contents.
Your comments and corrections are always welcome: please e-mail Bill McClain.
Return to the Eric Voegelin Study Page.
Multiple and parallel leaps in being
The generic-unique nature of Man
Concrete societies and mankind
Philosophy of history: the source of the difficulties
Mysteries and problems
The authoritative structure of history
The ranking of authorities
The ancients and the leaps in being
Israelite and Hellenic theology of history
Panaetius and Poseidonius
Truth of the present and untruth of the past
Limitations of the Israelite and pagan positions
St. Paul
Stages of the spiritual process toward the truth of existence
Coexistence of truth and untruth
The defect of the Pauline interpretation of history
The problem of Jewish existence
The pagan policy of tolerance
The moderns and the leaps in being
Bossuet and the Augustinian tradition
Voltaire
Parallel profane histories: Spengler and Toynbee
The expansion of sacred history: Hegel
Parallel sacred histories: Jaspers and Toynbee
Philosophy of history as a western symbolism
Clement of Alexandria
1. Preliminary Questions
The delimitation of Greek order
Polis and philosophy
Cretan, Achaean and Hellenic societies
Minoan, Mycenaean, and Hellenic civilizations
The range of Greek order and the memory of the classic period
2. The Hellenic Consciousness of History
1. General Characteristics
The content of the Hellenic memory and the historical process
The growth of historical consciousness
2. Herodotus
The preservation of traditions
The case of the Trojan war
The common sense psychology of the Asiatic frontier
The destruction of the myth
The misunderstanding of Homer
3. Thucydides
The Athenian rationalism of power
The reconstruction of Greek history
4. Plato
Ordering memory
The return to the cave of Zeus
The transfer of the omphalos from Crete to Delphi
5. Conclusions
Spatial and temporal extension of the classic memory
The motif of power organization
The continuum of Greek history
The construction of the historical course
Its motive
The term history
The symbol of the course
Town culture as the basis of civilizations
The Aegean town areas and the non-urban invaders
1. The Cretan Society
History
Minoan symbols of order
The absence of imperial institutions
2. The Achaean Society
History
The Linear B tablets
The decline of the early civilizations
The migrations
The formation of an Aegean-wide society
1. Homeric Questions
F.A. Wolf
Homeric question and pentateuchal criticism
The date of the epics
The poet's break with the cosmological myth
The music authority--Homer, Pindar, Hesiod
Blindness and seeing, remembrance and oblivion
Immortality through song
The creation of the past through mnemosynic consciousness
2. Order and Disorder
1. The Constitutional Order of the Achaean Kingdoms
Size
Federal organization for war
Constitutional procedure
Agamemnon's dream
Procedure in council, in assembly
Jovian order and royal rule
2. The Wrath of Achilles
The face
The obsession with death
The exhortation of Phoenix
The dialectics of guilt and restoration
The pathology of Achilles
Cholos and anxiety
The battle of the ships
The death of Patroclus
The acceptance of life
3. The Eros of Paris and Helen
The combat
The scene on the Scaean gate
The corruption of order
Dream and embrace
The assembly of the gods
4. The Odyssey on Disorder
The prologue
The disorder in Ithaca
5. The Aetiology of Disorder
The sources of evil
Homer's anthropology
Human and divine action
Agamemnon's apology
Blindness and seeing
Divine order and human disorder
The decline of Mycenaean civilization
Individual action and the pattern of history
1. Synoecism and Gentilitian Structure
The case of Athens
2. The Polis
Decline of aristocratic order
The people and the tyranny
Aristotle on the Athenian prostasia
3. Sympoliteia
The case of Olynthus
4. The Failure of the Leagues
Clan leagues
Amphictyonic leagues
The Spartan and Athenian leagues
The league of Corinth
1. From Myth to Metaphysics
Hesiod's transitional form
Aristotle on theological philosophies
Motivating experiences
The poet and his truth
Truth and falsehood
Catharsis through truth and memory
2. The Theogony
The origin of order
The titanomachia and the evolution of Zeus
Theogonic speculation
The self-generating origin
Mythopoetic freedom
3. The Works and Days
Invocation and exhortation
Paraenetic form
Oriental affinities
The great and the humble
The exhortation to Perses
The two Erides, Dike
The virtue of work
Truth and admonition
4. The Fables
Paradise
Contents and paradigmatic purpose
The fable of Pandora
5. The Ages of the World
Contents of the logos
Anthropogonic and epic myth
The metal ages
Comparison with a Chinese myth of five ages
6. The Apocalypse
Delimitation and structure
Experience and form
The anxiety of spiritual annihilation
Aidos and Nemesis
The fable for princes
Hybris
Collective suffering and reward
The unjust and the just cities
Parallels from the prophets
Historical reality as apocalyptic nightmare
The nightmare and true reality
1. The Emergence of Philosophy
Area and carriers of Hellenic civilization
Freedom from imperial institutions
The style of intellectual adventure: Homer, Hesiod, and the Milesians
The schools of Pythagoras and Parmenides
The form of Hellenic civilization
Comparison with Israel
The individual breaks with the myth
2. Xenophanes' Attack on the Myth
1. The Seemliness of Symbols
The attacks on Homer and Hesiod
The classification of symbolic forms
Plato's types of theology
Truth and lie of the soul
2. Anthropomorphism
A fallacious charge in retrospect
Critique of Tylor's theory
3. The Universality of the Divine
The one god v. the parochialism of the myth
Universality of the divine and monotheism
4. The Divinity of the One
Aristotle's recognition of the problem
Anaximander
The Xenophantic glance at the heaven
1. The Sophia of Xenophanes
The attack on the Olympiadic excellences
The discovery of transcendence as a source of authority
Universal appeal and limitation to the polis
2. The Savage Valor of Tyrtaeus
The arete of the polis v. the Homeric Excellences
The elegiac form
Existence v. justice
The lyricism of existence
Immortality through the memory of the polis
The discovery of the aretai and its completion through Plato
Plato on the valor of Tyrtaeus
3. The Eunomia of Solon
Disorder of the polis and the order of dike
Doxa as the cause of crisis
The Homeric excellences as doxa in the polis
Arete as faith in the unseen measure
Eunomia of the soul and the polis
The type of the lawgiver
Solon and Plato
4. "But I say unto you..."
The traditional order and resistance of the soul
Sappho
The authority of eros
Subjectivity of opinion v. objectivity of the erotic soul
The common doxa and the solitude of truth
1. The Way
The prologue of Parmenides' poem
The transport
The knowing man and the renowned way
Divinity and immortality of the soul
Plato on the soul as daemon
2. The Truth of Being
The vision
Perception through nous and analysis through logos
Being and not-being
The exclamatory Is!
The subject of propositions concerning transcendent being
Propositions not transferable to immanent being
The predicates of transcendent being
The autonomy of the logos
The hieratic compactness of truth and being
3. Doxa
The world and the way
Doxa as cosmology, as not-being
The likely doxa of Parmenides and the likely myth of Plato
The ontological gap between doxa and aletheia
The Platonic myth as solution
4. The Rivalry between the Ways of Truth
The truth of the logos and the truth of revelation
From Parmenides to Heraclitus
The dimensions of the soul
1. The Pythagorean Destiny of the Soul
The psyche of Homer, of Empedocles
Metempsychosis
2. The Exploration of the Soul
Ethos as daemon
The types of divine and human wisdom
Much-knowing and understanding
The philosopher
Plato's clarification of the term
The life of the soul: depth, increase through exploration
Love, hope and faith
3. The Philosophy of Order
The logos and its communication
The sleepwalkers
Reconstruction of Heraclitean concepts: xynon; logos; cosmos; common world and private worlds; the common, the nous, and the nomos; strife and war
The cycle; the way; the kingdom of the playing child
Flux
Passion of existence
The war of life and the peace of the logos
The many, the few, and the one
4. Conclusions
The challenge to the order of the polis
The new authority
The philosopher-king as the link between spirit and power
1. The Truth of Tragedy
The awakening of Athens
Aristophanes and Aristotle on tragedy
The truth of action
2. The Meaning of Action
The Suppliants of Aeschylus
The experimental situation
Conflicts of Themis
Descent into the depth of the soul
The polis as the Heraclitean xynon
Peitho
The decision for dike
The Aeschylean theory of action
3. Tragedy and History
The order of dike and the disorder of the world
The Prometheus
The theomorphic dramatis personae
The truth of being and daemonic existence
Titanomachia and dike
Force in order
The problem in the Oresteia
Prometheus
Philanthropia
Wisdom v. self-reliance
Defiance and inventiveness
The spiritual disease
The forces of progress
Excess of pity and revolt against god
The interplay of Jovian and Promethean forces
The soul as the hero of the Prometheus
The birth of history from tragedy
Comparison with the meaning of history in China and Israel
Aeschylean tragedy and Platonic myth
4. The End of Tragedy
The disintegration of Athens
Its reflection in the world of Euripides
1. The Education of Athens
The sophistic personnel
The achievement
Education for political life
Curriculum
Prodicus
The art of politics
Protagoras
Law and order
The inventory of problems
Plato and the sophists
The propositions on God
Gorgias' On Being
The type of enlightened philosophizing
Continuity from the sophists to Plato
2. Plato on the Sophists. Hippias
Plato as a source
The Hippias anecdote
Autarky
Hippias
Truth about man through comparative study
The Hippias scene in Plato's Protagoras
Physis and nomos
The community of encyclopedic intellectuals
The essence of sophistic ideas
3. Plato's Protagoras
The position of Protagoras
The myth of Prometheus
Relation to Aeschylus
The sophist as the teacher of man
The Socratic attack
The debate on virtue
The art of measurement
The transfer of the Prometheus symbol from Protagoras to Socrates
4. The Fragments of Primary Sources
1. From Parmenides to Protagoras
The correlation of nous-logos and being
The immanentization of nous-logos
Anaxagoras; Protagoras
The immanentization of being: Zeno; the dialectics of being
The dissoi logoi
Anaxagoras' theory of sense perception
The Protagorean homo-mensura
2. Democritus
Immanentization of being: the atoms and the void
The element of Heraclitean depth
Toward the recognition of essence
Essentials of the psyche: eudaimonia
Euthymia
Knowledge and discipline
Joy and pleasure
Balance and multifariousness
Health and disease
Alcmeon
From Democritus to Plato and Aristotle
3. Nomos and Physis
Nomos: Pindar; Heraclitus; six meanings of nomos
The conservative skepticism of Protagoras
Physis: Pindar; Protagoras
Physis as essence: Xenophanes; Empedocles; Anaxagoras
The pair nomos-physis: the Hippocratic Airs, Waters, Places; Herodotus
4. Antiphon
The fragments On Truth
Physis, nomos, and the sympheron
Justice
The antithetical method
The corruption of Athens as a motive
The quality of late sophistic debate
5. Critias
The Sisyphus fragment
Critias' pseudos logos and Plato's pseudos mythos
6. Equality, Inequality, Harmony
Disintegration and search for substance
A new climate of experience: Prodicus, Lycophron, Alcidamas
The Pseudo-Antiphonic Homonoia
The Anonymus Iamblichi
7. Hippodamus and Phaleas
The great wars
Decline of civilization
Dramatic unity of mankind
1. Herodotus
Life and work
The program
The Hypothesis
The balancing of accounts
Anaximander and Heraclitus
The turning of the wheel
The power drive
Necessity and disaster
Historiographic method
The use of speeches
The expedition against Hellas
The great debate
The motives of action
Breakdown of the Heraclitean xynon
The dream of world dominion
The form of government
The speeches for and against the three forms
The cycle of antilogies and the cycle of history
Decision through action
2. The Old Oligarch
The Pseudo-Xenophontic Constitution of Athens
The polis a power unit
The change of ethos as the history of the polis
The merits of the democratic constitution
The merits of sea power
The game of power
Periclean democracy and imperialism
Types of man and types of order
3. Thucydides
1. The Syngraphe
The creation of the Peloponnesian War as a unit in history
2. The Method
The kinesis
Methodological attack on Herodotus
The influence of the Hippocratic treatises
Categories: cause, principle, method, eidos, thing-in-itself, disturbance, disease
Different methodological situations in medicine and politics
Empiricism of the craftsman and science
Thucydides' science of disorder and Plato's science of order
3. The Theory
The splendor of empire and the breakdown of ethos
Progress and enterprise v. connivance and backwardness
Necessity and justice
The Aeschylean dike of action
Attempted justification and despair
Theoretical vacillations
Kinesis and the end of tragedy
Thucydides and Machiavelli
4. The Form
The speeches as part and as interpretations of reality
Government by persuasion as condition of the form
The Hellenic interplay between types of life and art
Theory as a heightening of types in reality
The passing of the paradigms from the poets to the historians and philosophers
5. Formulations
The position of the protagonists
The pathos of Athens
The horror of atrocities
The Melian dialogue