The end of the twentieth century witnessed a Confucian revival. Beginning in the 1980s, we had, among those who would speak in behalf of the Chinese, advocates like Tu Wei-ming who predicted a “third wave” of Confucianism that—with the gradual waning of Marx-Leninism's star—would provide a new ideological foundation to undergird the economic boom on Asia's Pacific Rim. In the West, the years preceding the fin de siècle produced a bumper crop of scholarly works on Confucian thought and—more to the general public's benefit and interest—numerous translations of the Lunyu, the collection of sayings which (according to tradition) contain all that we have of Confucius's teachings, as directly transmitted to his disciples. This essay reviews four of these translations, those by (in alphabetical order) Roger T. Ames and Henry Rosemont, Jr., E. Bruce and A. Taeko Brooks, Chichung Huang, and Pierre Ryckmans (writing under the pseudonym Simon Leys). All use “theAnalects” as their title, after the nineteenth-century missionary-scholar James Legge. The four are by no means the only recent translations of the book, although two are among the very best, but they represent something of the broad spectrum of styles and approaches to interpreting Confucius. I would like first, however, to describe my own approach to reading the Analects—not my interpretation of its contents but my understanding of how the text works on me as one of its many readers—by way of outlining a general framework for my review.

Just thirty years ago, R. J. Hollingdale began the introductio to one of his translations with the defensive question: “Why read a book by Nietzsche?” Now these same books are being simultaneously retranslated in several competing editions, so eager are university presses to capitalize on the academic bonanza that Friedrich Nietzsche has become. Many of Nietzsche's works were first published in print runs of some two hundred copies. We have now reached the point where there are many more books about Nietzsche than there were once copies of the original titles themselves. In the past decade alone, as a quick computer search will inform anyone, nearly three hundred volumes have been written concerning Nietzsche's work, his relation to other philosophers and cultural figures, and his effect on every aspect of our contemporary existence. Even for those seriously concerned with Nietzsche's philosophy, keeping up with this literature is a nearly impossible task. If forty days and forty nights were enough to cover the earth with water, then the flood of Nietzsche literature is perhaps nearing the thirty-eighth day. Once is almost tempted simply to wait until the waters have receded and then to see what, if anything, remains.

The relationship between philosophy, revelation, and politics is a basic intellectual theme, either at the forefront or in the background, of all political philosophy. The 1998 publication of John Paul II's encyclical Fides et Ratio occasioned much reflection on the relation of reason and revelation. Though not directly concerned with political philosophy, this encyclical provides a welcome opportunity to address many theologicalpolitical issues that have arisen in classic and contemporary political philosophy. The argument here states in straightforward terms how philosophy and theology, as understood in the Roman Catholic tradition, can be coherently related to fundamental questions that have legitimately recurred in the works of the political philosophers.

In the following, the focus will be on the German reception of the work of Eric Voegelin. Nevertheless snapshots from Austria, Italy, France, Poland and the Czech Republic will be presented

Leo Strauss's writings reveal a subtle but consistent set of accusations against the influence of Christian thinkers on political philosophy. These accusations may be summarized in three charges. First, the attempt by Aquinas and other Christian scholastics to synthesize faith and reason led later philosophers to eschew prudence in favor of a humane project to employ science to transform political life. The result was the destruction of the modus vivendi, safeguarded by classical political philosophy, between pious citizens and diffident but inwardly free philosophers. Second, the rationalization of political life implies that a universal regime is possible. But, unless all men become philosophers, this universal regime can be only a universal tyranny, ruled by means of perverted faith in the guise of a final philosophy. Third, Christian thinkers must bear ultimate responsibility for precipitating the early modern rejection of classical political philosophy. Without the Christian appropriation of Aristotle, there might never have been a Machiavelli or a Hobbes.

Within History of Political Ideas, an eight-volume series within The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, readers will discover a new representation of Eric Voegelin that immediately recalls his personal presence as teacher, tutor, and lecturer. This is not one of the more familiar representations that Voegelin and his works have inspired to date. For a small, devoted but diminishing group of personal friends and former colleagues, Voegelin was unquestionably one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century, a sage and mystic, an uncompromised academic exemplar, and a serious person who embodied the love, intellect and habits for reading, thinking, and writing that are essential to the scholarly life. For a still small but presently growing number of commentators, Voegelin stands as a paragon of the Western tradition of learning and knowing. There are other familiar representations of Voegelin: the antipositivist critic who condemned the shadowy methodologies of American political science long before it became acceptable or fashionable; the European scholar refugee who narrowly escaped the Nazi regime and who, with others, subsequently transformed American intellectual and university life; the ceaseless critic of modern gnosticism; and the marginalized academic who weathered the trials of immigration, uncertain employment, and appointments at second-tier American universities and colleges and still produced a massive body of world-class scholarship that will require several generations to absorb fully. For many if not most others today, Eric Voegelin and his works remain a great enigma: embarrassingly prodigious, thoughtful, and enduring by present standards, and yet by convention conveniently ignored and dismissed as unreadable and unteachable.

Disorder is a constant theme in John Calvin's political work. Calvin describes politics as a chaotic arena, precariously held together by contending forces. However, few who write on Calvin recognize how disorder shapes his political reflections. Calvin analyzes disorder by tracing it to unfaithfulness, the failure to acknowledge God's goodness. Created in the image of God, human beings reject divine goodness ungratefully, plunging themselves into sin. In leaders, this unfaithfulness produces pride and mistrust which create conflict within and among political communities. In groups, unfaithfulness spawns cruelty, leading violent mobs to kill the innocent and denigrate the image of God. By exploring mob and political violence, Calvin draws attention to those forces sustaining order. Natural sensibilities, conscience, and divine providence restrain the worst excesses in human beings.

These three volumes of Voegelin's History of Political Ideas— volumes three, four, and five—cover the death of Saint Thomas to Bodin and the close of the sixteenth century. One might question David Walsh's contention in his introduction to volume three, The Later Middle Ages, that no other survey “even approaches the insights Voegelin draws out of his study— (p. 5). Nevertheless, it would be impossible to name a study that both captures the sustaining theme of medieval civilization, which Voegelin names the sacrum imperium, and identifies the philosophic forces leading to its decline and the rise of modernity.

Voegelin wrote the History of Political Ideas with the clear intent that it would become his entry ticket into the American political science profession. The posthumous publication of the eight volumes explains only partly why he never succeeded in becoming a recognized figure in the discipline. After all, he published from 1940 onwards a series of articles that were chapters of the History. His first American book, The New Science of Politics (1952), and, beginning in 1956, the volumes of Order and History grew also out of the massive work of the History and continued some of the themes of its rigorous inquiry into the origins of the meaning narratives of Western civilization. Though he arrived in the United States in 1938 as a refugee from Nazi-annexed Austria, unlike most other refugee social scientists he was already familiar with American intellectual and academic life. He had spent the years from 1924 to 1926 as a Rockefeller scholar in New York and Wisconsin and published his first book in 1928 in Tübingen (Germany) on American philosophical and cultural developments from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Still, neither the earlier American years nor the obvious need for him to establish his professional credentials in the new environment made him adjust the emerging scope and outline for the project of the History.