ABSTRACT
Eric Voegelin provided some crucial elements for us to at least pose these questions in a meaningful way. He did so outside the still-hegemonic Durkhemian framework for thinking about pathologies. He belongs to a group of thinkers who lived through both World Wars. His work can certainly be seen as a reflective attempt to understand the wars, and the related political ideologies and mass movements. To concretize what Voegelin meant here it is perhaps useful to consider one particular aspect of Voegelin's position, namely his appreciation of both Thucydides and Plato. Voegelin saw it differently: Thucydides' work was a concentrated effort to diagnose the pathologies of his age. Thucydides sees the Peloponnesian war as part of a kinesis hitting the Hellenic world. But kinesis is more than the war itself; it is a movement, a disturbance which affects all aspects of human life. Voegelin's focus on Antiquity was therefore an inquiry into the ordering and disordering structures of the present.
