ABSTRACT
Professor Eric Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics excited such interest that Time magazine seized upon it for the feature article of its thirtieth anniversary issue, entitled “Journalism and Joachim’s Children.” Arnold Brecht wrote elsewhere that the “mid-century revolt against positivism, scientific method, and relativism in political science is making headway. It has now found what may easily come to be considered its leading expression in a small and difficult, but rich and important book by Voegelin.” Common sense has its philosophical representation preeminently in the eighteenth-century Scottish school of that name. Thomas Reid then defined it as that “certain degree” of rationality “which is necessary to our being subjects of law and government, capable of managing our own affairs, and answerable for our conduct towards others. Voegelin suggests that the best-known novelties of modern ideological thought have been attained at the expense of science and honesty, to a degree of human detriment that becomes monotonously murderous in practice.
