ABSTRACT
From around 1930 onward Voegelin showed his intention to develop a new political science, and we have seen that he actually began such a project at that early date only to abandon it because his knowledge of political theory—“ideas”—was still too imperfect. The development of his thought over the next twenty years, then, brought him to the “breakthrough” of The New Science of Politics (1952), which set the theme of much subsequent work in these opening sentences. The grand design suggested by these lines was given its first incarnation in The New Science of Politics and in the first three volumes of Order and History to which the former book serves as something of a prolegomenon. The Gnostic eschatology of the Third Realm and the transfiguration of man into superman decisively affects modern politics both pragmatically and theoretically—in the struggle for power and in the struggle for existential representation against Gnostic misrepresentation.
