This book is a collection of five essays placed between an introduction and an epilogue that are helpful in pulling such an eclectic group together. The epilogue includes material not covered in the essays that points the reader to possible ways in which the Voegelin-postmodern connection can be developed. An index is helpful in locating the various postmodern thinkers and ideas spread throughout the essays. The editors' intent is to offer an invitation to scholars interested in either Eric Voegelin or postmodernism to explore the common ground shared by a major twentieth-century political theorist and a fashionable school of thought. The implication is that Voegelin's work will be more widely considered if postmoderns see its merits, and likewise, postmodernism will benefit from Voegelin's rejection of modernity without abandoning ethical foundations. The primary postmodern thinkers discussed in the essays include Paul Ricoeur, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, Edmund Husserl, and Jan Patočka.

The title is somewhat misleading because Voegelin did not engage in a dialogue with the postmoderns. He paid some attention to their work and occasionally commented on it. The dialogue, then, is not so much between Voegelin and the postmoderns as it is between contemporary scholars who recognize that the contributions of Voegelin and the postmoderns can be, in some ways, synthesized to provide insights into the postmodern world. Consequently, the book is a rare combination of scholarship on Voegelin's political theory and postmodernism. The nexus is not self-evident and requires some thought. Voegelin was not a postmodernist in the sense that the term is commonly used. He was, rather, a critic of much of what passes for postmodernism. For example, in Science, Politics, and Gnosticism (1968), he classifies Martin Heidegger as a “gnostic” along with Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. He comments that “Heidegger's speculation occupies a significant place in the history of Western Gnosticism” (p. 33). This comment is significant because Voegelin's central criticism of modernity is its rejection of transcendent reality, what he sometimes referred to as “the murder of God.” Heidegger is part of the gnostic movement that destroys what Voegelin wants to restore: the balance of consciousness that embraces transcendence without falling into reified notions of universality. This is not to say that Voegelin's work does not share common ground with aspects of postmodernism but that such commonality has to be carefully qualified.

There is also the question of why a dialogue between Voegelin and the postmoderns is desirable. Voegelin was firm about the conditions for rational discussion (see his essays “On Readiness to Rational Discussion” and “On Debate and Existence”), and they included openness to the full range of human experience. He was critical of any ideology that was existentially closed to transcendent reality. Few postmoderns share Voegelin's willingness to search for historical experiences with transcendence. For the dialogue to be fruitful, one side or both have to give ground. Voegelin was not inclined to move in a postmodern direction, but the book is evidence that at least some Voegelinians are willing to push the two schools of thought closer together.

So how do the authors make the connection between Voegelin and postmodernism? The basis for their argument is that both reject metaphysical foundations. Once this ground is established, the authors search for ethical limits that are acceptable to Voegelinians and postmoderns. Peter Petrakis notes that the book's objective is to establish “moral and political foundations without resorting to foundationalism or metaphysical thinking” (p. 23). He believes that Voegelin and Ricoeur have accomplished this objective in part by relying on myths, symbols, and narratives to ground politics and ethics experientially. The danger of metaphysical thinking is that it leads to ideological mass movements and the horrors of twentieth-century totalitarianism. The objective is to be concrete, that is, to ground thinking on experience and to recognize that the symbolic articulation of experience is not itself what is real.

Murray Jardine's essay considers Voegelin a philosopher of speech and, like Petrakis, Jardine argues that ethical foundations can be constructed and foundationalism avoided if, like Voegelin, philosophers ground their work in experience and reject literalism. Because the modern world is so visually oriented, it makes sense that oral traditions help to avoid the problems that accompany reified symbols. Oral traditions require repeated telling of stories of experiences of order that are less prone to derailment; the focus is on the engendering experience, not the symbols that articulate the experience. Literate societies are prone to “take symbols of transcendent experience ‘literally,’ as referring to objects in three-dimensional space, and thus misunderstand them” (p. 77). The preservation of experiences of order has been plagued by ideological derailments that Jardine believes would be less common if traditions/experiences were orally preserved. Doing so avoids the subjectivism of modernity and restores ethical limits on human action without derailing into foundationalism.

Jeffrey A. Bell argues that Deleuze's critique of traditional metaphysics is superior to Voegelin's because it avoids foundational metaphysics where Voegelin does not. Deleuze avoids subjectivism because he accepts the existence of a fundamental reality. Bell attempts to pull Voegelinians in a more postmodern direction. The argument, however, is abstract and ahistorical. Its intellectual texture is precisely akin to the very metaphysics that Bell aims to refute. One wonders what the experiential basis for the argument is. There are no historical or political references that serve as illustrations for the argument. Voegelin is criticized by Bell because he admits to the discovery of a hierarchy of being that includes transcendence. The argument comes across as ideological opposition to the very notion of transcendence. His “theory at the edge of chaos” provides little theoretical substance from which one can conceive of a historical order.

William Simmons's essay draws on the work of Aristotle to clarify what Voegelin means by “the ontology of ethics” and what Levinas means by “the Other.” Voegelin reaffirms Aristotle's notion that ethics is experiential and not abstract; we know the good or justice by participating in experiences of order, not by affirming abstract principles. Both Voegelin and Levinas describe a “route to transcendence” that requires a response to something that is and is not beyond the individual. Voegelin tends to use the language “attunement to the divine ground of being” to refer to man's movement toward the attraction of grace or helkein. In either case, the response requires an ethical act that subordinates the will to something higher that has a transcendent quality. Simmons's argument is ethically abstract. Take for instance his quotation from Adriaan Peperzak: “‘My responsibility for you extends itself necessarily to all human others; it implies my responsibility for social justice and worldwide peace’” (p. 140). The connection between the transcendent and concrete historical life needs to be made for political theory to avoid ahistorical abstraction, but claiming that individuals are responsible to all humans, rather than to those they actually confront in everyday life, smacks of Rousseaustic humanitarianism. Distinctions need to be made between true and false notions of transcendence and ethics. Appeals to justice remain largely abstract if they take the form of social justice rather than, as one possibility, the Christian idea of loving one's neighbor.

The final essay is by Edward Findlay, who draws on Patočkas's work. He continues the theme of creating a theory that “offers the possibility of foundational order without foundationalism” (p. 148). Transcendence exists but it is not a “thing.” It is, rather, part of the realm of human experience, not something beyond it. Consequently, ethical foundations can only relate to human experience, not some Archimedean point outside of it. Here is the key dividing line between Voegelin and the postmoderns: Voegelin does not believe that Plato or Christians like Augustine claim the existence of a separate realm of being that serves as the foundation for moral action. Postmoderns argue that thinkers like Plato and the Christians are guilty of metaphysical foundationalism.

The epilogue draws conclusions about the search for foundations without foundationalism. It makes the case for a Voegelinian-inspired postmodernism that embraces the classical perspective. Included in this argument is an appeal to the works of Albert Camus, ground covered in greater depth by David Walsh's After Ideology (1990).