Although the relatively flexible state constitutional amendment and revision procedures are generally considered to be inferior to the corresponding procedures in the U.S. Constitution, there have been few efforts to explain why state constitution-makers adopted these procedures, and as a result we have not been in a position to assess adequately the merits of the state approach. This article undertakes to explain the development of state constitutional amendment and revision procedures by examining the state convention debates that have been conducted throughout American history. The adoption of these procedures can be attributed, in part, to a different theoretical understanding of constitutionalism than prevailed at the national level, and, in part, to a desire to overcome various problems of governance at the state level, including the need to overcome entrenched geographic interests in the nineteenth century, and the need to overcome powerful special interests, as well as intransigent judges, in the twentieth century.

I outline from a non-foundational standpoint why knowledge does not rest on a circular argument and why the nonunivocality of language is compatible with scientific truth and objectivity. The theory sketch is advanced as the form of scientific theory appropriate to homeostatic systems. A rebuttal to the arguments against my theory sketches of international systems permits a concrete and systematic investigation of why the theory sketch—rather than formal theories of the type of physics or historical generalizations - is the appropriate method. I later explore more briefly how theory sketches apply to other types of homeostatic systems. I discuss how the homeostatic control metaphor informs the vicarious test-in-principle that I employ in the area of moral analysis and why other types of moral analysis, including those of Rawls and Nozick, fail. How my position on moral analysis accords with and differs from that of Aristotle is noted.

“As I returned, here—I did not return.” With these words of Alfred Doeblin, Eric Voegelin could also have described his German experience of the years 1958 through 1969. That is valid in a general sense, to speak with the poet: “You are no longer the one who left, and you no longer find the home that you left. You don&t know it when you leave, but you suspect it on the way back.” And it is valid in a special sense too, namely, for Voegelin's relationship to German political science. Here too he remained a stranger among strangers, although his presence in Munich left behind important and lasting impulses. Yet a wider reception of his work in Germany came only with delays, and more outside than inside the guild, so that to this day there exists a substantial need of reconsideration by scholars as well as students. Beginners above all encounter in handbooks and introductions only arid clichés about the “Munich School” and its peculiarity, described with few exceptions stereotypically, as “ontological-normative.” But the central figure of Eric Voegelin remains remarkably dimly lit. All the more welcome, then, are the efforts of the initiators of this symposium to illuminate the details of Voegelin's effects in the postwar era. And more welcome still is the long neglected presentation of his major work, Order and History, in German.

In 1990, with the support of the Bavarian Ministry of Cultural Affairs, the University of Munich, and the Fritz-Thyssen Foundation, Peter Opitz organized the Eric-Voegelin-Archiv at the Geschwister-Scholl Institute for Political Science at the University of Munich. Opitz is currently the director of the institute, which Voegelin founded during the 1950s upon his return to Europe from the United States, to which he fled as a refugee in 1938 following the occupation of Austria by the German army. Voegelin taught in Munich for little more than a decade prior to his retirement in 1969 as a Henry Salvatori Distinguished Scholar at the Hoover Institution, Stanford.

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

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.

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.