The German-Austrian political theorist Eric Voegelin (1901-1985), who became an American citizen after exile from Nazi Germany, will probably gain influence as the most subtle rethinker of Augustine's City of God and the leading Christian philosopher of history of the 20th century.

Eric Voegelin was born in Cologne, Germany, on January 3, 1901, and moved as a boy to Vienna, Austria. He received his doctorate with a dissertation written under the legal positivist Hans Kelsen in 1922. His American education, under a Rockefeller grant from 1924 to 1927, was most significant. In contrast to the positivism which dominated political philosophy in Europe, what he discovered in the United States was intellectual life still rooted in Christianity and in classical culture. His first book, On the Form of the American Spirit (1929, not yet translated into English), although on the interpretation of law, was broadly based on a knowledge of the great American Golden Age...