ABSTRACT

Eric Voegelin, a scholar surprisingly ignored in the Romanian academic world, answered his troubled times marked by two World Wars and two totalitarianisms, with a tenacious life-long research explaining what was happening to the world, especially with the harsh political realities of modern times. He proved that a type of modern Gnosticism was the climax of modernity and the totalitarianism was the end of a gnostic dream. We use a Voegelin key to understand these times, marked by serious challenges for society and man, times that made us wonder whether totalitarianism acquired another face, thus becoming a neo-totalitarianism, with anarchic vulnerabilities. In the end of this reading, we try to confine neo-totalitarianism, using categories that could attest for new anarchic dangers found in our drifted times.               

Keywords: Voegelin, totalitarianism, Gnosticism, neo-totalitarianism, second-reality.

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