Voegelin returned to the United States in 1969 to join Stanford University's Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace as Henry Salvatori Fellow.

The first three volumes, Israel and Revelation, The World of the Polis, and Plato and Aristotle, appeared in rapid succession in 1956 and 1957 and focused on the evocations of order in the ancient Near East and Greece.

This, combined with his university administrative duties and work related to the new institute, meant that seventeen years separated the fourth from the third volume.

It broke with the chronological pattern of the previous volumes by investigating symbolizations of order ranging in time from the Sumerian King List to Hegel.

According to Ellis Sandoz, Voegelin may well be America's leading philosopher, and is rightly compared with the premier minds of our century and, perhaps, of the millennia.

He identified the root of the Gnostic impulse as alienation, that is, a sense of disconnection from society and a belief that this lack is the result of the inherent disorder, or even evil, of the world.

That alienation has two effects: According to Voegelin, the Gnostics really reject the Christian eschaton of the kingdom of God and replace it with a human form of salvation through esoteric ritual or practice.

[citation needed] The primary feature that characterizes a tendency as gnostic for Voegelin is that it is motivated by the notion that the world and humanity can be fundamentally transformed and perfected through the intervention of a chosen group of people (an elite), a man-god, or men-Gods.

[citation needed] In both cases specifically analyzed by Voegelin, the totalitarian impulse is derived from the alienation of the individuals from the rest of society.

That leads to a desire to dominate (libido dominandi), which has its roots in the Gnostic's conviction of the imperative of his vision but also in his lack of concord with a large body of his society.

[citation needed] One of his most quoted passages (by such figures as William F. Buckley Jr.)[13] is: The problem of an eidos in history, hence, arises only when a Christian transcendental fulfillment becomes immanentized.

Furthermore, the dualist perspective was the very essence of gnosticism via the misuse of noema and caused a destructive division between the internal and external world in human consciousness.

[16][17] Voegelin's work does not lay out a program of reform or offer a doctrine of recovery from what he termed the "demono-maniacal" in modern politics.

He was not interested so much in what religious dogmas might result in personal salvation but rather a recovery of the human in the classical sense of the daimonios aner (Plato's term for "the spiritual man").

He did not speculate on the institutional forms in which a spiritual recovery might take place but expressed confidence that the current 500-year cycle of secularism would come to an end because he stated that "you cannot deny the human forever.

"[citation needed] In an essay published in 1965,[18] Voegelin suggested that the Soviet Union would collapse from within because of its historical roots in philosophy and Christianity.

Later, at an informal talk given at University College, Dublin, Ireland in 1972,[19] Voegelin suggested the Soviet Union might collapse by 1980 because of its failure to succeed in its domestic commitments and external political challenges.

"[20][page needed] Webb continues, "the category (of Gnosticism) is of limited usefulness for the purpose to which he put it… and the fact that the idea of Gnosticism as such has become so problematic and complex in recent years must at the very least undercut Voegelin's effort to trace a historical line of descent from ancient sources to the modern phenomena he tried to use them to illuminate.

Rather, they claim, the term "Gnosticism" as used by Voegelin is more of an invective just as "when on the lowest level of propaganda those who do not conform with one's own opinion are smeared as communists.