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Arnhart's "Aristotle's Biopolitics: A Defense of Biological Teleology against Biological Nihilism" is both a valuable and yet at the same time a problematic study. Its value for political science lies in Arnhart's reminder that for many of the most important thinkers in the history of Western political thought their efforts to discover and articulate the principles of a political order necessarily presupposed a specific understanding of the order of nature itself. Given this, the fundamental political challenge of the modern scientific and industrial revolutions not only includes the new instruments and techniques of organization and manipulation made possible by the discoveries of modern science, but also those cultural and intellectual assumptions which create that very environment within which such instruments and techniques first became possible. In illustrating this intimate relationship between modern natural science and modern political science, Grant (1976:124) has written: "What calls out for recognition here is that the same apprehension of what it is to be 'reasonable' leads men to build computers and to conceive the universal and homogenous society as the highest political goal. The ways such machines can be used must be at one with certain conceptions of political purposes because the same kind of 'reasoning' made the machines and formulated the purposes. To put the matter extremely simply, the modern physical sciences and the modern political sciences have developed in mutual interpenetration, and we can only begin to understand that interpenetration in terms of some common source from which both forms of science found their sustenance."

Bruce A. Ackerman, Social Justice in the Liberal StateScott Gordon, Welfare, Justice, and FreedomJennifer L. Hochshild, What's Fair? American Beliefs about Distributive Justice

Eric Voegelin's influence upon contemporary political philosophy is an acknowledged fact. Thus although one may disagree with much of what Voegelin has written, no responsible scholar can afford to simply overlook his work. Of his writings, the book that apparently has had the widest, if not the deepest, impact is The New Science of Politics. And although some commentators have focused upon the critical analysis of scientism with which Voegelin begins his text, most scholars appear to be interested primarily in his development of the concept of gnosticism. This interest, in turn, seems to reflect Voegelin's own intentions at the time.