[cornelis]

Yes.

Your citations made me pull out the a published essay, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" wherein he reviews Hannah Arendt's book.

Here's an excerpt for good measure:

The true dividing line in the contemporary crisis does not run between liberals and totalitarians, but between the religious and philosophical transcendentalists on the one side and the liberal and totalitarian immanentist sectarians on the other side. It is sad, but it must be reported that the author herself draws this line. The argument starts from her confusion about the "nature of man": "Only the criminal attempt to change the nature of man is adequate to our trembling insight that no nature, not even the nature of man, can any longer be considered to be the measure of all things" --a sentence that, if it has any sense at all, can only mean that the nature of man ceases to be the measure, when some imbecile conceives the notion of changing it. The author seems to be impressed by the imbecile and isready to forget about the nature of man, as well as about all human civilization that has been built on its understanding. The "mob," she concedes, has correclty seen "that the whole of nearly three thousand years of Western civilization . . . has broken down." Out go the philosophers of Greece, the prophets of Israel, Christ, not to mention the patres and scholastics; for man has come of age, and that means "that from now on man is the only possible creator of his own laws and the only possible maker of his own history." This coming-of-age has to be accepted; man is the new lawmaker; and on the tablets wiped clean of the past he will inscribe the "new discoveries in morality," which Edmund Burke had still considered impossible.

Voegelin feels shy about chastizing Arendt, but the point must be made.

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

What's interesting is that contemporary liberals usually present some fuzzy idea that they have found in left-wing social science or psychology this or that reason for proposing a new model of human nature. They also read their own personal preferences into law. Because they would prefer to have an entirely atheistic and secular "state" occupying and policing the entire public realm (and much of the private realm), they try to find ways to read this preference back into the Constitution. The Constitution does not ban, for instance, religious speech in the public realm. Neither does it call for an expansion of such a state to dominate as a monoply throughout all educational institutions. This is a fantasy entirely dreamt up by 20th-century anti-Christian secular humanist extremists. The notion that children should be required to appear before such a godless state promptly every morning at 8:00am or 9:00am is a nightmare that should have been reserved for George Orwell or Aldous Huxley satires.