In his personal letters, Eric Voegelin not only mocked Russell Kirk and conservatism, but he freely admitted that he cynically accepted funding from conservative sources, even though he had no sympathy with conservatism. And yet he was a genius, one of the single finest thinkers of the 20th century, and perhaps the single finest scholar when it came to dissecting ideologies. In some strange and mysterious way—or ways in which I could never fully…