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Eric Voegelin

Eric Voegelin (January 3, 1901January 19, 1985) was a political philosopher. He was born in Cologne, Germany, and educated in the fine arts at the University of Vienna, where he became a professor of political science at the Faculty of Law. In 1938 he fled with his wife from Nazi Germany, immigrating to the United States, where they became citizens in 1944. He then spent considerable parts of his academic career at Louisiana State University, University of Munich and the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

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Biography

Voegelin was born in Cologne in 1901. He taught political theory and sociology at the University of Vienna after his habilitation there in 1928. In 1933 he published two books criticizing Nazi racism, and was forced to flee from Austria following the Anschluss in 1938. After a brief stay in Switzerland, he arrived in the United States and taught at a series of universities before joining Louisiana State University's Department of Government in 1942.

Voegelin remained in Baton Rouge until 1958 when he accepted an offer by Munich's Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität to fill Max Weber's former chair in political science, which had been empty since Weber's death in 1920. In Munich he founded the Institut für Politische Wissenschaft . Voegelin returned to America in 1969 to join Stanford University's Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace as Henry Salvatori Fellow where he continued his work until his death on January 19, 1985. Because of his willingness to invite anyone over for a cup of coffee, he was occasionally used by the University to mentor undergraduates, so long as they followed the rule: don't discuss basics, get to the point. The penalty for failure was a referral to two or three books which discussed the issue in an advanced manner, to be read before the next meeting.

Work

Voegelin labored throughout his life to account for the endemic political violence of the twentieth century in an effort that is variously referred to as a philosophy of politics, history, or consciousness.

Voegelin published several books and scores of essays and reviews in his lifetime. His magnum opus was the multi-volume (English-language) Order and History, which began publication in 1956 and remained incomplete at the time of his death 29 years later. His 1951 Charles Walgreen lectures, published as The New Science of Politics, is sometimes seen as a prolegomena to this, and remains his best known work. He also left many manuscripts unpublished, including a history of political ideas that has since been published in eight volumes.

Order and History was originally conceived as a six-volume series attempting to discern the order in history through an examination of the history of order, using recent explosive growth of knowledge about the past and occasioned by Voegelin's personal experience of the disorder of his time, in the Nazi genocide. 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 societies of the Near East and Greece.

At this point Voegelin encountered difficulties that forced him to rework parts of his theory and slowed the publication down. 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. His new theoretical concerns were indicated in the 1966 German collection Anamnesis: Zur Theorie der Geschichte und Politik, and the fourth volume, The Ecumenic Age, appeared in 1974. 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. Continuing work on the final volume, In Search of Order, occupied Voegelin's final days and it was published posthumously in 1987.

Voegelin's work is extremely difficult to characterize and does not fit in any standard classifications, although some of his readers have found similarities in it to the concerns found in contemporaneous works by, for example, Ernst Cassirer, Alfred North Whitehead, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. It is further complicated by a very unapproachable style and a heavy reliance on the reader's background knowledge. Moreover, Voegelin often introduced new technical terms or new uses for existing ones. Primarily, however, the difficulty stems from the unusual subject-matter and an approach to it likely to be unfamiliar, if not uncomfortable, to most readers. Also, he followed in English a stylistic rule more appropriate to academic German: if the subject was difficult, the style should be difficult to cue the reader to be careful. Voegelin's works are often controversial, and are sometimes perceived as (merely) a large chain of loosely-linked facts, comprising a heterogeneous conspiracy theory.

All of these obstacles have led to many readings conflating Voegelin's work with reactionary political opinion and Christian triumphalism. His advocates increasingly reject this equivalence in the now-burgeoning secondary literature on Voegelin. Among indications of growing engagement with Voegelin's work are the 305 page international bibliography published by Munich's Wilhelm Fink Verlag in 2000; the presence of dedicated research centers at universities in the United States, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom; the appearance of recent translations in languages ranging from Portuguese to Japanese; and publishing efforts like the nearly complete 34 volume collection of primary works from the University of Missouri Press and the various series of primary and secondary works offered by the Eric-Voegelin-Archiv of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität. Voegelin's work, though, remains most influential among political scientists; he receives little attention from philosophers.

Voegelin on Gnosticism

Voegelin wrote extensively on what he perceived as the flawed concept of Christianity. With books like The New Science of Politics, Order and History and Science, Politics and Gnosticism he became the leader of an intellectual movement opposing what they believed to be unsound Gnostic influences in science.

Voegelin identified a number of similarities between ancient Gnosticism and those held by a number of modernist political theories, particularly communism and nazism.

He identified the root of the Gnostic impulse as alienation, that is, a sense of disconnection with society and a belief that this lack of concord with society is the result of the inherent disorder, or even evil, of the world. This alienation has two effects. The first is the belief that the disorder of the world can be transcended by extraordinary insight, learning, or knowledge, called a Gnostic Speculation by Voegelin. The second is the desire to implement a policy to actualize the speculation, or as Voegelin described to Immanentize the Eschaton, to create a sort of heaven on earth within history.

The totalitarian impulse is derived from the alienation of the proponents of the policy from the rest of society. This leads to a desire to dominate (libido dominandi) which has its roots not just in the conviction of the imperative of the Gnostic's vision but also in his lack of concord with a large body of his society. As a result, there is very little regard for the welfare of those in society who are impacted by the resulting politics, which ranges from coercive to calamitous (cf. Stalin's nostrum: "You have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet").

This totalitarian impulse in modernism has been noted by Catholic writers, particularly in Henri de Lubac's work "The Drama of Atheist Humanism", which explores the connection between the totalitarian impulses of political communism, fascism and positivism with their philosophical progenitors Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Comte and Nietzsche.

Indeed, Voegelin acknowledges his debt to this book in creating his seminal essay "Science, Politics, and Gnosticism". The Catholic catechism makes an oblique reference to the desire to "Immanentize the Eschaton" in article 676:

The Antichrist's deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgment. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism, especially the "intrinsically perverse" political form of a secular messianism.

Other Catholic scholars have extended this theory using vivid conspiracy imagery created by Abbe Augustin Barruel.

One of the more oft-quoted passages from his work on Gnosticism is the following:

The problem of an eidos in history, hence, arises only when a Christian transcendental fulfillment becomes immanentized. Such an immanentist hypostasis of the eschaton, however, is a theoretical fallacy.

From this comes the catch phrase: "Don't immanentize the eschaton!" (used by Robert Anton Wilson among other characters of popular culture) which actually simply means: "do not try to make that which belongs to the afterlife happen here and now", or "don't create heaven on earth".

Some believe that Voegelin's ideas on Gnosticism amount to nothing but another conspiracy theory, and indeed it features in several works of conspiracy fiction.

External links

  • The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin: http://www.umsystem.edu/upress/voegelin/voegelin.htm
  • Eric-Voegelin-Archiv: http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~voegelin-archiv/
  • The Eric Voegelin Institute: http://www.ericvoegelin.org/
  • Eric Voegelin Study Page: http://www.salamander.com/~wmcclain/ev-index.html
  • An Eric Voegelin page: http://www.fritzwagner.com/ev/eric_voegelin.html

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