Eric Voegelin

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Eric Voegelin
Born

January 3, 1901
Cologne, Germany

Died

January 19, 1985

Stanford, California, U.S.

Era

20th-century philosophy

Region

Western Philosophy

School

Continental philosophy

Main interests

History
Consciousness
Religion
Political science

Influences

[show]

Influenced

[show]

Eric Voegelin (born Erich Hermann Wilhelm Vgelin, German: [fglin]; January 3, 1901
January 19, 1985) was a German-born American political philosopher. He was born
in Cologne, then within Imperial Germany, and educated in political science at theUniversity
of Vienna. He became a teacher and then an associate professor of political science at the
Faculty of Law. In 1938 he, with his wife, fled from the Nazi forces which had recently
entered Vienna, emigrating to the United States, where they became citizens in 1944. He
spent most of his academic career at the University of Notre Dame, Louisiana State
University, the University of Munich and the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.
Contents
[hide]

1 Biography
2 Work
3 Voegelin on gnosticism
o 3.1 Immanentizing the eschaton
o 3.2 Social alienation
o 3.3 Spiritual revival
4 See also

5 References
6 Further reading
o 6.1 Primary literature
o 6.2 Primary sources
o 6.3 Secondary literature
7 External links

Biography[edit]
Voegelin was born in Cologne in 1901. He taught political theory and sociology at
the University of Vienna after his habilitation there in 1928. While in Austria Voegelin
established the beginnings of his long lasting friendship with F. A. Hayek.[1] In 1933 he
published two books criticizing Nazi racism, and was forced to flee from Austria following
the Anschlussin 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. His advisers on his dissertation were Hans Kelsen and Othmar
Spann.
Voegelin remained in Baton Rouge until 1958 when he accepted an offer
by Munich's Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitt 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 fr Politische Wissenschaft. Voegelin returned to America in 1969 to
join Stanford University'sHoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace as Henry
Salvatori Fellow where he continued his work until his death on January 19, 1985. He was
a member of thePhiladelphia Society.[2]

Work[edit]
After fleeing Nazi Germany, Voegelin worked throughout his life to account for the
endemic political violence of the twentieth century in an effort variously referred to as
aphilosophy of politics, history, or consciousness. In Voegelins complex Weltanschauung,
he "blamed a flawed utopian interpretation of Christianity for spawning totalitarian
movements like Nazism and Communism."[3] Voegelin first and foremost wished to be
remembered as a scientist, and he eschewed any ideological labels or categorizations that
readers and followers attempted to impose on his work.
Although he did not express his scholarly aims didactically, there is a consistent, implicit
claim throughout Voegelin's works that he could establish a set of scientifically based
criteria for recognizing, examining and evaluating transcendent experiences through their
various textual symbolizations.
Voegelin published scores of books, essays, and reviews in his lifetime. An early work
was Die politischen Religionen (1938), (The Political Religions), on totalitarian ideologies
aspolitical religions due to their structural similarities to religion. His magnum opus is 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 generally seen as a prolegomenon to
this, and remains his best known work. He 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 examination of the history of
order occasioned by Voegelin's personal experience of the disorder of his time. 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.
Voegelin then encountered difficulties that 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 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.[original research?]
One of Voegelin's main points in his later work is that a sense of order is conveyed by the
experience of transcendence. This transcendence can never be fully defined nor described,
though it may be conveyed in symbols. A particular sense of transcendent order serves as
a basis for a particular political order. It is in this way that a philosophy of politics becomes
a philosophy of consciousness. Insights may become fossilised as dogma. The main aim of
the political philosopher is to remain open to the truth of order, and convey this to others.
Voegelin is more interested in the ontological issues that arise from these experiences than
the epistemological questions of how we know that a vision of order is true or not. For
Voegelin, the essence of truth is trust. All philosophy begins with experience of the divine.
Since God is experienced as good, one can be confident that reality is knowable. As
Descartes would say, God is not a deceiver. Given the possibility of knowledge, Voegelin
holds there are two modes: intentionality and luminosity. Visions of order belong to the
latter category, lights within a limited horizon bounded by the unknowable. The truth of any
vision is confirmed by its orthodoxy, by what Voegelin jokingly calls its lack of originality.
Voegelin's work does not fit in any standard classifications, although some of his readers
have found similarities in it to contemporaneous works by, for example, Ernst
Cassirer,Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. He has a
sometimes unapproachable style and a heavy reliance upon extensive background
knowledge. Voegelin often invents terms or uses old ones in new ways. However, there are
patterns in his work with which the reader can quickly become familiar.
Among indications of growing engagement with Voegelin's work are the 305 page
international bibliography published in 2000 by Munich's Wilhelm Fink Verlag; 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 the publishing of the nearly complete 34 volume collection of
his primary works by the University of Missouri Press and various primary and secondary
works offered by the Eric-Voegelin-Archiv of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitt.

Voegelin on gnosticism[edit]
In his The New Science of Politics, Order and History, and Science, Politics and
Gnosticism, Voegelin opposed what he believed to be unsound Gnostic influences in
politics. He defined gnosis as "a purported direct, immediate apprehension or vision of truth
without the need for critical reflection; the special gift of a spiritual and cognitive
elite."[4]Gnosticism is a "type of thinking that claims absolute cognitive mastery of reality.
Relying as it does on a claim to gnosis, gnosticism considers its knowledge not subject to
criticism. Gnosticism may take transcendentalizing (as in the case of the Gnostic
movement of late antiquity) or immanentizing forms (as in the case of Marxism)."[5]
Apart from the Classical Christian writers against heresy, his sources on Gnosticism
were secondary, since the texts in the Nag Hammadi library were not yet widely available.
For example Voegelin uses Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, and the Jewish
German philosopher Hans Jonas.[6]
Voegelin perceived similarities between ancient Gnosticism and modernist political
theories, particularly communism and nazism. He identified the root of the Gnostic impulse
asalienation, 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. 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 Gnostics
themselves referred to this as gnosis).
The second is the desire to implement and or create a policy to actualize the
speculation, or Immanentize the Eschaton, i.e., to create a sort of heaven on earth
within history.

According to Voegelin the Gnostics are really rejecting the Christian eschaton of the
kingdom of God and replacing it with a human form of salvation through esoteric ritual or
practice.