Eric Voegelin - Böcker

Eric Voegelin, one of today's leading political theorists and author of the contemporary classic The New Science of Politics, here contends that certain modern movements, including Positivism, Hegelianism, Marxism and the "God is Dead" movement, are variants of the Gnostic tradition of antiquity. He attempts to resolve the intellectual confusion that has resulted from the dominance of gnostic thought by clarifying the distinction between political gnosticism and the philosophy of politics. Highly provocative, this book is essential reading for students of modern politics, philosophy, and religion.

"Thirty-five years ago few could have predicted that The New Science of Politics would be a best-seller by political theory standards. Compressed within the Draconian economy of the six Walgreen lectures is a complete theory of man, society, and history, presented at the most profound and intellectual level. . . . Voegelin's [work] stands out in bold relief from much of what has passed under the name of political science in recent decades. . . . The New Science is aptly titled, for Voegelin makes clear at the outset that a 'return to the specific content' of premodern political theory is out of the question. . . . The subtitle of the book, An Introduction, clearly indicates that The New Science of Politics is an invitation to join the search for the recovery of our full humanity."—From the new Foreword by Dante Germino "This book must be considered one of the most enlightening essays on the character of European politics that has appeared in half a century. . . . This is a book powerful and vivid enough to make agreement or disagreement with even its main thesis relatively unimportant."—Times Literary Supplement "Voegelin . . . is one of the most distinguished interpreters to Americans of the non-liberal streams of European thought. . . . He brings a remarkable breadth of knowledge, and a historical imagination that ranges frequently into brilliant insights and generalizations."—Francis G. Wilson, American Political Science Review "This book is beautifully constructed . . . his erudition constantly brings a startling illumination."—Martin Wright, International Affairs "A ledestar to thinking men who seek a restoration of political science on the classic and Christian basis . . . a significant accomplishment in the retheorization of our age."—Anthony Harrigan, Christian Century

Race and State is the second of five books that Eric Voegehn wrote before his emigration to the United States from Austria in 1938. First published in Germany in 1933, the year Hitler came to power, the study was prompted in part by the rise of national socialism during the preceding year. Yet Voegelin neither descended to the level of contemporary debates on race nor dismissed these debates by way of value judgments. Although still young when he wrote this book, Voegelin already demonstrates his singular analytical capacity as well as his ability to put political phenomena into a new perspective.In Part I Voegelin analyzes contemporary race theories by placing the question of race in the context of the more comprehensive philoiophical problem of the interrelationships of body, mind, and soul. He demonstrates the intellectual shortcomings and theoretical fallacies of current theories; more important, he contributes to the development of a modern philosophical anthropology that aims, as Helmuth Plessner put it in a review of Race and State, "at a concept of the human being that does justice to its multilayered existence as a physical, vital, psychic, and intellectual being, without making one of these layers the measure and explanatory basis for the others."In Part II Voegelin deals with race ideas, which he distinguishes from race theories. Race ideas, like other political ideas, form a part of political reality itself, contributing to the formation of social groups and societies. Voegelin shows that the modern race idea is just one "body ideal" among others, such as the tribal state and the Kingdom of Christ, each offering a different symbolic image of community. He traces the rise of the modem race idea, analyzes its function to structure community, and offers an answer to the question of why race ideas became successful in Germany.Voegelin's meticulous sifting of all the Nazi race literature finally arrives at this blunt statement regarding its overall validity: "In order to preclude even the slightest possibility of a misunderstanding, let us again point out emphatically that the contrasting descriptions of the Semitic and the Aryan, the Jewish and the German character . . . contain little that is true about the nature of Jewishness.

In The History of the Race Idea: From Ray to Carus, Eric Voegelin places the rise of the race idea in the context of the development of modern philosophy. The history of the race idea, according to Voegelin, begins with the post-Christian orientation toward a natural system of living forms. In the late seventeenth century, philosophy set about a new task--to oppose the devaluation of man's physical nature. By the middle of the eighteenth century the effort of philosophy was to place man, with his variety of physical manifestations throughout the world, within a systemic order of nature. Voegelin perceives the problem of race as the epitome of the difficulties presented by this new theoretical approach.Part I covers the development of race theories from the English naturalist John Ray to Blumenbach and Kant. Voegelin, anticipating fairly recent genetic insights, explains that human beings must be seen as one species, different races must not be interpreted as emerging from separate species. In Part II, Voegelin discusses the evolution of the concepts of the body, the organism, and the person. The finite image of the person as a body-mind unit in which body is equal to mind in value provides the basis for Carl Gustav Carus' theory of race, the first significant racial ideology, in Voegelin's estimation.Voegelin's complex analysis levels a scathing critique at Nazi pretensions. He writes: "Compared to its classical form, the current condition of race theory is one of decay. . . . [T]hese men, with no eyes for the brilliance of the German spirit, want to interfere in human relations and ultimately presume to explicate the German nation to us and to the world--an undertaking with evil consequences. . . . [The] great thinkers of the past would have been horrified at somebody finding in himself all the traits of the Nordic race with the help of a book on anthropology and then imagining himself to be somebody special who does not have to do anything else."Let us now take a look at contemporary race theory--we will see an image of destruction. . . . It is a nightmare to think that we should recognize the people whom we follow and whom we allow to come near us not by their looks, their words, and their gestures, but by their cranial index." Ultimately, Voegelin dismisses any attempt to reduce the human being—his existence, appearance, or actionsto a lower level: "Man as mind-body and historical substance cannot be explained' by an element that is less than man himself.

This is the first English paperback version of this text originally published in German in 1966, and first made available in English in 1978. The translated version includes Voegelin's ""Reason: the Classic Experience"", as well as a new first chapter written by Voegelin especially for this translation. ""Anamnesis"" pulls together those materials that focus most sharply upon the development of Eric Voegelin's philosophy of consciousness. One of the most influential and profound philosophers of our time, Voegelin has had an enormous impact on contemporary intellectual life where he was formerly Salvatori Distinguished Scholar of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

From the decline of the Greek Polis to Saint Augustine, this text provides an account of Apostolic Christianity's political implications and the work of the early church fathers. It considers the political philosophy of Rome and includes an analysis of Greek and early Roman law.

Voegelin's magisterial account of medieval political thought opens with a survey of the structure of the period and continues with an analysis of the Germanic invasions, the fall of Rome, and the rise of empire and monastic Christianity. The political implications of Christianity and philosophy in the period are elaborated in chapters devoted to John of Salisbury, Joachim of Flora (Fiore), Frederick II, Siger de Brabant, Francis of Assisi, Roman law, and climaxing in a remarkable study of Saint Thomas Aquinas's mighty thirteenth-century synthesis.Although History of Political Ideas was begun as a textbook for Macmillan, Voegelin never intended it to be a conventional chronological account. He sought instead an original comprehensive interpretation, founded on primary materials and taking into account the most advanced specialist scholarship—or science as he called it—available to him. Because of this, the book grew well beyond the confines of an easily marketable college survey and until now remained unpublished.In the process of writing it, Voegelin himself outgrew the conceptual frame of a "History of Political Ideas," turning to compose Order and History and the other works of his maturity. History of Political Ideas became the ordered collection of materials from which much of Voegelin's later theoretical elaboration grew, structured in a manner that reveals the conceptual intimations of his later thought. As such, it provides an unparalleled opportunity to observe the working methods and the intellectual evolution of one of our century's leading political thinkers. In its embracing scope, History of Political Ideas contains both analyses of themes Voegelin developed in his later works and discussions of authors and ideas to which he did not return or which he later approached from a different angle and with a different emphasis.The Middle Ages to Aquinas has withstood the test of time. What makes it still highly valuable is its thoroughly revisionist approach, cutting through all the convenient clichés and generalizations and seeking to establish the experiential underpinnings that typified the medieval period.

In this text, the third volume of ""History of Political Ideas"", the author continues his exploration of one of the most crucial periods in the history of political thought. Illuminating the great figures of the high Middle Ages, Voegelin traces the historical momentum of our modern world in the core evocative symbols which constituted medieval civilization. These symbols revolved around the enduring aspiration for the ""sacrum imperium"", the one order capable of embracing the transcendent and immanent, the ecclesiastical and political, the divine and human. The story of the later Middle Ages is that of the ""civilizational schism"" - the movement in which not only the reality of but the aspiration for the sacrum imperium gradually disappeared. His recognition of this civilizational schism provides Voegelin with his perspective on medieval society. William of Ockham, Dante, Giles of Rome and Marsilius of Padua all emerge in his study as predecessors to modern thought; each turns to personal authority and intellectual analysis in an attempt to comprehend the loss of the sacrum imperium. Yet the story of the later Middle Ages is not shown to merely revolve around disintegration. Voegelin recognizes the emergence of the constitutional political tradition as the most positive development of this period. His study of the English political pattern is juxtaposed with his perspective on the German imperial zone.

Examining the emergence of modernity within the philosophical and political debates of the 16th century, this book analyzes the ""great confusion"". It features such thinkers as Calvin, Althusius, Hooker, Bracciolini, Savonarola, Copernicus, Tycho de Brahe, Giordano Bruno and Jean Bodin.

Reaching into our own time, Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man confronts the disintegration of traditional sources of meaning and the correlative attempt to generate new sources of order from within the self. Voegelin allows us to contemplate the crisis in its starkest terms as the apocalypse of man that now seeks to replace the apocalypse of God. The totalitarian upheaval that convulsed Voegelin's world, and whose aftermath still defines ours, is only the external manifestation of an inner spiritual turmoil. Its roots have been probed throughout the eight volumes of History of Political Ideas, but its emergence is marked by the age of Enlightenment.In our postmodern era, discussions of the collapse of the "enlightenment project" have become commonplace. Voegelin compels us to follow the great-souled individuals who sought to go from disintegration of the present toward evocations of order for the future. Such thinkers as Comte, Bakunin, and Marx suffered through the crisis and fully understood the need for a new outpouring of the spirit. They resolved to supply the deficiency themselves. As a consequence they launched us irrevocably on the path of the apocalypse of man.One of the great merits of Voegelin's analysis is his exposition of the pervasive character of this crisis. It is not confined to the megalomaniacal dreamers of a revolutionary apocalypse; rather, echoes of it are found in the more moderate Enlightenment preoccupation with progress to be attained through application of the scientific method. Faith in the capacity of instrumental reason to answer the ultimate questions of human existence defined men such as Voltaire, HelvÉtius, Diderot, D'Alembert, and Condorcet. It remains the authoritative faith of our world today, Voegelin argues, demonstrated by our continuing inability to step outside the parameters of the Enlightenment. Are we condemned, then, to oscillate between the rational incoherence of a science that never delivers on its promises and a now discredited revolutionary idealism that wreaks havoc in practice? This is the question toward which Voegelin's final volume points. While not direct, his response is evident everywhere. Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man could have been written only by a man who had reached his own resolution of the crisis.

Volume 6 of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin offers the first translation of the full German text of Anamnesis published in 1966. The previous English edition, translated by Gerhart Niemeyer, focused largely on the sections of Anamnesis dealing directly with Voegelin's philosophy of consciousness. It omitted some of the extensive historical studies on which the philosophy of consciousness was based. To properly understand Voegelin's work, however, it is essential to give equal weight to the empirical as well as the philosophical aspects. This complete version of Anamnesis captures the full integrity of his vision. It is at once scientific, in the sense of fidelity to the demands of historiographic scholarship, and philosophical, in exploring the significance of the texts for the meaning of human existence in society and history. Anamnesis is a pivotal work within Voegelin's intellectual odyssey. Alone among Voegelin's books, it reveals an author looking back and taking stock of his growth rather than customarily forging ahead into new regions and new problems. This critical work is both a recollection of Voegelin's own development, reaching back even to his infant memories, and a demonstration of the anamnetic method as applied to a wide range of historically remembered materials. Written as more than just a collection of essays, Anamnesis is the volume in which Voegelin works out for himself the reconceptualization of what Order and History, and by definition his central philosophical approach, is going to be. By revisiting his previous work - a departure from Voegelin's usual scholarly habits - he found at last the literary form for the kind of empirical philosophical meditation that had long absorbed his labors. Parts I and III contain two meditative exercises written by Voegelin in 1943 and 1965, respectively. The first exercise was the breakthrough by which Voegelin recovered consciousness from the current theories of consciousness. Part III begins as a rethinking of the Aristotelian exegesis of consciousness, and then expands into new areas of awareness that had not come within the knowledge of classic philosophy. Between the two meditations are eight studies that demonstrate how the historical phenomena of order gave rise to the type of analysis which culminates in the meditative exploration of consciousness.

Over the course of his varied and distinguished academic life, Eric Voegelin was often called upon by review editors of scholarly journals as well as by editors in the popular press to examine, summarize, and critically assess the work of other scholars, of statesmen, and of men of affairs. The contents of the books Voegelin reviewed mirror his changing interests over the years, including questions of method, points of legal philosophy and jurisprudence, and issues of race, war, and the afternath of war. Of course, he was frequently called upon as well to review standard texts and new editions and monographs across the full range of political science. This collection of Voegelin's reviews amounts to a reflection in miniature of many of the problems Voegelin tackled in his essays, articles, and books from the 1920s until the 1950s, when, owing to the press of other business, he began to decline requests to review the work of others. Some of his reviews are little more than clinical summaries; others are analytic essays. A few are extended engagements with a text or a set of problems. Occasionally, particularly among the later reviews originally written in English, one finds flashes of Voegelin's legendary wit and a restrained impatience with the inadequate approaches or sheer incompetence of others. These book reviews will be of interest to all students and scholars of Eric Voegelin's work.

Between 1933 and 1938, Eric Voegelin published four books that expressly stated his opposition to the increasingly powerful Hitler regime. As a result, he was forced to leave his homeland in 1938. Twenty years later, he returned to Germany as a professor of political science at Ludwig-Maximilian University. Voegelin's homecoming allowed him the opportunity to voice once again his opinions on the Nazi regime and its aftermath. In 1964 at the University of Munich, Voegelin gave a series of memorable lectures on what he considered ""the central German experiential problem"" of his time: Adolf Hitler's rise to power, the reasons for it, and its consequences for post-Nazi Germany. For Voegelin, these questions demanded a scrutiny of the mentality of individual Germans and of the order of German society during and after the Nazi period. ""Hitler and the Germans"" offers Voegelin's most extensive and detailed critique of the Hitler era. Voegelin interprets this era in terms of the basic diagnostic tools provided by the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, Judeo-Christian culture, and contemporary German-language writers like Heimito von Doderer, Karl Kraus, Thomas Mann and Robert Musil. His inquiry uncovers a historiography that was substantially unhistoric: a German Evangelical Church that misinterpreted the Gospel, a German Catholic Church that denied universal humanity, and a legal process enmeshed in criminal homicide.

This first of two volumes of Voegelin's miscellaneous papers brings together crucial writings, published for the first time, from the early, formative period of this scholar's thought. The book begins with Voegelin's dissertation on sociological method, completed under the direction of Othmar Spann and Hans Kelsen at the University of Vienna in 1922. It reveals an intimate knowledge of the writings of Georg Simmel and a skillful use of insights gained from Edmund Husserl's Logical Investigations and Ideas. The dissertation, and other smaller pieces written at this time, addresses problems that remained of great importance to Voegelin throughout his life: the relation of insight to language, the structure of the human being, and the human's spiritual center. They disclose both Voegelin's theoretical reference points during these early years, including the thought of Henri Bergson, Othmar Spann, Georg Simmel, and Edmund Husserl, as well the young scholar's remarkably independent approach to theoretical problems. Moreover, this volume includes a work that is fundamental to an understanding of Voegelin's theoretical development: his extended study on the ""theory of governance,"" written between 1930 and 1932. It follows the issues that confront political society to their roots in the soul and in the soul's relationship to the ground of being. The Theory of Governance and Other Miscellaneous Papers presents a meditative-exegetic study of texts from Augustine, Descartes, and Husserl, early examples of the meditations that became central to Voegelin's later work. Other essays included in this volume such as ""The Theory of Law"" and ""Political Science as Human Science"" develop these theoretical insights and refine Voegelin's methodological tools. This volume will be of interest to all scholars of the work of Eric Voegelin and of the refoundation of political philosophy in the twentieth century in general.

This second volume of Eric Voegelin's miscellaneous papers contains unpublished writings from the time of his forced emigration from Austria in 1938 until his death in 1985. The volume's focus is on dialogue and discussion, presenting Voegelin in the role of lecturer, discussant, and respondent.

The thirty-fourth volume of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin consists of Voegelin's Autobiographical Reflections, reprinted from the 1989 edition with additional annotations; a glossary of terms used in Voegelin's writings, illustrated with examples from throughout the Collected Works; a volume index; and a cumulative index. The last covers the entire edition, apart from The History of Political Ideas, which has its own index, and volumes 29 and 30, the Selected Correspondence, which are at present not published. The glossary lists, defines, and illustrates from the author's writings many of the key terms employed, paying particular attention to the Greek terms. The cumulative index supplies a more comprehensive access to the contents of the entire Collected Works. Together, the glossary and index systematically include names, subjects, ideas, writings, and terms, making this culminating volume an indispensable help for any serious study of Eric Voegelin's oeuvre.

This second volume of letters written by Eric Voegelin covers the period from 1950 through 1984. With few exceptions, the originals are to be found in the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University. Correspondents include Leo Strauss, Karl Lowith, Alfred Schutz, Aaron Gurwitsch, Hans Kelsen, Marshal McLuhan, Bertrand de Jouvenel, Arnold Toynbee, and Marie Konig, among others. Beginning at a time when Voegelin was working on a major theoretical breakthrough, reflected in the Walgreen Lectures at the University of Chicago and The New Science of Politics, the correspondence highlights the years of publication of the first four volumes of ""Order and History""; Voegelin's move to ""Munich"", where he founded and directed the university's Institut fur Politische Wissenschaft; and his years as Henry Salvatori Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford from 1969 to 1974. Voegelin remained a tireless correspondent until the last years of his life. Voegelin's Munich years, while not without controversy, can be seen as the most successful time in his life, as well as his most creative and prolific as a political philosopher. During that time, Voegelin worked on volume IV of ""Order and History"", and the letters written to successive directors of the Louisiana State University Press, as well as to friends and colleagues, give a vivid account of the changing nature of this seminal project. Voegelin's letters written between 1969 and 1984 provide compelling evidence of the intellectual vigor that characterized his work throughout his life and continued virtually undiminished until the last weeks before his death. Voegelin's realism, his sharp wit, and his superbly developed sense of irony remain evident in the correspondence throughout all these years. While letters to Leo Strauss, Robert Heilman, and Alfred Schutz have been published in separate volumes of correspondence, this selection adds an abundance of hitherto unpublished letters, many of them translated from the original German, providing for the first time the outlines of an intellectual biography of one of the most profound thinkers of the twentieth century. Any reader with a serious interest in Voegelin's work will find that the freshness and vitality of his thought are perhaps nowhere more evident than in the letters collected here. As a letter writer, Voegelin always challenged his counterparts, and he is bound to challenge the reader of this correspondence.