Eric Voegelin Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Eric Voegelin (1901–1985) was an Austrian American political philosopher and philosopher of history. He is best known for his New Science of Politics (1952), in which he characterized modern civilization in ter ms of the ancient Chr istian heresy, Gnosticism. In his magnum opus, Order and History (1956–1987),Voegelin developed a theory of politics and history meant to understand equivalent experiences across Western and non-Western cultures. He stated his thinking was an act of resistance against “stop-history” ideological systems such as those of Enlightenment intellectuals Georg Hegel and Karl Marx.

An eclectic range of sources inspired Voegelin, including ancient Greek philosopher Plato, German political economist and sociologist Max Weber, medieval mysticism, ancient Egyptian meditations on death, and prehistoric cave paintings. The theory of humanity Voegelin developed over his career consisted of an attempt to understand the wide range of experiences conveyed by these sources. He believed that a political science that failed to understand such sources—or found ways to ignore them—was not genuine science.

Voegelin was born to a Lutheran family in Cologne, Germany, in 1901. In his book Anamnesis (1966), he recalls nineteen childhood experiences that opened up his later philosophical reflections. One of these was learning, at the age of five, about the Monk of Heisterbach, who had gotten lost in meditation for one hundred years; to the monk, this only seemed to last a few hours in the afternoon. Voegelin considered this a source of his interest in differing modes of historical time. In Anamnesis, he also recalls seeing Halley’s comet when he was seven or eight, and the apocalyptic fear it caused his neighbors. This prompted his interest in apocalyptic movements and the paradox of how something so beautiful could also be so fearsome.

Voegelin spent his early career at the University of Vienna, where he received his doctorate under the supervision of legal scholar Hans Kelsen. He also came under the influence of Max Weber and members of the Stefan-George literary and academic circle. His time in Vienna was punctuated by the events of World War II (1939–1945). During this time, he published books and newspaper articles critical of Nazi race ideology as well as his Political Religions (1938), which examined the religious nature of revolutionary ideology. These publications prompted the gestapo to seek his arrest in 1938, and he fled from Austria.

Voegelin immigrated to the United States and taught at Louisiana State University between 1942 and 1958. During this time, he published the first three volumes of Order and History (1956 and 1957), which covered the ancient Near East, Israel, and Greece. From 1958 to 1969, he directed the Institut für Politische Wissenschaft in Munich, Germany, and attempted to introduce the study of political science as part of the postwar reconstruction of German society. While at the University of Munich, he delivered his controversial lecture series, “Hitler and the Germans,” which indicted a wide spectrum of German society for Nazism.

Voegelin returned to the United States in 1969 by joining the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. During that time he published the fourth volume of Order and History (1974), along with numerous articles detailing the theory of consciousness he regarded as the basis for a genuinely empirical political science. He died in Palo Alto, California, on January 19, 1985.The fifth volume of Order and History was published in 1987, and the University of Missouri Press published the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (thirty-four volumes) between 1990 and 2009.

Bibliography:

Cooper, Barry. Eric Voegelin and the Foundations of Modern Political Science. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999.
Puhl, Monika. Eric Voegelin in Baton Rouge. Munich: Fink, 2005.
Sandoz, Ellis. The Voegelinian Revolution: A Biographical Introduction. 2nd ed. Somerset, N.J.:Transaction, 2000.
Voegelin, Eric. The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. Edited by Ellis Sandoz et al. 34 vols. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990–2009.
Faith and Political Philosophy:The Correspondence Between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934–1964. Edited by Barry Cooper and Peter Emberley. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004.

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