Eric (Herman Wilhelm) Voegelin

Biography

Voegelin was born in Cologne in 1901.

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. 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.

Work

Voegelin worked 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 scores of books, essays, and reviews in his lifetime.

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.

At this point Voegelin encountered difficulties that forced him to rework parts of his theory and slowed the publication down. Continuing work on the final volume, In Search of Order, occupied Voegelin's final days and it was published posthumously in 1987.

One of the later Voegelin's main points seems to be that a sense of order is conveyed by the experience of transcendence. To some extent 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.(Voegelin's thought does have an epistemological basis, but since he does not constantly return to it, it can easily be overlooked. As Descartes, who derived his epistemology from the same sources as Voegelin, would say, God is not a deceiver.) However as Voegelin has a tendency to dismiss those he disagrees with, or who question his assumptions, as 'smart idiots' or as 'spiritually diseased', then these others may tend to wonder if it is not Voegelin who is avoiding the hard questions - especially as his work is so voluminous.

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. Moreover, Voegelin often introduced new technical terms or new uses for existing ones. Voegelin's works are often controversial, and are sometimes perceived as (merely) a large chain of loosely-linked facts, comprising a heterogeneous conspiracy theory. However, there are repetitions and patterns of analysis in the work that the reader can quickly become familiar with, when the Gnostic Voegelin uses his own ghost to guard his shadow.

All of these obstacles have led to many readings conflating Voegelin's work with reactionary political opinion and Christian triumphalism. Among indications of growing engagement with Voegelin's work are the 305 page international bibliography published by Munich's Wilhelm Fink Verlag in 2000; Voegelin's work, though, remains most influential among political scientists;

Voegelin on Gnosticism

Voegelin wrote extensively on what he perceived as the flawed concept of Christianity.

Apart from the Classical Christian writers against heresey, Voegelin's sources on Gnosticism were of secondary nature, since the texts in the Nag Hammadi library were not yet widely available.

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:

To some extent, Voegelin's use of the term 'gnosticism' might be unfortunate as it suggests some pseudo-continuity between religious movements and modern revolutionaries. (Although Voegelin never suggested this, radical or cultural feminism is also gnostic in this sense, for believing that the evil patriarchal world characterized by domination, imperialism, and destruction can be perfected into a matriarchal utopia characterized by harmony and equality when the secret culture of women which has been suppressed is allowed to infuse into the world.)

In the two cases he focused on, the totalitarian impulse is derived from the alienation of the individuals from the rest of society.

It is possible to think that Voegelin made every political and philosophical movement he did not like into some kind of offshoot of gnosticism, and thus joins many movements which would otherwise appear to have little in common (what would not be 'gnostic'?).

According to Stephen McKnight, the post 1970 Voegelin found the emphasis of his readers on gnosticism to be frustrating.

Ultimately, Voegelin's analysis of the disorder of the West and the rise of totalitarianism suggests that the primary cause is spiritual pathology rather than social disorganisation, or rather that the first inevitably leads to the second. Voegelin's later works discuss this idea, and explore the ontological and experiential problems that spring from this realization.

The 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 Friedrich Nietzsche.

Immanentizing the eschaton

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:

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

From this comes the catch phrase: "Don't immanentize the eschaton!" which simply means: "Do not try to make that which belongs to the afterlife happen here and now." The phrase was popularized by US conservative readers of Voegelins work, most notably William F.

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. Others find this notion to be a misunderstanding stemming from Voegelin's broad use of the term 'gnosticism' to refer to any system of belief or thought based on human perfectibility and the special knowledge to make it so, rather than using the term in its well-developed historical sense. In either case, Voegelin's work on gnosticism has proved at once seminal and questionable to readers for decades.

Further reading

Primary literature

All of Voegelins writing is published as his Collected Works (CW).

People usually recommend beginning with CW 5 Modernity Without Restraint, which includes 'The Political Religions', 'New Science of Politics' and 'Science, Politics, and Gnosticism'.

However, those more interested in anchored empirical works might prefer Hitler and the Germans (CW 31) or Order and History vol.2: The World of the Polis (CW 15). In many ways this latter is a central text, as Voegelin's reading of Plato seems vital for his understanding of Politics and Order.

After that, if you are still reading, the two final volumes of Order and History, The Ecumenic Age and In search of Order, are worth the effort, as Voegelin attempts a new formulation of the problem.

Secondary literature

Perhaps the best introductions to Voegelin are: