The Preservation of Democracy

Part 2  Political Frustration

This is taken from a paper delivered in November, 1939, two months after the outbreak of World War II. Voegelin's descriptions of the actions and attitudes required for democracy to survive at that time are just as valid today. This excerpt appears in three parts.

One of the leit-motifs of Hitler's speeches explaining his expansion is always the wrong done to the German people by the Treaty of Versailles, a wrong that can be righted only by the successive steps he takes. The motif is clad recurrently in the promise that he will settle down peacefully if only just this last of his burning desires is quieted. This screen has proved successful again and again. The reason for the success, as far as it can be gathered from British speeches and editorials, letters to the editor of the Times, etc., seems to be a curious belief, current in the Anglo-Saxon world, in the psychology of frustration.

Eric Voegelin — A Recollection 

Part 3

by Robert B. Heilman

The late Robert B. Heilman wrote many books. He was a distinguished teacher and  literary critic who flourished at Louisiana State Univeristy. It was a remarkable time and place; his colleagues included Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks and Alan Tate. He became a close friend of Eric Voegelin and nurtured his understanding of American culture and English language. This essay is taken from Professor Heilman's book, The Professor and the Profession, available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay appears here in three parts. It appears with permission of the publisher.

VI      Visiting the Voegelins in Munich

In 1948 Ruth and I left for Seattle, and after that Eric and I exchanged letters regularly, if not frequently (as did our wives).^fn The correspondence continued when the Voegelins returned to Europe in 1958. Eric had accepted the directorship of the Bavarian state political science institute in Munich. This was a professional advancement, I suppose, but it never seemed to me that Eric suffered from the institutional angst so common among American professors. He thought about his work; in no way did his status, or his sense of achievement, depend upon what post he held or what university he served in. So though the Munich post may well have seemed a promotion, I imagine that his motivating influence in taking it was the strong pull of Europe after twenty years away, and of the Voegelins' native language.

They must have crossed the ocean about the time we were returning from a 1957-1958 sabbatical. When we returned to Europe in 1964-1965, the Voegelins generously asked us to visit. Eric invited me to speak at a seminar of his, and he also managed — against what resistance I know not — to encourage the department of English to sponsor a lecture by me. The chair of English was Wolfgang Clemen, and since we had both trafficked somewhat in Shakespearean imagery, there were grounds for our finding ourselves at least mildly simpatico.

Then I received a letter — a sort of warning I took it to be — from a member of the Munich faculty who had taken his Ph.D. in our department at the University of Washington, where, the gifted son of an immigrant family, he had established himself both as a superior student and as a talented one-upper.

The Preservation of Democracy

Part 1  The First Condition

This is taken from a paper delivered in November, 1939, two months following the outbreak of World War II. Voegelin's descriptions of the actions and attitudes required for democracy to survive at that time are just as valid today. This excerpt appears in three parts.

According to the popular idea, [democracy] is a form of government where the government does what the people want; and the people secure a government, which acts according to their interests, by participating in governmental procedure through the election of legislative representatives and executive and judicial officers who depend for their reelection on the conduct of affairs while they hold office. This is a fairly correct description of the structural side of democracy, and the only trouble with it is that the structural side does not mean very much.

We know — through the efforts of the leading scholars who have analyzed the problems of parliamentarism and popular representation in the last hundred years, through Hegel and Bagehot, through Grey and Renan, through Mosca, Pareto, LeBon, and Max Weber — that the essential problem of a working democracy is not the vote of the people but the type of the governing elite and its relation to the mass of the people. The election of men and the voting on issues is the last and relatively least important phase of the democratic process. The decisive question is, Who shapes the issues and who presents the men?

The Crisis of Americanism:

The Destructive Tradition of  Spiritual and Political Individualism — Part 3

by Juergen Gebhardt

Dr. Gebhardt is emeritus Professor at the Institute for Political Science at the University of Erlangen-Nürenberg. He is editor of the final volume of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Selected Correspondence, 1924-1949. We feature here Chapter 5 from his Americanism: Revolutionary Order and Societal Self-Interpretation in the American Republic, Louisiana State University Press, 1993. This is the first part of a muti-part article. It is reproduced here with permission.

The Dynamics of the Expanding Self  (concluded)

In terms of world history, the imperial republic understood itself pri­marily as the new Rome, destined to spread throughout the world the novus ordo seclorum, that is, the republican order. The expansion not of imperial power but of republican order, whether in the form of a republic encompassing the entire continent or in the form of a republican fed­eration of states, was the primary objective of the Founders, and in this they cleverly combined the power-political continental claim with clear economic-political interests.²⁶

But the Roman model and the Fathers' own theoretical insight similarly planted the seeds for justified doubts about the possibility of combining imperial politics and republican order. This contradiction intensified in the latent psychic crisis at the end of the nineteenth century, when increasingly libidinously motivated apocalypses were substituted for the original consciousness-shaping spiritual-political experiences of order, and when Manifest Destiny treated other people and nations as objects of one's own libido dominandi. So, on one hand, imperial foreign policy was always tied to the mental, political, and eco­nomic crisis within the country, thus also the crisis of Americanism. On the other hand, time and again, foreign affairs dealings by the political leadership and the majority that supported it showed that the various strands of motivation were intertwined: republican pathos, the modes of imperial apocalyptics, and the power-political and economic-political pragmatism of dominant social interests.

from The Collected Works

Thomas More and Murderous Idealism

[Note: This excerpt is taken from a long essay considering St. Thomas More's writings and personality.  The original should be consulted in order to appreciate its breadth, originality and  nuanced thought.  It strongly suggests the political and spiritual situation in Western civilization in this year 2010. —ed]

Nevertheless, with all due allowance for More's critical intentions and personal reservations, there remains, as in the case of his other institutional devices [as set forth in Utopia—ed], the hard fact that he could indulge in such flights of fancy at all. What strikes the reader as loathsome in this relation of the causes and methods of war is the infallibility of the ideal. ^FN

Those who live by the ideal can do no wrong; the ideal decides on the justice of conduct of those who do not accept it; and, as a consequence, the carriers of the ideal combine in their persons the functions of party, judge, and executor. When through endowment with an absoluteness that properly is the Spirit's, the temporal order acquires the characteristics of an "ideal," the effect is a peculiar "moralization" of political conduct.