Voegelin and
his Contemporaries -Pt 2
by Barry Cooper
Professor Cooper has edited three volumes of the Collected Works. He has authored numerous essays and books relating to Voegelin, including a volume of reminiscences, Voegelin Recollected. This essay was delivered by Professor Cooper at Careleton University, Ottawa, on October 24th, 2008. This is the second of two parts.
Turning to Hans Kelsen, who was Voegelin’s Doktorvater, matters were extremely complex. To begin with, early in his career Voegelin was identified, quite properly, as a member of the “Vienna School” of jurisprudence. His early work was unquestionably part of the Staatslehre tradition though with his first publications he expressed his reservations about the neo-Kantian methodology that was central to Kelsen’s work. Voegelin also came to the conclusion that Staatslehre was itself both a parochial German discipline and radically defective inasmuch as it was useless in the understanding of British, French, or American political reality and, even when confined to German phenomena, could not handle what, during the 1930s, he was already calling political ideas. This was especially significant in his analysis of the “race idea” as it was employed by the National Socialist.
The difference with Kelsen, at least in retrospect, can be detected in Voegelin’s work during the 1920s. His concern was directed at “units” or “lines” of meaning that were found in social and political self-understanding. In contrast, as Kelsen put it, “the object of knowledge is determined by the aim of knowledge,” namely science as defined by neo-Kantian premises. The purity of Kelsen’s “pure theory of law” was achieved by ensuring its independence from what Kelsen called “social events.” For Voegelin it was a virtuoso performance that described the formal order of a logic of norms independent of any particular content.
The implication Voegelin drew from this argument was clear: it was always possible to practice “norm logic” because norms were postulated objects of cognition. By the same token norm logic was not genuine legal logic because the formative elements in the latter were not objects of cognition but “symbols, ideas, fragmentary acts, and the founding elements” of the polity – all of which demanded imaginative participation not scientific, neo-Kantian cognition in order to be apprehended. In short, the criteria by which law was to be distinguished from other social and political realities was found not in the formal structure of its norms but in its content, as Voegelin said as early as 1924. And content, as Voegelin stated on several occasions, appears in “a particular manner of givenness” and not as an a priori cognitive construct of a transcendental ego or anything similar. This remained a major limitation to Staatslehre.
On the other hand, one could look at Kelsen’s pure theory of law as being itself a “content” or historical event. In that case Kelsen’s jurisprudence was internally or experientially connected to the historical reality of defeat in the Great War and the enormous social, political, economic, and legal disruption associated with the replacement of two large empires with one medium and one small republic – much as the entire Staatslehre tradition grew out of the successful conclusion to the wars of unification in 1871 and the necessity of establishing uniformity among a large number of heterogeneous legal systems.
In Beginning the Quest I traced Voegelin’s dissatisfaction with Staatslehre in general and Kelsen’s version of it in particular through his writing what he called a Herrschaftslehre in the early 1930s. The term was borrowed from Max Weber and can be translated more literally as “theory of dominance,” or “command” or “theory of rulership,” but is nowadays translated as “theory of governance.” In a report to the Rockefeller Foundation in 1930 Voegelin said he was at work on a study of the “Principles of Government.” Whatever it was called, Voegelin was looking to integrate legal theory with philosophical anthropology to develop what today we would call a theory of the regime.
This was the context within which he wrote his two books on race in 1933, and his 1936 book on Austria, which contained a fifty-page criticism of Kelsen. And Kelsen, it will be recalled, was the author of the Austrian constitution. Voegelin was perfectly willing to praise the logical coherence of the constitution, but he insisted that it had nothing to do with the political reality indicated by the term “Austria.”
The Austrian populace, Voegelin said, remained a Reichvolk, an imperial people, but without an empire and without becoming a Staatsnation, by which he meant a “nation of common spirit intent upon the formation of a state.” There did exist Kelsen’s legal order but there was no body politic to which it applied. Indeed, if you read The Authoritarian State as Voegelin’s version of a Viennese comic opera – not an easy thing to do, admittedly – then it reminds you of Robert Musil’s Man without Qualities which appeared a few years earlier. Voegelin’s more serious conclusion was that the authoritarian regime under which Austria existed was a late and rather desperate effort to maintain its political existence. When he completed the book Austria enjoyed another 26 months of existence. By then Kelsen was teaching at Berkeley.
It was not until 1954 that Voegelin and Kelsen exchanged letters. This correspondence provides a fascinating example of an exchange between a brilliant Doktorvater and his brilliant pupil. It is made even more compelling because from Kelsen’s standpoint Voegelin had, in the words of the Book of Common Prayer, “erred, and strayed…like lost sheep.” From Voegelin’s point of view, Kelsen’s philosophical assumptions were now questionable on their own terms because Voegelin had moved far beyond them and had come to understand neo-Kantianism, as other uncritical intellectual doctrines, as symptoms of a more fundamental problem to which he had, as yet, not attached an unequivocal name. The discussion between Kelsen and Voegelin can be seen, as it were, as the voice of a younger Voegelin interrogating what the mature Voegelin had become.
Kelsen replied to Voegelin’s initial letter by saying that he had just finished The New Science of Politics and that Voegelin must consider him an “agent of destructive positivism” and worse, an out-and-out gnostic. Voegelin replied with polite formality and said that he would like to clarify “a misunderstanding that necessarily and improperly clouds relations with a man to whom I owe as much as I do to you.”
Voegelin sketched the differences between Kelsen’s “dogmatic assertion” that there were no legal problems outside the pure theory of law that admit of scientific treatment and Voegelin’s view that the pseudo-problems were in fact “substantial and real.” For Kelsen, pseudo-problems were quite properly to be dismissed; for Voegelin, “because I am of the opinion that these problems are real and very important, you will certainly understand that we are of divergent opinions in the evaluation of your destructive intention.” Moreover, if Kelsen did not care to deal with metaphysical questions, his “subjective” attitude, did not, in fact touch upon those “substantive and real” problems at all. The most that could happen was that Kelsen’s rhetorical brilliance would deter others from concerning themselves with metaphysical questions, that were, for them existentially real or important. The consequence, which Voegelin did not spell out, would be that such genuinely searching individuals would be prevented from asking what to them were meaningful questions, which, Voegelin said, was a serious matter.
Finally, on the question of gnosticism, Voegelin assured Kelsen that the purity of his metaphysical agnosticism ensured that he never attempted to “fill the vacuum of transcendence” created by his attitude with any immanent type of gnosis – unlike both Cassirer and Husserl who did so by creating positivistic philosophies of history. Voegelin ended on a conciliatory note: “if you reconsider your misguided student, you might consider that the best students are not necessarily those who swear in verba magistri and remain inside the ‘school,’ but perhaps rather those who studied so thoroughly at school that they free themselves from it and can go their own way.”
In an additional exchange of letters Kelsen and Voegelin expressed mutual respect for one another’s scholarship. Kelsen did not, however, deal with the issues Voegelin raised because, from his position they were not issues at all. He did however produce a lengthy manuscript criticizing The New Science of Politics, which he sent to Voegelin with instructions that Voegelin should respond to it and that they would publish the criticism and the response in the same issue of an unnamed journal.
Voegelin provided his own somewhat melancholy postscript to Kelsen’s criticism in a 1956 letter to his older colleague and fellow student of Kelsen, Alfred Verdross:
The conversation with Kelsen a while back was not very pleasant. He had sent me his voluminous critique of my New Science, apparently with the request that I should give him my opinion on the matter. And he wanted to hear my counter-arguments in a discussion. Now, for quite some time I have been beyond letting myself get caught up in debate with ideologues. And I indicated that to him. I further assured him that as far as I’m concerned, he can publish anything about me that he wishes, and that I wouldn’t think badly about it if he did, but he mustn’t demand that I answer him. In any case: the review did not get published; and I have heard indirectly that K. has discovered in the meantime that I am not an isolated criminal case, but that there is a very extensive scientific literature of this sort. He is now, the rumors have it, occupying himself with that. I wonder what he will have to say when the Exodus volume, with its overview of the literature on various individual questions is published.
In the event Kelsen said nothing. Nor did he ever publish his critique of The New Science of Politics. Indeed, its very existence was denied for a time by the Kelsen Institute in Vienna.
Finally a few words on Leo Strauss. In 1993, when Peter Emberley and I drew together 53 letters by Strauss and Voegelin, the task of accounting for their relationship was relatively manageable. The eight commentaries in Part III of that book provide the evidence. Fifteen years ago it was possible to argue that Voegelin’s hermeneutic of experience and symbolization was sharply distinct from Strauss’s “total commitment to Greek philosophy,” as Thomas Altizer put it. Thomas Pangle contrasted “Voegelin’s faith-inspired historical philosophizing or philosophy of history” with Strauss’s “intransigent stand for philosophy as rigorous science.”
Several commentaries drew attention to a remark by Strauss from his 1954 paper, “The Mutual Influence of Theology and Philosophy,” also included with the correspondence, that: “no one can be both a philosopher and a theologian or, for that matter, a third which is beyond the conflict between philosophy and theology, or a synthesis of both.” The great division, apparently, was over reason and revelation. Or, as Strauss wrote to Voegelin in 1951, “every synthesis is actually an option either for Jerusalem or for Athens.” Voegelin replied that “the problem of revelation,” along with the form of the Platonic dialogue, was “quite rightly identified in your letter as the cardinal points at which our views probably differ.”
There is also an element of accident that should be noted. Prior to the publication of the correspondence the only public evidence that Strauss and Voegelin were aware of one another was the 1949 review by Voegelin of Strauss’s study of Xenophon’s Hiero, and Strauss’s response to it a few years later. Most political scientists during the 1950s and 1960s would likely have categorized the two scholars, probably along with Hannah Arendt, Yves Simon, and perhaps Jacques Maritain, as “political theorists,” the most familiar exemplar of which was George Sabine, and before him, reaching back to the turn of the century, W. A. Dunning.
By the late 1960s, the differences among these practitioners of “political theory,” and specifically between Strauss and Voegelin, gradually fell into focus. To simplify but not unduly distort, many who read Voegelin were also concerned with theology and comparative religion, for example, whereas, it is probably accurate to say that many who read Strauss carefully were chiefly, not to say exclusively, concerned with the tradition of western “political philosophy.” Indeed, the term “political philosophy,” as a term of art, was introduced by Strauss, so far as I can tell, in a lecture at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in the winter of 1954-55.
In the past fifteen years a number of things have changed regarding the scholarly literature on the work of both Voegelin and Strauss. I would like to suggest briefly a couple of them today and indicate that these changes may have a bearing on how we understand the work of these two men on this particular question.
Beginning with Voegelin, I agree with Jürgen Gebhardt in his dispute with Fred Lawrence that Voegelin was first and last a Wissenschaftler, a scientist. As he said to a rather surprised Patricia Coonan at the Thomas More Institute in Montreal:
everywhere in departments of religion, you run into somebody who is bright enough to ask himself occasionally whether it is just a question of the Buddha having a conception of something, and Confucius having another one, and so on – or whether perhaps they have all experienced the same Divine reality and there is only one God who manifests Himself, reveals Himself, in a highly diversified manner all over the globe for all these millennia of history that we know. The mere fact that we now have in history a global empirical knowledge extending into the archaeological millennia all over earth requires a theology that is a bit less confined to Islam or to Christianity. It must explain why a God who is the God of some witch doctor in Africa is the same God who appeared to Moses as “I am” or to Plato in a Promethean fire. And that theology is unfortunately not yet in existence.
P. Coonan: But wouldn’t you have to use philosophy in order to try to understand the evidence and the formulation?
E. Voegelin: Absolutely.
Voegelin’s concern, in other words, was with the experiential sources of the various symbolic orders he had distinguished and “the problem is that the language of the gods…is fraught with the problem of symbolizing the experience of a not-experientiable divine reality.” As a result, because the language of gods tends to be misconstrued as referring to “a divine entity ‘beyond’ the experience of the [presence of the] Beyond,” then the gods must die when a more adequate language is achieved. In this way “the historical scene becomes littered with dead gods.”
On the other hand, if language is not misconstrued “the succession of gods becomes a series of events to be remembered” as the history of the presence of the Beyond. What has history, what leaves a historical trace, is not the Beyond, which is also “beyond history,” but the presence of the Beyond “in the bodily located consciousness of questioning man.” That is, “the experience of non-experientiable divine reality has history,” namely “the history of truth emerging from the quest for truth” that in turn occurs “in the bodily located consciousness of questioning man” and so constitutes an element of his (or her) biography. In this respect, “the serious effort of the quest for truth acquires the character of a divine comedy.”
In other words, there is no Beyond beyond the experience of the presence of a Beyond. And that being so, the focus of science is on the experience and its symbolization, not the imaginary hypostasis of a Beyond beyond experience. This is why Voegelinian political science is empirical in the precise, Aristotelian sense and why, for Voegelinian political science, the problem of reason and revelation does not exist.
Now, what about Strauss? I would not attempt to make any definitive remark on the question of how Strauss and Voegelin differed on the issue of reason and revelation. I would, however, note that several recent studies help because they clarify what had been largely obscure, namely Strauss’s starting point.
To state the obvious: Voegelin began his scholarly career as a lawyer, as an exegete of Staatslehre, whereas Strauss came from a traditional or conservative Jewish home in the village of Kirchhain; he received a classical German humanist education at the Gymnasium Philippinum also in Kirchhain and then attended the nearby university in Marburg. That is, if one may say that the internal logic of Staatslehre and its limitations guided the beginnings of Voegelin’s political science, one would say that the internal logic of the Bildungsideal and its limitation by Conservative Judaism guided Strauss’s.
To put my point in a non-biographical way: if we follow one of Strauss’s most celebrated hermeneutical maxims, that we seek to understand an author as he understood himself, then the fact that Strauss was a Jew in Germany mattered. Here is a supporting anecdote from the 1970s told by Hadley Arkes:
Not long after Mr. Strauss’s death in 1973, Milton Himmelfarb was doing a commemorative piece, and as he tried to estimate Strauss’s relation to Judaism he remarked that Strauss had not been seen often in the synagogue. I remember calling Himmelfarb at the time and recounting to him a story I had been told about Mr. Strauss’s appearance for a lecture at Amherst – a few years before I had arrived at the College. After his lecture, he was approached by a professor of English, a man of Jewish ancestry who had managed, with a steady policy, to detach himself from things Jewish. He ran up to Strauss and said, “But if I follow what you’ve said, you have to believe in revelation.” To which Strauss replied, “But I’m a Jew.” The professor of English said, “But what does that mean – these days?” To which Strauss said, “That’s not my problem.”
In 1965 he remarked that, “the theological-political problem has remained, from that time [1920s] on, the theme of my inquiries.”
His analysis of Zionism no less than his discussion of assimilation were centred, as he said, on the problem of the Galut, Exile. And Strauss argued from the 1920s on, if you abandon the world of the Galut – or the understanding that the world is the site of the Exile – then you abandon a central attribute of Judaism. This is not a position with which Voegelin would differ.
As a final remark on the question of revelation, let me conclude with a remark Strauss made to Karl Löwith in a letter in 1946: “there is only one objection against Plato-Aristotle: and that is the factum brutum of revelation or of the ‘personal’ God.” In light of what has been previously discussed, it is clear that Strauss was emphasizing the externality or objectivity of revelation as an event that human beings can accept or reject, to be sure, but the reality of which does not depend on acceptance or rejection.
Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, and many lesser and dimmer lights have accused Strauss of being an atheist. For reasons just elaborated, such a judgement is contradicted by the evidence. Nor is it clear that one can say that Strauss took an intransigent stand for philosophy as a rigorous science – that is, for Athens over Jerusalem. When Strauss wrote that “no alternative is more fundamental than this: human guidance or divine guidance,” he meant it.
I would say, therefore, that recent analysis particularly of Strauss’s early work has situated his political philosophy more accurately than was done fifteen years ago. Among Voegelin’s contemporaries Strauss has always seemed to me to be the most interesting and the most important. This is why the most important chapter in a non-existent book called Leo Strauss and His Contemporaries would deal with Voegelin. And vice versa. So: there is still plenty of work for contemporary political science to do. 
[This is the second of 2 parts] [Read part 1]
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