Law and Politics in the Early Work of Eric Voegelin

Beginning the Quest: Law and Politics in the Early Work of Eric Voegelin. Barry Cooper. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2009.

Barry Cooper’s book offers a comprehensive analysis of the early writings of the German-Austrian-American political philosopher Eric Voegelin. One of the major figures within the 20^th century philosophical discourse and at the same time a highly disputed and often deliberately provocative political thinker, Voegelin is primarily renowned for the five volumes of Order and History. In this major work he, over a period of four decades, successively unfolded the results of his unfinished, frequently revisited and eventually fragmentary inter-civilizational study of the most fundamental human experiences of political and spiritual order and disorder and their various forms of articulation and symbolization.

Less well-known are Voegelin’s early works, written in the 1920s and 1930s in Vienna where Voegelin lived and worked until 1938 when the annexation of Austria by National Socialist Germany forced him to emigrate to the United States. While this Austrian period of Voegelin’s intellectual biography received an ever growing international attention by scholars in the past decade, Cooper’s book offers the first comprehensive study of this early material in the English language. Not only because the author is undoubtedly one of the foremost interpreters of Voegelin’s work, but also because this early material entails much more than a mere intellectual prelude to Order and History, the book is worth the close attention of any reader interested in Voegelin’s very unconventional, original, often surprising political thinking.

While Cooper’s earlier book from 1999 on the foundations of modern political science¹ had analyzed Voegelin’s work by embedding it into its Wirkungsgeschichte, as it were, thus contextualizing it into a broader discourse, in Beginning the Quest he deliberately affirms a more narrowly focused perspective, both in terms of content and in terms of method. In terms of content, Cooper confines himself to Voegelin’s early writings. In terms of method, he chooses a distinctly biographical hermeneutical perspective in which Voegelin’s intellectual development itself serves as the primary interpretive frame of reference.

The individual chapters of Cooper’s study focus on the major periods and topics of Voegelin’s early career, starting with his methodological, sociological and legal studies on the question of a geisteswissenschaftliche Staatslehre and his two years as a Rockefeller visiting scholar in the United States from 1924 to 1926. These are followed by chapters on Voegelin’s 1933 published monographs on the political “race” idea, on his analyses of the political constitution of Austria and, finally, on Voegelin’s first attempt to formulate a fundamental critique of totalitarian ideologies in his essay on “The Political Religions” from 1938.

A special focus of the study lies on Voegelin’s relation to the work of his early academic teacher Hans Kelsen, particularly to his Neo-Kantian “pure theory of law.” Cooper comes back to this question several times in the course of his argument, and his study closes with an appendix on “Voegelin, Kelsen, and The New Science of Politics” in which Cooper suggests that 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.” (p. 220.)

While this statement should not be over-interpreted with regard to the actual impact of Kelsen’s work even on Voegelin’s early political theory, it is indeed apt to point towards a number of important continuities within Voegelin’s intellectual biography, namely: his distinct interest in epistemological problems and their close connection with very personal intellectual and political experiences. In terms of experiential background, Voegelin’s beginnings particularly unfold in the contexts of the early 20^th century Methodenstreit in Germany on the one hand and of his personal “American experience” on the other.

In the precise and detailed first chapters of his study, Cooper clearly brings out the crucial significance of these two experiential contexts, and he particularly emphasizes the significance of the latter for Voegelin’s perspective on the former. Set within the comparative European-American perspective which Voegelin adopted after his two years in the United States, the Neo-Kantian epistemology which dominated the German Methodenstreit at the time and which also Voegelin had at first defended, turned out to be too narrow in epistemological terms and too “provincial” in cultural terms.

It appeared to be founded less on universally valid philosophical insights but rather on the articulation of a peculiarly German type of self- and world-perception. Voegelin’s American experience “destroyed,” as Cooper puts it, “his ‘European provincialism’” (p. 42) and replaced Neo-Kantian epistemology with the broader epistemological question of various “national types of mind” and their impact on scientific and philosophical reasoning.

In light of this background, the attempt to formulate a comparative socio-cultural science of “national types of mind” turns out to be the major epistemological concern of Voegelin’s early work. Cooper rightly emphasizes the significance of this early comparative conception which not only renders the basis for important distinctions within Voegelin’s later analyses of the modern “race” idea (pp. 139, 149 ff.) and of the “Austrian problem” (p. 159). It also foreshadows crucial aspects of his later inter-civilizational project of Order and History.

In the following chapters, Cooper reconstructs Voegelin’s further intellectual development in the course of detailed analyses of his writings from the 1930s in which he combines a close textual reading of the systematic arguments on the one hand with their historical contextualization on the other. While the study offers numerous interesting insights and a lot of relevant details in both respects, it is not always very clear how the author understands the relation between these two interpretive perspectives.

It would have been interesting to see Cooper dealing with this methodological question more elaborately, or even to see him considering Voegelin’s own respective methodological reflections as they can be found, for instance, in the posthumously published History of Political Ideas. Particularly interesting in this respect are Voegelin’s reflections on his hermeneutic principle of focusing on the “motivating center” and at the same time on the civilizational context of a thinker’s work:

“‘The interpretation of a thinker . . . must not attach itself,’ as Voegelin stresses in his interpretation of Jean Bodin, ‘to particular doctrines (for instance, the theory of sovereignty) but penetrate to the motivating center of his thought that endows the particular doctrines with their meaning; and it must place thinker and work in their civilizational environment.'”²

Voegelin’s further arguments in this text and elsewhere in the History of Political Ideas seem to suggest a theory of hermeneutics which assumes a third position, as it were, between the radical interpretive contextualism of the Cambridge School and the radical classicism of Straussian hermeneutics.

Cooper’s interpretation follows neither of these two schools of interpretative theory which currently dominate the methodical discourse in the history of political ideas, but rather Voegelin’s own example with regard to this question. Hence, while Cooper’s Voegelinian methodological perspective remains rather implicit in this respect, his study also offers more explicit and highly interesting insights with regard to the question of a distinctly Voegelinian form of hermeneutics.

It is no coincidence that Cooper’s book, although it deals with Voegelin’s writings from the 1920s and 1930s, starts off with a reference to one of Voegelin’s latest texts written in the final period of his intellectual biography. Contemplating on the “Voegelinian resonance” of the term “beginning” in the title of his study, Cooper refers to the 5^th volume of Order and History. In this last book, written in the 1980s, Voegelin offers a philosophical analysis of the temporal, lingual, and meaningful structure of human “beginnings” by reflecting on the first sentence, hence the very “beginning” of the text he is about to write, the meaning and “truth” of which is yet unknown to the author when writing it down as well as to the reader when beginning to read:

“The reader does not know whether it is true before he has finished reading the chapter . . . . Nor do I know at this time, for the chapter is yet unwritten; and although I have a general idea of its construction, I know from experience that new ideas have a habit of emerging while the writing is going on, compelling changes in the construction and making the beginning unsuitable.”³

In a certain sense, it is indeed this problem of the complex phenomenon of human “beginnings” that also sets the general methodical perspective of Cooper’s study. Within its biographical interpretive frame of reference, the question of “beginning” turns out to constitute a major question not only within Voegelin’s philosophical science of order, but also within an attempt to bring out and to interpret the experiential and intellectual background of this scientific conception.

Accordingly, when Cooper at the end of his introduction sketches the aim of his study explicitly as the attempt to “make intelligible the beginning of Voegelin’s beginning” (p. 16), he not only emphasizes the significance of those experiences and questions that mark the starting point of Voegelin’s lifelong “quest for truth.” He also indicates that such an attempt may encounter the same complex problems and difficulties Voegelin analyzed in his meditation on “beginnings” in general–at least their more concrete hermeneutical and methodological implications.

As a consequence, Cooper frequently emphasizes the need for a distinctive methodological caution not to read back or to project Voegelin’s later mature philosophy of order into his early writings “by introducing” indiscriminately, for instance, “arguments made by Voegelin many years later” (p. 32) while attempting to grasp the young scholar’s perspective in the 1920s. Instead, this early perspective and its concerns for Cooper have to be understood on their own terms (p. 18). Consequently, instead of constructing from the retrospect a biographical narrative of unbroken and undisrupted continuity in which each of Voegelin’s books and articles, each of his strains of thought would appear as a deliberate and targeted preparation of his subsequent major arguments, Cooper tries to approach Voegelin’s early texts with a distinct hermeneutic openness.

This leaves room for the peculiarities, the obscurities and the originality of this early material. And it brings to the fore lines of continuity as much as substantial changes and reorientations within Voegelin’s intellectual development. While there certainly “is continuity in Voegelin’s work from the early 1920s to the mid-1980s” (p. 2), as Cooper asserts in his introduction, this continuity turns out to consist of abiding and recurring questions and problems rather than continuously unfolding “answers,” “convictions” or even dogmatic “principles.”

It is precisely this open interpretive approach of Cooper’s study which brings to the fore the most fascinating aspects of Voegelin’s early intellectual development. Especially in his early years, Voegelin appears to have been radically open to the complexities, contradictions, and the unstable and unpredictable character of philosophical reasoning. Consequently, he strongly refused to stick to his own “principles” once stated when new insights into the problems at hand required fundamental reorientations and demanded “a very different answer.” (p. 2)

In this respect Voegelin was deeply influenced by Max Weber’s idea of “intellectual honesty,” hence the idea that it is the scholar’s duty “to face the truth of facts” and “the realities of life” as they are, regardless of the consequences for one’s personal convictions and ideals.⁴ Cooper’s study attempts to follow Voegelin’s example also in this respect, and it succeeds in doing so. Cooper’s interpretation in some passages may be slightly more cautious than the thinker whose intellectual journey’s beginnings he investigates.

With regard to some aspects one may argue for an interpretation even more focused on the complexities and tensions within Voegelin’s thought. Voegelin’s juxtaposition of the American “open self” and the European “closed self” as developed in his early study “On the American Type of Mind,” for instance, and particularly his own position in this respect may be more “dialectic,” as it were, or even more contradictory than it appears in Cooper’s interpretation (p. 49 f.).

The tendency present in Voegelin’s account of “national types of mind” to interpret collective political identities in the rather anonymous terms of symbolic “style” similarities, may reveal a stronger influence of certain German epistemological ideas of the time (such as Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge) than Cooper’s interpretation indicates (p. 53). The peculiar distinction between (scientific) theories and (political) ideas which Voegelin puts forth in his race books may be even less suitable to distinguish the “history of an idea . . . from its truth” (p. 119), than Cooper’s interpretation suggests.

Regarding these questions, Voegelin’s beginnings, viz. his early attempts to come to terms with his time as well as his struggle for an intellectual basis for resistance against certain currents of his time, may entail even more complexities, contradictions and major changes of perspective–and these complexities may be even more important for the further development of Voegelin’s philosophical science of politics–than Cooper’s study already accounts for. Nonetheless, Cooper’s interpretation skillfully evokes the very open, dynamic and unsettled tone which seems to be the most characteristic trait of Voegelin’s early writings.

What is more, insofar as it partly explicitly–and partly implicitly–takes up the “Voegelinian resonances” outlined above, Cooper’s seminal study of the major themes within Voegelin’s early intellectual biography is at the same time an attempt to itself apply a Voegelinian method of hermeneutic interpretation, and it particularly argues for the significance of Voegelin’s understanding of the problem of “beginnings” in this respect. Besides the detailed and insightful analyses of Voegelin’s early writings, it is also this peculiar methodological argument which makes the study a highly interesting contribution to the scholarly discourse on Eric Voegelin’s work.

Notes

1. Barry Cooper: Eric Voegelin and the Foundations of Modern Political Science, Columbia (University of Missouri Press) 1999.

2. Eric Voegelin: The Collected Works, Vol. 23, Columbia (University of Missouri Press) 1998, p. 182.

3. Eric Voegelin: The Collected Works, Vol. 18, Columbia (University of Missouri Press) 2000, p. 27.

4. Max Weber: “Die Objektivität sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis,” in: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, 7th Edition, Tübingen (Mohr) 1988, pp. 151, 155.

Print