Political History Through the Eyes of Eric Voegelin

In his Autobiographical Reflections, Eric Voegelin recounted the moment when he had abandoned writing a history of political ideas to write a history of political order rooted in the human encounter with reality. “It dawned on me,” Voegelin wrote, “that the conception of a history of ideas was an ideological deformation of reality. There were no ideas unless there were symbols of immediate experiences.” The exploration of reality for Voegelin was necessarily open-ended and unknown. There was no predetermined answers: it was solely dependent upon a person’s existential attunement to the order of reality. 

A series of essays that examine Voegelin’s search for order is Bernat Torres’s and Josep Monserrat-Molas’s Eric Voegelin’s Political Readings. Torres is a Professor at the Faculty of Humanities at the Universitat Internacional de Catalunya in Barcelona, and he has translated the Voegelin-Strauss correspondence, among his many other works. Monserrat-Molas is a Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Barcelona, and he has published numerous works in political philosophy. In this book, they explore how Voegelin read and interpret three ancient and three modern political thinkers that had an influence on his thought—what role did these thinkers play in Voegelin’s recovery of the classical and Christian thought in political science?

Bernat Torres starts with Plato and demonstrates how Plato is at the core at Voegelin’s political philosophy. Like Plato, Voegelin envisioned himself as fighting against the climate of opinion dominated by ideologies. As Plato created myths to push back against the sophists, Voegelin created symbols like metaxy to establish foundation for a new political science. Thus, Plato is both a teacher and a model for Voegelin’s own philosophical endeavor.

Following Plato is Aristotle. In his chapter, Barry Cooper focuses on how Voegelin absorbed Aristotle’s concept of nature into his new science of politics. Aristotle’s notion of physei dikaion (right by nature) as the correct ordering of community is at the center of Voegelin’s political theory. Cooper also shows how Aristotelian symbols like the mature human person (spoudaios) and human flourishing (eudaimonia) form the other building blocks of Voegelin’s own philosophy of consciousness and politics.

Among the Christians is St. Augustine whom is the subject of Nicoletta Scotti Muth’s chapter. Muth explores how Voegelin borrowed Augustine’s symbols like amor sui and amor Dei and civitas Dei and civitas terrena into his own political philosophy. Particularly insightful was how Voegelin’s own theory of history—empirical and sacred history—was inspired by Augustine’s civitas Dei and civitas. With spirituality no longer found in the empirical world, humans must find a way to recover it, as Muth concludes in her chapter—the task of thinkers in the modern world.

Thierry Gontier introduces the reader to the modern world with Voegelin’s reading of Hobbes. For Voegelin, Hobbes was seen as the embodiment of secular modernity with its anthropological vision of humanity as one of self-love. Yet, at the same time, Hobbes recognized the need for a civil theology to maintain social and political order. This is the fundamental problem that confronts modern thinkers and whose political solution is a type of Gnosticism that denies a transcendent reality and instead substitutes a man-made utopian vision that descends quickly into totalitarian politics. The modern person is thus trapped in the “iron cage” of his or her own rationality.

Modern rationality is the subject of Arpad Szakloczai’s chapter, which discusses Voegelin’s reading of Max Weber. As part of the German rationalistic-critical philosophical tradition, Weber tried to free himself from Hegel and Kant (as did Voegelin). Whereas Voegelin was able to break free from this tradition and recover a science based on transcendence, Weber was not able to and therefore remained in his world of human rationality and Gnosticism.

The debates Voegelin had with Weber were like the ones he had with his teacher, Han Kelsen. In his chapter, Bjøn Thomassen revisits these exchanges about religion-secularism, positivism-anti-positivism, and how to understand totalitarianism. Although the two never could come to agreement about these issues, the debate between Voeglein and Kelsen is representative of the controversies that were at heart of twentieth-century political theory.

Eric Voegelin’s Political Readings does a tremendous service for Voegelin scholars in delineating the difference between how Voegelin read ancient and modern thinkers. Among the ancient thinkers, Voegelin learned and borrowed; among the moderns, he also learned but disagreed. To understand Voegelin is to understand western intellectuality itself; and Eric Voegelin’s Political Readings provides us a pathway to do so.

Eric Voegelin’s Political Readings: From Ancient Greeks to Modern Times
By Bernat Torres and Josep Monserrat-Molas, eds.
New York: Routledge, 2022; 108 pp

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