The Methods of Voegelin, Strauss, and Arendt

Eric Voegelin, Leo Strauss, and Hannah Arendt were all forced to flee Germany when that country fell under the sway of the National Socialists. They have been grouped together by hostile critics and by those who admired their work; their interpersonal relations have been the subject of gossip, speculation, and occasional analysis. Whatever the motives one may have for an interest in the persons, the outstanding quality of their work was bound to attract the attention of scholars.

It is regrettable that the public exchanges of these three thinkers were so few. In the event, Voegelin did have occasion to comment publicly on the work of both Arendt and Strauss, and they to reply. Moreover, the two books he reviewed were both concerned with understanding the significance of the war and of the evils that had appeared with two of the major participants, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.¹

Characteristically, Arendt’s account of totalitarianism was direct and explicit, while Strauss’s was indirect and implicit. Both of Voegelin’s reviews (and the two authors’ replies) raised important and serious questions regarding the proper method to be employed in political science, especially as concerns vile and evil regimes.

The first edition of Strauss’s On Tyranny appeared in 1948; Voegelin reviewed it the following year. Most of the commentary on this book has revolved around the issues raised by the “debate” between Strauss and Alexandre Kojève, who had known one another for many years and apparently agreed on the agenda of questions considered philosophi­cally important, though not on the answers to them.²

Whether the term debate is indeed le mot juste, whether the two participants did establish the fundamental alternatives, or whether theirs was properly speaking an intramural contest are all topics of considerable appeal as intellectual puzzles. Our present concern, however, is to make clear the terms of Voegelin’s analysis of Strauss’s political science, and to consider the general question of method.

Strauss: Contaminating Political Science with Religious Faith

In 1942 Voegelin had sent Strauss a copy of his review of Huntington Cairns’s Theory of Legal Science, which was discussed in the previous chapter [of this volume]. Strauss thanked him and praised the excellence of Voegelin’s refutation of Cairns but expressed a number of significant reserva­tions concerning Voegelin’s argument.³

“The position you attack,’ wrote Strauss, “is only the last remnant of the science established by Plato and Aristotle,” which he then characterized by enumerating five attributes, the first four of which concerned Strauss’s understanding of the “posi­tion” of Plato and Aristotle. The fifth attribute of Platonic-Aristotelian science was “the impossibility of grounding science on religious faith.” Cairns, according to Strauss, had derived his position from a rejection of Voegelin’s position and thus indirectly, and perhaps unconsciously, from that of Plato and Aristotle.

“Now, you will say,” Strauss continued, “that the Platonic-Aristotelian concept of science was put to rest through Christianity and the discovery of history. I am not quite persuaded of that.” Strauss’s first objection, then, was that Voegelin had contaminated the classical understanding of political science with considerations of “religious faith” and “history,” which were in turn connected to a spe­cific, historical religious faith, Christianity.

Strauss went on to say that he was persuaded by a “countercriticism of the Cartesian position,” namely that it would be wrong to “adopt the thesis of Descartes and all his successors that Plato and Aristotle are fundamentally inadequate.” Such a position would be intelligible and adequate only if it could be shown successfully that a “direct critique of Plato and Aristotle,” based upon an “adequate understanding,” had been completed.

In the evident absence of such a critique, the central question of Plato and Aristotle versus Descartes must remain “entirely open.” In other words, once philosophical questions were purged of religious faith and a concern with history, then a straight-ahead contrast between ancient and modern science was possible.

There remained, however, the possibility that an equivalent to reli­gious faith might be found in Plato. If so, the prospect of a simple con­frontation of ancients and moderns across the playing fields of “science” would have to be recast or augmented by “religious” questions. Strauss rejected that possibility: “I can especially not agree with you when you speak of Plato’s attempt ‘to create a new myth’: his effort was directed toward grounding science anew and especially the science of the soul and of the state.”

Voegelin: Platonic Political Science Founded in Myth

Voegelin replied in a letter dated December 9, 1942. He thanked Strauss for his “dear letter,” agreed with his observation that Cairns’s critique of positivism solved nothing, and indicated his desire to pro­vide, “if not solutions, at least possibilities of clarification.”

As did Strauss, Voegelin found “the inevitable starting-point” in the Platonic-Aristotelian problem. Voegelin distinguished the two components in the following way: first, at the center of Platonic political thinking stand the fundamental experiences bound up with the person and death of Socrates. Specifically, the right ordering of the soul, the Platonic dike, was formed by the experiences of “catharsis through consciousness of death and the enthusiasm of eros.”

These fundamental experiences, moreover, were expressed through the great mythic representations in the Phaedo, Symposium, Republic, and Laws. Of secondary importance to the fundamental experiences and the expression of them through the form of the myth, therefore, was the “theoretical political-ethical achievement,” because only after the fundamental order of the soul had been established could “the field of social relations determined by it be systematically ordered.” For this reason Voegelin considered Platonic political science to be founded in myth.

Moreover, the persuasiveness of the actual content of the Platonic myths as well as the suitability of the form for the expression of fundamental experiences was what made possible the ” ‘scientific’ treatment of political and ethical problems,” in Voegelin’s view because the persuasive truths of the myths established “the stable point for the choice of the relevant materials.”

That is, myth, and its ability to persuade philosophers of its truth, was the analytical center of what would later be called philosophical anthropology. And for Voegelin a sound philosophical anthropology was a crucial element of political science.

The Bio Theoretikos, The Christian Adaptation, and Disagreement

In the second place, and in contrast to Platonic political science, Aristotle’s episteme politike was founded not on the Socratic myth but on “the bios theoretikos of the intellectual mystic.” The “system of relevance” achieved by the Socratic myth could be assumed by Aristotle to be valid; on the basis of that assumption, Aristotle was able to consider extensive empirical materials “under the now conceptualized mythical image.”

Third, therefore, Voegelin did not agree with Strauss’s paraphrase that Platonic-Aristotelian political science “was put to an end through Christianity and the discovery of history.” Rather, he said, “the very possibilities of the Platonic-Aristotelian science already have their roots in myths and . . . Christianity and historical consciousness only changed them.” The change wrought by Christianity was to replace “Hellenocentric man” by the individual, “the person in direct communication with God” rather than by way of the Delphic omphalos.⁴

Precisely from the Hellenocentric position of Plato and Aristotle, therefore, “a universal political science is radically impossible.” The universalization of the image of man in Christianity “is the decisive reason for the superiority of the Christian anthropology over the Hellenic.”

Strauss replied on December 20,1942, indicating his general disagree­ment with Voegelin’s interpretation but adding, “it is so toweringly superior to nearly all that one gets to read about Plato and Aristotle, that I would greatly welcome its being presented to the American public.” He then raised the specific objection that, even if Greek political science was not universalizable, which he denied, the universalization did not take place in the Renaissance but with its reception “by the Muslims and the Christians (from the ninth century on).”⁵

So far as the sources indicate, Voegelin did not reply to this observation of Strauss. He did, however, ask for Strauss’s publication on Arabic and Jewish medieval political philosophy, and their epistolary conversation moved on to other things.⁶

Strauss’ On Tyranny: Voegelin’s Qualified Admiration

In a letter dated October 16,1946, Strauss asked for Voegelin’s advice on finding a suitable venue for his “first attempt to interpret Xenophon’s dialogue on tyrants (the Hiero)” A little more than two years later Voegelin had On Tyranny in hand, and Waldemar Gurian had asked him to review it.⁷

The “nucleus” of Strauss’s book, Voegelin began in his review, was the analysis of Xenophon’s much neglected dialogue Hiero, and in that respect it constitutes a valuable contribution to the history of political thought. Strauss’s interpretation will compel revision of judgment with regard to Xenophon’s “psychological subtlety and his skill of compo­sition” but not with regard to his stature as a thinker.

In addition to textual exegesis, Strauss reflected systematically on the broader problem of tyranny in ancient and modern times, on differences between ancient and modern political science, and on the connection between Hiero and The Prince of Machiavelli. “Every political scientist who tries to disentangle himself from the contemporary confusion over the problem of tyranny will be much indebted to this study and inevitably use it as a starting point.”

More specifically, according to Voegelin, Strauss was particularly interested in the problem “of freedom of intellectual criti­cism under a tyrannical government.” In Hellenic antiquity, critics were adept at describing the defects of tyranny without being executed for their trouble. Strauss’s mode of interpretation brought this and related problems into focus particularly well, Voegelin said.

One of the related problems and “one of the finest parts of Professor Strauss’s analysis concerns the subtle gradation of human ranks”–the wise man, the just man, the brave man, the gentleman, and so on, leading to “the socially relevant type which the tyrant must face in the mass” who “can be handled by various enticements and fears, by prizes for good conduct and by persuasion.”⁸ In general, therefore, Voegelin had great admiration for Strauss’s achievement.

Tyranny Before and After Democracy

Even so, “we miss a proper evaluation” of the following point: for Xenophon, as for Plato, the problem of tyranny was “one of historical necessity” as well as a topic suitable for theoretical discussion. Notwith­standing the defective character of tyranny, it had become in Xenophon’s day “the inevitable alternative to a democracy which had ceased to func­tion effectively.” Historically, of course, the “age of tyrants” preceded the development of Athenian democracy.⁹

For Voegelin, though not for Strauss, this historical sequence was theoretically, methodologically, and scientifically significant. More specifically, Voegelin raised the ques­tion of whether, in the sequence tyranny-democracy-tyranny, the term tyranny meant the same thing in the sense of referring to substantially the same regime in both the pre- and postdemocratic context, which is to say in the pre- and postconstitutional context.

Strauss’s own textual analysis had pointed to the curious change in vocabulary: in the first part of the dialogue, ” ‘Tyrant’ (and derivatives) occurs relatively much more frequently in the first part (83 times) than in the second part (7 times); on the other hand, ‘ruling’ (and derivatives) occurs much more frequently in the much shorter second part (12 times) than in the much more extensive first part (4 times).”

This was significant because “the wise” Simonides “wants to induce Hiero to think of his position in terms of ‘ruling’ rather than in terms of ‘tyranny.'”¹⁰ Voegelin agreed with Strauss that the change in usage reflected the dramatic development of the dialogue but was of the view that something more was involved. The changing, or inconsistent, usage “may derive from the fact that a new political situation,” one where a postdemocratic and postconstitutional regime appears to be necessary for public order, “is discussed in terms of ‘tyranny’ because a vocabulary more suitable to the new problems is not yet developed.” The change from “tyrant” to “ruler,” therefore, may indicate “the genuine necessity of dropping an inadequate term.”

This observation introduced the question of what an adequate term might be so that preconstitutional (and genuine) tyranny might be distinguished from the postconstitutional regime that had been identified by Xenophon and indicated indirectly through a change in the frequency of usage of the two terms, tyrant and ruler. Only a “careful reader,” to use a favored Straussian locution, would notice so subtle a hint.

Understanding The Prince

Pushing this line of interpretation [tyrant vs. ruler] further, Voegelin then argued that the opposition Strauss maintained as existing between Xenophon’s mir­ror of the prince, Cyropaedia, and the mirror of the tyrant, Hiero, was not the whole story. In one respect, the two dialogues were on the same side, namely, both texts explored the question of establishing a new rulership “that will make an end to the dreary overturning of democracies and tyrannies in the Hellenic polis.” By this interpretation, the apparent opposition of the perfect king and the improved tyrant may be nothing more than an artifact of Xenophon’s inadequate conceptual vocabulary. The comparison with Machiavelli, which was stressed by Strauss, sharpened the issue.

By Strauss’s interpretation, the tendency of both Hiero and The Prince to neglect the distinction between king and tyrant was the closest and most important point of contact between ancient and modern political thought. For Strauss, Machiavelli’s indifference to the distinction be­tween king and tyrant was one of the deepest roots of modern political thought.¹¹ Voegelin did not disagree with Strauss’s observation and pro­vided the following explanation for it: the parallel between Xenophon and Machiavelli existed, he said, because both are in the position of “moderns” in their respective civilizations; the parallel between the two thinkers is due to the parallel between their historical situations.

The distinction between king and tyrant is obliterated in The Prince, because Machiavelli, like Xenophon, was faced with the problem of a stabilizing and regenerating rulership after the breakdown of constitutional forms in the city-state; it is obliterated because Machiavelli, too, was in search of a type of ruler beyond the distinction of king and tyrant that is politically significant only before the final breakdown of the republican constitutional order.

Machiavelli’s Armed Prophet

The difference between Xenophon and Machiavelli lay in the fact that Machiavelli was able to discover a new term to designate the postcon­stitutional ruler, whereas Xenophon was able only to indicate that a new situation had arisen by means of the shift in usage that Strauss had noticed. Machiavelli’s new term was armed prophet, for which he claimed Xenophon’s Cyrus (not Hiero) as a predecessor.¹² Within the new type of postconstitutional ruler, the old categories of good (royal) and bad (tyrannical) reappeared.¹³

Moreover, Voegelin added, there was an in­direct influence of Xenophon on Machiavelli that Strauss overlooked. Machiavelli’s image of an armed prophet and a savior prince drew upon several conventions, including a standardized Life of Temür, which we shall discuss in detail in Chapter 7 [of this volume].

The pattern for the Life of Temür, which appeared most clearly in Machiavelli’s Life of Castruccio Castracani (but also in the closing chapter of The Prince), was drawn from Xenophon’s portrait of a young and ruthless Cyrus who compelled obedience through fear and terror.¹⁴

In addition, however, Machiavelli incorporated non-Hellenic apocalyptic spiritual elements into his evoca­tion of a postconstitutional prince. Accordingly, while Machiavelli and Xenophon were both “modern” with respect to their own civilizations, in the context of Western rather than Hellenic civilization, Machiavelli’s “modernity” is “burdened with the tradition that leads from medieval and Renaissance Paracletes to the secularized Superman of the nine­teenth century and after.”

We may note in passing that for Voegelin ancient and modern were terms that took their meaning from a historical or, as he said, following Toynbee, a “civilizational” context. We shall discuss this problem further in Chapter 8. For the present we would note only that, for Voegelin, the methodological distinction proper to the political and historical sciences involved was between Western and Hellenic civilizations, not ancient and modern (Western) civilization, which was the position of Strauss.

Strauss’ Sophistic Response to Voegelin’s Review

In January 1949, Voegelin sent Strauss a copy of his review. Strauss thanked him and expressed the hope that he might “argue out” their differences in print. In May 1949 Kojève wrote Strauss and suggested that they publish together a volume combining a French translation of Xenophon’s dialogue and of Strauss’s book, along with a review article that Kojève was in the midst of writing.

In August 1950, Strauss informed Voegelin of Kojève’s project and said he would begin his “Restatement” with a response to Voegelin’s review. “I am not sticking strictly to what you expressly said,” Strauss wrote, “I must come to terms with your unstated premises, which in part I know from your other publications, and in part presume.”¹⁵ By September 1950 Strauss had completed his “Restatement” and sent it off to Kojève. As promised, the first few pages dealt with Voegelin’s review.¹⁶

Strauss’s “Restatement” was a mixture of reasoned disagreement re­garding, for example, Voegelin’s interpretation of Xenophon’s intention in writing Cyropaedia or of Machiavelli’s intention in writing Life of Castruccio Castracani, with transparently sophistic remarks on whether the distinction between good and bad rulers was not more fundamental than that between constitutional and postconstitutional situations, or whether such postconstitutional regimes as Voegelin said were justified by historical necessity were not thereby necessarily inferior to those that were inherently choiceworthy.

Such statements may be called sophistic because, first, neither Voegelin nor anyone with a modicum of common sense would disagree with them and, second, Voegelin’s remarks, in context, concerned the proper interpretation of a historical pattern or configuration, not a moral claim. In short, part of Strauss’s “Restatement” was simply the rhetorical ploy of suppresio veri suggestio falsi.

The presupposition of Voegelin that Strauss considered to be the most questionable was the opinion that “what is decisive is not Xenophon’s conscious intention, stated or implied, but the historical meaning of his work, the historical meaning of a work being determined by the historical situation as distinguished from the conscious intention of the author.”

Strauss believed that Voegelin subscribed to this doctrine and that, therefore, Voegelin was a historicist and subject to the standard, and in Strauss’s view decisive, criticism, which Strauss leveled at all historicists, that they presumed to understand an author better than the author understood himself. This was, for Strauss, particularly to be regretted when it came to an ancient, classical, and Greek thinker. “After the experience of our generation,” he wrote:

“the burden of proof would seem to rest on those who assert rather than on those who deny that we have progressed beyond the classics. And even if it were true that we could understand the classics better than they understood themselves, we would become certain of our superiority only after under­standing them exactly as they understood themselves. Otherwise we might mistake our superiority to our notion of the classics for superiority to the classics.”

Strauss was genuinely concerned that Voegelin had fallen into error because he sent Voegelin a copy of his longer discussion, analysis, and refutation of historicism.¹⁷ From Voegelin’s perspective, Strauss had accepted the system of rel­evance (to use the language of the last chapter) or the philosophical anthropology (to use the language of the next chapter) of classical po­litical philosophy. It served Strauss well, and Voegelin maintained the highest regard for his scholarship.¹⁸

Voegelin Defends Strauss

Voegelin was particularly critical of attempts to turn Strauss’s scholarly achievements into support for a conservative political agenda. In 1977, for example, he wrote to John P. East, in response to East’s characterization of Strauss as a conservative:

“It was a pleasure to read your article; and I have no quarrel with its positive content. Still, I am not quite happy about it. For Strauss, after all, did not [do] the work he did, in order to extend comfort to Conservatives.”

“He was a great scholar; and by the influence on his students he was instrumental in restoring a certain amount of serious scholarship to a field as sadly lacking in it as is political science. If one puts the weight as strongly as you do on the incom­patibility of his classic and Judaeo-Christian tradition with the current isms, you underplay perhaps the fact that such a thing as “science” in the classic sense really exists, and that the various isms represented in our universities are not only immoral but objectively wrong.”

“They are not euphemistically ‘utopian,’ they are phony, dilettantic, illiterate, and fraudulent. Whenever a utopian ismist cashes his salary-check, he takes money for merchandise which he cannot deliver. In every other profession but the academic that is called commercial fraud.”

“A political theorist who cannot read the classics in his field because he is too lazy to learn Greek and Latin, should be immediately fired on elementary grounds of business ethics. I am expressing myself unequivocally, in order to make it clear that there is more at stake in a society than a liberal-conservative conflict when the universities become training centers for permissiveness, sloppy work, and intellectual confidence games.”

“I am far from agreeing with Strauss on everything, but he certainly has been a noticeable force in raising the awareness of standards in science.”¹⁹

A year later, East was preparing a similar article on Voegelin’s “contri­butions” to conservative thought. Voegelin’s response to the article, as was his response to the behaviorists of southern California, was that East had assembled the materials for a satire. But, Voegelin said:

“The Satire itself has remained incomplete. In order to make it complete, you would have to confront the actual content and purpose of my work, which has nothing to do with conservative predilections, with these predilections as illustrated by your selection of quotations.”

“Why you have left the satire incomplete, I am sure, you will know best yourself. But as a basis for satirical purposes your study merits high praise, and I shall use it perhaps sometime.”²⁰

Voegelin wrote similar letters on other occasions in an attempt to defend himself, Strauss, and other scholars against the smothering embrace of conservatives.²¹

In short, neither Strauss nor Voegelin was a “conserva­tive,” notwithstanding the many, many publications and interpretations of their work that declare the opposite. As Voegelin observed, it is material for satire, which is a sophisticated as well as an acquired literary taste. The question of the use made by self-described “conservatives” of Strauss’s and Voegelin’s work is akin to the use made, for example, of Nietzsche or Hegel.

A serious consideration of this problem would begin by an analysis of the status of terms such as liberal and conservative.²² Because this is seldom if ever done, and because the work of the two political scientists is not distinguished from vulgarian appropriation by political activists, Voegelin’s satirical reference to materials for satire adopted just the right tone.

Voegelin’s Techniques of Scientific Analysis

The controversy with Arendt illustrated a number of points. First, Voegelin’s attitude changed from one of irritation that his efforts at a rational exposition of the problems had been turned aside by Arendt to one of detached resignation. At the end of the day, about all that anyone can really do with individuals who will not or cannot discuss the important questions is gain whatever enjoyment one can from the experience of sheer disagreement. In the history of political philosophy, ironic resignation to the incomprehension of one’s potential interlocutor is not without precedent.⁵⁷

Second, while at the end of the controversy with Arendt, Voegelin’s attitude concerning her position was similar to that he held toward the behaviorists, he reached his conclusion by a different route and over a longer time. To recall an earlier observation: with the behaviorists, there was simply nothing to learn. Their actual commitments to scientism made their pretensions to science a bad joke.

Third, Voegelin’s attitude regarding the approach of Leo Strauss re­flected the possibility of honest disagreement between scholars who understood and respected one another. It was, therefore, a relatively straightforward problem to analyze and present the issues that arose in Voegelin’s review of On Tyranny.

Likewise in considering the dis­agreement regarding Plato and Aristotle or the difference made by Christianity to the conceptualization of political philosophy, misunder­standings were kept to a minimum. For example, both parties agreed that historical sequence mattered much more to Voegelin than to Strauss. Accordingly, the continuity of spiritual politics from medieval paracletes to the several varieties of supermen of the nineteenth century was for Voegelin a positive center of intellectual activism, whereas for Strauss it was sufficient to know that the doctrines espoused by such persons could be adequately comprehended and criticized from the standpoint of classical political philosophy.⁵⁸

Using Voegelin’s language in his review of Arendt, if the real division was between immanentist sectarians and re­ligious and philosophical transcendentalists, then Voegelin was in closer agreement with Strauss than with Arendt: no reasonable person would argue that Strauss was an immanentist sectarian. He was, as Voegelin said of him, a scholar who knew his business.⁵⁹

The Need for an Adequate Terminology

With The Origins of Totalitarianism Voegelin directly encountered a problem that was discussed somewhat abstractly in Chapter 3. Thinkers such as Plato or Aquinas, or even Strauss, present their arguments in technically competent philosophical or theoretical language. In the absence of such competence, if one is to make sense of an author’s ideas and arguments, they must be referred to a rational standard or to a philosophical, theoretical, or scientific context that transcends the one employed by the author. With Arendt, as with Voltaire, discussed in Chapter 6, this means that one must develop an adequate terminological apparatus to deal with a defective or spiritually impoverished language. The example of Arendt indicates that there is no guarantee that the author in question will accept the correction offered.

To illustrate Voegelin’s understanding of what a properly scientific treatment of these questions might entail, let us conclude this chapter with a brief recollection of Voegelin’s discussion of one aspect of to­talitarian domination, Nazi race ideas, introduced above in Chapter 2.⁶⁰ Voegelin began by distinguishing the concept of race, which may or may not prove useful in anthropology, natural science, population biology, and so on, from the idea of race, the purpose of which is to create an image of a group as a unit–because, as observable phenomena, groups dissolve into the actions, purposes, and motivations of individuals.

Second, he further distinguished the race idea as one of a series of body ideas that have developed historically and proposed a nominalistic taxonomy of his own around the three types: the body politic created by the Greek polis, the mystical body of Christ, and the race idea.

Third, however, Voegelin moved beyond the classification of types toward a realistic analysis of the human spiritual essence expressed in or through the body ideas. As with the discussion of Egidius, Voegelin was particularly concerned with the historical development of modern political ideas from medieval ones–or rather, from the one-sided interpretation of medieval ones.

Balancing Both Homonoia and the Mystical Body

In the symbolism of the mystical body of Christ, two antecedent elements came together.

First, the idea of like-mindedness, homonoia, re­ferred generally to the bond of sentiment among members of any type of community. Second, however, the symbolism of Christ as a second Adam established the genealogical principle of a common ancestor: Christ was, however, a common spiritual rather than corporeal ancestor of humanity.

The idea of the mystical body, in the technical sense that Voegelin used the term, “is based on an interpretation of the persons of Christ and of man. Both [Christ and ordinary human beings] consist of the body, the soma, and the mind [or spirit], the pneuma.” The ontological basis for the union of Christ and the human community of Christians is the assumption (or confession of faith) that the nature of Christ is both fully human and fully divine.

Accordingly, in their like-mindedness all members of the community, the ekklesia, participate in the spirit, the pneuma, of Christ, which, being also fully divine, is centered beyond the range of ordinary earthly experience. That is, the unifying force, the ontologically real bond of the ekklesia, is the divine and world-transcendent personality of Christ.

Voegelin drew a contrast with pre-Christian possessions by spirits (or demons), which were usually confined to a single other person; the full­ness, the pleroma, of the spirit of Christ, however, meant that it may live in an indefinite number of others, beginning “when two or three are gath­ered together” in Christ’s name, to use the formula of the Book of Com­mon Prayer. With the emphasis on the mystical body, we may call this the more pneumatic account of the construction of the Christian community.

A second, and balancing, account, which lays the emphasis on the mystical body and which we may call the more somatic one, symbolizes Christ as “the head of the body, the ekklesia” (Col. 1:18). The point of this second version is to avert the obvious danger that the Christian community might consider that it was simply a collection of like-minded individuals. By analogy with the human body, the head does not exist apart from the body; by the same token, the relationship between head and body must be specified.

The Pauline Balance Fragments into National Communities

Paul clarified this problem by means of the diversification of the one spirit of Christ into the charismata, the divine gifts, that determine the status and calling of the several members of the one body. In 1 Cor. 12, for example, Saint Paul begins by considering the diversities of the charismata but then remarks:

“But all these [gifts] worketh that one and selfsame Spirit, dividing to every man severally as he will. For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ. For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit. For the body is not one member, but many.” (1 Cor. 12:11-14)

As was mentioned above in the discussion of Egidius, the Pauline balance consists in the infusion of the more somatic account with the specifically Christian meaning expressed through the Christological interpretation of like-mindedness, which is to say, through what we have called the more pneumatic account.

With the fragmentation of medieval Christian universalism into particular national or other communities, the more so­matic interpretation, “which is most intimately dependent on the Christology, is referred to the background while the idea of the diversification of a spiritual unit into spiritual functions is transferred to spiritual sub­stances other than the pneuma of Christ,” such as, for example, the nation.

In other words, when the emphasis shifts from a balance of somatic and pneumatic to a heavily skewed pneumatic interpretation of com­munity, the way is opened “for a reconstruction of the spiritual meaning of community along lines diverging from the Christian.” The devel­opment was not toward a recovery of the polis symbolism or of the like-mindedness of the empire of Alexander the Great, but in a direc­tion unconnected to symbols of family, kinship, or bloodline.

Specifi­cally, the fragmentation or particularization of the Christian community substituted for Christological like-mindedness the like-mindedness of particular national communities, each endowed with “a more or less systematized body of symbolic doctrine asserting the superior qualities of the several national spirits and their consequent particular mission in history.”

Substituting New Symbols for Christological Content

The new parochial symbolism, therefore, presupposes the Christian form of the mystical body and simply replaces the Christological content, substance, and reality with something else. Moreover, because these new communities are fragments of a Christian community, “they are capable of evolving almost any new set of symbols out of elements which are offered by the civilizational situation of the mo­ment.” Such “elements” might include economic factors, as in the case of the Bolsheviks, or biological ones, as in the case of the Nazis. In either instance, these real but fragmentary factors are endowed with an imaginary spiritual meaning that, as a political idea, can serve as an image to unite a group and motivate it to act.

We need not provide a detailed account of the changes from the medieval Christian symbols and experiences that, following Bergson, Voegelin called “open” to the modern intramundane or “closed” equiv­alents in order to understand what a properly scientific account of the dynamics of the changes entailed: “The formerly open group with spiritual threads running from every single member beyond the earthly reality into another ontological realm closes by the transfer of the center from the beyond into the very community itself.”⁶¹

The actual content of the symbolism of closure has, in turn, varied across the range of political societies. As a mere matter of fact, racial symbolism (in 1940) was more acceptable in Germany than in France or Britain. In order to account for this fact, Voegelin introduced historical considerations similar to those that marked a point of major divergence with Strauss. Voegelin made the point in different contexts throughout his scholarly life, and we will encounter it again in the course of this study. In the formulation of 1940, he used the phrase “the structure of institutions and ideas” to describe what might be called a three-dimensional type-construct.

A two-dimensional categorization is familiar from Aristotle’s Politics. Good and bad versions of rule by the one, the few, and the many (Politics 1279a 25) can be plotted on a bivariate table. Similar categoriza­tions can be drawn up for the national state or the Western democracy or the authoritarian state. These two-dimensional type-categories neglect, however, the importance of “the relative time position of the characteris­tics” and so neglect as well the “relative historical weight” of the various constituent elements of, for example, the category of regime classified as a national democracy.

An example may clarify Voegelin’s point. In order to understand the French national democracy, one must not only look to the juridical construction of the French state but also bear in mind that the political unit of France was founded during late medieval times and to all intents and purposes was well established by the mid-seventeenth century. The bourgeois and democratic revolutions, which began in the eighteenth century, took place within a solid administrative structure established over the preceding centuries. Moreover, the political ideas that ani­mated French society during the eighteenth-century revolutions were eighteenth-century ideas of the rights of man, not ideas of race or class.

In contrast, a country such as Germany or Italy may belong to the same two-dimensional juridical type as France; indeed, it may even have a constitution that is modeled on the constitution of France. At the same time, however, it may have a perfectly different time structure when the fixation of the territory and political independence follow the awakening of national consciousness of the bourgeois stratum of society, instead of preceding it, as in the case in Germany and Italy, and in the Central and Eastern European states.

The Protection Afforded by the Weight of Centuries

National groups attaining statehood without the weight of centuries to provide stability to the regime are apt to have different political ideas than did the eighteenth-century French who established the legal state that was subsequently copied elsewhere. Specifically, the increased virulence of totalitarian domination in Italy, Germany, and Russia was, in Voegelin’s view, “strictly determined by the time structure of their democratic periods.”

In Italy the period of liberal republicanism preceded national unification by decades; in Germany national unification coincided with the Prussian wars, which were con­ducted independently of the liberal republicanism of the 1840s. “And the totalitarian revolution in Russia is probably the most complete one because the effective liberal revolution preceded the communistic one only by a few months.” A relatively long duration of a liberal democratic regime may act as a kind of inoculation against the totalitarian “virus.”

Using  less metaphorical language, Voegelin observed that:

“racial symbolism has comparatively little chance in a society which has gone through an eighteenth century revolution, because the collective element of racialism is hardly compatible with the belief in the value of the sovereign person and the indestructible soul, and its rights and liberties; and because the biological determinism is incompatible with the idea of reason as a spiritual substance independent of the qualities of the body which houses it.”

At the same time, however, such symbols are not simply self-evident. Even the American Declaration of Independence begins with the affir­mation “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Accordingly:

“whatever criticism can be launched rightly against the race symbolism under moral and religious aspects, as an interpretation of reality the idea that men are different, and that their differences may be due to differences in their biological structure, is not more unrealistic than the idea that all men are equal. Moreover, in a revolutionary upheaval the authority of established symbols is, practically by definition, highly impaired so that whatever symbols have currency are likely to prevail.”

Scientism

In the context of the totalitarian revolutions of the twentieth cen­tury, pride of place must go to what Voegelin here identified as “the superstition of science,” or scientism, to use the terminology of the last chapter. Likewise the “positivist destruction of science” may be intel­ligibly linked to totalitarian domination with the observation that the eclipse of an awareness, even among scholars, that social symbols create theological and metaphysical problems, not quantitative and phenome­nal ones, constitutes the background for the introduction of new social symbols, expressing specific spiritual experiences, under the guise of “science.”

This is why Bolsheviks called themselves “scientific socialists” and revered Marx as the founder of scientific socialism and also why Nazis considered their “race theories” to be scientific. One of Arendt’s insights regarding totalitarian domination is that the regime, if that is the correct word, is less a structure than a movement, which means that it “can have only a direction, and that any form of legal or governmental structure can only be a handicap to a movement which is being propelled with increasing speed in a certain direction.”⁶²

Voegelin offered his own account of the phenomenon:

“when science ‘progresses’ farther and new symbols evolve on the basis of new materials, the older ones cannot defend themselves by the authority of a religious belief of intrinsic value, but they are exposed to attack and dissolution on the level of their superstition.”

The history of symbols during the last century offers to a detached view the spectacle of a somewhat hectic sequence of scientific fads. Voegelin’s observation regarding the sequence of scientific fads needs to be distinguished from the progress of genuine science. He did, after all, criticize Arendt for not being up-to-date in her choice of analytic instruments, and urged her to take a look at Toynbee.

On the other hand, Strauss’s answer to the problem of scientism or of “scientific fads” was to consider it as an aspect of historicism, the self-refuting nature of which can be demonstrated easily enough. In more positive terms, Straussian political science is based on the philosophical anthropology of the classical thinkers. For Voegelin, however, historicity was a funda­mental dimension of human existence. This is why he was able to dismiss Aristotle’s classification of regimes as no longer relevant to the analysis of contemporary political problems, whereas Strauss considered such a position premature, to say the least. In this chapter we have seen in outline how Voegelin’s political science sought to incorporate the historically contingent with the nonhistorical or essential.

1. Voegelin usually sent both Arendt and Strauss copies of his major publications, and they usually responded with polite thanks. Strauss’s Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953) is in Voegelin’s library at Erlangen, but it is unmarked even by his usual light pencil lines in the margin. Strauss’s copy of Voegelin’s New Science of Politics in the Strauss Archive at the University of Chicago is accompanied by fourteen pages of notes evidently prepared with a view to writing a review. Voegelin agreed to review Strauss’s book for Review of Politics, but if ever he completed the work it remained unpublished. Voegelin to Gurian, September 28, 1953, University of Notre Dame, Archives, URP06/Box 6.

2. Leo Strauss, On Tyranny: An Interpretation of Xenophon’s Hiero, with a foreword by Alvin Johnson (New York: Macmillan, 1948); a second edition appeared in French six years later, De La Tyrannie, par Léo Strauss, Précédé de Hiéron, de Xénophon et suivi de Tyrannie et sagesse par Alexandre Kojève,trans. H. Kern (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), containing an edited version of the review by Kojève, which had originally appeared as “L’Action politique des philosophes,”Critique 6 (1950): 41-42,46-55,138-55, along with Strauss’s “Mise au point,” which replied briefly to Voegelin and at greater length to Kojève. In 1963 an English translation, On Tyranny: Revised and Enlarged, ed. Allan Bloom (Glencoe: Free Press, 1963), was published, and a paperback was issued by Cornell University Press in 1968. Finally, there is a critical edition, On Tyranny: Revised and Expanded Edition, Including the Strauss-Kojève Correspondence, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth. Reference is to the last text. Voegelin’s review was published as “On Tyranny” in 1949.

3. Strauss to Voegelin, November 24, 1942, in Faith and Political Philosophy, 5-7. Other quotations are taken from this edition. Most of the letters are in HI 37/1.

4. In his review of Cairns’s book, Voegelin did not say that (in Strauss’s words) “the Platonic-Aristotelian concept of science was put to rest through Christianity and the discovery of history.” Voegelin wrote there substantially what he wrote in his letter to Strauss: “the appearance of Christ has added to the idea of man [in Plato and Aristotle] the dimension of the spiritual singularity of every human being, so that we cannot build a science of social order, for instance, on the anthropologies of Plato or Aristotle” (CW, 27:104; emphasis added).

5. Voegelin’s point about the Renaissance concerned not the question of universal­ity but rather that of its impossibility, owing to what, in his review of Cairns, he called the discovery of the “dimension of historic singularity,” which was added to the spiritual singularity of Christianity (CW, 27:104). This problem is discussed in detail in connection with Vico in Chapter 9. In addition, and notwithstanding Voegelin’s admiration for Strauss’s access to the Arabic texts, Voegelin’s understanding of the medieval Arabic failasauf did not accord with that of Strauss. Compare Voegelin, “Siger de Brabant,” esp. 514 ff., with Strauss, “How Farabi Read Plato’s Laws,” in What Is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies, esp. 137-39.

6. Voegelin had been asked by Social Research, of which Strauss was an associate editor, to review a book on phenomenology, and the next topic the two men discussed was Husserl. The issues involved are discussed in Chapter 5.

7. Subsequent quotations are from Review of Politics 11 (1949): 241-44.

8. This aspect of Xenophon’s dialogue was an important topic in the “debate” between Kojève and Strauss owing to its connection to the Hegelian notion of “recognition,” which was central to Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel. See Barry Cooper, The End of History: An Essay on Modern Hegelianism, 266-72.

9. See, for example, A. Andrewes, The Greek Tyrants and Greek Society, chap. 4, and N. G. L. Hammond, A History of Greece to 322B.C., 2d ed.

10. Strauss, On Tyranny, 65.

11. Ibid., 23-24.

12. Machiavelli, The Prince, chap. 6.

13. Ibid., chap. 8.

14. Xenophon, Cyropaedia 1.4-5.

15. The correspondence is reproduced in Faith and Political Philosophy, 44-72. Voegelin wrote to Strauss that he was looking forward to learning “what the un­stated presuppositions of my work are.” Strauss replied to Voegelin: “My terrible handwriting must have brought about a terrible misunderstanding. How could you ever believe that I wrote that you will learn finally with clarity from my ‘Restatement’ what the unstated premises of your work are?” (71). Strauss probably possessed no copy of his handwritten letter and, in any event, did not provide a correction. Strauss’s handwriting was notoriously hard to decipher, and it is entirely possible that he wrote something else. To Voegelin (and to the editors of the correspondence) his words looked to be what Voegelin took them to be.

16. See the correspondence reproduced in Strauss, On Tyranny, 241-63; Strauss’s “Restatement” is available in On Tyranny, 178-85, reprinted from Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy?

17. Strauss, “Political Philosophy and History.” See Voegelin’s letter of March 12, 1949, in Faith and Political Philosophy as well as his blunt account of the whole business in a letter to Alfred Schütz, March 22,1949, HI 34/11.

18. In addition to defending Strauss against ill-informed, presumptuous, and often ignorant critics, Voegelin on several occasions sent his best undergraduates from LSU to do graduate work at Chicago. He served on the examination committee of one of Strauss’s Ph.D. students and wrote a strong letter to the William Volker Fund in support of Strauss’s proposal to establish a political philosophy seminar at Chicago. For details see the correspondence between Voegelin and Edward Shils, HI 36/11; Willmoore Kendall, April 8,1948, HI 20/39; Richard Cornuelle of the Volker Fund, July 14,1954, HI 42/1; James W. Fesler, March 20,1957, HI 42/18.

19. HI 10/23. East’s article appeared in Modern Age 20 (1977).

20. HI 10/23.

21. See, for example, Voegelin to Russell Kirk, April 23, 1956, HI 21/6; Robert Heilman, October 8, 1960, HI 17/9; David Collier, Modern Age, May 12, 1961, HI 25/26; Peter Berger, Social Research, December 19,1967, HI 36/29; Jeffrey M. Nelson, April 2, 1969, HI 27/1; Stephen J. Tonsor, April 3 and July 30, 1969, HI 37/27; Robert Schuettiger, October 13, 1969, HI 43/5; Ronald F. Docksai, Young Americans for Freedom, May 13, 1971, HI 42/19; Wolfram Ender, November 1, 1971, HI 44/11; Henry Regnery, June 14,1972, HI 18/2; George H. Nash, December 9,1974, HI 26/13; William F. Buckley, National Review, June 20, 1979, HI 26/19; Michael Berheide, March 9, 1981, HI 8/7.

22. See, however, Voegelin, “Liberalism and Its History,” trans. Mary and Keith Algozin, and Strauss, Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968).