On the Critical Understanding of Politics: Voegelin on Austria, Hitler and the Germans

Abstract

Insofar as the scientific community takes notice of Eric Voegelin, he is reputed a philosopher, if not theologian, aloof from the harsh world of politics. On superficial inspection, Voegelin's late work lends itself to the erroneous impression that, contrary to his selfdescription, the author of The New Science of Politics was not a political scientist after all-as many mainstream political scientists had insisted. Although he was contemptuous of politicizing intellectuals who would or could not distinguish between the conceptual language of rational science and the linguistic symbols of political discourse, he considered the political theorist to be consciously political by nature yet contemplatively distant from political reality so as to cultivate the reflective distance allowing him to subject politics to critical study. As a theorist, Voegelin was a thoroughly political animal committed to communicating knowledge to the public and instructing them about their world. The two books under review differ in subject, form, and purpose, as well as in biographical and historical context; yet both reveal the essentials of Voegelin's scholarship, which mutated, but never changed fundamentally in the course of his intellectual development. The Authoritarian State, published in 1936, was a carefully composed and cogently argued systematic investigation of the historical determinants and political implications of the emergent authoritarian regime in 1930s Austria. In content and form, it presented itself as a substantial work of academic scholarship designed to promote the academic standing of its author. It thus differs completely from Hitler and the Germans, based on the tape recordings of a spectacular lecture course given at the University of Munich in