Eric Voegelin Research Articles

Imprisonment and Freedom: Rejecting and Embracing the Tension of Existence in Marcel Proust's in Search of Lost Time

This essay begins from the premise that Marcel Proust's time regained can be understood as the recovery of a primary experience of the cosmos, and of the metaxy or in-between, as these terms are used by Eric Voegelin. The essay argues that the jealousy experienced by the narrator, Marcel, represents a closure of the self toward that primary experience of the cosmos and of the metaxy.

Eric Voegelin and Henri De Lubac: Reason Seeking Transcendence, Nature Longing for Grace

Professor Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) and Father Henri de Lubac (1896-1991) had much in common, beyond the fact that their lives overlapped. Both men were not only concerned with, but had been personally affected by, the mass ideological movements of the twentieth century. Both men were profound thinkers, who analyzed the problems of personal and political order and disorder not on the level of institutional arrangements, but down to their spiritual roots. And each man, in a different way, was accused of adopting a heterodox approach to Christianity. Indeed, some believed that de Lubac had committed heresy, and others would have accused Voegelin of heresy had they been able to pigeonhole him in a confessional denomination in the first place. Each man saw certain developments in Christian theology in the Middle Ages as a source of modern secularism. The paper considers the fundamental similarities between Voegelin and de Lubac, and their differences.

Bodies of truth: Eric Voegelin’s ontology of participation and the potentialities of embodied being

This article critically engages with the work of Eric Voegelin, a thinker who, for the most part, has remained neglected. Against this neglect the claim is advanced that Voegelin’s thought should be taken heed of, not least from thinkers who register themselves in the radical tradition of political theory. At the same time, however, it is argued that any positive appropriation of Voegelin from a radical perspective has to put under critical scrutiny basic assumptions informing his thought, and above all his conception of the body. In particular, the argument put forward is that Voegelin’s impoverished conceptualization of the body constitutes a real problem for his thought, and specifically one that underscores his dismissive attitude toward political radicalism. Subsequently, through a presentation of recent theoretical discussions of the body, a more positive conception of embodied being is sought for, which can lay open the radical dynamic of Voegelin’s participatory ontology.

Eric Voegelin and Karl LLwith on Nietzsche: Symptom or Solution to the Modern Crisis?

A radical crisis requires radical answers. Both Eric Voegelin and Karl Lowith, as can be seen in their similar diagnosis of the crisis of modernity, were aware of the problem and of the urgency of its solution. By criticising the modern break with classical thought as well as with the Christian tradition, they underline the growing dissolution of order within modernity and design – both of them – an attempt to return to the classical and Christian sources of philosophy in order to counteract the totalitarian tendencies of the twentieth century. But their attempt should not be simply reduced to a reaction to the specific historical situation they were confronted with, namely Germany’s national-socialism. Assuming that the crisis of modernity is a lasting, pervasive phenomena which is still present, Voegelin’s and Lowith’s “attempt” remain valid in today’s situation, which is different on its phenomenal level, but just as critical at its core. Considering this, an anamnesis of the philosophical and religious, classical and Christian tradition is necessary. Starting from this interpretation, which is common when it comes to the relationship between Voegelin’s and Lowith’s perspectives, the main topic of their extensive correspondence comes as no surprise: Nietzsche, probably the

LEV KARSAVIN, EURASIAN MOVEMENT AND THE THESIS BY ERIC VOEGELIN

Eric Voegelin calls the nature of all the major Western ideologies „gnosticism“. The roots of this spiritual phenomenon he sees in the medieval religious immanentism. The article attempts to examine the ideological history of the Eurasian movement in the context of Voegelin?s thesis. A special role in this history belongs to Lev Karsavin.

Michael Oakeshott’s Theological Genealogy of Political Modernity

This essay attempts to provide a historical account of Michael Oakeshott’s famous distinction between civil and enterprise association. As such, it demonstrates that Oakeshott’s political skepticism and his concomitant view of civil association can in part be explained by his reliance on Augustinian theology. In a similar vein, Oakeshott’s linkage of enterprise association with the rationalism of Bacon must be considered in terms of Oakeshott’s understanding of Pelagianism and Gnosticism. Unsurprisingly, it will be demonstrated that despite Oakeshott’s disagreements with the political philosopher Eric Voegelin, he was very impressed by Voegelin’s work on the Gnostic origins of modernity. Consequently, a major claim of this essay is that Oakeshott’s speculative understanding of modern political thought constitutes a theological genealogy of political modernity in all but name.

Symbols of the 'Depth' of Psyche and Cosmos in Eric Voegelin

Symbols of the 'Depth' of Psyche and Cosmos in Eric Voegelin

Review of Eric Voegelin’s Race and State

Review of Eric Voegelin’s Race and State

From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe

From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe

The death of civilizations

This article questions the popular assumption that the concept of civilization that entered public discourse in a grand way with Samuel P. Huntington’s sensational article on a ‘clash of civilizations’ refers to any meaningful historical formations that can be identified across time and space in plural manifestations, apparently withstanding collapse, disintegration and a final withering away. Contrasting Huntington’s rather stable universe with A. J. Toynbee’s and Eric Voegelin’s radically different perspectives on an open-ended dynamics of civilizational processes makes it possible to recognize that the sequence of institutional cycles and the succession of universes of symbolic meaning that accompany them may be limited. Civilizations are not natural phenomena but human constructs and have therefore limited timelines. Toynbee and Voegelin were facing an end of the history of traditional civilizations and all their pseudo-morphed variations. They envisioned something new would emerge out of the wasteland of meaning without clearly knowing what it would be. The political economy of globalization has certainly accelerated the terminal conditions of traditional civilizations that Toynbee and Voegelin had anticipated long before this modern endgame began. The signs of decay and death are overwhelming while the quests for a new universe of meaning are still in their infancy.

Ke dvěma východiskům filosofického tázání po Bohu

Adopting the standpoint of Eric Voegelin, this article deals with the two kinds of the the philosophical search for God: the cosmological one, starting from the contingency of things in the external world, and the existential one, starting from the contingency of the self. The aim of the article is to show that the latter is not only a necessary supplement of the former, but also its very basis.

Voegelin as Philosopher and Realist: The Western Crisis and World Politics

This paper examines how the langugage of world politics have been shaped by Eric Voegelin's analysis of the intellectual and spiritual crisis of the West. Particular attention is paid to developments since the French Revolution as well as the two world wars of the twentieth century.

The Priority of Existence in Medieval Political Thought

This paper will consider both the pragmatic and intellectual context of the medieval problem of order, politically and philosophically. The struggle for order in the Middle Ages was about more than the contest for jurisdiction between the empire and the church. What emerged from beneath the clamor for legitimate authority was the growing assertion of a more subtle third center of authority, the individual. This paper aims at articulating and charting the emergence of what is called existential authority, drawing on the insights of Eric Voegelin among others.

Talcott Parsons and Eric Voegelin, “Correspondence, 1940-1944” Edited by Peter Brickey LeQuire and Daniel Silver

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Critical Naïveté?

AbstractBetween 1940 and 1944, sociologist Talcott Parsons and political scientist Eric Voegelin engaged in a vigorous correspondence, discussing the origins of totalitarianism and modern anti-Semitism, the legacy of Max Weber, patterns of secularization set in motion by the Protestant Reformation, the methodology and goals of social science, and more. This article introduces and explicates the surprisingly amicable and intellectually rich exchange between these two seemingly different thinkers. Although the letters hold obvious historical interest, their variegated topics are also closely thematically related, revealing an inner logic that we interpret as a theoretical search for “critical naïveté”. This logic, we argue, is relevant to contemporary discussions about the social, political, and scientific legacies of world-transcendent spiritual traditions.

Diagnosis and salvation

Eric Voegelin and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy provide an interesting and important contrast in their Augustinian diagnoses of modernity and the role of revolution and faith in salvation in history. For Eric Voegelin the desolation of modern humanity springs from its unreal elevation of the self – its Gnostic inheritance – and its immanentization of God and the eschaton into history and progress. In keeping with this is the moderns’ failure to appreciate that the symbolic order required for a fulfilling human community and experience relies upon the necessity of maintaining God as a beyond in relation to society, man and world. Rosenstock-Huessy is also concerned that the failure of the moderns to understand the sign and significance of God is disastrous. And like Voegelin he is deeply opposed to modern Gnosticism and the pathologies that emerge from it, but Rosenstock-Huessy is also interested in something that is not Voegelin’s primary concern – mainly the role of providence in history.

Politics Reformed: The Anglo-American Legacy of Covenant Theology. By Glenn A. Moots. The Eric Voegelin Series in Political Philosophy. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2010. xiv + 240 pp. $44.95 cloth.

Politics Reformed: The Anglo-American Legacy of Covenant Theology. By Glenn A. Moots. The Eric Voegelin Series in Political Philosophy. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2010. xiv + 240 pp. $44.95 cloth.

The Revolutionary Global Islamism – Politicized or Political Religion? Applying Eric Voegelin’s Theory to the Dynamics of Political Islam

AbstractIn recourse to the theory of fundamentalism Islamism can be defined as a form of “other” or “halved modernity.” Therefore Islamism politicizes the understanding of Islam and has been described often as a ‘politicized religion’. But it is further be necessary to differentiate clearer between Islamist tendencies of traditionalism and totalitarianism: On the one hand there is the aim to restore the ‘naturalness’ and purity of a pre‐modern, monistic world. On the other the ideology of a specific revolutionary type of Islamism can be described partially as totalitarian, gnostic and messianic or defined as a ‘modern political pseudo‐religion’, diametrically opposite to the spirit of the traditional religions such as Christianity, Judaism or Islam itself and rather comparable with ideologies such as Marxism‐Leninism, Fascism and National Socialism. To answer the question whether the revolutionary Islamism is a politicized or political (pseudo‐)religion, this essay applies Eric Voegelin’s Theory of ‘political religion’ to the revolutionary global Islamism expressed by the al‐Qaeda terrorist movement.

Eric Voegelin, Liberalism, and the Life of Reason

Eric Voegelin, Liberalism, and the Life of Reason

From “Political Theology” to “Political Religion”: Eric Voegelin and Carl Schmitt

In his workPolitics as Religion, Emilio Gentile credits Eric Voegelin with having invented, if not the expression itself, then at least the concept of “political religion” which the latter would use consistently throughout the 1960s to describe totalitarian regimes. In hisAutobiographical Reflections, drawn from an interview recorded in 1973, Voegelin revisits the use of this expression and gives an indication of the sources that inspired him to adopt it:When I spoke of thepolitischen Religionen, I conformed to the usage of a literature that interpreted ideological movements as a variety of religions. Representative of this literature was Louis Rougier's successful volume onLes Mystiques politiques.Besides the work by Louis Rougier, it is highly likely that Voegelin is thinking of the French Catholic “personalist” philosophers, such as Jacques Maritain, Henri de Lubac, and Joseph Vialatoux, who also interpreted the emerging totalitarian movements less in terms of social and political phenomena than as a profound spiritual disorder. These readings are also enriched by Bergson's work (which proved decisive for Voegelin)The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. It may appear surprising that Voegelin does not refer to the emblematic work by Carl Schmitt, thePolitical Theologyof 1922. Schmitt had also invented, if not a term, then at least a concept destined for a productive career. Moreover,Political Theologyand Voegelin'sPolitical Religions(1938) have similar objectives, namely, to show that all political doctrines involve a relationship between mankind and the sacred in one form or another—even (and perhaps especially) those that claim to have eliminated the religious element entirely.