Eric Voegelin: life, ideas and books

Life

Eric Voegelin was born Erich Vögelin in Cologne in 1901 and studied at the University of Vienna, where Hans Kelsen and Othmar Spann advised his dissertation and where he completed his habilitation in 1928. He taught in Vienna until the 1938 Anschluss, when he was dismissed and emigrated to the United States. He became an American citizen in 1944.

He taught in the Department of Government at Louisiana State University from 1942 to 1958, then took Max Weber's former chair at the University of Munich, where he founded an institute for political science. From 1969 until his death he was a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. He died in 1985.

Ideas

Voegelin's early book The Political Religions (1938) argued that totalitarian movements function as religions of this world, borrowing the structure of religious faith while claiming to find salvation inside history. In The New Science of Politics (1951) he developed the claim that modern ideologies, communism and National Socialism among them, are modern forms of Gnosticism: movements that promise to transform reality by knowledge and will. His shorthand for the error was the warning against immanentizing the eschaton, that is, trying to realise ultimate fulfilment within history.

His central thesis was that political order rests on an experience of transcendence. Societies understand themselves through symbols that articulate this experience, and they become disordered when they lose it. He pursued the theme in the multi-volume Order and History, which treats Israel, Greece and the ecumenic empires.

Major works

• The Political Religions (1938).
• The New Science of Politics (1951).
• Order and History, vols. 1-3 (1956-1957), vol. 4, The Ecumenic Age (1974).
• Anamnesis (1966, a German collection).
• In Search of Order (1987, published after his death).

Why conservatives read him

Voegelin's analysis gave Cold War conservatives a vocabulary for what they saw in communism: a rival faith rather than just a rival economic system. His work was taken up mainly by conservatives in that period, and it sits beside that of Leo Strauss as one of the two great émigré influences on American conservative thought. Russell Kirk and others valued his defence of transcendent order against materialism, and his critique of utopianism fits the Burkean suspicion of grand schemes described by Edmund Burke.

His dense, learned writing is not easy to read, and he himself resisted party labels, including that of conservative. Even so, research centres devoted to his work exist in several countries and a long collected edition of his works has been published. Readers return to him for a serious account of why ideological movements can take on the force of religion, and of why politics that forgets the limits of the human condition ends badly.