Abstract

According to Niebuhr, Oakeshott, Voegelin, Arendt and others, the modern era has been dominated by efforts to differentiate reality into theories that deny to it any fundamentally mysterious or transcendent quality. Historically, this tendency has been evidenced by the social displacement of mystical religion by technical or formal conceptions of reality. The central claim of this work is that the distinctively modern phenomenon of totalitarian government is the direct consequence of the social decline of mysticism and the ascendancy of intramundane or 'inner-worldly' speculation on the order of social-historical reality. ;We will demonstrate that inner-worldly theoretical systems by nature fail to represent social reality adequately because of the nature of reality as transcendent. Through examination of the theoretical enterprise itself, we will show how all knowledge rests on an apprehension of a transcendent reality that by nature cannot be reduced in formal or technical terms. Intramundane theories, or 'ideologies', commit a basic error of logic by denying the reality of transcendence while simultaneously requiring it to foster meaning. ;The reality of transcendence induces a fundamental tension in the experience of history, which may be defined as a state of simultaneously knowing and not knowing or an awareness of the separation between what is and what ought to be. Ideological systems are based on the mistaken attempt to collapse these related but disparate poles of reality and eliminate the tension of history from human experience. They thus commit a basic violence against reality, and, when they achieve hegemony in the social consciousness, engender political-institutional regimes that undertake a course of policy whose logical terminus is the destruction of reality itself. Ironically, but for very specific reasons, these 'totalitarian' regimes invariably develop the trappings of mysticism even while explicitly rejecting mystical religion. We will show that the social power of ideology results from the decline of traditional, mystical religion, which has left modernity with an 'existential vacuum' that inner-worldly religions have attempted, if perversely and abortively, to fill. As a case study, we will examine the growth of French Revolutionary ideology into a totalitarian regime in the thinking of Thomas Paine and criticism of Edmund Burke. Paine's thought, and Burke's dissent, powerfully illuminate the insidious process by which totalitarianism can arise from apparently modest and benign premises