Publie a Vienne en 1933 par Eric Voegelin (1901-1985), alors jeune privat-dozent en politique et sociologie, Race et Etat, fut assez rapidement retire de la vente par son editeur. En effet, mettant a profit les connaissances en genetique de l'auteur, la premiere partie propose une analyse critique minutieuse des theories pretendument scientifiques de la race, alors en vigueur. Utilisant les theses de Scheler, d'Aristote, de Descartes, ainsi que l'anthropologie du jeune Fichte, Eric Voegelin les replace dans (...) le cadre d'une anthropologie philosophique des relations entre le corps, l'esprit et l'ame. De meme que l'Etat tribal ou le royaume du Christ, l'idee moderne de race fait partie de la realite politique et propose une image symbolique de la communaute, dont l'idee de millenarisme est une composante-cle. Eric Voegelin analyse donc dans la seconde partie le mythe de la race nordique tel qu'il a ete elabore a partir du milieu du XIXe siecle par G. Klemm, A. de Gobineau et A. Rosenberg en forgeant sa contre-image: celle de l' anti-race juive. L'echo tout particulier qu'a trouve cette idee en Allemagne, s'expliquerait en definitive par un sentiment d'inferiorite des Allemands a l'egard des juifs, representants de la race elue. (shrink)

"Thirty-five years ago few could have predicted that The New Science of Politics would be a best-seller by political theory standards. Compressed within the Draconian economy of the six Walgreen lectures is a complete theory of man, society, and history, presented at the most profound and intellectual level. . . . Voegelin's [work] stands out in bold relief from much of what has passed under the name of political science in recent decades. . . . The New Science is (...) aptly titled, for Voegelin makes clear at the outset that a 'return to the specific content' of premodern political theory is out of the question. . . . The subtitle of the book, An Introduction, clearly indicates that The New Science of Politics is an invitation to join the search for the recovery of our full humanity."--From the new Foreword by Dante Germino "This book must be considered one of the most enlightening essays on the character of European politics that has appeared in half a century. . . . This is a book powerful and vivid enough to make agreement or disagreement with even its main thesis relatively unimportant."-- Times Literary Supplement "Voegelin . . . is one of the most distinguished interpreters to Americans of the non-liberal streams of European thought. . . . He brings a remarkable breadth of knowledge, and a historical imagination that ranges frequently into brilliant insights and generalizations."--Francis G. Wilson, American Political Science Review "This book is beautifully constructed . . . his erudition constantly brings a startling illumination."--Martin Wright, International Affairs "A ledestar to thinking men who seek a restoration of political science on the classic and Christian basis . . . a significant accomplishment in the retheorization of our age."--Anthony Harrigan, Christian Century. (shrink)

Autobiographical Reflections is a window into the mind of a man whose reassessment of the nature of history and thought has overturned traditional approaches to, and appraisals of, the Western intellectual tradition. Here we encounter the motivations for Voegelin's work, the stages in the development of his unique philosophy of consciousness, his key intellectual breakthroughs, his theory of history, and his diagnosis of the political ills of the modern age. Included in this revised volume is a glossary of terms (...) used in Voegelin's writings. The glossary lists, defines, and illustrates from the author's writings many of the key terms employed, paying particular attention to the Greek terms. Together, the glossary and enlarged index systematically include names, subjects, ideas, writings, and terms, making this volume an indispensable help for any serious study of Eric Voegelin's oeuvre. (shrink)

Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) was one of the most original philosophers of our time, working throughout his life to account for the endemic political violence of the twentieth century, in an effort variously referred to as a philosophy of politics, history, or consciousness. Drawing from the University of Missouri Press's thirty-four-volume edition of his collected works, Charles Embry and Glenn Hughes have assembled a selection of Voegelin's representative writings, satisfying the need for a single volume that can serve (...) as a general introduction to his philosophy. The selection demonstrates the range and creativity of Voegelin's thought, including writings that show his thinking as it developed historically in his long search for order in human society. (shrink)

Annotation Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) was one of the most original and influential philosophers of our time. Born in Cologne, Germany, he studied at the University of Vienna, where he became a professor of political science in the Faculty of Law. In 1938, he and his wife, fleeing Hitler, immigrated to the United States. They became American citizens in 1944. Voegelin spent much of his career at Louisiana State University, the University of Munich, and the Hoover Institution at (...) Stanford University. During his lifetime he published many books and more than one hundred articles. The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin will make available in a uniform edition all of Voegelin's major writings. (shrink)

Interprétant l’histoire de l’humanité comme la suite discontinue dans le temps des différents degrés d’ouverture de l’âme humaine au mystère du fondement de l’être, Eric Voegelin a cherché à rompre avec toutes les visions unilinéaires de l’histoire qui ont caractérisé la pensée occidentale depuis le XVIIIe siècle et ont constitué une forme désastreuse d’impérialisme spirituel. En 1970, le philosophe a voulu rendre explicites les principes de sa démarche dans un article intitulé « Equivalences of experience and symbolisation in (...) history ». C’est ce texte qui est ici traduit en français pour la première fois.Les équivalences de l’expérience et de la symbolisation dans l’histoire Interpreting the history of mankind as the discontinued temporal succession of the various degrees of openness of the human soul to the mystery of the ground of being, Eric Voegelin has tried to break with all the one-line histories, characteristic of the Western thought since the eighteenth century and forming a disastrous kind of spiritual imperialism. In 1970, the philosopher wanted to clarify the principles of his thought processes in an article entitled « Equivalences of experience and symbolisation in history ». This text is translated here in French for the first time. (shrink)

In _The New Order and Last Orientation,_ Eric Voegelin explores two distinctly different yet equally important aspects of modernity. He begins by offering a vivid account of the political situation in seventeenth-century Europe after the decline of the church and the passing of the empire. Voegelin shows how the intellectual and political disorder of the period was met by such seemingly disparate responses as Grotius's theory of natural right, Hobbes's _Leviathan,_ the role of the Fronde in the (...) formation of the French national state, Spinoza's _Tractatus Theologico-Politicus,_ and Locke's _Second Treatise,_ the blueprint of a modern middle-class society. By putting these responses and the thought of Montesquieu, Hume, and others in the context of the birth pains of the national state and the emergence of a new self-understanding of man, Voegelin achieves a brilliant mixture of political history and profound philosophical analysis. Voegelin's verdict of modernity is pronounced most powerfully in the opening part of "Last Orientation," in the chapter entitled "Phenomenalism." His discussion of the intellectual confusion underlying the modern project of scientistic phenomenalism is the most original criticism leveled against modernity to date. It is at the same time the first step toward a recovery of reality through philosophy conceived as a science of substance in the spirit of Giordano Bruno. Voegelin's first example of such an effort at recovering reality is the chapter on Schelling, one of the spiritual realists who has not been affected by the prevailing rationalist or reductionist creeds that are part of the modern disorder. Schelling's indirect yet powerful influence on Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud more than justifies Voegelin's interest in his philosophy and character, even though Voegelin would later distance himself from some of Schelling's positions. The volume's concluding chapter, "Nietzsche and Pascal," applies the understanding gained from the study of Schelling to the thought of the most powerful critic of the age, Nietzsche. Nietzsche's self-avowed affinity with Pascal provides the key to an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of his thought and reaffirms the connection that links the beginning of modernity with its most recent crises and the efforts to overcome them. (shrink)

Hitler and the Germans, published here for the first time, offers Voegelin's most extensive and detailed critique of the Hitler era.

Once again available in paperback, Plato is the first half of Eric Voegelin's Plato and Aristotle, the third volume of his five-volume Order and History, which ...

Science, politics and gnosticism -- Ersatz religion.

Volume 6 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin offers the first translation of the full German text of Anamnesis published in 1966.

Annotation In this collection of essays, which covers the years from 1934 to 1939, we see Eric Voegelin in the role of both scholar and public intellectual in Vienna until he was forced to flee the Nazi terror that descended on Austria in 1938. These essays encompass a broad spectrum of topics, ranging from Austrian politics, Austrian constitutional history, and European racism, to questions of the formation and expression of public opinion, theories of administrative law, and the role (...) of political science in public university education. Several essays serve as useful commentaries on, elaborations of, or synopses of arguments Voegelin made in the four books he had published between 1928 and 1936. These essays will be of interest to a wide range of scholars, including constitutional historians, historians of political science, political theorists, and students of Voegelin's later work. (shrink)

In 1924, not quite two years after receiving his doctorate from the University of Vienna, Eric Voegelin was named a Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fellow and thus given the opportunity to pursue postdoctoral studies in the United States. For the next twenty-four months, Voegelin worked with some of the most creative scholars in America and at several of the country's great universities, an experience that undoubtedly influenced his scholarly and personal perspectives throughout his life. A more immediate (...) result was the publication in 1928 of _On the Form of the American Mind,_ the young philosopher's first major work, in which his acute perceptions and analyses combine with a conceptual vocabulary struggling to find its own coherence and form. Voegelin begins his inquiry into the form of the American mind with a complex discussion of the concepts of time and existence in European and American philosophy and continues with an extended interpretation of George Santayana, a study of the Puritan mystic Jonathan Edwards, a presentation on Anglo-American jurisprudence, and a consideration of the historian, economist, and political scientist John R. Commons. Although admitting that this diversity of themes seems only loosely connected," Voegelin demonstrates the actual overall unity of these various subjects: each concerns linguistic expressions of a theoretical nature. Analysis of _On the Form of the American Mind_ indicates that Voegelin integrated the approaches of _Lebensphilosophie_ into what Georg Misch called the "philosophical combination of anthropology and history," which characterized contemporary trends within the discourse of the _Geisteswissenschaften_ and finally resulted in a theoretical paradigm of philosophical anthropology. Jürgen Gebhardt and Barry Cooper provide access to this brilliant study with their two-part introduction. The first part considers _On the Form of the American Mind_ in the context of methodological debates ongoing in Germany at the time Voegelin was writing the book; the second describes Voegelin's American experience and compares his work with similar studies written during the post-World War I period. (shrink)

Between 1933 and 1938, Eric Voegelin published four books that brought him into increasingly open opposition to the Hitler regime in Germany. As a result, he was forced to leave Austria in 1938, narrowly escaping arrest by the Gestapo as he fled to Switzerland and later to the United States. Twenty years later, he was invited to Munich to become Director of the new Institute of Political Science at Ludwig-Maximilian University. In 1964, Voegelin gave a series of (...) memorable lectures on what he considered "the central German experiential problem" of his time: Adolf Hitler's rise to power, the reasons for it, and its consequences for post-Nazi Germany. For Voegelin, these questions demanded a scrutiny of the mentality of individual Germans and of the order of German society during and after the Nazi period. _Hitler and the Germans,_ published here for the first time, offers Voegelin's most extensive and detailed critique of the Hitler era. Voegelin interprets this era in terms of the basic diagnostic tools provided by the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, Judeo-Christian culture, and contemporary German-language writers like Heimito von Doderer, Karl Kraus, Thomas Mann, and Robert Musil. Responding to publications on National Socialist Germany, Voegelin discusses the historian Percy Schramm's "Anatomy of a Dictator," along with studies of the churches and the legal profession. His inquiry uncovers a historiography that was substantially unhistoric: a German Evangelical Church that misinterpreted the Gospel, a German Catholic Church that denied universal humanity, and a legal process enmeshed in criminal homicide. While most of the lectures deal with what Voegelin called his "descent into the depths" of the moral and spiritual abyss of Nazism and its aftermath, they also point toward a restoration of order. His lecture "The Greatness of Max Weber" shows how Weber, while affected by the culture within which Hitler came into power, has already gone beyond it through his anguished recovery of the experience of transcendence. _Hitler and the Germans_ provides a profound alternative approach to the topic of the individual German's entanglement in the Hitler regime and its continuing implications. This comprehensive reading of the Nazi period has yet to be matched. (shrink)

In his review on Leo Strauss’ «On tyranny» Eric Voegelin, pointing out importance of his opponent’s work, still disagrees with several crucial Strauss’s findings. Especially important for him is comparing of «ancient» and «modern» tyranny, as well as Strauss’ idea that the text of «Hiero» makes up bounds between ancient and modern political philosophy, «tyrannical teaching» of Xenophon, the author of «Hiero», is very close to the Machiavelli’s point of view as presented in «The Prince». Voegelin points (...) out that this thought is indeed not that true and Machiavelli’s teaching does deal with the same sort of problem as Xenophon’s writing, because these texts were created in different historical contexts. The main aim is to understand modern tyranny, but, Voegelin argues, it won’t happen if we, as Strauss does, think that ancient and modern tyranny are the same. (shrink)

A lo largo de su larga y fecunda trayectoria intelectual, Eric Voegelin se propuso mostrar la desviación ideológica del pensamiento moderno y contemporáneo y destacar el aura religiosa que estaban adquiriendo los movimientos políticos. Esta es la aportación principal de Las religiones políticas (1938), el primero de los dos ensayos recogidos en esta edición. Según Voegelin, la configuración religiosa de los símbolos políticos obliga a replantear el proceso de secularización y a analizar la sustitución de lo transcendente (...) por las ideologías mundanas. Desde esta nueva perspectiva, en Ciencia, política y gnosticismo (1959), el segundo de los textos incluidos en este volumen, se expone su conocida teoría sobre el origen gnóstico de la Edad Moderna. A juicio de Voegelin, la expansión cultural y social de la gnosis provocó la «inmanentización» de la esperanza salvadora y resultó determinante para que el hombre y la sociedad se apropiaran de los rasgos y el lugar reservados tradicionalmente a la transcendencia. Ambos trabajos tienen la intención de subrayar las consecuencias de la divinización de categorías inmanentes, pero también buscan revertir, al menos filosóficamente, la perturbadora influencia gnóstica. (shrink)

Les époques d'instabilité et de désordre politique coïncident généralement avec un développement de la science politique. En atteste une fois de plus la Correspondance qu'entretinrent ces " deux géants de la science politique ", Leo Strauss et Eric Voegelin, tous deux contraints par la révolution national-socialiste à s'exiler aux Etats-Unis. Dans la cinquantaine de lettres échangées, dont le cœur se constitue au cours des années 1942-1953, le lecteur assiste à la gestation des deux grands théoriciens politiques de ce (...) début de siècle. L'échange de vues concernant la restauration du niveau de questionnement platonicoaristotélicien, leur lecture divergente des dialogues de Platon, la critique virulente qu'adresse Voegelin à l'egologie husserlienne ainsi qu'à sa réduction de l'Humanité incarnée par l'homme occidental ou encore à son interprétation de l'histoire à travers le telos qui se révèle en elle, la divergence d'appréciation concernant la tyrannie moderne, enfin leurs critiques réciproques de l'existentialisme retiendront particulièrement l'attention. Mais le désaccord irréductible entre les deux penseurs porte bien évidemment sur le rôle de la foi et de la philosophie politique, ainsi qu'en témoigne le sous-titre de cette Correspondance, désaccord dont le lecteur trouvera témoignage dans les quatre essais, datant de la période de la maturité des deux auteurs, dont trois inédits, qui composent la seconde partie de ce volume. La troisième partie rassemble huit essais d'éminents spécialistes de l'un ou l'autre penseur, commentant les problèmes soulevés dans la Correspondance et, plus généralement dans l'œuvre des deux auteurs. (shrink)

Reaching into our own time, _Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man_ confronts the disintegration of traditional sources of meaning and the correlative attempt to generate new sources of order from within the self. Voegelin allows us to contemplate the crisis in its starkest terms as the apocalypse of man that now seeks to replace the apocalypse of God. The totalitarian upheaval that convulsed Voegelin's world, and whose aftermath still defines ours, is only the external manifestation of an inner (...) spiritual turmoil. Its roots have been probed throughout the eight volumes of _History of Political Ideas,_ but its emergence is marked by the age of Enlightenment. In our postmodern era, discussions of the collapse of the "enlightenment project" have become commonplace. Voegelin compels us to follow the great-souled individuals who sought to go from disintegration of the present toward evocations of order for the future. Such thinkers as Comte, Bakunin, and Marx suffered through the crisis and fully understood the need for a new outpouring of the spirit. They resolved to supply the deficiency themselves. As a consequence they launched us irrevocably on the path of the apocalypse of man. One of the great merits of Voegelin's analysis is his exposition of the pervasive character of this crisis. It is not confined to the megalomaniacal dreamers of a revolutionary apocalypse; rather, echoes of it are found in the more moderate Enlightenment preoccupation with progress to be attained through application of the scientific method. Faith in the capacity of instrumental reason to answer the ultimate questions of human existence defined men such as Voltaire, Helvétius, Diderot, D'Alembert, and Condorcet. It remains the authoritative faith of our world today, Voegelin argues, demonstrated by our continuing inability to step outside the parameters of the Enlightenment. Are we condemned, then, to oscillate between the rational incoherence of a science that never delivers on its promises and a now discredited revolutionary idealism that wreaks havoc in practice? This is the question toward which Voegelin's final volume points. While not direct, his response is evident everywhere. _Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man_ could have been written only by a man who had reached his own resolution of the crisis. (shrink)

In _The Later Middle Ages,_ the third volume of his monumental _History of Political Ideas,_ Eric Voegelin continues his exploration of one of the most crucial periods in the history of political thought. Illuminating the great figures of the high Middle Ages, Voegelin traces the historical momentum of our modern world in the core evocative symbols that constituted medieval civilization. These symbols revolved around the enduring aspiration for the _sacrum imperium,_ the one order capable of embracing the (...) transcendent and immanent, the ecclesiastical and political, the divine and human. The story of the later Middle Ages is that of the "civilizational schism"—the movement in which not only the reality but the aspiration for the _sacrum imperium_ gradually disappeared and the unification of faith and reason dissolved. His recognition of this civilizational schism provides Voegelin with a unique perspective on medieval society. William of Ockham, Dante, Giles of Rome, and Marsilius of Padua all emerge in Voegelin's study as predecessors to modern thought; each turns to personal authority and intellectual analysis in an attempt to comprehend the loss of the _sacrum imperium_ as an authoritative ideal. Voegelin is further drawn into investigations that, despite insufficient attention by scholars, still bear relevance to the study of the later Middle Ages. The mysticism apparent in _Piers Plowman_ and the apocalyptic revolt of Cola di Rienzo are merely two reactions to the disintegration of wholeness. Yet the story of the later Middle Ages does not merely revolve around disintegration. Voegelin recognizes the emergence of the constitutional political tradition as the most positive development of this period. He is at his best when explaining the difference between the presence of a representative institution and the growth of communal consciousness. Voegelin's study of the English political pattern is matched only by his unique perspective on the German imperial zone, culminating in a fitting conclusion on Nicholas of Cusa—the one political thinker with the ability to evoke the unity of mankind beyond fragmentation. _The Later Middle Ages_ is at once a brilliant examination of the symbols that characterized medieval society and a remarkable predecessor to Voegelin's study of the modern world, beginning with the Renaissance and the Reformation. (shrink)