Eric Voegelin

Eric Voegelin (born Erich Hermann Wilhelm Vögelin, ; January 3, 1901 – January 19, 1985) was a German-American political philosopher.

He was born in Cologne, and educated in political science at the University of Vienna, where he became an associate professor of political science in the law faculty.

Voegelin was born in Cologne on January 3, 1901.

His parents moved to Vienna in 1910, and he eventually studied at the University of Vienna.

The advisers on his dissertation were Hans Kelsen and Othmar Spann.

After his habilitation there in 1928, he taught political theory and sociology.

In Austria, Voegelin began lasting friendships with Alfred Schütz and with F. A. Hayek.

In 1938, he and his wife fled from the Nazi forces which had entered Vienna.

As a result of the Anschluss in 1938, Voegelin was fired from his job.

Narrowly avoiding arrest by the Gestapo and after a brief stay in Switzerland, he arrived in the United States.

An early work was Die politischen Religionen (1938; The Political Religions), on totalitarian ideologies as political religions due to their structural similarities to religion.

He taught at various universities before he joined Louisiana State University's Department of Government in 1942.

They emigrated to the United States, where they became citizens in 1944.

He spent most of his academic career at Louisiana State University, the University of Munich and the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

His 1951 Charles Walgreen lectures, published as The New Science of Politics, is sometimes seen as a prolegomenon to this series, and remains his best known work.

He left many manuscripts unpublished, including a history of political ideas, which has since been published in eight volumes.

Order and History was originally conceived as a five-volume examination of the history of order occasioned by Voegelin's personal experience of the disorder of his time.

He wrote the multi-volume (English-language) Order and History, which began publication in 1956 and remained incomplete at the time of his death 29 years later.

The first three volumes, Israel and Revelation, The World of the Polis, and Plato and Aristotle, appeared in rapid succession in 1956 and 1957 and focused on the evocations of order in the ancient Near East and Greece.

Voegelin then encountered difficulties which slowed down the publication.

This, combined with his university administrative duties and work related to the new institute, meant that seventeen years separated the fourth from the third volume.

Voegelin remained in Baton Rouge until 1958, when he accepted an offer by Munich's Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität to fill Max Weber's former chair in political science, which had been unoccupied since Weber's death in 1920.

In Munich, he founded the Institut für Politische Wissenschaft.

His new concerns were indicated in the 1966 German collection Anamnesis: Zur Theorie der Geschichte und Politik.

Voegelin returned to the United States in 1969 to join Stanford University's Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace as Henry Salvatori Fellow.

There he continued his work until his death.

He was a member of the Philadelphia Society.

Although some have found his books obscure, according to his student Ellis Sandoz, he was a "wonderfully lucid lecturer with the gift of explaining with complete intelligibility the most abstruse theories to the comprehension and fascination" of his students.

In his later life Voegelin worked 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.

In Voegelin's Weltanschauung, he "blamed a flawed utopian interpretation of Christianity for spawning totalitarian movements like Nazism and Communism."

Voegelin eschewed any ideological labels or categorizations that readers and followers attempted to impose on his work.

Nevertheless, his work came to the forefront during the Cold War and was adopted mainly by conservatives.

Voegelin published scores of books, essays, and reviews in his lifetime.

The fourth volume, The Ecumenic Age, appeared in 1974.

It broke with the chronological pattern of the previous volumes by investigating symbolizations of order ranging in time from the Sumerian King List to Hegel.

Work on the final volume, In Search of Order, occupied Voegelin's final days and it was published posthumously in 1987.

One of Voegelin's main points in his later work is that our experience of transcendence conveys a sense of order.

Although transcendence can never be fully defined or described, it may be conveyed in symbols.

A particular sense of transcendent order serves as a basis for a particular political order.

A philosophy of consciousness can therefore become a philosophy of politics.