Eric Voegelin

The Origins of Totalitarianism

The vast majority of all human beings alive on earth is affected in some measure by the totalitarian mass movements of our time. Whether men are members, supporters, fellow-travellers, naive connivers, actual or potential victims, whether they are under the domination of a totalitarian government, or whether they are still free to organize their defenses against the disaster, the relation to the movements has become an intimate part of their spiritual, intellectual, economic, and physical existence. The putrefaction of Western civilization, as it were, has released a cadaveric poison spreading its infection through the body of humanity. What no religious founder, no philosopher, no imperial conqueror of the past has achieved — to create a community of mankind by creating a common concern for all men — has now been realized through the community of suffering under the earthwide expansion of Western foulness.

Immortality: Experience and Symbol *

Immortality is one of the language symbols engendered by a class of experiences to which we refer as the varieties of religious experience. This term is perhaps no longer the technically best one but it has the advantage of a great precedent, especially here at Harvard. Hence, its use will be convenient to secure, I hope, a common and immediate understanding about the subject-matter of inquiry.

Nietzsche, The Crisis and the War

As a fixed point for the orientation in this field of problems it is necessary to state the rule that political philosophers are not much of a cause in history insofar as any direct influence on specific actions is concerned, but that their work is effective, if at all, through the more subtle means of evocation, rationalizing support, or disenchantment. Nietzsche is no exception to this rule, though his case shows certain peculiarities of which the quantitative dimensions are a symptom; more copies of his works have been sold than of those of any other philosopher who ever has seen print, and the opprobrium attaching to his name in the more popular opinion is hardly matched even by that of Machiavelli. A first thought would suggest a relation between the success of an author and his influence, but a few second thoughts will show presently that the case is not as simple as its quantitative aspects seem to indicate. We can start our analysis best with some reflections on the very popular magical belief, of which Nietzsche like many other political thinkers has been a victim, that the political analyst who predicts an event is the cause of the event. A philosopher who is sensitive to symptoms of decay in the spiritual situation of his age will be able to chart the

Liberalism and Its History

The task of sketching the history of liberalism, though modest, is for methodological reasons difficult. For we stand before the question of whether there is even such a thing as liberalism as a clearly definable subject and whether this subject, should it not be clearly definable, can have a history. We touch here upon a general methodological problem. Toynbee, for example, opens his great work with the question whether England has a history; he concludes that the English nation as a society is so closely related to the society of Western civilization that one cannot write an English history without going into the entire history of Western civilization. It is in this sense that there arise the questions of how liberalism is to be delimited and whether it has a history. And they arise more acutely because the case of liberalism is much more complicated than that of England. For even if some phases of English history, for example the Reformation, can be dealt with only in relation to the general European history of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, still there are long periods of isolated, specifically English history. In the case of liberalism, a narrowing of the subject to national societies — German, French, English or American — is hardly justifiable. For all the regional phases of liberalism are only parts of a common Western movement; and furthermore, this movement can only with difficulty be isolated from other movements which run parallel with it in time.

Machiavelli's Prince: Background and Formation

The name of Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–1527), to the public at large, still lies in the shadow of moralistic condemnation. The anti-Machiavellian propaganda of the Counter-Reformation concentrated on the principles of political craftsmanship, developed in the Prince , as its target; and, apart from a narrower circle of historians, Machiavelli has ever since remained the author of the famous work, while the morality of his advice to rulers has remained the great issue of evaluation. It is hardly necessary to say that such preoccupations with moralistic propaganda cannot form the basis for a critical analysis of Machiavellis ideas. All we can retain from the caricature is the consciousness that something extraordinary has occurred, a severe break with the traditions of treating political questions, the consciousness that with the author of the Prince we are on the threshold of a new, “modern” era. Even this element of the caricature, however, needs qualification. The furious concentration on the evil book has created the illusion that its author was a solitary figure, something like a moral freak. That, of course, is not so. There is nothing solitary or enigmatic about Machiavelli. His ideas, like everybodys, have a solid pre-history stretching over generations; and they were shared in his time by others. Historically unique, however, is the genius of Machiavelli as well as the strange disposition of circumstances directing his genius toward the crystallization of die ideas of die age in the symbol of die Prince who, through fortuna and virtu, will be the savior and restorer of Italy.

On Hegel — A Study in Sorcery

When the gods are expelled from the cosmos, the world they have left becomes boring. In the seventeenth century, the ennui explored by Pascal was still the mood of a man who had lost his faith and must protect himself from the blackness of anxiety by divertissements; after the French Revolution, the ennui was recognized by Hegel as the syndrome of an age in history. It had taken a century-and-a-half for the lostness in a world without God to develop from a personal malaise of existence to a social disease.1

The Formation of the Marxian Revolutionary Idea

The Marxian idea of the great proletarian revolution that will end the pre-history of mankind and inaugurate its true history sprang into public effectiveness through the Communist Manifesto . Well known as is the progress of this idea after its formulation and publication of 1848, we know comparatively little about the process of its formation in the preceding decade. The main cause of this unsatisfactory state must be sought in the fact that the materials for a study of the genesis of he idea have been completely available only since 1932. In the meantime, the monographic literature on the subject has clarified many details; but a comprehensive study is still a desideratum.

The Eclipse of Reality

By an act of imagination man can shrink himself to a self that is “condemned to be free”. To this shrunken or contracted self, as we call it, God is dead, the past is dead, the present is the flight from the self’s non-essential facticity toward being what it is not, the future is the field of possibles among which the self must choose its project of being beyond mere facticity, and freedom is the necessity of making a choice that will determine the self’s own being. The freedom of the contracted self is the self’s damnation not to be able not to be free.

Some Problems of German Hegemony

To deal with the problems of German hegemony at the present moment is a rather delicate task. There is no doubt that the German government has been successful in transforming the larger part of non-Russian Europe into a powerful structure under its leadership, the legal forms varying from incorporation, as in the cases of Austria and the Sudeten German territory, to an alliance of formally equal partners, as in the case of Italy. The success has not been consolidated, however; and it is impossible, therefore, to give a definite account either of the new institutions or of the principles on which they are based. The well known reasons are of an internal and an external nature. Internally, the German expansion is a phase of the National Socialist revolution, and the future developments of this revolution are not foreseeable. Externally, the result of the expansion is conditioned by the power struggle of the war; and the outcome of the war is again entirely unpredictable. All that a scholar can do responsibly at such a juncture is to outline and depict some of the essential features of the situation which will probably have a bearing on any future settlement whatever the outcome of the armed struggle.

On Readiness to Rational Discussion

Exactly one hundred years ago, John Stuart Mill published his essay, ‘On Liberty’. He deals with civic and social liberty, with the nature and the limitations of the power which society may legitimately exercise over the individual; and particularly with the freedom of conscience, thought and discussion. He has concentrated on the freedom to discuss, and in this treatise it is the readiness to discuss that is the subject of my scrutiny. This alteration of accentuation, when discussion itself is under discussion, is not arbitrary. Let me make clear the reasons which have caused me to approach the subject from a different angle to that from which Mill approached it.