Manfred Henningsen

Democracy: The Future of a Western Political Formation

Democracy evokes contradictory responses these days around the world. Global news creates the impression as if democracy were the focal point of Political attention everywhere. But a closer look at the Western scene belies this assumption, for a rather melancholy political climate seems to prevail in the postindustrial societies of the West. This paper is an attempt at Interpreting this paradox in the context of the history of democracy as a modern Western political formation. The Western melancholy state of mind reflects that history, and a future, which cannot yet purge tertain memories of the past. The purge indeed would amount to self-destruction of the historical achievements of the formation. The democratic news from other parts of the World, however, may assist the West in reappropriating its own democratic heritage. A random survey of contemporary political configurations shows that the Promise of democracy” does occupy the center-stage. In the Philippines, democratic legitimation played a tremendous role in the disintegration of the h‘farcos regime and the initial success of nonviolent rebellion led by the Aquino-coalition. The continuing unrest among students and workers in South Korea underlines a similar crisis of democratic legitimation. The racist distortion of democratic legitimation in South Africa has made the struggle against the apartheid regime an authentic and just cause. Recent developments have catapulted Burma, one of the most secluded societies, into the limelight. In a climate of wide-ranging transformation, the two major State socialist societies, the USSR and the PRC, are faced with interpretation of democracy as the most sensitive issue. The intra-party ideological tug of yar among various segments of the Soviet and Chinese party establishments Indicates how crucial the resolution of this legitimation debate has become. A conflict has reached crisis proportions in some of the East European The hegemonic legitimation claims of the communist party elites have come under attack through and by movements of social dissent. Poland G <

The Collapse and Retrieval of Meaning

Voegelin wrote the History of Political Ideas with the clear intent that it would become his entry ticket into the American political science profession. The posthumous publication of the eight volumes explains only partly why he never succeeded in becoming a recognized figure in the discipline. After all, he published from 1940 onwards a series of articles that were chapters of the History. His first American book, The New Science of Politics (1952), and, beginning in 1956, the volumes of Order and History grew also out of the massive work of the History and continued some of the themes of its rigorous inquiry into the origins of the meaning narratives of Western civilization. Though he arrived in the United States in 1938 as a refugee from Nazi-annexed Austria, unlike most other refugee social scientists he was already familiar with American intellectual and academic life. He had spent the years from 1924 to 1926 as a Rockefeller scholar in New York and Wisconsin and published his first book in 1928 in Tubingen (Germany) onAmerican philosophical and cultural developments from the eighteenth to the twentieth century.1 Still, neither the earlier American years nor the obvious need for him to establish his professional credentials in the new environment made him adjust the emerging scope and outline for the project of the History.

The death of civilizations: Huntington, Toynbee, and Voegelin – three variations on a theme

This article questions the popular assumption that the concept of civilization that entered public discourse in a grand way with Samuel P. Huntington’s sensational article on a ‘clash of civilizations’ refers to any meaningful historical formations that can be identified across time and space in plural manifestations, apparently withstanding collapse, disintegration and a final withering away. Contrasting Huntington’s rather stable universe with A. J. Toynbee’s and Eric Voegelin’s radically different perspectives on an open-ended dynamics of civilizational processes makes it possible to recognize that the sequence of institutional cycles and the succession of universes of symbolic meaning that accompany them may be limited. Civilizations are not natural phenomena but human constructs and have therefore limited timelines. Toynbee and Voegelin were facing an end of the history of traditional civilizations and all their pseudo-morphed variations. They envisioned something new would emerge out of the wasteland of meaning without clearly knowing what it would be. The political economy of globalization has certainly accelerated the terminal conditions of traditional civilizations that Toynbee and Voegelin had anticipated long before this modern endgame began. The signs of decay and death are overwhelming while the quests for a new universe of meaning are still in their infancy.