Global Intellectual History

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Thinking founding moments with Leo Strauss,

Hannah Arendt, and Eric Voegelin

Rutger Kaput

To cite this article: Rutger Kaput (2017): Thinking founding moments with Leo Strauss, Hannah
Arendt, and Eric Voegelin, Global Intellectual History, DOI: 10.1080/23801883.2017.1377400

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/23801883.2017.1377400

Published online: 13 Sep 2017.

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 GLOBAL INTELLECTUAL HISTORY, 2017

BOOK REVIEW

Thinking founding moments with Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, and Eric Voegelin,
by Eno Trimçev, Münich, Nomos Verlag, 2017, 299 pp., €59 (paperback), ISBN 978-3-
8487-3550-1

With his book Thinking Founding Moments with Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, and Eric Voe-
gelin political theorist Eno Trimçev has made an interesting contribution to our understanding
of these three influential thinkers specifically, but also more generally to central currents
informing contemporary philosophy. Moreover, Thinking Founding Moments arguably
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constitutes the first serious attempt to discuss them together, as such making a twofold
contribution to the current debate. For one, it moves beyond the partisanship of much con-
temporary reception – with Arendt often portrayed as a darling of the Left, and Strauss,
and to a less extent Voegelin, as (false) prophets of Conservatism – to emphasize the proximity
of their intellectual contributions. More important still, it recaptures a sense of urgency by
locating their individual thinking in the context of a joint pursuit: How to come to terms
with the catastrophes of modern politics in the wake of totalitarianism and reconsider political
science from the perspective of everyday experience.
It is perhaps relevant to stress that the book is not set up or meant to offer an intellectual
history by situating the writings of these three thinkers within the political, intellectual and
theoretical concerns of the age. Rather, it offers a ‘dialogue’ between three interlocutors
aiming to retrace the internal coherence of their responses to the shared issue of political
foundings. As such, the first two chapters on Strauss set up the problem, the middle two
chapters on Arendt develop an initial response, and the final two Voegelian chapters
suggest a summation (if not resolution) of the problem. Although such a treatment may go
against the dominant trend in political historiography with its emphasis on the importance
of methodological contextualism, this hermeneutical approach seems to be borne of the
material itself: all three writers themselves were highly critical of and sought to tackle the
problem of the historical relativism incipient in explaining ideas through context.
The choice to organize the book around the topic of political foundings is a smart one, for it
offers a focal point to orient a potentially disparate amount of material. Also, the challenge of
founding and maintaining a political community remains a locus classicus in political theory
ever since Plato. However, in Strauss, Arendt and Voegelin the problem attains a new signifi-
cance. All three were exiles of Nazism, and thus fell victim to a disastrous modern attempt at
constituting a new political order, ending up as emigres in the United States – itself a product
of an experiment in political founding. Moreover, the issue of founding ties in with their
shared fundamental critique of the direction of modern thought. With its strict separation
between theory and practice on the one hand, and normativity and value free observation
one the other, far from resolving political conundrums modern political science had opened
up an intellectual abyss in between the relativism of historicism and the empty generalizations
of positivism. This was to be filled with the messianic claims of radical modern political ideol-
ogy. As such, Strauss, Arendt and Voegelin are united in their belief that moving forward we
have to revisit classical political theory, insofar it understood one important lesson that
modern political theory forgot. Namely, the insight that the problem of political founding con-
stitutes a paradox that cannot be resolved theoretically, and that to rethink this paradox offers
the central test case for any meaningful political theory rooted in human experience.
 2 BOOK REVIEW

It is worthwhile to briefly dwell on the conceptual difficulties in thinking about political

founding by considering the problems associated with three dominant political approaches
to it. The first, political scientific strategy has been and remains to offer a systematic, causal
explanation to the question ‘what causes political revolution’, by examining the logical precon-
ditions across a variety of cases. Hence, its ideal is to offer a causal model explaining how, why
and when political transformation occurs. However, this approach at best offers a preliminary
analysis, and at worst provide a series of empty generalizations that do not satisfactorily
account for any specific transformative political events. A second, ‘historical’ approach is to
refuse the very possibility of such a general approach and to argue for the historical particu-
larity of each individual case, by narrating a specific sequence of events. However, this strategy
salvages historical detail at the expense of any attempt of understanding political transform-
ations as recurrent aspects of historical experience. A third ‘modern’ strategy, has been to
develop a general normative model for the legitimate conditions of political order, as we
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find it in Rousseau and others. Yet, this approach tends to disconnect the question of political
legitimacy from the more practical questions of the proper institutions to attain and maintain
it. A central goal of political theory has been political transformation towards realizing this
model, yet in the absence and rejection of prudential guidebooks, political entrepreneurs
have (frequently) ended up utilizing the dictum that ‘anything goes’.
As Trimçev explains in his helpful introductory mapping of the state of debate an important
postmodern response to this conceptual difficulty has been to dispense with the issue of found-
ing altogether. However, as in everyday life, genuine political challenges rarely disappear just
by ignoring them. Nor does even a cursory glance at history fail to produce a lack of political
transformations plain for all to witness. Very shortly, then, the challenge of thinking political
foundings stems from its uneasy location somewhere within the triad of the generalizations of
political sociology, the normativity of political theory, and final the particularity of history.
How do our three thinkers engage the problem of founding, and how in turn does Trimçev
weave these together into a coherent story? First, he discusses Strauss’ return to the ancients,
which is meant to restore a prudential understanding about political foundings as ambivalent
moments and thereby restore access to classical political wisdom. Foundings break with but
also tend to ‘overwrite’ the history preceding them. Theorizing founding moments, then,
becomes an exercise in squaring two resolutely opposite political impulses, namely the ‘idealist’
normative desires that give rise to the political order and the ‘realist’ frequently messy business
of instituting and maintaining it. Yet, for all his regard for ancient political prudence, Strauss
remains the brilliant student of political theory rather than the astute observer of political prac-
tice. Far from the occasional popular caricature of Strauss as a master schemer, the picture
emerging here is that of a political scholar too engaged in the contemplative life to be much
concerned with the business of everyday politics.
This task befalls Arendt, scholar of revolutions and of totalitarianism, as well as optimist
about ‘new beginnings’. As Trimçev makes plausible, one of Arendt’s great accomplishments
is to marry a genuine appreciation for everyday political experience to an awareness of the
inadequacy of traditional political concepts in coming to terms with the political catastrophe.
Simply put, carrying on political scientific ‘business as usual’ was both an illusion – although a
remarkably successful one, judging by success of the positivist project in the Social Sciences –
and failed to acknowledge the depth of the crisis at the heart of political understanding itself.
Her positive response is to recover an appreciation for the human capacity for new beginnings,
by drawing an analogy between the ‘radical’ happenings of birth, the activity of thinking, and
ultimately the political founding as a collective capacity for meaningful self-expression. This
means that to start something anew opens up a possibility that cannot be predicted or under-
stood theoretically but finds expression in lived experience. However, for all her unsentimental
 GLOBAL INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 3

political realism as an observer, this perspective tends to embrace a binary romantic idealism,
which solely attributes meaningful political experience -Freedom- to those rare moments of
collective self-expression. This understates the possibility of experiencing freedom in the
grind of everyday political affairs.
One of the most fascinating findings of the book is that, for Trimçev, paradoxically Voege-
lin turns out to be the most astute analyst of everyday experience in political understanding. Of
the three writers, Voegelin is perhaps the least well known and certainly the most elusive, for
even if his concerns are always political, at times he reads like mystical Byzantine theology.
Voegelin is mostly well-known for his strong critique of modern politics as a project of salva-
tion. However, already in the early 30s, he formulated an extraordinary, prescient critique of
Nazi-politics, which was to lead to his expulsion from Austria. Away from the big name uni-
versities of the American coasts, Voegelin embarked on a quest to retrieve a ‘science of order’
that intimates politics as the shared, never-ending human quest for a meaningful relation to
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the world around us, arguably a form of Aristotelianism that seeks to retrieve the good life
as shared participation in a harmonic world, whilst eschewing the traditional Church
metaphysics which had traditionally supported it. Trimçev argues it is not always easy to
grasp Voegelin, since his thinking was always on the move, and therefore his results provi-
sional, yet this movement itself offers a way in. Central to human experience is the never
ceasing activity of locating and understanding ourselves within a world both preceding and
surpassing us. Yet, this constitutes a ‘transcendence of everyday life’, which is not exclusively
reserved to mystical revelation, or political revolution – but rather forms the bread and butter
of lived experience. Political founding, then, expresses the possibility of establishing order, not
by tracing it to underlying causes, but rather through the shared sustenance and endowment
with meaning by (ever new) participants within it.
Historians will be glad to read that Thucydides is held up as an exemplar of political analy-
sis. All three writers agree with the Greek historian that understanding is not to transcend and
thereby ‘resolve’ historical events but rather to deepen our understanding of them. Thucydides
does this by connecting events through the question how they could have happened, to offer an
analysis of the wider significance of these events for the Greek world in the confrontation
between its two polar opposites without sacrificing their historical particularity to unified
theoretical explanation. Hence, the book’s ultimate conclusion: to understand politics is in
‘thinking founding moments’. That is, thinking along with the materials in the interplay
between theory and events, rather than imposing theoretical explanation at the expense of
what ultimately has its roots in shared human experience and activities, namely history itself.
This is not a book for those seeking a quick introduction to the subject. At times, the book is
challenging, as the author engages with his scholarly task to work through – and wrestle with –
the demanding ideas of these important theorists. However, perhaps its core virtue is to do
what it states: to show political theory as a thinking activity in progress, and the patient
reader will find reward in the skilful manner in which the author has woven together the
threads of analysis. Frequently, the text is at its best when the author interposes theoretical
analysis with a deadpan political irony (‘Bullets may not be political, yet do affect the
outcome of the new world struggling to be born’.). Moreover, by choice of form, it focuses
on the ‘internal coherence’ of dialogue, although in the background always looms the wider
significance of theorizing foundings for understanding history. The twentieth century was a
century of foundings, from postcolonial emancipation, through the EU, to the German demo-
cratic transformation, and finally unification. It would have been fascinating to see the author
briefly discuss how we relate the collective insights of his three interlocutors to the task of
grasping these transformative events, particularly in light of the fact that early twenty-first
century analysis of political founding remains dominated by State Building literature.
 4 BOOK REVIEW

Finally, owing partially to their background and the gravity of the circumstances, Strauss
&co tend to write and think in a register that remains somewhat remote from the vernacular
experience of everyday politics. Hence, theirs is the theoretical challenge to understand the
world, although a full understanding of political founding arguably requires accepting that
for the political entrepreneur, the primary task remains not to understand the world, but
rather to change it.

Rutger Kaput
St Antony’s College, Oxford University/PPLE College, University of Amsterdam
rutgerkaput@gmail.com
© 2017 Rutger Kaput
https://doi.org/10.1080/23801883.2017.1377400
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