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 Introduction

Conscious reflection on the philosophical foundations of Western civiliza-

tion has increased steadily since Descartes, and especially since the middle of
the twentieth century with its growing concerns about the possible collapse of
modernity.' The Enlightenment confidence in human reason's ability to under-
stand and convey the fundamental structure of reality has been shaken by the
advent of revolutionary political movements, totalitarian-ideologies, and the
philosophical skepticism of "postmodemity," Perhaps this should not be sur-
prising given the modern restriction of knowledge to the external and empiri-
cal sphere of reality, which was made possible by Cartesian subjectivism and
then subsequently legitimated by the methods of the natural sciences. Ours is
a truncated reason. The experiences of God, morality, and the other transcen-
dent teleologies that constitute human existence are no longer allowed the sta-
tus of knowledge in this Cartesian world. Instead, they are seen as private and
often suspect beliefs.
Eric Voegel in (1901-1985) is one of the severest critics of th is Cartesian
subjectivity, its successive philosophical practitioners, and its political and
philosophical consequences. For Voegelin, modernity was fundamentally char-
acterized by man's attempt to refashion the world in his own image-an at-
tempt that ultimately was doomed to failure, but was nonetheless enacted at
the price of millions of lives. This failure was perhaps best exemplified by the
rise of National Socialism, but it could only occur in a civilization that had fall-
en into a spiritual and intellectual malaise. As Voegelin notes, "The phenom-
enon of Hitler is not exhausted by his person. His success must be understood
in the context of an intellectually or morally ruined society in which person-
alities who otherwise would be grotesque, marginal figures can come to public
power because they superbly represent the people who admire them,": Near the
end of the twentieth century, Voegelin thought that modernity's ruin had not
only pervaded all aspects of society but run its course. What was required was
a new philosophy-a new science-that would restore a proper understanding
of reality and reestablish a basis for its communication.
2 Eric Voegelin and Continental Tradition
Voegelin thought that the modern philosophical trajectory was implicated
in and partly responsible for the crisis of modernity, and thus he sought his
philosophical bearings among the premodern philosophers. Yet Voegelin's re-
lationship to modern philosophy is not wholly negative, and the essays in this
volume reevaluate Voegelin's critique of modernity by examining his relation-
ship to the continental tradition of philosophy from Kant to Derrida. Although
Voegelin is often critical of many of the thinkers in the modern tradition of
philosophy, it is the premise of this volume that he nevertheless has much more
in common with them than is usually recognized. We think it is important to
recognize this because we suspect that Voegelin's own attempt to grapple with
the crisis of modernity would have been aided by a friendlier consideration of
these other thinkers. In short, we want to go beyond Voegelin's criticisms of
these thinkers and to explore, from a fresh point of view, how Voegelin's search
for order can be enriched by a more sympathetic reading of their works. What
commonalities can be found between Voegelin and the others? What contribu-
tions can both Voegelin and the other modern philosophers make in our un-
derstanding of both the crisis of modernity and the path beyond it? But before
we explore these questions, who was Eric Voegelin, and what were his criti-
cisms of modernity?
Eric Voegelin
Eric Voegelin was born in 1901 and raised in Germany and Austria, where
he received a classical education that emphasized language, physics, and math-
ematics. He briefly became infatuated with Marxism because of the excitement
that surrounded the Russian Revolution. He read Das Kapital before entering
the university. "Being a complete innocent in such matters," Voegelin later re-
flected, "I was of course convinced by what I read, and I must say that from
August of 1919, to about December of that year I was a Marxist. By Christmas
the matter had worn off," since he had studied economic theory in his univer-
sity courses.' Although he was attracted to Marxist ideology this one time in
his youth, Voegelin would never again become partisan to an ideology. The
problem of ideology, however, as representative of modernity, would preoc-
cupy Voegelin for the rest of his life.
When Voegelin matriculated at the University of Vienna in 1919 to pur-
sue his doctorate in political science, he studied under Hans Kelsen, a neo-
Kantian professor of law who had drafted the Austrian Constitution in 1920,
and Othmar Spann, an economist and sociologist who was influenced by Ger-
man idealism. Voegelin finished his doctorate in 1922 but found the neo-Kan-
tianism of Kelsen's Pure Theory of Law too restrictive, for "the field of science
[was determined] by the method used in its exploration." For Kelsen, politi-
Introduction 3
cal theory (Staatslehre) was only a theory of law (Rechtslehre), which meant
that anything beyond the scope of law was beyond the field of political theory.
Voegelin would also find Max Weber's philosophy defective for a similar rea-
son: the restriction of the role of the scientist to an exploration of cause and
effect dictated the subject matter studied in a philosophically unjustifiable way.
Voegelin thus found the reductionism of both Kelsen and Weber experientially
unappealing and intellectually limiting.
During the mid-1920s Voegelin studied in the United States as a Laura
Spelleman Rockefeller Fellow. He would later claim that "these two years in
America brought the great break in my intellectual development." In the first
year he studied at Columbia, taking a class from John Dewey and thereby com-
ing into contact with the English commonsense tradition; in his second year,
he spent time at both Harvard and the University of Wisconsin, where he was
influenced respectively by Alfred North Whitehead and John R. Commons.'
Thanks to these experiences, which resulted in his first book, On the Form of
the American Mind (1928), Voegelin was able to escape the provincial method-
ological debates of central Europe and pursue questions that went beyond the
restrictive scope of positivist social science.
Voegelin returned to Vienna in 1929 and took a position as a lecturer at the
University of Vienna, eventually achieving the rank of associate professor. With
the rise of National Socialism in Germany and later in Austria, Voegelin began
work on the subject, particularly the Nazi race doctrines, which he exposed as
intellectually shallow. His books-Race and State and The History of the Race
Idea-not only undermined the biological theories that supported the Nazi's
race doctrines but also attacked Nazism itself. These works resulted in Voege-
lin's forced emigration to Zurich and eventually to the United States.
Once in the United States, Voegelin moved from Harvard to Bennington
College and then to the University of Alabama before settling at Louisiana State
University in 1942. At this time he began his massive project, "The History
of Political Ideas," but, after having written more than four thousand typed
pages, Voegelin came to the conclusion that his study was theoretically flawed:
"It dawned on me that the conception of a history of ideas was an ideological
deformation of reality. There were no ideas unless there were symbols of im-
mediate experience." Ideas were secondary to the experience of reality itself;
consequently, Voegelin would have to find a way to study the experiences that
themselves remained beneath the political ideas.
He began afresh in 1951 when he delivered the Walgreen Lectures, which
were published later as The New Science of Politics (1952). Voegelin critiqued
the poor state of contemporary political science and explained that his "new
science" would be a reintroduction of the principles of premodern philosophy
into the analysis of political reality. Voegelin rejected the positivist assumptions
4 Eric Voegelin and Continental Tradition
that pervaded the discipline, specifically the incorporation of the mathemati-
cal methods of the natural sciences to understand the world of human affairs
and the belief that these methods were the sole criterion for theoretical rele-
vance/ Like Kelsen's neo-Kantianism or Weber's fact-value distinction, Voege-
lin thought that positivist political science was ultimately reductive in nature
and, therefore, avoided the questions that are existentially most relevant to
both the political scientist and society at large.
Voegelin's "new science" was a return to the study of consciousness as the
locus in which human beings articulate their experiences of reality in symbolic
forms. The core experiences that human beings have, according to Voegelin, are
"God and man, world and society," and he argues that these are encountered
in a participatory as opposed to an intentional mode of existence. There is no
vantage point from which a person can survey the whole of reality; rather, he is
like "an actor, playing a part in the drama of being and, through the brute fact
of his existence, committed to play it without knowing what it is." The best a
person can hope for is some partial understanding of the reality in which he is
a participant, in "making the essentially unknowable order of being intelligible
as far as possible through the creation of symbols which interpret the unknown
by analogy with the really, or supposedly, known."
For the rest of his career Voegelin would refine his theory of consciousness in
a series of works, the five volumes of Order and History (volumes 1-3 published
in 1956-1597, volume 4 in 1974, and volume 5 in 1987) and Anamnesis (1966)
being the most important ones. These works represent Voegelin's attempt to
overcome the reductionism of contemporary political science and to restore the
discipline to its premodern principles. This project was not merely an academic
exercise for Voegelin; rather, it was an existential response to the crisis of mo-
dernity and the failure of the social sciences to correctly diagnose contemporary
evils such as National Socialism. Voegelin hoped that a restoration of premod-
ern philosophical principles to political science would provide the intellectual
and spiritual means to analyze and possibly overcome this crisis.
The Critique of Modernity
Voegelin's critique of modernity pervades his works. Simply put, Voegelin
argues that modernity is a Gnostic revolt against the fundamental structure of
reality. For Voegelin, the word "Gnostic" refers not to an ancient religious sect
but to the belief that human beings can transform the nature of reality through
secret knowledge and social action. Specifically, Gnosticism has three primary
components: a strong feeling of alienation stemming from a sense that some
essential aspect of one's own humanity remains unfulfilled, a revolt against
the conditions in the world that purportedly cause this alienation, and the be-
Introduction 5
lief that esoteric knowledge and political action will be sufficient to overcome
these conditions. In short, Gnosticism is the belief that human beings have the
power to transform both themselves and the order of reality into some sort of
magical utopia."
According to Voegelin, such a transformation could never occur, and such
Gnostic beliefs (and the actions based on them) are violations of the mystery of
being itself. Although the Gnostic unleashes tremendous power in society, par-
ticularly through the application of science and technology, the magnificence
of the spectacle comes at a terrible cost, namely, the exclusion of the spirit, with
its ordering principles for both individuals and society. This Gnostic decapita-
tion of human existence is continually committed by those who sacrifice the
stillness and constancy of the divine for world-immanent action. As the life of
the spirit slowly becomes extinguished in Gnostic civilization, the very success
of the Gnostic paradoxically becomes the cause of its own decline."
In response to the Gnostic crisis of modernity, Voegelin offered a "new sci-
ence of politics," which was in fact a recovery of the Aristotelian method, since it
recognized that "the existence of man in political society is historical existence;
and a theory of politics, if it penetrates to principles, must at the same time be
a theory of history?" Thus, for Voegelin, this project was not an innovation in
political science at all, but rather a restoration of the discipline as itwas original-
ly formed by Plato and Aristotle in response to the crisis of their own Hellenic
civilization. Voegelin observed that, historically speaking, political science has
flourished in epochs of upheaval and revolutions, and he pointed to examples
such as the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle during the Hellenic crisis, Augus-
tine's Christianity at the time of the decline of the Roman Empire, and Hegel's
and Schelling's philosophies at the beginning of the modern era. Voegelin him-
self fitted the pattern: in a time of existential crisis for both the individual and
society, in the wake of modernity's failure, he returned to the premodern prin-
ciples of political science in search of a new basis for order.
One of these premodern principles is the understanding that both individu-
als and societies give meaning to their existence through symbolic expression.
These symbolic forms emerge from the experiential encounter of the person
with the fundamental structure of reality. Although these symbolic forms fur-
nish significance to both the individual and society, they ultimately are inade-
quate because they emerge from a human mode of participatory as opposed to
observatory existence. That is, since human beings exist as participants in real-
ity, they are unable to provide a complete account of it, although they may de-
sire to do so. To fall into this temptation of false certitude is to believe that the
symbolic form is a fully intelligible and complete account of reality. Modernity
for Voegelin has capitulated to such a temptation, exchanging the uncertainty
of faith for the comforting but false certainty of ideology.
6 Eric Voegelin and Continental Tradition
The first modern Gnostic was Joachim of Flora, who in the twelfth century
revolted against the fundamental structure of reality by creating the "aggregate
of symbols which govern the self-interpretation of modern political society
to this day." Based on Christian eschatology, Joachim developed a new con-
ception of history that was divided into three stages, with each period repre-
senting a member of the Christian Trinity and the final stage resulting in the
"perfect spiritual life." This tripartite progressive account of history became
the standard interpretative model through which modern ideologues viewed
historical reality. Unlike the Christian's separation of human and divine reality,
as in Augustine's two cities, the Gnostic's view produces a utopian end time of
which only the ideological prophet has special knowledge. Voegelin argues that
the process that started with Joachim culminated in twentieth-century totali-
tarianism, in which "the immanentization of the Christian eschaton made it
possible to endow society in its natural existence with a meaning which Chris-
tianity denied to it. And the totalitarianism of our time must be understood as
journey's end of the Gnostic search for a civil theology." II
As the ideological movements of the twentieth century demonstrated, when
the Gnostic tries to reform the world, the fundamental structure of reality will
not break, and his ideological constructs ultimately collapse under the weight
of their own falsehoods. Voegelin perhaps believed that the ideological con-
structs of his own time were beginning to collapse under the pressure of real-
ity and that the struggle for a new symbolization of order would begin again.
Voegelin's "new science" therefore was his contribution to the diagnosis of mo-
dernity as a Gnostic enterprise, as man's revolt against the fundamental struc-
tures of reality, and his hope was that we could recover those aspects of reality
that have been neglected by modern philosophy. Thus, as he would say, his phi-
losophy was meant to be both "diagnostic and therapeutic."
Voegelin and Modern Philosophy
As has been noted, Voegelin's critique of modernity involved a return to the
great ancient and medieval philosophers in search of a philosophical founda-
tion for the critique. The necessity of the return is suggested by Voegelin's claim
that "the history of philosophy is in the largest part the history of its derail-
rnent.?" The modern philosophers cannot lead us beyond the crisis because
they themselves are implicated in it: the Gnostic mass movements of moder-
nity arise out of the Gnostic intellectualizing of the modern philosophers. In
order to overcome the derailment, then, Voegelin must step behind it by re-
turning to the birthplace of philosophy in ancient Greece. As a result, Voegelin
always felt the greatest affinity for classical thinkers such as Plato and Augus-
tine. Yet to say that Voegelin had nothing in common with the great thinkers
Introduction 7
of modernity would overstate the case. Voegelin's relationship to modern phi-
losophy is somewhat more ambiguous than the pattern of critique and return
suggests.
It cannot be denied that Voegelin was highly critical of modern philosophy.
His published remarks on representative thinkers are often scathing, and stu-
dents of Voegelin's thought will remember some of the most memorable lines:
G. W. F. Hegel is analyzed as a "sorcerer" and a "master magician";" Karl Marx
is convicted of being an "intellectual swindler";" and they (along with F. W. J.
Schelling, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and others) share the dubi-
ous distinction of being Gnostic intellectuals. Moreover, beyond these more
famous remarks are the critical analyses of the modern philosophers that are
found throughout Voegelin's works. Voegelin devoted a significant amount of
time and effort to uncovering the errors of these thinkers, since he believed that
they contributed to the Gnostic character of modernity.
Yet Voegelin also sometimes praised many of the philosophers in the conti-
nental tradition (including some of those just mentioned). He refers to Kant's
philosophy, for example, as a "brilliant developrnent.?" and he credits Kant
with a "revolutionary effort?" He argues that Schelling's philosophy is "one of
the most important points of orientation for a modern philosophy of human
existence" and that his potenzenlehre, or doctrine of potencies, is credited as
being "perhaps the profoundest piece of philosophical thought ever elaborat-
ed.?" In conversation, Voegelin acknowledged the influence of Kierkegaard on
his work," and even Hegel receives moderate praise for "his rediscovery of the
experiential source of symbolization, as well as his identification of the funda-
mental problems in the structure of consciousness,"> Such statements of praise
may be rare, and they may often be coupled with criticism, but they exist and
they cannot be discounted.
Moreover, beyond Voegelin's own remarks is the fact that he was a student of
the continental tradition, even if he tried to distance himself from it. He stud-
ied Kant and the great German idealists Hegel and Schelling. He was trained
by the neo-Kantian legal theorist Hans Kelsen. He admired Max Weber even
as he critiqued his value-free science. His philosophy of consciousness was de-
veloped through his study of Edmund Husserl. He later kept up with develop-
ments in the tradition, including the work of Martin Heidegger. Thus, even if
these philosophers achieved nothing more than a series of "brilliant errors,'?' it
cannot be said that they were without influence on Voegelin's philosophical de-
velopment. As some of the essays in this volume suggest, connections between
Voegelin's thought and the work of these other philosophers can be found even
where Voegelin was silent about them. Voegelin may have preferred Plato and
Augustine to Kant and Kierkegaard, but he owed an intellectual debt to the lat-
ter as well.
8 Eric Voegelin and Continental Tradition
Some scholars have recognized the similarities between Voegelin's thought
and the work of other thinkers in the continental tradition." These studies
show that Voegelin's work often paralleled the trajectory of modern philoso-
phy, even though Voegelin worked at a distance from the tradition. In some
cases, they also suggest the positive influence that Voegelin's encounter with
modern philosophy had on his own thought. These hints of recognition that
Voegelin has more in common with the great philosophers of the continental
tradition than has been acknowledged are rare, however. There remains a need
to systematically study his relationship to that tradition. There is much work to
be done toward uncovering Voegelin's intellectual relationship to modern phi-
losophy. This volume is intended to begin that work.
Plan of the Volume
We could not include every relevant thinker in the volume, but we did
proceed according to a general logic of selection. Three criteria in particu-
lar were applied: we looked for modern philosophers who were relevant to
Voegelin's philosophy (that is, those about whom Voegelin had written, who
had influenced Voegelin's own philosophy, or who asked the same fundamen-
tal questions about the structure of reality that Voegelin had), we tried to avoid
covering philosophers where published analyses already compared their works
with Voegelin's, and, finally, we searched for contributors who were not only
familiar with a modern philosopher's works but equally comfortable with writ-
ing about Voegelin's own philosophy. Thus, we do not envision this volume to
be a complete account of Voegelin's relationship to modern philosophy. There
are some significant omissions. There is, for instance, no chapter on Voege-
lin's relationship to Husserl, despite his importance for Voegelin's philosophy
of consciousness (although David Walsh does devote some space to Husser! in
his chapter on Voegelin and Heidegger). Thus, we see this project as a starting
point for a task that ought not to be neglected.
Thomas W. Heilke starts the conversation between Voegelin and modern
philosophy with an analysis ofhowVoegelin read Kant. On the one hand, Heil-
ke shows that Voegelin overtly rejected the Kantian epistemology of intention-
ality; on the other hand, he traces several aspects of Kant's philosophy that
aided Voegelin's own philosophical enterprise. Moreover, Heilke suggests that,
despite his rejection of Kantian epistemology, Voegelin's extensive efforts to
demonstrate that history is constituted by the experiential encounter with re-
ality rested on a neo-Kantian epistemology that had been reinserted into his
theory of consciousness. Although Voegelin follows the path of Plato and Au-
gustine, his theory of consciousness is divided into an inner luminous realm,
in which human beings experience the fundamentals of reality, and an external
empirical space. The affinity between this theory of consciousness and Kant's
Introduction 9
epistemology is suggestive, and, as HeiJke concludes, it remains an open ques-
tion whether Kant underwrites Voegelin's theory of consciousness rather than
Plato.
Arpad Szakolczai continues the exploration of Voegelin's relationship to
modern philosophy by focusing on the role of neo-Kantianism in Voegelin's
development. VoegeJin was trained in neo-Kantianism, but he always had some
reservations about its methods, and he explicitly and publicly rejected thi-S"phi-
losophy in The New Science of Politics. But this rejection was not only phiJo-
sophical in nature: it also had a personal dimension, since Hans Kelsen, the
neo-Kantian professor of law, was Voegelin's doctoral supervisor. Szakolczai
provides readers with an overview of the development of neo-Kantianism, dis-
cusses its influence on Voegelin, and then suggests that Voegelin's rejection of
neo-Kantianism was in fact incomplete due to the complicated nature of his
relationship to Kelsen.
Moving on from Kant and neo-Kantianism to the German idealists, Cyr-
il O'Regan analyzes Voegelin's relationship to Hegel. Where Kant and neo-
Kantianism had ambiguous roles in the formation of Voegelin's thought, the
Hegelian philosophy plays a central role, since it is the one that Voegelin harsh-
ly critiques as "Gnostic," "apocalyptic," and representative of the crisis of mo-
dernity. Although O'Regan does not deny the ultimately negative assessment of
Hegel by Voegelin, he also points out that careful attention to Voegelin's read-
ing of Hegel reveals that some of the former's suppositions are indebted to the
latter. In particular, Hegel's influence can be felt in Voegelin's understanding of
the nature of modernity, his views on the relationship between reason and his-
tory, and his differentiation of philosophy and other cultural discourses that
make claims to meaning and truth, such as art and religion. Thus, O'Regan
suggests that Voegelin's attention to Hegel implies an undercurrent of appre-
ciation for Hegel's flawed genius and a degree of influence that is not well rec-
ognized. In any event, whether positive or negative, we can say that Hegel is a
genuine conversation partner for Voegelin.
Steven McGuire looks at the crucial differences between the philosophies
ofVoegelin and Schelling in spite of what they have in common. McGuire ar-
gues that, whereas Voegelin's theory of consciousness is the centerpiece of his
philosophy, Schelling's philosophy is best characterized as a philosophy of
freedom in which the attempt to conceive the order of reality in conscious-
ness necessarily becomes distorted, and, therefore, our true knowledge of
order must exist prior to its articulation. According to McGuire, Voegelin
struggles toward a similar insight in his late writings, but he cannot articulate
them philosophically because he continues to operate within the framework
of a philosophy of consciousness. McGuire thus concludes that, although in-
debted to Schelling's philosophy, Voegelin did not learn the deepest lesson
that Schelling had to teach.
10 Eric Vcegelin and Continental Tradition
Eugen L. Nagy also argues that Voegelin neglected aspects of modern philos-
ophy that could have proved beneficial to his philosophical enterprise. Accord-
ing to Nagy, Voegelin engaged in a Socratic pursuit in his understanding of the
reality between human beings, while Kierkegaard pushed beyond the Socratic
quest to the path of faith that is the only possible response to the self-revelation
of an unknowable God. Given the similar structures of reality they describe as
an in-between state of finite and infinite, temporal and eternal, worldly and
divine, it is intriguing that both thinkers selected different paths and reached
different conclusions about the right attunement of the self to the structure of
reality. As with Schelling, Nagy suggests that Voegelin could have been assisted
in his own project to understand the structure of reality by a more sympathetic
reading of Kierkegaard's works.
Rouven J. Steeves compares Voegelin's quest for order as transcendently il-
luminated to Nietzsche's relentless search for immanent meaning. Steeves sug-
gests that, although Voegelin offered a sensitive and psychologically revealing
reading of Nietzsche's philosophy, he did not seriously explore the possibil-
ity of Nietzsche's claim that existential truth is an unflinching explication of
a transcendentally devoid reality. According to Steeves, Voegelin did not take
seriously Nietzsche's philosophy as an alternative mode of the quest for or-
der, instead ultimately writing him off as a Gnostic who was foreclosed to the
truth of existence. Steeves's chapter suggests that a closer consideration of the
Nietzschean search for immanent meaning would have strengthened and con-
tributed to Voegelin's understanding of modernity and clarified his own search
for transcendental order.
Entering into the twentieth century, David Walsh examines the relationship
between Voegelin's and Heidegger's philosophical projects. Walsh observes
that, despite evidence that Voegelin kept up with Heidegger's work, a suffi-
cient and satisfactory account of Heidegger is conspicuously absent in Voege-
lin's writings, and he suggests that this is unfortunate, since both philosophers
were attempting to "refound" Western metaphysics in the wake of its "derail-
ment." Walsh also notes, however, that a collaboration between Voegelin and
Heidegger was unlikely: Heidegger remained too close to his own narrow range
of texts and questions, while Voegelin sought a mastery of the historical sweep
of reality that precluded a fundamental revision that might have been needed
after a prolonged engagement with Heidegger's thought. Nevertheless, Walsh
puts the two into conversation and shows how a revision of Voegelin's theory
of consciousness, as necessitated by Heidegger's philosophy, might lead us to
learn something about ourselves and our relation to the structure of reality.
Fred Lawrence next presents Hans-Georg Gadamer and Voegelin as two phi-
losophers who confronted the crisis of modernity by turning to the wisdom
found in ancient texts for aid. He argues that their methodological approaches
Introduction 11
to the interpretation of these texts were quite similar, as they both sought the
truth of existence through Platonic anamnesis. He argues that in taking such
an approach they both develop an expansive understanding of consciousness
that goes beyond Husserlian phenomenology and opens up a space for an un-
derstanding of truth as performative or participatory. Noting that Voegelin was
much more comfortable discussing the religious dimension of human exis-
tence in his work, Lawrence suggests that Gadarner's discussions of how to
read scripture nevertheless suggest a method quite similar to the one Voegelin
followed in his readings of the Bible. In the end, Lawrence suggests that Voege-
lin and Gadamer share much in common, and he recommends them both as
thinkers who should receive more attention than they commonly do.
In the penultimate chapter, Barry Cooper looks at Voegelin's relationship
to Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojeve, The discussion is grounded in the fact
that all three had similar experiences with totalitarianism, and it is centered
on Strauss's interpretation of Xenophon's Hiero and the subsequent reviews of
that interpretation written by Kojeve and Voegelin. Cooper notes that Strauss
and Voegelin knew one another personally, and he argues that their relation-
ship was cordial even though their letters evince both disagreements over the
self-sufficiency of classical Greek philosophy and repeated misapprehensions
of Voegelin's positions by Strauss. Voegelin and Kojeve, by contrast, did not
know one another personally, but, as Cooper shows, Voegelin thought Kojeve's
lectures on the Phenomenology to be indispensable for understanding Hegel-
even as he realized (as did Strauss in his own way) that Kojeve had for some
reason allowed himself to succumb to the temptation to become a magician
like Hegel. Thus, despite their disagreements, Strauss and Voegelin stand in
contrast to Kojeve, since they were never tempted to become ideologists.
In the final chapter of the volume, Lee Trepanier puts Voegelin into conver-
sation with Jacques Derrida. For Trepanier, both Voegelin and Derrida were
engaged in the same philosophical task: the recovery of an existential mode of
participatory and paradoxical existence against Cartesian subjectivity. Although
the strategies employed were different, Voegelin and Derrida were essentially in
agreement about questions of consciousness, ontology, and the conveyance of
experience. By overcoming the problems of Cartesian subjectivity with its on-
tological dichotomy, Gnostic certainty, and belief in the transparency of com-
munication, both Voegelin and Derrida suggest a recovery of philosophy and a
mode of existence that is both paradoxical and participatory.
The hope is that this volume will contribute to our understanding ofVoege-
lin's ambiguous relationship to modern philosophy, and specifically to the
continental tradition's attempt to grasp the structure of reality and our place
within it. The study of Voegelin's place within the continental tradition will
also illuminate Voegelin's own contribution to modern philosophy, something
12 Eric Voegelin and Continental Tradition Introduction 13

that has not received adequate attention by scholars who study continental and 14. Voegelin, Cw, vol. 12, Published Essays, 1965-1985, ed. Ellis Sandoz (1990).339.
15. Voegelin, Cw, 5:264.
modern philosophy. Although Voegelin worked at a distance from the conti-
16. As Thomas W. Heilke points out in his contribution to this volume. See Voegelin, Cw, vol.
nental tradition, his philosophy is nevertheless a part of it insofar as he both
7, Published Essays, 1922-1928, ed. Thomas Heilke and John von Heyking (2003), 336.
studied the thinkers normally associated with this tradition and grappled with 17. Voegelin, Cw, vol. 18, Order and History, Volume V: In Search of Order, ed. Ellis Sandoz
many of the same philosophical problems that they did. This volume shows (2000),64.
18. Voegelin, Cw, vol. 25, History of Political Ideas, Volume VIT: The New Order and Last Orien-
that Voegelin made an important contribution to the philosophical conversa-
tation, ed. Iurgen Gebhardt and Thomas A. Hollweck (1999),236.208.
tion of modernity and that a critical comparison and contrast of his thought 19. As reported by Glenn Hughes in Voegelin Recollected: Conversations on a Life, ed. Barry
with other modern philosophers can provide a helpful approach to some of the Cooper and Jodi Bruhn (Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 2008).
20. Voegelin, Cw, 18:85.
most important questions we face today.
21. The reference is to James v. Schall. At the Limits of Political Philosophy: From "Brilliant Er-
To overcome the problems of modernity we must work through modernity. rors" to Things of Uncommon lmportance (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America
That is, we cannot go back to some premodern view of the world; instead, we Press, 1996). Schall takes the phrase from Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of
must somehow reconcile what has been lost in modernity with what has been Chicago Press, 1964).
22. For example. analyses that compare Voegelin with the philosophies of Polayni, Lonergan,
gained. We must be willing to take the achievement of modern philosophe~s, Ricoeur, Girard, and Kierkegaard can be found in Eugene Webb, Philosophers of Consciousness
while casting aside their errors. This volume hopes to show both that Voegelin (Seattle: University of Washington Press, J 988); Voegelin and Strauss in Barry Cooper and Peter
did not reject modern philosophy entirely and that there still remains a need Emberley, eds. and trans .. Faith and Political Philosophy: The Correspondence between Leo Strauss
and Eric Voegelin, 1934-1964 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993); Voege-
to explore how Voegelin's own project might be aided by a more sympathetic
lin and Husserl in David Levy,"Europe. Truth. and History: Husser! and Voegelin on Philosophy
reading of modern philosophy. and the Identity of Europe;' in Stephen A. McKnight and Geoffrey L. Price, eds., International
and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Eric Voegelin (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997),
Notes 59-83; Voegelin and Schelling in Barry Cooper, Eric voegelin and the Foundation of Modern Po-
litical Science (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), and Jerry Day. Voegelin, Schelling,
1. The "crisis of modernity" literature is vast. For a few different approaches, see Alasdair Ma- and the Philosophy of Historical Existence (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003); Voege-
cIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame lin and Foucault and Weber in Szakolczai, The Genesis of Modernity; and Voegelin with Ricoeur,
Press, 1984); Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, DeJeuze, Levinas, and Patoeka in Petrakis and Eubanks, eds., Voegelin's Dialogue with the Post-
1987); Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard moderns. See also David Walsh, "Voegelin's Place in Modern Philosophy," Modern Age (Winter
2007): 12-23.
University Press, 1989) and The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1992); David Walsh, After Ideology: Recovering the Spiritual Foundations of Free~om (~an ~ran-
cisco: Harper San Francisco, 1990) and The Growth of the Liberal Soul (Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 1997); Arpad Szakolczai, The Genesis of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2003);
and Peter A. Petrakis and Cecil L. Eubanks, eds., Eric Voegelin's Dialogue with the Postmoderns
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004). . .
2. Eric Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (hereafter CW), 34 vols. (Columbia: Uni-
versity of Missouri Press, 1990-2009), vol. 34, Autobiographical Reflections WIth a Yoegelin Glos-
sary and Cumulative Index, ed. Ellis Sandoz (2006),45-47. .,
3. Ibid., 37-38. See also Ellis Sandoz, The Voegelinian Revolution: A Biographical Introduction
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publications, 2000); and Ellis Sandoz, ed., Eric Voegelin's Sig-
nificancefor the Modern Mind (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991).
4. Voegelin, cw 34:49.
5. Ibid., 56-57 (quote), 58.
6. Ibid., 89-90.
7. Voegelin, Cw, vol. 5, Modernity without Restraint: The Political Religions; The New Science of
Politics; and Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, ed. Manfred Henningsen (2000),90-91.
8. Voegelin, Cw, vol. 14, Order and History, Volume I: Israel and Revelation, ed. Maurice P. Ho-
gan (2001),39-40.
9. Voegelin outlines the theory of Gnosticism in "Erstaz Religion," in Cw, 5:295-313.
10. Ibid., 193-95.
11. Ibid., 88.
12. Ibid., 179,221.
13. Voegelin, Cw, vol. 16, Order and History, Volume III: Plato and Aristotle, ed. Dante Ger-
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