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Tracing the Roots of Disorder: Perspectives on the Early Work of Eric Voegelin
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10520 |
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BOOK WORLD
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2 / 1986 |
10,542 Words |
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Thomas J. DiNapoli, Ernest Easterly III, Henry Vander Goot, and Barry Cooper
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POLITICAL RELIGIONS
Eric Voegelin, trans. Thomas J. DiNapoli and Ernest Easterly III
Edwin Mellen Press, 1986
210 pages, $49.95
Introduction
Since the death of Eric Voegelin in January 1985 at the age of 84, his stature among historians of intellectual thought has risen steadily. For years restricted to a rather limited, often elitist circle of interpreters, Voegelin is finally receiving the much deserved attention of a wider scholarly community.
Given the evergrowing awareness on the part of scholars and publishers of this significant philosopher, there has now arisen a desire first, to place in print all of his extant work and second, to make available in translation work previously inaccessible to all but a German-speaking readership. An example is his Political Religious, a work as important today as it was nearly fifty years ago, when it first appeared on the eve of World War II. The 1986 publication by the Edwin Mellen Press of Political Religions in the first English-language edition is thus a literary event of the first order.
Because of this work's importance in the overall development of Voegelin's thought, The World and I presents the three discussions which follow: the first, an introduction to the book and the climate leading up to its publication, by translators DiNapoli and Easterly on pages 686-690, a critical appraisal of the book by Henry Vander Goot on pages, 691-695 and the story of Eric Voegelin's life and intellectual pilgrimage leading up to the publication of Political Religions, by Barry Cooper on pages 696-703.
The Nightmare Years
by Thomas J. DiNapoli and Ernest Easterly III
For Voegelin, Political Religions expressed the fruition of the early scholar's intellectual endeavor, and also gave birth to much of what would become his later life's work. This brilliant, somewhat emotional essay reflects the course of thought developed in his Rasse und Staat (Race and the State) and Die Rassenidee in der Geistesgeschichte (The Race Idea in Intellectual History), both published in 1933, and Der Autoritare Staat (The Authoritarian State), published in 1936. In these earlier writings Voegelin critiques, with a devastating calm, the attempts of Nazi doctrine and Marxist materialism to explain the necessarily religious bases for political order in terms of either genetics or economics.
This earlier critique reaches full expression in Political Religions, in which Voegelin articulates the principles, explains the processes, and identifies the root causes of political disorder from the cosmological empire of Akhenaton in ancient Egypt to the then current heresies of Marxism and nazism. Voegelin conjectured that such political disorder largely resulted from the secular effort to sever human existence from transcendental experiences. This idea, which anticipates much of the scholarship of the later Voegelin, represents the maturing of the young Vogelin's
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