An Introduction to Eric Voegelin

Out of this paradoxical mish-mash of empire, Fascism, Catholicism, tradition, and modernity stepped a big dose of genius. Men who became giants in their fields, ranging from music to economics to psychoanalysis, many of whom fled Fascism to settle in western Europe or the United States. A partial list: Carl Menger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolph Carnap, Sigmund Freud, Martin Buber, Karl Popper, Viktor Frankl, Arnold Schoenberg, Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek.And Eric Voegelin.Voegelin is possibly the least known but possibly the greatest among them. He was poor at self-promotion, his prose was difficult, and his ideas were nearly impossible to appreciate. To compound the problem, he refused to “write down” to make his prose more accessible, insisting the reader make the required effort to understand the problem that was modernity, and then he compounded the problem even more by using neologisms that no one understood. Voegelin biographies spend a lot of time defining words, some even including a separate glossary at the end.But I suspect the real reason Voegelin never really caught on like, say, Freud or von Mises: He simply didn’t resonate. Luther wouldn’t have resonated in the 11thcentury; Nietzsche would have lived with the wolves in the 8th.Voegelin, with the analytic precision of a mathematician, tried to explain how transcendence plays into earthly politics. It wasn’t a song that played well in the exuberant and optimistic days of post-WWII America, which cared for such things about as much as Stalin cared about the Pope’s legions.On top of that, I believe Voegelin set himself an impossible task. The Tao can’t be explained in mathematical terms. But he was also correct: The Tao can’t be ignored, whether currently or in historical explanations.Show notes here