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Although his contributions to philosophy are revered and his writings have been collected, Eric Voegelin s persona will inevitably fade with the memories of those who knew him. This book preserves the human element of Voegelin by capturing those personal recollections. Cooper and Bruhn conducted interviews with Voegelin s wife, his closest friends, and his first-generation students. Episodes of pathos, humor, fear, rivalry, and ambition are interwoven throughout the accounts. We witness Voegelin s persistent and partly self-imposed communication problems and impatience with administrative duties; his respect for prudent political actors and public servants; and his genuine affection not only for his colleagues and best students but also for diligent secretaries and empathetic nurses. Key elements of his personality repeatedly emerge: his intelligence, optimism, and integrity, combined with an acute perception of the significance of his work. ... Read more

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An Affectionate Memorial
I have just finished reading "Voegelin Recollected--Conversations on a Life," edited by Barry Cooper and Jodi Bruhn (U. of Missouri Press,2008) 292 pp plus index, chronology and select photos.

The book consists of transcripts of interviews conducted by Cooper in the US and Bruhn in Germany.This involved extensive travel.Bruhn also translated the German language interviews.Some of the interviews must have taken place at an annual convention of the American Political Science Association, while the contributors were in attendance.

The book is organized in a surprising yet effective way.The chronology is reversed, the interviews running from Voegelin's death backwards to his early years as an academic. (Voegelin was born in 1901 and died in 1985.)The chronology is divided into four periods: Stanford, Munich, Louisiana and Vienna. There is also a chapter for Notre Dame, where he taught every third semester or so to protect his American citizenship while he was at Munich and continued the relationship for ten years after that.Not surprisingly, the Munich years are given the greater weight, because this was the time when he had the most intense interaction with graduate assistants and other students as well as his most intense interaction with the surrounding milieu (The "Hitler and the Germans" lectures).By comparison, the Vienna years are sparsely covered.

You can add Barry Cooper and Jodi Bruhn (who was then Jodi Cockerill) to the list of contributors, because their questions are often revealing commentaries based on their own knowledge of Voegelin.

I don't think Bruhn is old enough to have known Voegelin personally, but she brings an insight into human character and occasionally asks questions that deal with personal aspects of Voegelin's relationships. One example:Michael Hereth, an early student, believed many of Voegelin's students in Munich saw EV as a father-figure.In a number of instances, their own fathers had been killed in World War II.

This would tend to explain the still evident bitterness of Manfred Henningsen in his 1995 interview, although his break with Voegelin (which he describes) had taken place a quarter century earlier.

Lissy Voegelin tells us much about their life together for over fifty years.She was a wonderful wife for Eric.She accepted a life of being the "Frau Professor" and did everything for him.He didn't answer the phone or take out the trash.Later when he became relatively wealthy from stock market speculation, he tried to make it up to her for their many years of near penury. Paul Caringella helps Lissy with her recollections.It becomes evident that he had become her loving son and cared for her like no one else.

Tilo Schabert is one of the better contributors.His memory seems to be especially good.The personality of Reinhold Knoll, a true Viennese scholar and gentleman, comes across warmly in his commentary. I hadn't known that his parents were friends of EV back in the 1920's. Ellis Sandoz, a student of Voegelin from 1949 and general editor of the 34 volume Collected Works, provides a steadying voice that helps maintain perspective.

There are some funny stories, like the time when Miss Germany enrolled in EV's class. Or when the student asked EV whether Justinian preceded or followed Socrates.

I was surprised to learn that Bruno Schlesinger, distinguished head of the Christian Culture program at St. Mary's Notre Dame, had been a student of EV in Vienna in the early '30's.

There are certain thematic questions which recur through the book. One is EV's religion.To one student who could not deal with the trappings of Christianity, he said, "Christ is a true myth."This seems to have brought relief to the student, to have cut the Gordian knot. Some thought he was an agnostic.Some a sort of Lutheran. Many assumed he was Catholic and his position in Munich was likely procured for him by Bavarian Catholics who thought so.

Another theme is his demeanor towards others. He was courtly at times (One remembered him as having dance student manners "Tanzstudent"!) and he could be nasty if he thought you were a provocateur (A tale told by Walter Nicgorski, former editor of the Review of Politics). Glenn Hughes also tells a horrendous tale.

Quite unexpected are the accounts of the reasons for his decision to become an American.Apparently EV considered his flight from Vienna to be a life-altering exodus of the spirit from the land of Egypt. One way he expressed his gratitude for finding a new life in America was his apparent contentment with his living conditions.He never complained about anything when he was at LSU, according to his long time secretary, Joe Scurria (who emerges as a capable "gal Friday" and the only one who, even at the time of the interview, could read all his manuscripts).He would have preferred a better position at Yale or at Johns Hopkins (The latter position torpedoed, apparently on good evidence, by no one less than Leo Strauss).

When he returned to Munich, he returned as an American, not as a German refugee coming home. It was said he read the Herald Tribune rather than the Munich papers.He apparently did not bind himself to the society of Munich and remained aloof.As one person put it, EV would have been happiest in a boat anchored in the middle of the Atlantic. Apparently with his inaugural lecture he managed to alienate many of his Catholic supporters. As a politician, he was inept or disinterested, and in either case the result was the same: he saw his dream of a Voegelin school in Munich erode to a point where he was ready to leave. Richard Allen worked to create a position for him at the Hoover Institution and he was happy to accept it following his mandatory retirement.

Friendship is another recurring theme.Those interviewed seem to agree that he had no friends (except possibly Alfred Schütz or Gregor Sebba) in the sense of unguarded exchanges between sympathetic equals. Robert B. Heilman is interviewed and adds a few new notes to his long essay about EV.Heilman was a formidable scholar of English literature and yet was saddened by his inability to think and talk with EV at his own level.Quite different was EV's relationship with Strauss.It is brought out here, and evident in their published correspondence, that EV was open and enthusiastic and detailed while Strauss was quite the opposite.Apparently at Notre Dame EV spent a lot of time in the faculty cafeteria with Anton Herman Chroust, whom I remember as rumpled and unshaven and dirty, though certainly a genius. A picture is drawn here of the sartorially splendid EV passing the time with the grungy Tony Chroust.

In the book there is a photo of EV sitting in a lounge chair at Notre Dame. No exact location is given but I think I recognize the coffee urn in the background soI am guessing the photo was taken in the law student lounge at the law school, a few paces from the auditorium where EV lectured.

At the end of the book there is a chapter listing the 52 contributors and it gives a sentence or two about their careers and present whereabouts. Most of the interviews were conducted between 1995 and 1997.I didn't realize this until I reached the contributor list and was surprised and a little shocked to read remarks such as "He died in April 2005."

One would like to know why ten years passed before this book finally appeared.We are told there was an attempt to organize the book by topics and that didn't work.That alone would have consumed time. Perhaps the editors needed an inspiration and that proved to be the idea of the reverse chronology.

What we do know is that they conducted their interviews before it was too late.

I believe this book will become the affectionate memorial to Eric Voegelin.

Highly recommended. ... Read more

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Excellent synthesis of Voegelin's political philosophy
Years ago a good friend of mine, who knew Voegelin personally, recommended that I read him.It was not until recently that I delved into his works, motivated mostly by the increase in fundamentalism and falsified consciousness in U.S. society (and elsewhere).Voegelin's own works are daunting in their sheer volume, but I have found Franz's little book a superb accounting of the most essential parts of Voegelin's thought, at least of the parts that are of most interest to me.Franz writes clearly and captures well the depth and expanse of Voegelin's panoramic mindset.
If I can register one minor complaint: though Marxism as a closed ideology has its problems, I would disagree with Franz's judgment (in a footnote on p. 116) that "the ideology has NEVER had much going for it in terms of empirical support or theoretical cogency."Despite the weakness of its philosophical underpinnings, I believe that as an analytical tool for understanding what's happening in today's economy, Marxism still has much worth.And that is precisely its appeal, not some hankering after an illusory communistic paradise.
But this is a minor complaint.Franz makes Voegelin highly accessible to people who will never be able to navigate the ocean of his collected works, and I recommend his book highly to anyone who wants to understand not only Voegelin but the radical nature of the crisis of our small-minded society. ... Read more

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This volume contains selected correspondence written by Eric Voegelin during the period 1924 to 1949. Because of the enormous number of letters that he wrote in his later years, this book contains only letters from Eric Voegelin. The letters grant insight into the development of his thought; document the author s struggle with himself, the telos of his scholarship; and reveal an often-involuntary conflict with his life-world. These letters shed light on an ongoing and open-ended thought process from which a multifaceted, sometimes apparently contradictory, work emerged. ... Read more

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Although some critics of Eric Voegelin s later work have faulted his failure to deal with the historical Jesus and to address the implications of Christianity for social and political life, the recent publication of Voegelin s History of Political Ideas has allowed a more complete assessment of his position regarding the Christian political order. This book addresses that criticism through an analysis of Voegelin s early work. Focusing on the tension between a spiritual phenomenon based on Pauline faith and the institutionalization of that experience in the church, Jeffrey C. Herndon offers one of the first examinations of the relationship of the History of Political Ideas to Voegelin s larger body of work. ... Read more

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Voegelin's "Plato"
Unquestionably the best commentary on Plato I have read as yet. No ideology, no radical interpretations of Plato, just extraordinarily insightful and incisive. The essential secondary reference in studies of Platonic political philosophy.

Plato as a Referent for Life
Oxford Don, Raghavan Iyer noted that the world is a fortunate place when there are two people alive -- at the same time -- who understand Plato.Eric Voegelin was clearly one of those people in the twentieth century.This material was originally published in Volume 3 of Order and History, the core of the magnus opus that Voegelin chose to publish during his life time.

I met Eric Voegelin once as a graduate student, and asked him, "why'd you publish all this stuff?"I've been digesting his answer ever since. It was "to resist totality and totalitarianism."

Particularly, seen from this standpoint, a clear core of this book is his articulation of the Platonic concept of "metaxy," or the in-between character of life.In philosophical terms, this refers most directly and fully to "in-between" the Agathon (e.g., see myth of the cave and the Divided Line in the Republic) and the apeiron (explored most directly and deeply in the Timaeus). For the philosophically uninitiated, it is possible to speak of this in more mundane terms.

An unstated corollary of Plato's notion of the "metaxy" is that life is always larger than our categories.From a Socratic/Platonic perspective, this may include but will entail more than the epistemological recognition that every way of seeing is a way of not seeing.The notion of the "metaxy" is most fundamentally a linguistic indice pointing to ontological plenty as the ground of life, albeit lived within bounds of existential scarcity.This is a notion commonly shared by the great civilizations of East and West.The notion of the "metaxy" underscores that life is lived within a tension between the "transcendent" and "immanent" dimensions of being.

When we lose track of this tension, as we have to a great extent in the modern world, and subscribe to reductive ideological notions/understandings of life -- and most particularly, when we imagine that we can encapsulate life within the pride of our own "enlightened" categories -- on a political plane, there may be little to constrain the prideful actions of ideologies, irrespective of whether their clothing is Red or Black, or whether it is "left" or "right." Irrespective of the political stripe, repression and murder become "justified" in the pursuit of an ideological aim -- which in Voegelin's philosophical terms is to dissolve the "metaxy" in the usual modernist mode, through immanetizing the transcendent "eschaton."

Voegelin's philosophical terms may sound remarkably abstract to the modern ear (recall Robert Dahl's silly review of Voegelin's The New Science of Politics for the American Political Science journal).Facile critiques such as Dahl's typically focus on the unfamiliar language while overlooking the elementary fact that what Voegelin is asking us to do in every aspect of his work is to take a journey that precisely allows us to see the world in terms other than that of our inherited climate of opinion.For those willing to be thorough scholars rather than merely play at it within the context of given suppositions, Voegelin's scholarship offers new vistas and incredibly rich fields of study.His scholarship offers the capacity to reflect upon and act in the world in a substantively grounded mode with implications for every discipline (see e.g., A.G. Ramos' New Science of Organizations).

I submit that a key to understanding this text and the greater body of his work at large is to grasp the central significance of the "metaxy" -- not as a concept within the history of ideas -- but as a life referent of perennial relevance to the recurring challenge of resisting sophistic pretensions and the inherited or emergent ideologies of any time and place.

This text demands a good deal.You'll develop insights into Plato available no where else.But for Voegelin, such studies were never a matter of antiquarian interest.They were a matter of developing meaningful referents for life.The value in this text is precisely in its yield, capable of resonating throughout your life and offering far more than the initial effort it will require of you. ... Read more

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This volume of The Collected Works contains essays that were published by Eric Voegelin from 1922 to 1928, the period immediately following his doctoral studies and including a two-year study trip to the United States. They trace his intellectual formation in the 1920s, which resulted in a critique of political science conceived of in exclusively legal terms, and a move toward one that examines the substratum of ideas and structures that provide the meaningful unit of a given political society. ... Read more

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This collection of essays endeavors to generate a dialogue between Eric Voegelin and other prominent twentieth-century thinkers and explore some of the more perplexing issues in contemporary political theory. Each essay rests on the underlying question: is it possible or desirable to construct or discover political foundations without resorting to metaphysical or essentialist constructs? The introduction focuses on the two nineteenth-century thinkers Nietzsche and Husserl, who have framed the debate about modernity and postmodernity; thereafter the book examines Voegelin's ideas as compared to those of other twentieth-century thinkers. ... Read more

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collected articles on little-known influential philosopher
"Voegelin's lifelong meditation on transcendence...led him to search repeatedly and consistently for appropriate symbolizations that provide an understanding of the ground of being without resorting to rigid and dangerous concretizations...We have called that a search for foundations without foundationalism." What this means is that the influential mid 20th-century philosopher Eric Voegelin searched for ways to stay in touch with the spiritual, historical, and existential fundamentals giving life substance, meaning, and direction without resorting to the extremes of dogma or totalitarianism. By his own experiences as an emigre from Europe threatened by Nazism and his philosophical interests growing out of them, he had a unique, and fertile, understanding of modernism's yearning for new, enriching dimensions of spirituality and for reliable, meaningful stability behind the era's new forms of politics such as Nazism and Communism and the delusions and conceits of modern individuals. Voegelin makes trenchant criticisms of these and other radical, misguided modernist creeds and styles. Gnosticism as arising in the modern era is one aberrant attempt to gain heightened spirituality he criticized especially. A philosopher, not a political scientist or social critic, Voegelin only rarely refers directly to specific errors and evils of modern culture. But one familiar with the contests of the modern world continuing into this day understands those which his work grapples with. The editors, both with Louisiana universities, collect five articles relating Voegelin's voluminous writings with other major late 19th-century and 20th-century philosophers and thinkers. The names Nietzsche, Ricoeur, Deleuze, and Husserl crop up in different essays. Classical sources of Voegelin's extensive works based on a few simple precepts are also discussed. The essays are rounded out with introductory and closing sections by the editors which provide biographical information on Voegelin and put the project of the book into perspective. The collected academic philosophical articles demonstrate the continuing relevance of Voegelin's thinking on the main, though often elusive, issues of modern culture, politics, and individual lives while also serving as an introduction to this philosopher whose influence continues to grow.

Student of Peter Petrakis
I have not yet read this book.However, Dr. Petrakis is a professor of mine.Based upon his keen intellect, wit, and encyclopedic knowledge, I predict this to be an excellent book. ... Read more

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From Aristotle to Thomas Jefferson, seminal thinkers have declared 'common sense' essential for moral discernment and civilized living. Yet the story of commonsense philosophy is not well known today. In "America and the Political Philosophy of Common Sense", Scott Segrest traces the history and explores the personal and social meaning of common sense as understood especially in American thought and as reflected specifically in the writings of three paradigmatic thinkers: John Witherspoon, James McCosh, and William James. The first two represent Scottish Common Sense and the third, Pragmatism, the schools that together dominated American higher thought for nearly two centuries. Educated Americans of the founding period warmly received Scottish Common Sense, Segrest writes, because it reflected so well what they already thought, and he uncovers the basic elements of American common sense in examining the thought of Witherspoon, who introduced that philosophy to them. With McCosh, he shows the furthest development and limits of the philosophy, and with it of American common sense in its Scottish realist phase. With James, he shows other dimensions of common sense Americans had long embraced but that had never been examined philosophically. Clearly, Segrest's work is much more than an intellectual history. It is a study of the American mind and of common sense itself - its essential character and its human significance, both moral and political. It was common sense, he affirms, that underlay the Declaration of Independence and the founders' ideas of right and obligation that are still with us today. Segrest suggests that understanding this foundation and James' refreshing of it could be the key to maintaining America's vital moral core against a growing alienation from common sense across the Western world. Stressing the urgency of understanding and preserving common sense, Segrest's work sheds new light on an undervalued aspect of American thought and experience, helping us to perceive the ramifications of commonsense philosophy for dignified living. ... Read more

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A core addition to any political or philosophical collection
Common sense seems so rarely common. "America and the Political Philosophy of Common Sense" discusses traditional American political philosophy and the role of common sense int he discussion. Three thinkers converse in this book discussing how the American standard of common sense came to be, and Scott Philip Segrest weaves it into an insightful and thought provoking read. Scottish Common Sense, what the early American intellectuals founded their own notions on, has done much to shape America in the two hundred years of its existence. "America and the Political Philosophy of Common Sense" is a core addition to any political or philosophical collection.
... Read more

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This volume of The Collected Works contains essays published by Eric Voegelin between 1929 and 1933, the period between the publication of his first book, On the Form of the American Mind, and Hitler's rise to power, as well as Voegelin's two books analyzing the explosive race issues posed by National Socialism. The essays herein reflect the intellectual and political tumult of the period and their author's maturing grasp of political reality as he moved away from positivism and Kelsen's "Pure Theory of Law" toward a more refined and open philosophical stance. ... Read more

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This first of two volumes of Voegelin's miscellaneous papers brings together crucial writings, published for the first time, from the early, formative period of this scholar's thought. The Theory of Governance and Other Miscellaneous Papers presents a meditative-exegetic study of texts from Augustine, Descartes, and Husserl, early examples of the meditations that became central to Voegelin's later work. Other essays included in this volume such as "The Theory of Law" and "Political Science as Human Science" develop these theoretical insights and refine Voegelin's methodological tools. ... Read more

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THE LAST WORD ON AN INFLUENTIAL (BUT UNFINISHED) PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) is one of the most well-known of modern political philosophers and theorists, but his massive five-volume series "Order and History," as well as the posthumously published eight-volume History of Political Ideas (Volume 8): Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man (Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 26), put forward a coherent and somewhat influential philosophy of history. In the Preface to Volume II, Voegelin says, "Order and History is a philosophical inquiry concerning the principal types of order of human existence in society and history as well as the corresponding symbolic forms."

This volume was published in 1987, after Voegelin's death.The Introduction by Ellis Sandoz tells us that "the concluding volume of Order and History is devoted to the elucidation of the experiences of transcendence that Voegelin has widely discussed..."The Epilogue by Jurgen Gebhardt also provides additional information.For myself, however, this was an anticlimactic end to Voegelin's original project, and one is left wishing that he had been able to complete the original four volumes according to their original design.

Here are some quotations from the final volume:

"Whatever the order of history may ultimately be, there is a history of order because the truth of consciousness is documenting itself as a historical process through the reflectiveness of symbolizing consciousness.The history of consciousness, as I have formulated it, is internally cognitive."
"the God who is declared dead is alive enough to have kept his undertakers nervously busy by now for three centuries."
... Read more

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This study provides an introduction to two of the twentieth century's most significant philosophers, Herman Dooyeweerd and Eric Voegelin. Dooyeweerd and Voegelin provided a new, deeper understanding of history and philosophy. They were early interpreters of the crisis of modern humanism, exposing its contradictions and uncovering its fundamental, spiritual problems. They both re-described philosophy itself as depending upon something deeper than human autonomy. Dooyeweerd demonstrated that all philosophizing was shaped by the commitment of the human heart and Voegelin showed that all philosophizing was a reflection on one's deeper experiences of transcendence. Throughout their work they both consistently emphasized the limits of humanity. Despite these similarities, Dooyeweerd and Voegelin came from different religious traditions, they never met, spoke different languages, lived in different countries, and with the exception of one passing reference, never made mention of the other's work. Dooyeweerd was a Christian philosopher, and Voegelin a Classical philosopher.Despite their significance, Dooyeweerd and Voegelin are largely unknown in part because there are few introductions to their works and no introductions to both of them. The purpose of this book is to provide an introduction to these two significant philosophers. "relatively few people have studied both Dooyeweerd and Voegelin and even fewer who have written about them in a comparative fashion. This book is, in that regard, unique." ... Read more