Eric Voegelin 1901 – 1985

Eric Voegelin was a German-American political philosopher whose work ranged from political theology to a vast philosophy of history. After the publication of his Political Religions in 1938 made his position in Vienna untenable, he fled to the United States and spent most of his career at Louisiana State University and at Notre Dame. His unfinished five-volume Order and History traced the experiences of order in Mesopotamian, Israelite, Greek, and modern history as a long differentiation of the human relation to the divine ground. His diagnosis of modern political ideologies as forms of immanentized eschatology has exercised wide influence.

Erich Hermann Wilhelm Vogelin was born in 1901 at Cologne and grew up in Vienna, where his Saxon father had moved the family in 1910. He took his doctorate in political science at Vienna in 1922 under Hans Kelsen and Othmar Spann, spent two transformative years on a Rockefeller Fellowship at Columbia, Harvard, Wisconsin, and Paris in the late 1920s, and in 1938, with the Anschluss, fled Vienna with his wife Lissy a step ahead of the Gestapo. He took the Anglicized name Eric Voegelin in his American exile.

He taught at Louisiana State University from 1942 to 1958 and at the Geschwister-Scholl-Institut in Munich from 1958 to 1968 before returning to Stanford as a fellow of the Hoover Institution. His major works are The Political Religions (1938), The New Science of Politics (1952), the five-volume Order and History (1956-1987), the polemical Science, Politics, and Gnosticism (1959), and the unfinished philosophical anthropology of the late writings collected in In Search of Order.

Voegelin treated political life as constituted by the symbolizations through which a society interprets its place between the divine and the human; his concept of 'Gnosticism' as the modern attempt to immanentize the eschaton and his analysis of totalitarian movements as political religions made him one of the most distinctive twentieth-century philosophers of order. He died at Stanford in January 1985.