From Enlightenment to Revolution

by Eric Voegelin, John Hallowell (Editor)

Contents:

The emergence of secularized history : Bossuet and Voltaire --
Helvetius and the genealogy of passions --
Helvetius and the heritage of Pascal --
Positivism and its antecedents --
The conflict between progress and political existence after Turgot --
The apocalypse of man : Comte --
The religion of humanity and the French Revolution --
Revolutionary existence : Bakunin --
Bakunin : the anarchist --
Marx : inverted dialectics --
Marx : the genesis of gnostic socialism.

Genres: Philosophy

307 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

German-born American political philosopher. He taught political theory and sociology at the University of Vienna after his habilitation there in 1928. While in Austria Voegelin established the beginnings of his long lasting friendship with F. A. Hayek. In 1933 he published two books criticizing Nazi racism, and was forced to flee from Austria following the Anschluss in 1938. After a brief stay in Switzerland, he arrived in the United States and taught at a series of universities before joining Louisiana State University's Department of Government in 1942. His advisers on his dissertation were Hans Kelsen and Othmar Spann.

Voegelin remained in Baton Rouge until 1958 when he accepted an offer by Munich's Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität to fill Max Weber's former chair in political science, which had been empty since Weber's death in 1920. In Munich he founded the Institut für Politische Wissenschaft. Voegelin returned to America in 1969 to join Stanford University's Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace as Henry Salvatori Fellow where he continued his work until his death on January 19, 1985. He was a member of the Philadelphia Society.

Reviews

[Nils · Rating 5 out of 5]

A crucial diagnosis, conducted via intellectual history, of the “spiritual crisis” of secular modernity, which reaches its apotheosis (according to Voegelin) in the French Revolution and its various echoes, including Soviet Communism and Nazism. The attempt to replace the “monadism” of Christianity with the secular power of Reason leads to repeated efforts (which Voegelin centers on the thought of Auguste Comte) to respiritualize History, but with some alternative to a surrender to the mystery of the Divine. For Voegelin, these efforts are bound to end either in intellectual failure or totalitarianism — replacing the totalizing but ultimately benign figure of Christ with some arbitrarily chosen human conception, which varies depending on the mere whims of the modern analyst. “The weakness of all universal histories since Voltaire,” Voegelin grandiosely declares, is “the impossibility of finding a meaning that could substitute, on the larger scene, for the providential meaning of Western history under the Christian interpretation.” (8) Instead secular histories all follow the same tripartite structure of the old Christian metanarrative of Fall, Redemption, and spiritual redemption (often phrased by the secularists as “extinction,” “renaissance” and “progress” with the latter defined by some arbitrarily selected new God). Voegelin thus ends of endorsing the position of Maistre, who Voegelin approvingly quotes for having declared that Reason “is an essentially disorganizing force” (183) though he acknowledges that Maistre’s vision of a restoration of the pre-modern order is also impossible.

For Voegelin, all philosophy begins with experience of the divine and of man’s both spiritual exaltation and ineluctably flawed character. The original sin of the Enlightenment was to reorient philosophy from an attempt to understand God (and man’s alignment with respect to Him) to an attempt to understand and ultimately control nature — which issued in the doctrine of the perfectibility of man. This ambition to Voegelin is not only impossible but can only lead to political and moral disaster. His argument in FETR is that this ambition begins with Condorcet and the French encyclopedists, proceeds inexorably toward Comte’s visions of technocratic mastery of society, develops further in Bakunin’s chiliastic vision of the transformation of man’s soul through revolutionary activity, and culminates in Marx’s synthesis of dialectical materialism — in which, he argues, Marx poses himself as a new God, declaring a new truth about the relationship between man and nature in the confidence that a revolutionary leap will yield a proper Gleichschaltung between the two.

Needless to say, I am unconvinced by any of this as a political argument against modernity. I’d rather have the totalizing force be that of empirically-committed Reason than some obscurantist nonsense proposed by ultramontane forces who literally sanctify their own arbitrary ideas on the basis of ancient tradition rather than technical facility. A system of thought that can more accurately describe Reality and is capable at least in principle of revising its premises on the basis of observed results seems to me clearly preferable to a system of values and spiritual commitments that have nothing to recommend them other than their antiquity. With that said, Voegelin is clearly correct that once obeisance to the latter is relaxed, it opens up a space of never-ending political contention over what the alternative should be. Voegelin is right that blind obedience to received authority is a viable solution to the problem of social order, but whether secular or religious, this is not a world we want to live in.