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Surveying the Occasional Papers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Extract

In 1990, with the support of the Bavarian Ministry of Cultural Affairs, the University of Munich, and the Fritz-Thyssen Foundation, Peter Opitz organized the Eric-Voegelin-Archiv at the Geschwister-Scholl Institute for Political Science at the University of Munich. Opitz is currently the director of the institute, which Voegelin founded during the 1950s upon his return to Europe from the United States, to which he fled as a refugee in 1938 following the occupation of Austria by the German army. Voegelin taught in Munich for little more than a decade prior to his retirement in 1969 as a Henry Salvatori Distinguished Scholar at the Hoover Institution, Stanford.

Type
Eric Voegelin and Voegelin Scholarship
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2000

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References

1 Reference is given in the text to the Occasional Papers by Roman numeral and page number.

2 Herz, , Das Ideal einer objectiven Wissenschaft von Recht und Staat: Zu Eric Voegelins Kritik an Hans Kelsen, vol. III (1996).Google Scholar

3 Timms, , Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist: Culture and Catastrophy in Hapsburg Vienna (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 28.Google Scholar

4 Reference is given in the text to the uniform edition of Voegelin's Collected Works, by volume and page number as CW. All volumes are available from the University of Missouri Press.

5 See Kraus, Karl, “Die Büchse der Pandora,” in Literatur und Lüge (Munich: Kösel, 1958), pp. 1819.Google Scholar

6 Voegelin, , Autobiographical Reflections, ed. Sandoz, Ellis (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1989), pp. 16ffGoogle Scholar; see Hollweck, II-A, 7–9, 38–40.

7 Voegelin, , Autobiographical Reflections, p. 17.Google Scholar

8 See the contemporary remarks of Elster, H. M., Wedekind und seine besten Bühneniverke (Berlin and Leipzig: Schneider, 1922), pp. 1013.Google Scholar

9 Voegelin, , Autobiographical Reflections, p. 53Google Scholar; The Authoritarian State is published in English as CW, IV. See esp. chap. 6. Chignola provides a very useful account of Voegelin's criticism of Kelsen: X, 49–66.

10 Hoover Institution, Voegelin Papers, Box 63, file 13; abbreviated as HI, 63/13.

11 See Voegelin, , Review of Kelsen and Ebenstein, Louis iana Law Review 6 (1945): 489Google Scholar; Autobiographical Reflections, p. 21.

12 Voegelin, , “Reine Rechtslehre und Staatshlehre,” Zeitschrift für öffentliches Recht, IV (1924), 80131.Google Scholar

13 ibid., pp. 111–12, 120, 124–25.

14 ibid., p. 131.

15 In Race and State, Voegelin remarked that a “theory of governance” or Herrschaftslehre was the second systematic element in a Staatslehre, following the elaboration of a philosophical anthropology. The purpose of a Herrschaftslehre, he said, is “to delimit the specific action by which the community constitutes itself as having political existence,” and referred to his essay on Carl Schmitt as a source of further elaboration of this question (CW, II: 3). The Schmitt paper, Die Verfassungslehre von Carl Schmitt: Versuch einer koustruktiven Analyse iher staats theoretischen Prinzipien,” Zeitschrift für öffentliches Rech 11(1931): 89109Google Scholar, is unavailable in English. In his study of Voegelin's manuscript text, identified as Herrschaftslehre, Petropulos focuses on the first systematic element. The text is in the Voegelin Papers, HI, 53/5.

16 ibid., chap. 2, p. 7.

17 ibid., chap. 1, p. 3.

18 Order and History, vol. 3, Plato and Aristotle (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1957), p. 363.Google Scholar

19 As indicated above, Opitz provided an extensive contextual and philological analysis of the development of Voegelin's work from the 1920s up to the “Introduction.” In addition to his discussion of the argument of the race books and The Political Religions emergent from the Staatslehre tradition, Opitz gave a detailed account of Voegelin's discussion with the original publishers, McGraw-Hill, with his Viennese friends Alfred Schütz and Max Mintz, and with Morstein Marx, who commissioned a modest text-book on behalf of McGraw-Hill, a text that quickly grew far beyond the bounds they had envisaged. Opitz also reproduced four of the outlines for the History that Voegelin produced between 1939 and 1942 (XI, 75ff). In his introduction to the German translation of Voegelin's study of Hegel (IX, v–ix) Opitz indicated the influence of Hegel and of the broad scope of Hegel's philosophy of history on Voegelin's work, from On the Form of the American Mind up to Order and History. It is a useful and reliable presentation of materials originally written in English. See CW, XI: 1–48 for a more extensive account.

20 Voegelin, , Anamnesis: Zur Theorie der Geschichte und Politik (Munich: Piper, 1966), p. 20.Google Scholar

21 Many of the important letters that Weiss used in his analysis were published in Voegelin, Eric, Schütz, Alfred, Strauss, Leo, and Gurwitsch, Aron, Briefiveschsel über ‘Die Neue Wissenschaft der Politik,’ ed. Opitz, Peter J. (Freiburg-Munich: Karl Albert, 1993)Google Scholar. The correspondence was published with the support of the Eric Voegelin Archive.

22 See also Srubar, Ilya, Kosmion: Die Genesis derpragmatischen Lebenszvelttheorie von Alfred Schütz und ihr anthropologischer Hintergrund (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989)Google Scholar. The term apparently originated in the work of the Austrian philosopher Adolf Stöhr in his Wege des Glaubens. See CW, XIX: 18.

23 Anamnesis, p. 17.

24 See HI, 28/12.

25 Thus the title of chapter 4 of The New Science of Politics was entitled, “Gnosticism: The Nature of Modernity” (CW, V:175).

26 See Bloom, Harold, Agon: Toward a Theory of Revisionism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 59.Google Scholar

27 See HI, 69/9; 69/11; 70/2; 70/13; 70/16.