Eric Voegelin in Vienna - his intellectual period 1920 - 1938

The proposed project aims to reconstruct the early - "Austrian" - period of the work of the political philosopher Eric Voegelin (1901-1985). Voegelin, born in Cologne, Germany, came to Vienna with his family in 1910. He studied at the University of Vienna, where he became an adjunct professor of political science in the Faculty of Law. In 1938, he and his wife, fleeing Hitler, had to leave the country and emigrated to the United States. In the USA, Voegelin taught at various universities. In 1958, he accepted a call to the University of Munich where he founded the Institute of Political Science. In 1969, he went back to the United States and became Henri Salvatori Distinguished Scholar at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. He died in Stanford in 1985. During his lifetime Voegelin published many books and a vast number of articles. In the anglo-american world, Eric Voegelin is today considered a major representative of political philosophy in the 20th century. His work has seen an according reception in the last decades - including a vast number of secondary books and articles in a variety of academic fields and disciplines such as political science, philosophy, religious studies, theology, literary theory, sociology. What has, up to today, remained comparatively underexamined in the international reception of Voegelin`s work, is the early period of his work in Vienna during the 1920s and 1930s. From 1922 until 1938 Voegelin published 5 books and a large number of articles and reviews. A variety of unpublished materials exist from this period and are collected in the archives of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University (CA/USA), where Voegelin`s Nachlass is kept. These materials include typescripts, holographs and outlines of speeches delivered at various occasions (very often at the Vienna Volkshochschulen), university course materials and outlines, course catalogs, examination questions, memoranda, reading lists, syllabi, notes and research material, correspondences, and a large number of newspaper articles (mostly in the Neue Freie Presse). The aim of the proposed project is to focus on that period and, by doing so, add new perspectives to international Voegelin scholarship. The aim is to reconstruct the lines and foci of his work in these Vienna years and to identify central steps in his early development of methodological and theoretical tools. It is intended to illuminate especially the interrelations between his research on the one hand and his teachings and courses held at the University of Vienna and at the city`s Volkshochschulen (adult education centres) on the other. Furthermore, the context of his work in the intellectual surroundings in Vienna shall be particularly elaborated. Accordingly, the project will also significantly contribute to the intellectual-historical research of the inter-war-period in Vienna and Austria.

The project aimed to reconstruct the early - "Austrian" - period (1922-1938) of the work of the political philosopher Eric Voegelin (1901-1985). It investigated the lines and foci of his work in these Vienna years and identified central steps in his early development of methodological and theoretical tools - proving that major elements of his later, "mature" approach to history, philosophy and consciousness were already developed in the Austrian years. A large amount of published and unpublished materials from this period - collected in American and European Archives and including typescripts, holographs and outlines of speeches, university course materials and outlines, course catalogs, memoranda, reading lists, syllabi, notes and research material, correspondences, and a variety of newspaper articles (mostly in the Neue Freie Presse) were researched. Voegelins theoretical investigations and research work of the time were closely related to his teaching activities and to his participation in the different discussion circles in Vienna such as the Geistkreis and the Ludwig Mises-Privatseminar. All these different data were tied together in order to develop an appropriate picture of the early Voegelin. In the 1920s the primary points of reference for Voegelin were Max Weber, Edmund Husserl, Georg Simmel, Othmar Spann, and Hans Kelsen. The importance of Kelsen for the early Voegelin is commonly known in the literature; the particular relevance of Spann for core concepts of Voegelin`s "emerging" philosophical anthropology, however, was proved by this project; Similarly, the genesis of the Herrschaftsbeziehung (relation of domination/governance) as the center of Voegelin`s political science approach in the 1930s could be reconstructed in detail. This perspective clearly emerges form the increasing elaboration of the form of relation between individual and society strongly influenced by Simmel and Spann and already sketched out in the dissertation and in very early manuscripts from 1920-24. Over the years, the question of this form is getting linked - more and more - to the problem of "symbolic form". It is the symbolic dimension that increasingly attracts Voegelin and becomes the basis for what he calls a "geisteswissenschaftliche Staatslehre". With this development in the 1930s, the frame of his historical hermeneutics of the constitution of political meaning as then further elaborated in the History of Political Ideas in the 1940s and, finally, in his opus magnum Order and History (1956-1987) is given. In his writings of the 1930s - culminating in his essay on the Political Religions (1938) - Voegelin increasingly makes clear that the (symbolic, political) constitution of societies won`t be understood appropriately without recognizing the "Transzendenzoffenheit" (openness to transcendence) of man. More precisely, the ideological closing of this Transzendenzoffenheit becomes the major threat for freedom and democracy in central Europe - a threat that also forced Voegelin to leave the continent and immigrate to the USA. As a result of the project two books are in the process of being published: one monograph entitled "Eric Voegelin in Vienna" and written by Michael Ley and Gilbert Weiss; and one volume presenting a selection of "Early Writings of Eric Voegelin" that have long been unavailable in the German speaking world. The publication of the correspondence between Voegelin and Friedrich Engel-Janosi is in preparation.