Voegelin quotes

I’m now 50 pages into Eric Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics, and boy is it dense. Part of his thesis is that we use certain words very sloppily when speaking of political societies–words like “representation”–and so he invents an alternate vocabulary to express specific ideas. Also, his style is very passive and wordy, so it is difficult to understand. Nevertheless, it is fascinating enough to be worth the trouble.

If someone translated this book into Russell Kirk-style prose, it would just too good.

Quotes:

The persistent arrogation of the symbol “representation” for a special type of articulation is a symptom of political and civilizational provincialism. And provincialisms of this kind, when they obscure the structure of reality, may become dangerous. Hauriou very strongly suggested that representation in the elemental sense is no insurance against existential disintegration and rearticulation of a society. (p.50)

In other words, although a society may retain the working structure we have come to know as “democratic,” this is no guarantee that the ordering principle which originally inspired this type of structure will continue unharmed. This ordering principle may be subverted over time while the structure it created remains (not a good thing).

Although writing in the 50s, Voegelin already realized the dangerous effects that encouraging American-style political structure would have in societies whose underlying philosophy did not naturally flow into such a structure–bluntly, any society without the European tradition.

Our own foreign policy was a factor in aggravating international disorder through its sincere but naive endeavor of curing the evils of the world by spreading representative institutions in the elemental sense to areas where the existential conditions for their functioning were not given . . . One cannot explain the odd policies of Western democratic powers leading to continuous warfare, with weaknesses of individual statesmen–though such weaknesses are strongly in evidence. They are rather symptomatic of a massive resistance to face reality, deeply rooted in the sentiments and opinion of the broad masses of our contemporary Western societies.

And I just learned that it was Voegelin who coined the epithet, “immanentize the eschaton.”

Hasta,
PCS