Eric Voegelin

Eric Voegelin, born Erich Hermann Wilhelm Vögelin on 3 January 1901 in Cologne, came to Vienna with his parents in 1910, where he attended the secondary school (Realgymnasium). From 1919 he studied at the Faculty of Law and Political Science of the University of Vienna. In 1922 he received his doctorate under Hans Kelsen and Othmar Spann with the dissertation "Wechselwirkung und Gezweiung. Eine methodenkritische Untersuchung" (Interaction and Dyadic Pairing: A Critical Inquiry into Method). Years of study in the United States followed (from 1924 to 1926 at Columbia University, Harvard, the University of Wisconsin, and Yale), as well as a year in Paris. In 1928 he qualified as a university lecturer in Vienna with the work "Über die Form des amerikanischen Geistes", published in English as "On the Form of the American Mind". From 1929 he taught as a Privatdozent (unsalaried lecturer) in the theory of the state and sociology; in 1936 he became an assistant professor and research assistant to Hans Kelsen. In his Vienna years Voegelin moved in four very differently oriented discussion circles: Othmar Spann's seminar, Hans Kelsen's private seminar, Ludwig von Mises's private seminar, and the Geistkreis, founded in 1921 by Friedrich August von Hayek and Josef Herbert Fürth. From this period also dates his lifelong friendship with Alfred Schütz, continued after 1938 in an extensive correspondence. After the Anschluss of 1938, Voegelin was dismissed from the university, narrowly escaped arrest by the Gestapo, and fled via Switzerland to the United States. After short teaching posts at Harvard, Bennington, and in Alabama, in 1942 he came to Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where he taught until 1958. In 1944 he was granted US citizenship. In 1958 he accepted a call to the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, to the chair once held by Max Weber and vacant since 1920, and founded the Institute of Political Science. In 1969 he returned to the United States, first as Henry Salvatori Distinguished Scholar, later as senior research fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford. He died on 19 January 1985 in Palo Alto. Voegelin's work ranges from early critiques of race theory in "Rasse und Staat" (Race and State, 1933), through the analysis of modern totalitarian movements as secular substitute religions in "Die politischen Religionen" (The Political Religions, 1938), to the large-scale political philosophy of his late phase, above all "The New Science of Politics" (1952) and the five-volume series "Order and History" (1956 to 1987, the final volume posthumous). With his thesis on Gnosticism he became one of the most influential political thinkers of the twentieth century.