Eric Voegelin.pdf - Geschwister-Scholl-Institut für Politikwissenschaft

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violence, to borrow a concept from Herbert Marcuse, who
wrote of „surplus repression“. Violence declared to be an end
in itself, violence declared to be sacred, destruction held to be
the highest form of liberty, violence magnified and
collectivized, turned into an ideology, violence that has come
full circle and is cold and calculating rather than the result of
the heat of passion, violence with deep intellectual roots
anchored in the hatred of the cosmos, hatred of the body,
hatred of sensuality, hatred of sexuality — this violence is
what is really de trop.
One of the numerous advantages of using Voegelin’s analysis
of gnosticism to understand political reality is that it can help
to correct the bias of what in the last decade has come to be
called the „Politically Correct“ attitude, which concentrates
almost exclusively on right-wing extremist movements as the
harbinger of expressive violence. This bias, predominant in
Western social science, was anticipated in the so-called
„authoritarian personality“ studies of Adorno, including the
famous F (for Fascism) and E (for Ethnocentrism) scale tests.
Authority is an inescapable fact of political existence, and to
imply that anyone who respects authority is prone to violence
against the weak and dispossessed is the mark not of science
but of egalitarian leftwing prejudice. Nonetheless,Voegelin
probably — even undoubtedly — went too far at times in
correcting the equivalent of Political Correctness, to the point
that he left himself vulnerable to rather silly objections such as
that of his former teacher Hans Kelsen that his „new science“
of politics was not science at all but an expression of a
preference for the right (Republican) wing of American
politics. (Voegelin’s answer to Kelsen, had he chosen to give
one, would presumably have been the same as his response to
George Nash, who had requested a photograph of him to