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

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instrumental view of violence and its greatest thinker, Hobbes,
organized his whole system around preventing the „war of all
against all“ — i.e., the culture of violence. (Of course, as with
Marxism, one can detect gnostic elements in liberalism and
specifically in Hobbes.) If gnosticism be the catalyst of
expressive violence, liberalism cannot be gnostic because it
hasn’t a clue about the expressive dimension of political
reality. However, liberalism bears considerable responsibility
for helping to provoke gnostic movements because of its
fixation on the instrumental and its neglect of the expressive
dimension of human life.
What Voegelin gave away with one hand he sometimes took
back with the other. For example, he was emphatic in his
lectures I heard him deliver in Munich on the necessity for a
(liberal) welfare state in contemporary industrial society.
There are mistakes of judgment in Voegelin, but there is no
Achilles heel. It will not do to for a Kelsen to dismiss his
teaching on the basis of what Voegelin appropriately called
„positionism“ — i.e., the assumption that if a serious thinker is
suspected of occupying some „unacceptable“ place on the leftright
continuum of practical political ideas then his teaching
should be rejected in toto. But I have already said enough
about Political Correctness, that monument to contemporary
intellectual sloth. Voegelin does not have to be made relevant
to the tragedy of political existence in our century. He himself
accomplished that. But he was powerfully relevant to the
problem of the glorification of expressive violence in a way
that requires some digging to demonstrate. Enough said. Let us
get on with our work in this study, which I dedicate to his
memory.