Selected Correspondence: 1950-1984 (Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 30) [1 ed.] 9780826216724, 0826216722

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THE C O LLE CTED WORKS OF

ERIC VOEGELIN V O L U M E 30

SELECTED CORRESPONDENCE 1950-1984 TRANS LATI O N S FROM THE GE RMAN BY SANDY AD LER, THOMAS A. HOLLWECK, AND WILLIAM PETROPU L O S EDITED W I T H A N INTRODUCTION BY THOMAS A. HOLLWECK This second volume of letters written by Eric Voegelin covers the period from 1950 through 1984. With few exceptions, the originals are to be found in the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University. Correspondents include Leo Strauss, Karl Lowith, Alfred Schutz, Aaron Gurwitsch, Hans Kelsen, Marshall McLuhan, Bertrand de Jouvenel, Arnold Toynbee, and Marie Konig, among others. Beginning at a time when Voegelin was working on a major theoretical breakthrough, reflected in the Walgreen Lectures at the University of Chi­ cago and The New Science of Politics, the cor­ respondence highlights the years of publication of the first four volumes of Order and History; Voegelin's move to Munich, where he founded and directed the university's Institut fiir Politische Wissenschaft; and his years as Henry Salvatori Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford from 1969 to 1974. Voegelin remained a tireless correspon­ dent until the last years of his life. Voegelin's Munich years, while not without controversy, can be seen as the most successful time in his life, as well as his most creative and prolific as a political philosopher. During that

time, Voegelin worked on volume IV of Order and History, and the letters written to succes­ sive directors of the Louisiana State University Press, as well as to friends and colleagues, give a vivid account of the changing nature of this seminal project. Voegelin's letters written between 1969 and 1984 provide compelling evidence of the intel­ lectual vigor that characterized his work throughout his life and continued virtually un­ diminished until the last weeks before his death. Voegelin's realism, his sharp wit, and his superbly developed sense of irony remain evi­ dent in the correspondence throughout all these years. While letters to Leo Strauss, Robert Heilman, and Alfred Schutz have been pub­ lished in separate volumes of correspondence, this selection adds an abundance of hitherto unpublished letters, many of them translated from the original German, providing for the first time the outlines of an intellectual biogra­ phy of one of the most profound thinkers of the twentieth century. Any reader with a serious interest in Voegelin's work will find that the freshness and vitality of his thought are perhaps nowhere more evident than in the letters collected here. As a letter writer, Voegelin always challenged his counterparts, and he is bound to challenge the reader of this correspondence. THOMAS A. H O L LWECK is Associate Pro­ fessor of German at the University of Colorado­ Boulder. He is coeditor of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 25, History of Political Ideas, Volume VII, The New Order and Last Orientation and The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 28, What Is History? And Other Late Unpublished Writings (both avail­ able from the University of Missouri Press).

UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI PRESS Columbia and London http://press. umsystem.edu

T H E C O L L E C T E D WO RKS O F

ERIC VOEGELIN V O L U M E 30

SELECTED CORRESPONDENCE I 9 5 0- I 9 8 4

P R O J E C T E D VO LU M E S I N T H E C O L L E C T E D W O R K S r.

On the Form of the American Mind

2. Race and State 3· The History of the Race Idea: From Ray to Carus 4· The Authoritarian State: An Essay on the Problem of the Austrian State 5· Modernity without Restraint: The Political Religions; The New Science of Pol-

itics; and Science, Politics, and Gnosticism 6. Anamnesis: On the Theory of History and Politics y.

Published Essays, 1922-1928

8 . Published Essays, 1 928-19 3 3 9 · Published Essays, 1934-193 9 IO. Published Essays, 1 940-19 5 2 I I . Published Essays, 1953-19 6 5 I 2 . Published Essays, 19 66-1 9 85 I 3 . Selected Book Reviews I4. Order and History, Volume I, Israel and R evelation I 5 . Order and History, Volume II, The World of the Polis I 6 . Order and History, Volume III, Plato and Aristotle I ? . Order and History, Volume IV, The Ecumenic Age I 8 . Order and History, Volume V, In Search of Order I 9 . History of Political Ideas, Volume I, Hellenism, R ome, and Early Christianity 20. History of Political Ideas, Volume II, The Middle Ages to Aquinas 2 r. History of Political Ideas, Volume III, The Later Middle Ages 22. History of Political Ideas, Volume IV, Renaissance and Reformation 2 3 . History of Political Ideas, Volume V, R eligion and the Rise of Modernity 24. History of Political Ideas, Volume VI, Revolution and the New Science 2 5 . History of Political Ideas, Volume VII, The New Order and the Last Orientation 26. History of Political Ideas, Volume VIII, Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man 2 7. The Nature of the Law, and R elated Legal Writings 28. What Is History! And Other Late Unpu blished Writings 29. Selected Correspondence 30. Selected Correspondence, 1 9 5 0-1984 3 r. Hitler and the Germans 3 2 . The Theory of Governance and Other Miscellaneous Papers, 1921-193 8 3 3 · The Drama of Humanity and Other Miscellaneous Papers, 193 9-19 85 34· Autobiographical Reflections: Revised Edition, with a Voegelin Glossary and Cumulative Index

E D I T O R I A L B OA R D

Paul Caringella Jiirgen Gebhardt Thomas A. Hollweck Ellis Sandoz

The Editorial Board offers grateful acknowledgment to the Earhart Foundation for support provided at various stages in the preparation of this book for publication . A special thanks for support goes to the Charlotte and Walter Kohler Charitable Trust and the Sidney Richards Moore Memorial Fund. The University of Missouri Press offers its grateful acknowledgment for a generous contribution from the Eric Voegelin Institute in support of the publication of this volume .

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF

ERIC VOEGELIN V O L U M E 30

------- � ------

SELECTED CORRESPONDENCE 1950-1984 TRANSLATIONS FROM THE GERMAN BY

SANDY ADLER, THOMAS A. HOLLWECK, AND

WILLIAM PETROPULOS

EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

THOMAS A. HOLLWECK

UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI PRESS COLUMBIA AND LONDON

Copyright © 2007 by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 6poi Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved 5

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Voegelin, Eric, I 90 I ­ [Works. I 9 89] The collected works of Eric Voegelin f edited with an introduction by Ellis Sandoz. p. Vols.

em.


published by University of Missouri Press, Columbia.

Includes bibliographical references and indexes. Contents: v. I. On the form of the American mind - v. 2 . Race and state - v. 3· The history of the race idea - [etc. ] ISBN o-807 I - I 8 2 6 - 5 (v. I : alk. paper) - ISBN o-807 1 - I 6 7 3 -4 (v. 2 : alk. paper) ­ ISBN o-807 I - I 8 4 3 - 5 (v. 3 : alk. paper) - [etc.] 1. Philosophy. 2 . History-Philosophy. 3 · Political science-Philosophy. I. Sandoz, Ellis, I 9 3 IB3 3 5 4.V88

. II. Weiss, Gilbert. III. Title.

I989

I 9 3-dc20 ISBN 978-0-8262- I 672-4 @"'The paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z 3 9 .48, I 984. Designer: Albert Crochet Typesetter: BOOKCOMP, INC. Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc. Typeface: Trump Mediaeval

Contents

Editor's Introduction

I

Editorial Note

19

Illustrations

25

I . Letters from the 1 9 5 0s

4I

2 . Letters from the 1 9 60s

407

3 · Letters from the 1 970s

64 1

4· Letters from the 1 9 80s

854

Index of Correspondents

877

General Subject Index

88r

.r·.:·:·

SELECTED C ORRESPONDENCE 1 9 5 0 -1 9 8 4

Editor's Introduction

If we don't respect those who have gone before us, who will respect us when we are gone? If we exclude the community of mankind, the community will exclude us. Letter to Brendan Purcell, December 21, 1 976

The Background of This Edition The publication of the Selected Correspondence concludes this edi­ tion of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. The plan to make a representative number of Voegelin's letters more easily accessible to a larger public existed from the inception of this large editorial project. It was clear to the editors and numerous other persons with whom the concept of the Collected Works was discussed that Voegelin's letters, written over a span of more than five decades, provide the reader with more than anecdotal bits and pieces of Voegelin, the man, his life, and his thought; that they offer instead a unique perspective of a man's intellectual and spiritual struggle with the forces that shape human existence in society and his­ tory, and in the process elicit responses unique to each person, re­ sponses that ultimately define who this person is, his or her "iden­ tity, " to use the word with the caution that Eric Voegelin himself deemed necessary when he wrote in "The Eclipse of Reality" : "A man's identity is constituted through existence in tension toward the ground of his existence. " 1 It is with this understanding that Jii rgen Gebhardt and I undertook the task of reading through all of Voegelin's extant letters, as they are collected in the Hoover Institution Archives and as they would from time to time emerge from the archival repositories of some of his correspondents. What I. Eric Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 2 8 : 1 3 7 · Hereinafter ab­ breviated as CW. Titles of all volumes in the series can be found in each volume on the page titled "Projected Volumes in the Collected Works. "

I

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTI ON

we found in this massive body of letters is a document of truly astounding dimensions, especially when one considers that corre­ spondence was maintained alongside the ongoing theoretical and philosophical production that has now become more fully visible in this edition of the Collected Works. From the inception of our work on the correspondence, we faced a number of questions that grew out of the special nature of this project. We worked with the understanding that the title Selected Correspondence implied limitation from the outset. We were only going to publish selected letters from Voegelin to his correspon­ dents, not letters addressed to Voegelin. In other words, we were not able to follow the model of three successful volumes that already exist outside the Collected Works: the Strauss-Voegelin correspon­ dence edited by Barry Cooper and Peter Emberley, the Heilman­ Voegelin correspondence edited by Charles Embry, and the most re­ cent addition to the Voegelin correspondences, the Schutz-Voegelin correspondence edited by Gerhard Wagner and Gilbert Weiss, pub­ lished in 2004. These three volumes contain all known letters writ­ ten by each correspondent, and while Cooper and Emberly had to make translations of most of the letters written by Strauss and Voegelin, Embry, Wagner, and Weiss were fortunate to publish their correspondences in the original languages, English between Heil­ man and Voegelin, German between Schutz and Voegelin. There are other advantages to publishing complete correspondences. While it is often more difficult to get the rights to the other correspondents' letters and while the editors have to be aiming for the highest degree of completeness, these potential difficulties are easily out­ weighed by two facts: The editors have one criterion for their se­ lection, that of completeness, and they work within the framework of an ongoing dialogue between two people and their personal and intellectual relationship as it develops over time. In the cases of all three of the correspondences I have mentioned, this has worked to the advantage of each of them, and the reader gets an intimate view of how scholars of such different character and purpose as Voegelin and Strauss, Voegelin and Heilman, and, most of all, Voegelin and Schutz gave each other what few people are able to give each other, the gift of rational dialogue in the spirit of Aristotelian philia in the common discovery of the structure of reality. The Selected Correspondence pursues a different goal. Its pur­ pose is first and foremost to introduce students and readers of Eric 2

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTI ON

Voegelin's work to Voegelin, the man, the thinker, and the doer, sometimes in the middle of the currents of turbulent times, at others the ever-vigilant observer of these currents from a quieter spot on the shore. What this edition aimed for, and here both editors were from the beginning in perfect agreement, was to draw the outline of an intellectual biography that could, at the proper time, be developed into a differentiated portrait of Voegelin and his time. With this goal in mind, the editors have been striving to produce an edition that has a truly representative selection of all of Voegelin's letters, beginning in the 1 920s and ending only weeks before his death in r 98 5 . Proceeding strictly chronologically, the editors have divided the editorial work between them, with the result that Geb­ hardt's volume contains the earliest of Voegelin's letters, written during the years in Austria before his emigration to the United States, the first difficult months of gaining a foothold in the new home-country, and the ten years of a European academic's life in the American South, first in Alabama and then, beginning in 1 942, at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. It was during those years that Voegelin worked on the monumental torso of the History of Political Ideas, which would ultimately become the germinating cell of Order and History. This volume begins in the year I 9 5 0, and for a reason. For it was in I 9 5 0, five years after the end of the Second World War, that Voegelin decided to break the relative isolation of his Louisiana years and venture on a journey of intellectual exploration in still­ war-ravaged Europe, aided by a grant from the Guggenheim Founda­ tion. What Voegelin found during this "homecoming, " though, was not just a mournful scene of destruction and scarceness-he found that, too-but a flourishing intellectual life that had survived the human catastrophe of the Nazi rule over Europe and had in fact been strengthened by the spiritual demands that the inhumanity of the times had made on those persons who, for one reason or another, had not be en drawn into the whirlpool of intellectual and spiritual destruction. The encounters with men like Karl Barth, Karl Jaspers, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Alois Dempf, Friedrich Heer, Raymond Aron, and others left a lasting impression on Voegelin and can be seen as the kind of revitalizing and redefining experi­ ence that set Voegelin on his way to conceive the Walgreen Lec­ tures and the "breakthrough" book The New Science of Politics, which appeared shortly thereafter. Voegelin acknowledged in the 3

EDITOR'S I NTRODUCTI ON

Autobiographical Reflections that the years just prior to 1 9 5 0 had been a time of increasing awareness of the "inadequacy of my con­ ventional preconceptions about a history of ideas " and that the years between 1 945 and 1 9 5 0 had been a "period of indecision, if not paralysis. "2 But toward the end of 1 9 5 0 Voegelin was able to write to his friend Friedrich Engel-Janosi: "The trip to Europe has yielded enormous returns. At the moment I find myself in the same situation as you: I have in no way assimilated everything that I brought back in the way of books, etc. Probably the most significant impression came from Balthasar. "3 Thus, the year 1 9 5 0 constitutes a natural caesura in Voegelin's life and thought, and so the decision was made to let the present volume begin with 1 9 5 0 and to let the letters tell the story of Voegelin's growing reputation as the author of first The New Science of Politics and subsequently the three volumes of Order and History. An article in Time in r 9 5 3 had done its share to make Voegelin known to a larger group of Americans, but the reader of Voegelin's letters of the first five years of the 1 9 5 0s will come away with a different impression, that of a scholar hard at work to complete the three volumes of what was once known as The History of Political Ideas and to deal with the fact that the publisher, Macmillan, had lost interest in a venture that had been in the making for more than ten years and had kept growing-except not in its sales prospects. This edition has made it a point to give the reader a sense of the obstacles Voegelin had to overcome during those years and his perseverance that ultimately led to a contract for Order and Sym bols, as Order and History was at first to be called, with LSU Press. In a selection such as this, there is an obvious bias. The one­ sidedness of a selection that excludes the voices of Voegelin's corre­ spondents may be irritating to some readers. Brief explanatory foot­ notes are meant to mitigate this shortcoming by putting Voegelin's letters into the factual context the reader requires in order to make a fair judgment of both their writer and their addressees. What makes this task easier is the fact that Voegelin's letters never have that air of privacy that characterizes the letters of some letter­ writers in the public light. Voegelin seems to have enjoyed being a public person and almost never wrote about matters that he could 2 . Eric Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections, ed. Ellis Sandoz (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1 9 8 9 ), 64. 3 · Letter to Friedrich Engel-Janosi, November 20, 1 9 5 0.

4

' EDITOR'S I NTRODUCTI ON

not have written or spoken about in public with the same frank­ ness and with the same seriousness or irony. Whether Voegelin writes to philosophers like Leo Strauss, Karl Lowith, and Alois Dempf, or to other scholar friends such as Engel-Janosi, Gerhard Niemeyer, Robert Heilman, or Aron Gurwitsch, whether he shares his thoughts with younger men such as Ji.irgen Gebhardt, Man­ fred Henningsen, Stephen McKnight, or Klaus Vondung, to name only a few, or whether he reports to the directors of foundations and scholarly institutions such as the Volker Fund, the Rockefeller Foundation, or the Hoover Institution, it is always die Sache that guides his thought, and he is ever aware of who his addressees are and what they represent. Following Voegelin from Baton Rouge to Munich and the years that undoubtedly were the most vibrant and exciting years of his life-the years as head of one of the most unique academic insti­ tutes of the twentieth century, the Institut fur Politische Wissen­ schaften-the reader comes to appreciate, not merely the breadth of Voegelin's interests and knowledge, but the depth of the fervor with which he sought to create a new scientific paradigm, to use this much-abused term here. When one reads his letters to the art his­ torian Hans Sedlmayr, for instance, one is struck by the enthusiasm of discovery with which he discusses recent art historical literature and places it in the context of his own work. Similarly, we are touched by the respectful tone of the letters to the paleontologist and private scholar Marie Konig, who opened up for him the depth of the unwritten human past that occupied him during a major part of the last decade and a half of his life.

The Letter-Traces of an Unwritten Biography

The Breakthrough Within the chronological order of these volumes of Voegelin's let­ ters there emerge nevertheless certain clusters of emphasis and Sinnlinien, lines of meaning, to use one of Voegelin's own terms with which he attempted to describe continuity in history. As already mentioned, the years 1 9 5 0 to 1 9 5 2 witness the reestab­ lishment of Voegelin's ties with Europe, reconnecting with old friends, making new acquaintanc�s during the summer of 1 9 50, and receiving his first offer to assume a position as professor of American studies at the University of Munich. Simultaneously, 5

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

there is the invitation to present the Walgreen Lectures at the University of Chicago, with the result that Voegelin was forced to formulate a systematic political theory, something that propelled him into considerable prominence, having spent most of his years since his arrival on the periphery of the American political science establishment. Voegelin's letters to Leo Strauss, Karl Lowith, and especially the two letters to Alfred Schutz from January 1 9 5 3 are indispensable for an understanding of Voegelin's highly differenti­ ated theoretical positions on history, revelation, Christianity, and gnosticism. Early into this period, the year 1 9 5 1 , falls a letter to Hannah Arendt in which Voegelin has a considerably more nuanced reac­ tion to Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism than in the published review essay of 1 9 5 3 .4 But especially the letters to the other old friend from the Vienna days, the historian Friedrich Engel-Janosi, are indispensable for anyone who wants to follow the genesis of The History of Political Ideas. Voegelin knew his deficiencies as a historian and relied to a considerable extent on Engel-Janosi's professional assessment of the historical details of his manuscript, very much aware of the old adage that " the devil is in the details. " Engel-Janosi, an expert on Vatican diplomatic history, was not only a careful reader of each part of the History but acted as a friendly critic who refrained from arguing the "big" theoretical points and gave helpful advice on issues that fell within his areas of expertise. At the same time, Voegelin's letters to Alois Dempf, Eduard Baumgarten, and Hans Schima, the dean of the law faculty at the University of Vienna, show how much Voegelin had outgrown the German-Austrian world he had left in 1 9 3 8 . A letter to a German journalist, Jiirgen Schiiddekopf, from February I 9 5 3 , is an astute analysis of the times and a virtually complete compendium of the literature Voegelin considered essential for a philosophical theory of politics and history. The work on the History was at last coming to a close, and despite several surgical procedures on his lower intestine that year, Voegelin was able to teach summer school at the University of Southern California. By 1 9 5 4 he had sufficiently recovered to put the final touches to his History of Political Ideas, now under the new title Order and Symbols. Obviously, Macmil­ lan's decision not to publish the three volumes was a serious disap4· Cf. CW, u : r s-2 3 .

6

' EDI TOR'S I NTRODUCTI ON

pointment, as Voegelin wrote to Alfred Schutz in October I 9 5 4: "I have progressed a step further with 'Order and Symbols' inasmuch as after two months I finally elicited from Macmillan the decision that they don't want to take the book because of the financial risk. It is now with the Wolffs at Pantheon. They seem to want it if the Bollingen Foundation gives its financial support. But that is a very tedious procedure. I anticipate another three months before a decision can be made in the matter. " At last, in May I 9 5 5 , Voegelin would have the contract in hand with which LSU Press committed to publishing Order and Sym bols. A long period of the most intense intellectual work was coming to an end, and it is not without a certain irony that the year I 9 5 4 had brought the resumption of the contact with his old teacher Hans Kelsen, whose reaction to The New Science of Politics was to result in an eighty-page manuscript in which he took Voegelin to task for dealing with "unreal prob­ lems . " Voegelin's two letters to Kelsen are a document of major importance, since the former student was now able to write: "We have both grown older, and I have found my own theoretical posi­ tion. " Voegelin ended his letter with a statement that eloquently sums up not only his own position vis-a-vis his old teacher but emphatically states his views on the relationship between teachers and their students in general: "And if you then look again on your misguided student you might consider that the best students are not necessarily those who swear in verba magistri and remain in the 'shell, ' but perhaps rather those who studied so thoroughly at school that they free themselves from it and can go their own way. "5 Skeptical as Voegelin was about the political and intellectual state of postwar Europe, and Germany in particular, he considered a return to Europe from the time of the University of Munich's first offer of the directorship of its Amerika-Institut, which he declined because of the unsatisfactory management of the institute. But another long trip to Europe during the summer of I 9 5 5 clearly indicates that Voegelin saw a future for himself at a university in Germany and, as a letter to Max Horkheimer indicates, was actively seeking the opportunity for guest lectures on ancient Israel at the University of Frankfurt. Voegelin did receive the invitation, and a year later he gave those lectures in Frankfurt and spent the s. Letter to Hans Kelsen, February 1 9, 1 9 5 4 .

7

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

days just before Christmas 1 9 5 6 speaking to the top official in the Bavarian Ministry of Culture, Johannes von Elmenau, about a chair in political science at the University of Munich and the founding of an institute to support the research component of this position.6 A second trip at the beginning of 1 9 5 7 followed-Voegelin was on sabbatical-to complete the details of his negotiations with the State of Bavaria. The Voegelins were ready to make the move. The simultaneous publication of the "History" as the first three vol­ umes of Order and History by the LSU Press enabled Voegelin to close the longest chapter in his intellectual history, or so he thought. For it would remain a work in progress that was not con­ cluded until shortly before Voegelin's death and that ended as the meditation of an old man on the deepest questions of reality, and not as a study of history. The first three volumes of Order and His­ tory were a departure from all the philosophies of history that even up to Karl Jaspers's Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte had been primarily the meta-narrative of Western civilization. Over the next decade and a· half, Voegelin's thought further distanced itself from this meta-narrative, of which his own gnosticism and modernity thesis had been one last, if improved, instance.

The Munich Years The ten years Eric Voegelin spent as professor of political science and founding head of the Institut fur Politische Wissenschaften at the University of Munich were, as I suggested earlier, in many ways the best years of his life. Voegelin's detailed reports about the first months in the new institute offices in Munich's Theresien­ strasse betray a certain pride in his new situation. Voegelin had received significant funds to build an institute library that reflected his priorities in the study of politics and history and which was a state-of-the-art collection of literature not only in classical and modern politics and philosophy but even more so in its global range that represented the major civilizations of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. Voegelin's success in finding capable young scholars who engaged in research in all these areas gave the institute a unique 6. Cf. undated letter to Kenneth Thompson, probably written at the end of De· cember 1 9 5 6, which contains a request for funds to get the institute off the ground. A detailed report to Schutz goes even further in its indication of how far the nego· tiations had already progressed.

8

EDITOR'S I NTRODUCTI ON

composition and made it a drawing point for major scholars from Germany, France, Britain, and the United States. The eventual ad­ dition of a second chair in politi