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Six: Ethos and Ethnos: An Introduction to Eric Voegelin’s Critique of European Racism
- Indiana University Press
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As my title indicates, the purpose of this essay is to offer a historical and philosophical introduction to Eric Voegelin’s critique of European racist ideology . That critique is contained in two books, Race and State and The History of the Race Idea: From Ray to Carus, both published in Germany in 1933, and now reissued, in English translation, as volumes 2 and 3 of the thirty-four volume Collected Works of Eric Voegelin.1 In addition to these works, the reader can be referred to an article, “The Growth of the Race Idea,” which Voegelin published in The Review of Politics in 1940 following his emigration from Austria in 1938 in the wake of the Anschluss and in which he summarized for an American audience some of the analytical ideas he had advanced seven years before. This essay also has now been republished, in volume 10 of the Collected Works, and though generally it summarizes many of the ideas of the earlier books it also draws upon insights developed in the last book that Voegelin published before his escape from Austria, Political Religions. Between them, these works provide a unique contribution to the study of a phenomenon that has rarely, if at all, been analyzed with the philosophical and historical acuity that Voegelin provides. There is nothing like them in the literature on racism, and they remain to this day indispensable, if dif¤cult, reading for anyone seeking to understand the essential character of the phenomenon that they treat. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt refers to Voegelin’s race books as providing “the best account of race-thinking in the pattern of a history of ideas available,”2 and in a long, perceptive review of the German edition of Rasse und Staat that Helmuth Plessner published in 1934 in the Vienna-based journal Zeitschrift für öffentliches Recht, the already exiled philosophical anthropologist judged that Voegelin’s work represented a signi¤cant advance in understanding the phenomenon of racial ideology in a philosophi98 Six Ethos and Ethnos An Introduction to Eric Voegelin’s Critique of European Racism David J. Levy cally adequate way.3 Nor was it only opponents of National Socialism who perceived the merits in Voegelin’s work. For while the Nazi lecturer in international and constitutional law Norbert Gürke described Rasse und Staat as contradicting “in its general thought, the National Socialist concept of the people and the state” and as “neither a scholarly nor a meritorious book, but a collection of intellectual constructions that serves to question the basic idea of race,” the young Arnold Gehlen, already on his way to making his career within Hitler’s New Order as successor to the dismissed Paul Tillich, praised it. He described it in a review in the January 4, 1934, edition of Die Erziehung as a book which, despite its political shortcomings, was “an important work” that provided a “¤rst decisive approach to a philosophical analysis of the race problem.”4 Indeed, in his massive polemical tirade against National Socialism , The War against the West (1938), the Jewish-born Catholic philosopher Aurel Kolnai—a thinker who was, like Voegelin, deeply indebted to the philosophical anthropology of Max Scheler—classi¤ed Voegelin’s book among the works that contributed to the ideological climate of Nazi thought—“the work of a shrewd thinker of a counter-revolutionary society whose greatness is only partially due to his stupendous erudition,” and who, if “too fastidious to be a National Socialist himself,” was still in general terms a theorist “representative of Nazism or at least of its general trend and atmosphere.”5 As I hope to show, Kolnai’s verdict on Voegelin’s race books was profoundly mistaken, but the mere fact that he could so misjudge their signi¤cance is symptomatic of the dif¤culties that attended a proper contemporary reading of what Voegelin was trying to show in his analyses of the ideology of race. And if Voegelin’s two books created such confusion at the time of their publication, today they present problems that are no less great in an age when any objective discussion of the phenomenon of race and racist ideology is made more dif¤cult still by a climate of opinion in which the cool yet ultimately merciless tone in which he advances his analyses, and the relative merits that he perceives in the work of some race theorists, can all too easily be misunderstood as evincing a degree of sympathy for...