Voegelin’s From Enlightenment to Revolution*: A Review Article

VOEGELIN'S FROM ENLIGHTENMENT TO REVOLUTION* A REVIEW ARTICLE I T HAS BEEN twenty years since the work of Eric Voegelin was last reviewed in these pages (by Anton-Hermann Chroust, commenting at length on the second volume of Order and HistoryVoI . fll [July, 1958] 381-91). Yet the volume now under consideration goes back to the 1940's and early 50's when Voegelin was at work on a history of political thought and had not yet completed the analytical schemes which inform the five volumes of Order and History. Except for two passages\ the studies published in From Enlightenment to Revolution are appearing in print for the first time, at the instance of Professor Hallowell. A long-time student of Voegelin, Ellis Sandoz, has called this work" perhaps the best single introduction to Voegelin's philosophy of politics." 2 Its studies of Voltaire and Bossuet, of Helvetius and Pascal, of Comte and de Maistre, and of Turgot, Bakunin, Marx, and a number of lesser luminaries of modernity focus on the disordered experiences of reality that underlie their speculations. Another Voegelin student, John S. Kirby, has written an excellent summary of these studies: "Voegelin seeks to determine not only what these men thought, but also ... identifies the essential pattern as one of spiritual disintegration. The medieval, Christian pilgrim's progress towards a salvation beyond history is replaced by the intramundane progress of enlightened intellectuals. The spiritual structure of Augustine's historia sacra is discarded for the 'truths' of natural science, and the beatitude of Aristotle's bios theoretikos is replaced by the job of pragmatic action. "At the heart of this development, Voegelin sees an emergent will to power which seeks unqualified control over society in the name of one new gospel or another: the encyclopedistes' enlighten- * FROM ENLIGHTENMENT TO REVOLUTION. By Eric Voegelin, edited by John H. Hallowell. (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1975). Pp. ix + 307. $12.75. 1 Pages iWI-16 were originally published as "Bakunin's Confession" in The Journal of Politics 8 (February, 1946) 24-43; pages 273-75 and 276-98 (the bulk of chapter XI) are substantially the same as "The Formation of the Marxian Revolutionary Idea," Review of Politics 12 (July, 1950) 275-302. 2 Western Political Quarterly 28 (December, 1975) 744. 124 JOHN A. GUEGUEN ment, Turgot's progressivism, Comte's positivism, Bakunin's anarchism , and Marx's socialism. Within the doctrine of progress shared by these thinkers, there lurks, contends Voegelin, a strain of magic that seeks to reconstitute human nature in the image of the magicians who have taken the process of history into their own hands. This period provides a prelude to the totalitarian movements of our century, which translated these aspirations into concrete action." 8 Yet there is much more to these studies than a simple critique of modernity. As Professor Michael Dillon has remarked, From Enlightenment to Revolution is " an important and instructive book, but one to be approached with some caution " since it is not immediately evident where this early work stands "in the evolution of Voegelin's reflections upon the problems of historical consciousness and human order." 4 It is immediately apparent to the most casual reader of From Enlightenment to Revolution-and indeed, of Voegelin's other works as well-that he is a religious thinker who has diagnosed the crisis of Western civilization as a crisis of the spirit. This is the central problem of his early studies, in which he is like a contemporary Origen exposing modern ideologists as the earlier writer did the gnostics of his day. He seeks to show how it is that modernity is a "despiritualizing process" 5 and goes on to formulate " a theory of spiritual disease" 6 which constitutes the core The symptoms of this disease-" the critical breakdown of Western civilization "-are man's reduction to the level of utilitarian existence and the atrophy of his spiritual substance: "Spiritual impotence destroys the order of the soul." 7 And the cause of this " dedivinizing " of the world is the destruction of " a universe of symbol " by men closed to " transcendental Being " who would make themselves into gods.8 Voegelin writes that the moderns...