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Reviewed by:
  • Eric Voegelin’s Asian Political Thought ed. by Lee Trepanier
  • Manfred Henningsen (bio)
Lee Trepanier, editor. Eric Voegelin’s Asian Political Thought. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020. vi, 224 pp. Hardcover $100, isbn 978-1-4985-9861-3. E-Book $45, isbn 978-1-4985-9862-0.

Eric Voegelin has been recognized for restoring the scholarly interest in classical Western political philosophy. Like his fellow refugee from Nazi Germany, Leo Strauss, he published numerous studies on the origins of political reflection in ancient Israel and Greece and the following evolution of European political thinking. Yet neither Voegelin nor Strauss has been known for their knowledge interest in Asian political ideas. The intellectual focus of both thinkers on Western themes seemed to preclude any interest in Asian narratives of political meaning.

The surprising attention that Chinese scholars have recently paid to the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt and to Leo Strauss has also reached Eric Voegelin’s work. All five volumes of his Order & History (1956–1987), his [End Page 322] The New Science of Politics (1953), and the eight volumes of the History of Political Ideas (1987–1999) have been or are in the process of getting translated into Chinese. However, none of the ten articles that Lee Trepanier has brought together in the book under review covers this unusual coincidence of Chinese interest in works by three political theorists with a German intellectual background. One of them, Schmitt, was the most prominent legal theorist of the Nazi regime, whereas the other two were refugees from that regime. Voegelin returned to Germany, teaching at the University of Munich from 1958 to 1969, before spending the last sixteen years of his life in Stanford, being connected with the Hoover Institution.

Trepanier has selected ten articles for his volume. A few of them address directly Voegelin’s engagement of Asian topics, whereas many of them demonstrate a potential application of his theoretical approach toward mostly Chinese philosophical and spiritual issues. Two articles by Jonathan Ratcliffe and Todd Myers deal with Voegelin’s early interests in themes of Mongolian power and the self-understanding of the two most charismatic and violent leaders, the Turk-Mongol Khan Tamerlane (1336–1405) and the most famous Mongol leader of them all, Genghis Khan (1158–1227). He wrote these studies in the late 1930s after finishing his essay on the ideological meaning projects that justified the Nazi and Stalinist regimes. This essay on Die politischen Religionen1 was still published in 1938 in Vienna, when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany and Voegelin fled to the United States. A second edition appeared in the following year in Stockholm. Whether this work on the totalitarian regimes in his own time and his personal experiences sensitized him to the power libido of rulers and motivated him to look for historical antecedents is not clear. Yet he had already started research on the political ideas of intellectuals in the Italian Renaissance, when he stumbled on the extravagant superiority claims that both Mongol leaders expressed in response to European submission requests. In the Tamerlane article “The Humanists’ Image of Timur,” which appeared in 1937 in a judicial journal,2 he was intrigued by the impact Tamerlane—or as he was also called, Amir Timur—had on the imagination of the European humanists. This peculiar fascination carried over into Voegelin’s work during World War II on the history of Western political ideas,3 in which he dealt early on with Italian Renaissance thinkers like Machiavelli and Guicciardini, who together with other Italian writers emphasized the power dimension in politics.

One of the authors, Jonathan Ratcliffe, does not feel comfortable with Voegelin’s extrapolations and charges him with collapsing “the Chinese, Persians, Assyrians, and Mongols all into a uniform ‘oriental’ despotic stage of human development.” He adds as a conclusion: “Voegelin remains thoroughly Eurocentric” (p. 97). This charge of Eurocentrism may apply to Voegelin’s early work. Yet with the publication of volume 4 of Order & History in 1974, and [End Page 323] especially the chapter on “The Chinese Ecumene,” it is a misleading label. The Irish political philosopher Brendan Purcell would not agree with Ratcliffe’s Eurocentric characterization either. He...

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