Autobiographical Reflections, Revised Edition with Glossary

Introduction

[15], (15) Lines: 110 t ——— 2.6384pt ——— Normal Pag * PgEnds: Pag [15], (15) Introduction Eric Voegelin’s Autobiographical Reflections allows Voegelin himself to survey and interpret in brief compass the vast work of his lifetime down to 1973 when the Reflections were dictated and transcribed. They provide the best possible introduction to the person and thought of a man who was a remarkable scholar and arguably the greatest philosopher of our time. Here Voegelin explains Voegelin, in an autobiographical account calculated to elucidate his other writings and set them in the overall horizon of his thought. Authoritative, incisive, elegant, and profound as they are, the Reflections both disclose the motivations of Voegelin’s remarkable scholarly work in various stages of development from the 1920s onward and reveal at least something of the affable, witty, courageous, tenacious, tough, deeply principled, and learned man behind the work familiar to those who knew him well. Publication of the Autobiographical Reflections of Eric Voegelin is a major intellectual event. An elaborate introduction to a book this brief and accessible would be out of place. But a few words summarizing the facts of Voegelin’s life and the origins of the Reflections as a document will perhaps be pertinent and helpful to the reader. Erich Hermann Wilhelm Voegelin was born in Cologne, Germany , on January 3, 1901, and died in Stanford, California, on January 19, 1985. He was the son of Otto Stefan and Elisabeth Ruehl Voegelin, and his father was a civil engineer. The Voegelins lived in Cologne and in Königswinter in the Rhineland until 1910, when they moved to Vienna. There Eric attended school and the University of Vienna, ultimately becoming an associate professor 15 autobiographical reflections [16], (16) Lines: 12 ——— 8.0pt P ——— Normal P PgEnds: T [16], (16) of political science in the Faculty of Law. He was promptly fired by the Nazis after the Anschluss in 1938 because of his opposition to Hitler (given expression especially in four books published between 1933 and 1938), and he narrowly escaped arrest by the Gestapo as he fled to Switzerland. Shortly thereafter, he emigrated with his wife (the former Luise Betty “Lissy” Onken [September 3, 1906–October 8, 1996], whom he married on July 30, 1932) to the United States. After a year tutoring in the government department at Harvard and commuting during the second semester to teach at Bennington College in Vermont, Voegelin taught summer school at Northwestern in Evanston, Illinois. The Voegelins then took a short vacation in Wisconsin before moving to the University of Alabama in the fall of 1939, where they remained for two and one-half years. In January 1942, Voegelin joined the faculty of the Department of Government of Louisiana State University. He remained in Baton Rouge until January 1958 and was selected one of the first three Boyd Professors at LSU, writing and publishing during sixteen years in Louisiana the books in English that made his reputation : The New Science of Politics (1952), from the Walgreen Lectures of the previous year; and the first three volumes of Order and History: volume one, Israel and Revelation; volume two, The World of the Polis; and volume three, Plato and Aristotle (1956, 1957).1 He and Lissy became American citizens in 1944 and retained their citizenship thereafter. Voegelin accepted an appointment in 1958, however, as professor of political science at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, establishing the new Institute for Political Science there. During this period his principal publication was Anamnesis (1966),2 which directly presented the philosophy of consciousness underlying the work in English. After a decade, the Voegelins returned permanently to the United States in 1969. For a five-year period ending in 1974, Voegelin held an appointment at Stanford University as Henry Salvatori Distinguished Scholar in the Hoover Institution on War, Revolu1 . Available from University of Missouri Press in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vols. 14–16. N.B.: All volumes in the present edition are hereinafter cited merely as CW. The New Science of Politics is reprinted as part of CW, vol. 5. 2. English trans. 1978, available University of Missouri Press 1990; revised trans. CW, vol. 6. 16 introduction [17], (17) Lines: 130 t ——— 8.0pt PgV ——— Normal Pag PgEnds: TEX [17], (17) tion, and Peace. It was during this time that the present Autobiographical Reflections was produced. At the end of...