Science, Politics, and Gnosticism

Rating:
Summary: A great place to start
Review: Eric Voegelin was one of the most profound philosophers of history of the twentieth century. More than any other thinker I know, he was able to articulate a body of thought that recognizes the human need for a grounding in transcendent truth and analyses the vicissitudes of the inevitable search for meaning. His work deserves to be widely read, but perhaps because of its imposing bulk--his masterwork, "Order and History," weighs in at five fat volumes of complex reasoning, vivid exegeses of the symbolic forms of the past five thousand years, and indepth and illuminating readings of philosophers from Parmenides to Heidegger--it is not. "Science, Politics, and Gnosticism" is a perfect hors d'oeuvre of a book, and serves well not as a systematic introduction to the full scope of his vision but as a tasty morsel of his maturing thought at a crucial point in his oeuvre. Voegelin's incisive critique of ideological thinking in this book is lucid and mercifully accessible. I would hope that a reader comes away from this potent little classic inspired to dig deeper into the mine of wisdom that Voegelin's work offers.

Rating:
Summary: Political Science on a Rack
Review: Oh, the visionary has a new system to save the world? Put that in section II B, tray 5, right next to the same idea that sprouted 1000 years ago under a different name.
Voegelin has boiled down the rules for understanding all secular visions of salvation, which invariably play on some human dissatisfaction, the diagnosis of which always omits a key "given" of human nature, which is thus marketed as changeable, but isn't, leading to fanatical attempts to control people, devolving into scaring them into submission with the threat of death.
The opposite of the Christian love ethic which posits a brotherhood in relation to a heavenly Father, according to Voegelin.
Voegelin here achieves a scientific method of explaining how non-christian ideas relate to Christian ideas of social organization. He was very popular in Cold War times, but is also versatile enough here to help with the great conversation we are all having in relation to terrorism. This book is simple, direct and profound.

Rating:
Summary: The Murder of God and other Exhilarating Ideas
Review: These two essays describe the inability of modern political thought to get a grip on the confusion and horror of the 20th century, mainly because that thought itself has not been immune from the very disorders it seeks to study. The roots of modern disorder are found in "Gnosticism," which is usually defined narrowly as a form of Christian heresy, but thought of by Voegelin as a typical response to the universal human problems of uncertainty, meaninglessness and alienation. Thus seemingly disparate movements like communism, fascism and positivism are placed within a Gnostic tradition stretching back to antiquity.

After describing the characteristics of ancient Gnosticism, Voegelin defines his own approach to the "science of politics," derived mainly from Plato and Aristotle. He then proceeds to analyze thinkers such as Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger and to isolate what he feels to be their dominant motives. The one great theme of all Gnosticisms, ancient or modern, is the desire to do away with the notion of a given, "objective" world. If the project of world-transformation is to be made plausible, then nothing can be seen to be outside of human power. Social reality is a constructed thing, not a thing given or found, thereby allowing it to be "deconstructed."

In the second, shorter essay, "Ersatz Religion," Voegelin describes the complex of ideas characteristic of modern Gnosticism such as millenialism, utopianism and positivism. As the title of the essay suggests, the religious impulse does not die after the murder of God; it gets redirected into "political religions." Politics then becomes a matter of belief and fanaticism, instead of rational discourse and debatable opinions. Despite the abstractness of some of its theoretical concerns, this book is very readable and jargon-free. Those with no prior reading in philosophy may need to look up a term now and again such as "ontology." I recommend it as a good, short introduction to the kind of sober and ordered thought that we so desperately need after the century of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot.