Concerning Ideology, Personal Politics, and Publications
As the anecdotes just related show, my personal attitude in politics, and especially with regard to National Socialism, is frequently misunderstood, because entirely too many people who express themselves in public cannot understand that resistance to National Socialism can have other reasons than partisan motives. My reasons for hating National Socialism from the time I first got acquainted with it in the 1920s can be reduced to very elementary reactions. There was in the first place the influence of Max Weber. One of the virtues that he demanded of a scholar was “intellektuelle Rechtschaffenheit,” which can be translated as intellectual honesty. I cannot see any reason why anybody should work in the social sciences, and generally in the sciences of man, unless he honestly wants to explore the structure of reality. Ideologies, whether positivist, or Marxist, or National Socialist, indulge in constructions that are intellectually not tenable. That raises the question of why people who otherwise are not quite stupid, and who have the secondary virtues of being quite honest in their daily affairs, indulge in intellectual dishonesty as soon as they touch science. That ideology is a phenomenon of intellectual dishonesty is beyond a doubt, because the various ideologies after all have been submitted to criticism, and anybody who is willing to read the literature knows that they are not tenable, and why. If one adheres to them nevertheless, the prima facie assumption must be that he is intellectually dishonest. The overt phenomenon of intellectual dishonesty then raises the question of why a man will indulge in it. That is a general problem that in my later years required complicated research to ascertain the nature, causes, and persistence of states of alienation. More immediately, on the overt level that imposed itself, it caused my opposition to any ideologies—Marxist, Fascist, National Socialist, what you will—because they were incompatible with science in the rational sense of critical analysis. I again refer back to Max Weber as the great thinker who brought that problem to my attention; and I still maintain today that nobody who is an ideologist can be a competent social scientist.
As a consequence, partisan problems are of secondary importance; they come under the head of ideologists fighting each other. That, however, is not an entirely new phenomenon. I had to note the same problem in my studies on the intellectual battles in the Reformation of the sixteenth century. There I summarized the problem in the formula that there are intellectual situations where everybody is so wrong that it is enough to maintain the opposite in order to be at least partially right. The exploration of these structures helps to understand the meaning of “public opinion,” but these structures certainly have nothing to do with science.
Because of this attitude I have been called every conceivable name by partisans of this or that ideology. I have in my files documents labeling me a Communist, a Fascist, a National Socialist, an old liberal, a new liberal, a Jew, a Catholic, a Protestant, a Platonist, a neo-Augustinian, a Thomist, and of course a Hegelian—not to forget that I was supposedly strongly influenced by Huey Long. This list I consider of some importance, because the various characterizations of course always name the pet bête noire of the respective critic and give, therefore, a very good picture of the intellectual destruction and corruption that characterize the contemporary academic world. Understandably, I have never answered such criticisms; critics of this type can become objects of inquiry, but they cannot be partners in a discussion.
A further reason for my hatred of National Socialism and other ideologies is quite a primitive one. I have an aversion to killing people for the fun of it. What the fun is, I did not quite understand at the time, but in the intervening years the ample exploration of revolutionary consciousness has cast some light on this matter. The fun consists in gaining a pseudo-identity through asserting one’s power, optimally by killing somebody—a pseudo-identity that serves as a substitute for the human self that has been lost. Some of these problems I touched upon in my study on the “Eclipse of Reality,” published in 1970.1 A good example of the type of self that has to kill other people in order to regain in an Ersatzform what it has lost is the famous Louis Antoine Leon Saint-Juste, who says that Brutus either has to kill other people or kill himself. The matter has been explored by Albert Camus, and the murderous equanimity of the intellectuals who have lost their self and try to regain it by becoming pimps for this or that murderous totalitarian power is excellently exemplified by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Humanisme et Terreur (1947). I have no sympathy whatsoever with such characters and have never hesitated to characterize them as murderous swine.
The third motif that I can ascertain in my hatred against ideologies is that of a man who likes to keep his language clean. If anything is characteristic of ideologies and ideological thinkers, it is the destruction of language, sometimes on the level of intellectual jargon of a high level of complication, sometimes on a vulgarian level. From my personal experience with various ideologists of a Hegelian or Marxist type, I have the impression that a good number of men of considerable intellectual energy who otherwise would be Marxists prefer to be Hegelians because Hegel is so much more complicated. This is a difference not of any profound conviction but of what I would compare to the taste of a man who prefers chess to pinochle. Hegel is more complicated, and one can easily spend a lifetime exploring the possibilities of interpreting reality from this or that corner of the Hegelian system, without of course ever touching on the premises that are wrong—and perhaps without ever finding out that there are premises that are wrong. In conversations with Hegelians, I have quite regularly found that as soon as one touches on Hegelian premises the Hegelian refuses to enter into the argument and assures you that you cannot understand Hegel unless you accept his premises. That, of course, is perfectly true—but if the premises are wrong, everything that follows from them is wrong, too, and a good ideologist therefore has to prevent their discussion. In the case of Hegel, that is comparatively easy, because Hegel was a first-rate thinker and knew the history of philosophy. Hence, if one wants to attack Hegel’s premises one has to know their background in Plotinus and the neo-Platonic mysticism of the seventeenth century. Since very few people who pontificate about Hegel have any knowledge of philosophy comparable to his, the premises can easily be kept in the dark, and sometimes need not even be kept in the dark because they are, anyway, in the darkness of the ignorance of those who talk about him.
In the Marxian case, the falseness of the premises is more obvious. When Marx writes about Hegel he distorts him so badly that his honest editors cannot help being aware of the fact and expressing themselves cautiously on their findings. The editors of the Frühschriften of Karl Marx (Kröner, 1955), especially Siegfried Landshut, say regarding Marx’s study of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: “Marx, if one may express oneself in this manner, by misunderstanding Hegel as it were deliberately, conceives all concepts of Hegel which are meant as predicates of the idea as statements about facts” (pp. xxv–xxvi). In my uncivilized manner as a man who does not like to murder people for the purpose of supplying intellectuals with fun, I flatly state that Marx was consciously an intellectual swindler for the purpose of maintaining an ideology that would permit him to support violent action against human beings with a show of moral indignation. I stated the problem explicitly in my inaugural lecture in Munich in 1958, Science, Politics, and Gnosticism,2 and explored on that occasion the mental disturbance that lies behind such action. Marx, however, conducted his arguments on a very high intellectual level, and the surprise (with repercussions in the daily press) caused by my flat statement that he was engaged in an intellectual swindle can easily be explained in the same way as the darkness that surrounds the premises of Hegel. The Marxian swindle concerns the flat refusal to enter into the etiological argument of Aristotle—that is, on the problem that man does not exist out of himself but out of the divine ground of all reality. Again, as distinguished from our contemporaries who pontificate on Marx, Marx himself had a very good philosophical education. He knew that the problem of etiology in human existence was the central problem of a philosophy of man; and if he wanted to destroy man’s humanity by making him a “socialist man,” he had to refuse to enter into the etiological problem. On this point he was, one must admit, considerably more honest than Hegel, who never quoted the arguments into which he refused to enter. But the effect is the same as in the case of Hegel, because contemporary critics, of course, know about Aristotle and the etiological argument just as much as they know about Hegel’s neo-Platonic background—which is to say, exactly nothing. The general deculturation of the academic and intellectual world in Western civilization furnishes the background for the social dominance of opinions that would have been laughed out of court in the late Middle Ages or the Renaissance.
When we advance beyond Marx to the ideological epigones of the late nineteenth and of the twentieth century, we are already far below the intellectual level that formed the background even of Marx. And here comes in my particular hatred of ideologists because they vulgarize the intellectual debate and give to public discussion the distinctly ochlocratic coloring that today has reached the point of considering as fascist or authoritarian even a reference to the facts of political and intellectual history that must be known if one wants to discuss the problems that come up in political debate. The radical condemnation of historical and philosophical knowledge must be recognized as an important factor in the social environment, because it is dominated by persons who cannot even be called intellectual crooks because their level of consciousness is much too low to be aware of their objective crookedness, but who must rather be characterized as functional illiterates with a strong desire for personal aggrandizement.
These observations then bring us down to the level of National Socialism. It is extremely difficult to engage in a critical discussion of National Socialist ideas, as I found out when I gave my semester course on “Hitler and the Germans” in 1964 in Munich,3 because in National Socialist and related documents we are still further below the level on which rational argument is possible than in the case of Hegel and Marx. In order to deal with rhetoric of this type, one must first develop a philosophy of language, going into the problems of symbolization on the basis of the philosophers’ experience of humanity and of the perversion of such symbols on the vulgarian level by people who are utterly unable to read a philosopher’s work. A person on this level—which I characterize as the vulgarian and, so far as it becomes socially relevant, as the ochlocratic level—again, is not admissible to the position of a partner in discussion but can only be an object of scientific research. These vulgarian and ochlocratic problems must not be taken lightly; one cannot simply not take notice of them. They are serious problems of life and death because the vulgarians create and dominate the intellectual climate in which the rise to power of figures like Hitler is possible. I would say, therefore, that in the German case the destroyers of the German language on the literary and journalistic level, characterized and analyzed over more than thirty years by Karl Kraus in the volumes of Die Fackel, were the true criminals who were guilty of the National Socialist atrocities, which were possible only when the social environment had been so destroyed by the vulgarians that a person who was truly representative of this vulgarian spirit could rise to power.
These motivations were perfectly clear to me at the time, but clarity about their direction did not mean clarity about the implications in detail. The intellectual apparatus for dealing with the highly complex phenomena of intellectual deformation, perversion, crookedness, and vulgarization did not yet exist, and studies to create this apparatus were required. Into this context belong the studies that I published under the title Die politischen Religionen in 1938.4 When I spoke of the politischen Religionen, I conformed to the usage of a literature that interpreted ideological movements as a variety of religions. Representative for this literature was Louis Rougier’s successful volume on Les Mystiques politiques. The interpretation is not all wrong, but I would no longer use the term religions because it is too vague and already deforms the real problem of experiences by mixing them with the further problem of dogma or doctrine. Moreover, in Die politischen Religionen I still pooled together such phenomena as the spiritual movement of Ikhnaton, the medieval theories of spiritual and temporal power, apocalypses, the Leviathan of Hobbes, and certain National Socialist symbolisms. A more adequate treatment would have required far-reaching differentiations between these various phenomena. The book was just coming from the printer in March of 1938, when the National Socialist occupation of Austria occurred. The publishing house of Berman-Fischer was an inevitable target of the occupation forces, and the whole edition was confiscated at the publisher and never reached the public. Later I learned that a few copies had gone into commerce; apparently various National Socialist agencies received copies from the Gestapo, and these began circulating after World War II.
The volume on Der autoritäre Staat, published in 1936 in Vienna, was on the whole a piece of forced labor.5 I had been habilitated as a Privatdozent for sociology and wanted to expand my venia legendi to political science. For that purpose I had to write a new book of an undoubtedly political science nature and, if possible, on a subject related to Austrian politics. Material was there aplenty, because the 1930s were the period of the general resistance against National Socialism, of the civil war of 1934, the murder of Engelbert Dollfuss, and ultimately the creation of a corporate constitution. The new authoritarian constitution and its background were a suitable subject for treatment because at that time nobody else paid any attention to these matters.
The book is somewhat heterogeneous. In the first part, I dealt with the symbols “total” and “authoritarian.” Again, I should like to stress that at the time nobody else dealt with problems of this nature, and no intellectual apparatus for treating these topical terms had been created. I developed on that occasion the distinction between topoi and concepts. This distinction is basic for an adequate treatment of language problems in politics. Conventionally, whatever pops up as a language symbol in politics is simply accepted as such and enters the vague realm of political ideas. The first step in getting some rational order into this vague mass is to be clear about what constitutes theory (this question had already motivated my study of classical political philosophy) and in what way the concepts of theory differ from other language symbols, which do not express the order of existence, but various disorders and deformations of concepts only half understood by illiterates on the vulgarian level. To this class of political symbols, which are definitely not theoretical concepts, belong such symbols as “total” and “authoritarian.”
My interpretation of the Austrian authoritarian state derived considerable help from Maurice Hauriou’s institutionalism. Moreover, I had already been branching out into various areas of the history of philosophy, and I was able to recognize in the assumption of a collective entity that would justify the treatment of its members as subordinate beings who had to conform to the ideas of whoever represented the collective entity parallels to the Averroeist conception of the intellectus unus of which the mind of human beings is no more than a spark. I am not sure I was quite conscious of the importance of this finding. Certainly I already understood that the transfer of the conception of an intellectus unus to a world-immanent entity called nation, or race, and its representatives was lethal to man’s humanity. And I certainly was aware of the very serious split in the interpretation of Aristotle’s psychology that took place in the Middle Ages between Averroës and Thomas, my preference being on the side of Thomas rather than of the Averroizing thinkers. A small bit of the materials that I worked through at that time was later published in my study on “Siger de Brabant” in 1944.6
The reaction to this find of mine had a funny side effect. Since Averroës happened to be an Arab, and Arabs are Semites, and Semites in the end are Jews, certain thinkers close to the National Socialist regime like Carl Schmitt seriously doubted that the National Socialist collectivism had anything to do with such dirty Semitic origins. An important element in this first part was also my first clear understanding of Rousseau’s variety of collectivism. At the time I did not go very far in the analysis, only a few pages, but it is the problem that later was worked out splendidly by J. L. Talmon in his Origins of Totalitarian Democracy [1952].
The second part of the book gave a survey of Austrian problems of constitution making, in the historical perspective since 1848. It was the occasion for me to learn something about the background of constitutional problems in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and the continuity of solutions found at the time with the problems of the Austrian Republic after 1918.
In the third part, dealing with the new constitution, I gave an extensive analysis of Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law and its connection with a specifically Austrian theory of politics. The analysis runs about fifty pages. That was the section that got me into trouble with Kelsen, because here I obviously rejected, not the Pure Theory of Law, but its claim to be a substitute for a theory of politics. I had to stress the inadequacy of a theory of law for understanding political problems and the destructive consequences of the claim that one should, or could, not deal scientifically with political problems. My relationship with Kelsen was never the same after that, and years later, in America, after The New Science of Politics came out in 1952, he wrote an elaborate book-length critique crushing me thoroughly. However, Kelsen’s critique, which he was kind enough to let me see in manuscript, was never published, perhaps because I conveyed to him directly through a letter in cautious form, and through common friends more outspokenly, that his understanding of the historical and philosophical problems involved in the matter was inadequate and a publication would damage his prestige rather than mine. Since Der autoritäre Staat came out in 1936, and its sale was stopped in 1938 when the Nazis occupied Austria, it did not receive much attention at the time. Nor did it later, because during the Russian conquest of Vienna one of the bombs fell, of all places, on the Springer publishing house, and the whole edition was burned in the cellar.
1. Expanded version published in CW, vol. 28, chap. 3.
2. Eric Voegelin, Wissenschaft, Politik, und Gnosis (Munich: Kösel Verlag, 1959); Science, Politics and Gnosticism: Two Essays, trans. William J. Fitzpatrick (Washington: Henry Regnery Pubs., 1967; rpr. with intro. by Ellis Sandoz, 1997; rpr. ed. Ellis Sandoz, Wilmington, Del.: Intercollegiate Studies Institute Books, 2004). Reprinted in CW, vol. 5.
3. For English translation see CW, vol. 31.
4. English translation included in CW, vol. 5, which also contains The New Science of Politics and Science, Politics, and Gnosticism.
5. English translation in CW, vol. 4.
6. Original, uncut version reprinted in CW, vol. 20.