from The Collected Works

The Order of Society, its Lasting Nature, and its Tensions  

The Law's Inseparability from Society

We are faced with the following aporia¹:

On the one hand, the law is manifest phenomenally in a plurality of legal orders understood as aggregates of valid rules. These ag­gregates resist analysis under the categories of essence and individuation.

The obstacle proves to be the validity that pervades the legal order into every single rule. When analysis pursues validity into its consequences, however, the legal order disappears from existence altogether in the Zenonic paradox.

No assurances about a realm of normativity can confer ontological status on the legal order.

On the other hand, the result is at variance with the phenomena attesting the existence of "the law" in everyday parlance. In every country the statutes, the administrative orders, the administrative and judicial decisions form a literary corpus, increasing prodi­giously under the legislative and administrative needs of modern industrial societies, to which no one will deny existence.

Beneath the Southern Cross

Machiavelli

or The Demonic Confusion –Part 3

by Olavo de Carvalho

Olavo de Carvalho is a Brazilian philosopher and an exponent of Aristotle and Eric Voegelin.  We present here in six parts his latest study, Maquiavel, ou a Confusão Demoníaca (Machiavelli, or a Demonic Confusion), in a special English translation made available to VoegelinView.

A Machiavelli to Suit Everyone

In Machiavelli’s politics there are elements of despotic immoralism, democratic republicanism, patriotism, cold description, and artistic idealization.¹ Thus, all the various interpretations of his work have their share of truth.

Moreover, many illustrious readers in different times, though not producing radically new interpretations, sought to highlight a certain aspect of Machiavelli’s thought so as to somehow turn him into their own forerunner.

German nationalism, for example, in the footsteps of Hegel, easily assumed the form of a cult of the abstract idea of the State, and for this reason the historian Treitschke, an enthusiastic patriot, exalts the pioneer character of Machiavelli in discovering this idea. Machiavelli, he says, “was a powerful thinker, who cooperated with Martin Luther in the liberation of the State.” ²

The Crisis of Americanism–Part 4

by Juergen Gebhardt

Dr. Gebhardt is emeritus Professor at the Insitute for Political Science at the University of Erlangen-Nürenberg. He is the editor of the  final volume of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Selected Correspondence, 1924-1949.  We are featuring here Chapter 5 from his Americanism: Revolutionary Order and Societal Self-Interprestation in the American Republic, Louisiana State University Press, 1993. It appears here in multiple parts.  Parts 1 to 3 appeared here in 2010. It is reproduced here with permission.

The Progressive Attempt at Renewal

Charles Beard is an example of how little the intellectual revolt before the First World War was able to free itself from the ties to its own beginnings.

He developed his progressivist attack on the "American Way of Life," led by covetousness, greed, and acquisitiveness in his Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913), which revealed that among the members of the Constitutional Convention special interests were tied to decision making.

Similarly, Louis Boudin published his radical attack on judicial review as a device to block all social progress in a historical tract, Government by Judiciary (1911).

What is true for the critical literature of Progressivism applies even more to the Progressive political and social protest movement as well as to the earlier mass movement of Populism.

from The Collected Works

What is Society? 

Beyond Aristotelian Analysis

[Aristotle was plagued by such problems as whether a nation remained the same nation after a revolution]. He applied to the polis the categories of form and substance, assuming the constitution, the politeia, to be the form.

He had developed these categories when considering the natures of artifacts, organisms, and purposive action. Although suitable to these models, these cat­egories created difficulties when applied to the polis.

What was the substance of a society, if the constitution was its form? Was it the citizens? If so, who was a citizen? Was everyone to be counted as a citizen who was a permanent resident on the territory of the polis? But then slaves and metics [resident foreigners] would be citizens, and that usage would be in conflict with preanalytical, everyday language.

Recovering Reality

An Interview with Eric Voegelin –Part 2

In 1973 Eric Voegelin was interviewed by Peter Cangelosi, associate editor of the New Orleans Review, and by John William Corrington, novelist, critic, poet, and former editor-at-large of the NOR.  The interview originally appeared in the New Orleans Review, No.2 (1973) under the title “Philosophies of History: An Interview with Eric Voegelin.” In 2003  Bill McClain and Paul Caringella corrected several transcription uncertainties. It appears here with permission. We present it in two parts.

new orleans review: What about Christianity? What is the meaning of Christianity now, according to your thinking?

voegelin:   I am not sure about its meaning, because I have my doubts as to whether Christianity exists at all.

I can say what the meaning is of the Gospels today, or, more specifically, of Matthew, Chapter 16–which is the perfect analysis of the existential tendency in relation to God, just as the fullness of Christ is. This is as true today as it was at the time the Gospel was written.

But the analysis in Matthew 16 is so buried at present in secondary doctrine and dogma that few people are now aware how grandiose an existential analysis is there. One could reactivate it by reading it.