Common Sense and the Common Sense Tradition -Part 1

  by Scott Philip Segrest

Scott Segrest is Instructor in American Politics at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York. This essay is taken from Professor Segrest's new book, America and the Political Philosophy of Common Sense, available now from the University of Missouri Press. This appears here with permission and will be shown in three parts.

I.  What is Common Sense?

The philosophical and political import of common sense is strikingly suggested in a passage from Eric Voegelin's Autobiographical Reflections. The passage has the additional merit of highlighting the surprising philosophic richness of American culture and outlook. As a young German scholar studying in America at Columbia University around 1922, Voegelin found himself "overwhelmed by a new [cultural and intellectual] world of which hitherto I had hardly expected the existence." He took courses with John Dewey, among others, and repairing often to the university library "started working through he history of English philosophy and its expansion into American thought." His account of what he learned in the process is illuminating:

St. Augustine, the Limits

of Moral Action, and Politics  -Part 3

  by John von Heyking

John von Heyking is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Lethbridge. He is an author and editor and has edited Vols 7 and 8 of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin.  His biographical notice is found here. The following is taken from his book Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World, which is available here from the Publisher.  This excerpt is taken from chapter 4 of the book, "Ordo Amoris and Political Prudence" and appears here with permission. It appears in three parts.

 Moral Reasoning in Extreme Circumstances 

§3.   The Possibility of  Tyrannicide  and Rebellion    (concluded)

Augustine's distinction between virtue and officeholder is seen in the fact that he actually treats politics in personalist terms; he refers to each human being, rather than the city's institutions and physical attributes, as the primary element or seed of a city (CD 4.3 ; EnP 9.8). The dictator's power (imperium) was conferred upon citizens, almost always private citizens, by the constitutional form of lex curiata, and the most common and most general function he had was to be the dictatura rei gerundae causa, literally, "the dictatorship for getting things done."

For instance, early in Augustine's career he explicitly regarded such a power as just: "would it not also be right, provided some honest man of great ability was found at the time, to strip these [corrupt] people of the power to elect public officials and to subject them to the rule of a few good men, or even to that of one man?" (DLA 1.6.14). Augustine's recognition of this power is seen in his observation that Cincinnatus was entrusted with Rome's security because of his extreme poverty (Ep. 104; CD 3.17, 5.18). In the case of Hortensius, he notes that instituting a dictator was a "measure commonly adopted in times of gravest peril" (CD 3.17). Thus a Roman, upon reading the above passage, would have heard the gerens publicae potestatis as "the bearer of the public power." He would have understood it as the power conferred to a virtuous human being who would be called in on a particular occasion to save the republic.

Eric Voegelin — A Recollection 

Part 3

by Robert B. Heilman

The late Robert B. Heilman wrote many books. He was a distinguished teacher and  literary critic who flourished at Louisiana State Univeristy. It was a remarkable time and place; his colleagues included Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks and Alan Tate. He became a close friend of Eric Voegelin and nurtured his understanding of American culture and English language. This essay is taken from Professor Heilman's book, The Professor and the Profession, available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay appears here in three parts. It appears with permission of the publisher.

VI      Visiting the Voegelins in Munich

In 1948 Ruth and I left for Seattle, and after that Eric and I exchanged letters regularly, if not frequently (as did our wives).^fn The correspondence continued when the Voegelins returned to Europe in 1958. Eric had accepted the directorship of the Bavarian state political science institute in Munich. This was a professional advancement, I suppose, but it never seemed to me that Eric suffered from the institutional angst so common among American professors. He thought about his work; in no way did his status, or his sense of achievement, depend upon what post he held or what university he served in. So though the Munich post may well have seemed a promotion, I imagine that his motivating influence in taking it was the strong pull of Europe after twenty years away, and of the Voegelins' native language.

They must have crossed the ocean about the time we were returning from a 1957-1958 sabbatical. When we returned to Europe in 1964-1965, the Voegelins generously asked us to visit. Eric invited me to speak at a seminar of his, and he also managed — against what resistance I know not — to encourage the department of English to sponsor a lecture by me. The chair of English was Wolfgang Clemen, and since we had both trafficked somewhat in Shakespearean imagery, there were grounds for our finding ourselves at least mildly simpatico.

Then I received a letter — a sort of warning I took it to be — from a member of the Munich faculty who had taken his Ph.D. in our department at the University of Washington, where, the gifted son of an immigrant family, he had established himself both as a superior student and as a talented one-upper.

St. Augustine, the Limits

of Moral Action, and Politics  -Pt 2

  by John von Heyking

John von Heyking is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Lethbridge. He is an author and editor and has edited Vols 7 and 8 of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin.  His biographical notice is found here. The following is taken from his book Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World, which is available here from the Publisher.  This excerpt is taken from chapter 4 of the book, "Ordo Amoris and Political Prudence" and appears here with permission. It appears in three parts.

 Moral Reasoning in Extreme Circumstances  (continued)

§1.  Lying   (concluded)

Eric Voegelin — A Recollection 

Part 2

by Robert B. Heilman

The late Robert B. Heilman wrote many books. He was a distinguished teacher and  literary critic who flourished at Louisiana State Univeristy. It was a remarkable time and place; his colleagues included Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks and Alan Tate. He became a close friend of Eric Voegelin and nurtured his understanding of American culture and English language. This essay is taken from Professor Heilman's book, The Professor and the Profession, available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay appears here in three parts. It appears with permission of the publisher.

III      Finding a Home in Baton Rouge

Our relations with the Voegelins took a special turn in the summer of 1944, when they were in Cambridge, Massachusetts: as in many summers, Eric was working in the library at Harvard. During their absence from Baton Rouge, the rented house in which they had been living was leased or sold out from under them, this in accordance with a wartime regulation that permitted the dispossession of occupants if the premises were then to be occupied by the owners or members of their family.

This must have been another severe blow to people who, after the troubles that led to their flight from Austria, might have felt they were beginning to get a foothold in America. They evidently felt that they could not contest what amounted to an eviction. It would have been costly; as "foreigners" (though naturalization was imminent, they had not yet gone through it) they would have been at a disadvantage in a legal dispute; and Eric desperately needed all the time he could get at Harvard on materials unavailable at LSU. Had they made the long and expensive trip back to Baton Rouge, they might not have been able to find other rental housing. Apparently the only solution was to buy a house, provided a suitable one could be found for sale. At this point they phoned us and asked us to buy a house for them, that is, to find one for sale, commit them to buying it, and perhaps put down (I'm not sure about this) some earnest money. This was a forbidding assignment; picking out a house for someone else could never be easy, and for people of the Voegelins' fine taste it seemed close to impossible.

St. Augustine, the Limits

of Moral Action, and Politics

  by John von Heyking

John von Heyking is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Lethbridge. He is an author and editor and has edited Vols 7 and 8 of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin.  His biographical notice is found here. The following is taken from his book Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World, which is available here from the Publisher.  This excerpt is taken from chapter 4 of the book, "Ordo Amoris and Political Prudence" and appears here with permission. This appears in three parts.

The Compatability of Personal Virtue and Politics

People hope and pray that their nation will enjoy peace, security, and at least a modicum of neighborly flourishing. They are willing to suffer and bear large amounts of corruption and injustice in the body politic until a time comes when measures are required to save the polity, and perhaps even the cause of justice in the world. Unfortunately, people in such dark times generally are least likely and least suited to save their polity; thus hoping for such action is like hoping for nature to act outside its usual course that would allow a corrupt body politic to decompose and die. Saving the cause of justice in the world and preserving political life requires unusually austere virtue. The devil tempted Christ with a kingdom over the world.

Can one preserve political life without losing one's soul by proclaiming oneself Caesar? Augustine is usually seen to think that one cannot preserve one's virtue, or at least that one can keep one's soul only if one follows the absolute rules of engagement as set by Scripture and by the Church. Taking extreme actions in extreme circumstances is forbidden because forbearance and submission purify the soul.

We will try to show that Augustine, though not denying the virtue of forbearance, thought that one can know the right and good, and act upon it, through right-by-nature, and that moral and political reasoning is not restricted to the application of universal rules to all circumstances. His treatment of political reasoning is considered where following the letter of the law would have disastrous consequences in rare extreme circumstances (lying, adultery, and tyrannicide and rebellion). What appear as exceptions to the absolute rule (based either on natural law or on God's commandment) actually fulfill the law's purpose.

Eric Voegelin — A Recollection

by Robert B. Heilman

The late Robert B. Heilman wrote many books. He was a distinguished teacher and  literary critic who flourished at Louisiana State Univeristy. It was a remarkable time and place; his colleagues included Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks and Alan Tate. He became a close friend of Eric Voegelin and nurtured his understanding of American culture. This essay is taken from Professor Heilman's book, The Professor and the Profession, available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay will appear here in three parts. It  appears with permission of the publisher.

I     First Impressions

I first met Eric Voegelin in 1940 or 1941 when he came to Baton Rouge to lecture under the auspices of the department of government at Louisiana State University. He may have given a single lecture or a series, and the subject, I suppose, was something that would be part of Order and History, though that large work did not begin appearing for another decade and a half.

My first impression of Voegelin was of a speaker of great dignity and ease, of vast learning easily borne and not trimmed to please a general audience, of formality and yet graciousness. Here was a philosopher who had no marks of either the pedant or the popularizer; the gentleman as thinker. Despite a highly technical vocabulary and occasional, but not intrusive, problems of idiom and accent, Voegelin seemed comfortable and fluent in American English. During his stay in Baton Rouge, Eric — I use an informality that was slow to develop — attended a meeting of a faculty discussion group at which I was also present, whether as visitor or regular attendant (I am relying entirely on memory; I have no file of documents, formal or informal, to consult). I remember vividly the type, though not the specifics, of the argument that broke out there between him and several of my colleagues.

The latter were depending, as faculties often do, on the fundamental rightness of the current beliefs of social and political liberalism, and no doubt Eric challenged one or more of these; it was not that he was antiliberal in principle, but that he was a vigilant challenger of the going clichés of both left and right. Perhaps his point was that Hitler and Nazism represented less a violation of American democratic ideas than an enduring disorder of a distinguishable philosophical and theological type. I do not remember the details, but I do retain a strong impression that my colleagues, several of whom were my good friends, were badly though unknowingly overmatched.

The Crisis of Americanism:

The Destructive Tradition of  Spiritual and Political Individualism — Part 3

by Juergen Gebhardt

Dr. Gebhardt is emeritus Professor at the Institute for Political Science at the University of Erlangen-Nürenberg. He is editor of the final volume of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Selected Correspondence, 1924-1949. We feature here Chapter 5 from his Americanism: Revolutionary Order and Societal Self-Interpretation in the American Republic, Louisiana State University Press, 1993. This is the first part of a muti-part article. It is reproduced here with permission.

The Dynamics of the Expanding Self  (concluded)

In terms of world history, the imperial republic understood itself pri­marily as the new Rome, destined to spread throughout the world the novus ordo seclorum, that is, the republican order. The expansion not of imperial power but of republican order, whether in the form of a republic encompassing the entire continent or in the form of a republican fed­eration of states, was the primary objective of the Founders, and in this they cleverly combined the power-political continental claim with clear economic-political interests.²⁶

But the Roman model and the Fathers' own theoretical insight similarly planted the seeds for justified doubts about the possibility of combining imperial politics and republican order. This contradiction intensified in the latent psychic crisis at the end of the nineteenth century, when increasingly libidinously motivated apocalypses were substituted for the original consciousness-shaping spiritual-political experiences of order, and when Manifest Destiny treated other people and nations as objects of one's own libido dominandi. So, on one hand, imperial foreign policy was always tied to the mental, political, and eco­nomic crisis within the country, thus also the crisis of Americanism. On the other hand, time and again, foreign affairs dealings by the political leadership and the majority that supported it showed that the various strands of motivation were intertwined: republican pathos, the modes of imperial apocalyptics, and the power-political and economic-political pragmatism of dominant social interests.