Frederick Lawrence, in the next article in the book following Gebhardt’s, took issue with him.⁸ I discuss this dispute in the book at some length because it illustrates a feature of Voegelin’s political science that he shared with the other two great political scientists of the last century, Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss. Unlike them, however, Voegelin did not receive a classical humanistic education in the Gymnasiumor the philosophical seminar. He was, it is almost shocking to say, trained as a lawyer. This is why, to be frank, much of Voegelin’s writing during the 1920s and 1930s is highly technical and, compared to his later work, not nearly as charming. And yet, with a certain degree of perseverance, it is possible to discover an intellectual trajectory that is relentless in its penetration to the core of the problems that Voegelin tackled.

For a young man with legal training the major crisis of his youth, the Great War, appeared as a practical issue of social and historical reality, not as one of the “wars of the spirit” predicted by Nietzsche. Moreover, he was fascinated by the conceptual and argumentative complexity of the pure theory of law of his teacher, Hans Kelsen, where other Germans of comparable intellectual rank were similarly fascinated with Heidegger or Hegel. The accident of his legal and practical training accounts at least in part for why his early studies were motivated in part by a desire to understand the former enemies of Germany on their own terms. We would likely call these analyses comparative sociology. In the language of the 1920s Voegelin was interested in the “national mind” or “national spirit” of the French and the British. At the same time, this approach to French and British ways of thinking led him to reflect on the origin and the limits of Staatslehre, the discipline in which he had been trained.

The pivotal change in Voegelin’s work as a scientist arrived with his direct encounter of America insofar as the pluralism, which had been intimated or perhaps adumbrated by Voegelin’s early methodological reflections on law and sociology was confirmed directly, empirically, and experientially. William James, to take a specific example, was every inch as much a philosopher as Husserl or Heidegger, but his concerns, his language, and his arguments were unquestionably American.

Voegelin’s first attempt to deal with the self-interpretation of philosophy and of similar accounts of socio-historical reality, On the Form of the American Mind, developed its own detailed and, truth to tell, rather idiosyncratic and abstract conceptual apparatus—of intellectual formations, meaningful unities, and so on. The necessity of finding his own way also enabled him to find in John R. Commons an exemplary personality unfiltered by perceptions conditioned by a philosophical education—in the European or any other sense. In Commons he was able to discern achievements in gross and in detail comparable to the achievements of European thinkers, but recorded in an entirely different register.

Starting with the race books in 1933 and continuing in his book on Austria in 1937, Voegelin reversed the precedence of the chief teaching of the entire Staatslehre tradition. By starting with the political reality of “ideas” such as race he discovered there was no means of analytical access to what Kelsen called the norm-logic of Staatslehre. To Voegelin that meant, first, that Staatslehre was increasingly cut off from reality. Second, it reinforced Voegelin’s conclusion, arrived at after extensive critical analysis, that it was necessary to begin with the insights of philosophical anthropology. In turn, third, that meant paying greater attention to the fundamental experiences of reality that gave rise to the state.  Moreover—and fourth—these fundamental experiences—love and hate, for example—gave weight to the political ideas by burdening them with the emotional commitments of those who supported them, just as political ideas rendered those fundamental experiences articulate.

The race books are also significant because Voegelin criticized the so-called race theorists not simply on the grounds of philosophical anthropology but on the straightforward scientific grounds that they did not know anything about biology. To use a concept he employed when he revisited the Nationalist Socialist regime in Hitler and the Germans, Voegelin showed the race theorists had been constructing and acting upon a second reality.

In his book on Austria, Voegelin’s concern with the inadequacies of methodological orthodoxies combined with his continuous awareness of the political situation. The chief attribute of Austria during the 1930s, Voegelin discovered, was precisely the absence of a governing “idea” into which it might have made sense for citizens to place their emotional investment. Austria was, very simply, a Kelsenian legal structure, the finest in the world.