The New Science of Politics: An Introduction / Edition 1

by Eric Voegelin

Overview

"Thirty-five years ago few could have predicted that The New Science of Politics would be a best-seller by political theory standards. Compressed within the Draconian economy of the six Walgreen lectures is a complete theory of man, society, and history, presented at the most profound and intellectual level. . . . Voegelin's [work] stands out in bold relief from much of what has passed under the name of political science in recent decades. . . . The New Science is aptly titled, for Voegelin makes clear at the outset that a 'return to the specific content' of premodern political theory is out of the question. . . . The subtitle of the book, An Introduction, clearly indicates that The New Science of Politics is an invitation to join the search for the recovery of our full humanity."--From the new Foreword by Dante Germino

"This book must be considered one of the most enlightening essays on the character of European politics that has appeared in half a century. . . . This is a book powerful and vivid enough to make agreement or disagreement with even its main thesis relatively unimportant."--Times Literary Supplement

"Voegelin . . . is one of the most distinguished interpreters to Americans of the non-liberal streams of European thought. . . . He brings a remarkable breadth of knowledge, and a historical imagination that ranges frequently into brilliant insights and generalizations."--Francis G. Wilson, American Political Science Review

"This book is beautifully constructed . . . his erudition constantly brings a startling illumination."--Martin Wright, International Affairs

"A ledestar to thinking men who seek a restoration of political science on the classic and Christian basis . . . a significant accomplishment in the retheorization of our age."--Anthony Harrigan, Christian Century

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226861142
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	08/15/1987
Series:	Walgreen Foundation Lectures
Edition description:	1
Pages:	210
Sales rank:	544,926
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) was Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at the time of his death. He is the author of numerous books in addition to his major five-volume work Order and History.

Read an Excerpt

The New Science of Politics

An Introduction

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By Eric Voegelin

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 1987 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-86114-2

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CHAPTER 1

REPRESENTATION AND EXISTENCE

1

POLITICAL science is suffering from a difficulty that originates in its very nature as a science of man in historical existence. For man does not wait for science to have his life explained to him, and when the theorist approaches social reality he finds the field pre-empted by what may be called the self-interpretation of society. Human society is not merely a fact, or an event, in the external world to tie studied by an observer like a natural phenomenon. Though it has externality as one of its important components, it is as a whole a little world, a cosmion, illuminated with meaning from within by the human beings who continuously create and bear it as the mode and condition of their self-realization. It is illuminated through an elaborate symbolism, in various degrees of compactness and differentiation—from rite, through myth, to theory—and this symbolism illuminates it with meaning in so far as the symbols make the internal structure of such a cosmion, the relations between its members and groups of members, as well as its existence as a whole, transparent for the mystery of human existence. The self-illumination of society through symbols is an integral part of social reality, and one may even say its essential part, for through such symbolization the members of a society experience it as more than an accident or a convenience; they experience it as of their human essence. And, inversely, the symbols express the experience that man is fully man by virtue of his participation in a whole which transcends his particular existence, by virtue of his participation in the xynon, the common, as Heraclitus called it, the first Western thinker who differentiated this concept. As a consequence, every human society has an understanding of itself through a variety of symbols, sometimes highly differentiated language symbols, independent of political science; and such self-understanding precedes historically by millenniums the emergence of political science, of the episteme politike in the Aristotelian sense. Hence, when political science begins, it does not begin with a tabula rasa on which it can inscribe its concepts; it will inevitably start from the rich body of self-interpretation of a society and proceed by critical clarification of socially pre-existent symbols. When Aristotle wrote his Ethics and Politics, when he constructed his concepts of the polis, of the constitution, the citizen, the various forms of government, of justice, of happiness, etc., he did not invent these terms and endow them with arbitrary meanings; he took rather the symbols which he found in his social environment, surveyed with care the variety of meanings which they had in common parlance, and ordered and clarified these meanings by the criteria of his theory.

These preliminaries do by no means exhaust the peculiar situation of political science, but they have gone far enough for the more immediate purpose. They will allow a few theoretical conclusions which, in their turn, can be applied to the topic of representation.

When a theorist reflects on his own theoretical situation, he finds himself faced with two sets of symbols: the language symbols that are produced as an integral part of the social cosmion in the process of its self-illumination and the language symbols of political science. Both are related with each other in so far as the second set is developed out of the first one through the process that provisionally was called critical clarification. In the course of this process some of the symbols that occur in reality will be dropped because they cannot be put to any use in the economy of science, while new symbols will be developed in theory for the critically adequate description of symbols that are part of reality. If the theorist, for instance, describes the Marxian idea of the realm of freedom, to be established by a Communist revolution, as an immanentist hypostasis of a Christian eschatological symbol, the symbol "realm of freedom" is part of reality; it is part of a secular movement of which the Marxist movement is a subdivision, while such terms as "immanentist," "hypostasis," and "eschatology" are concepts of political science. The terms used in the description do not occur in the reality of the Marxist movement, while the symbol "realm of freedom" is useless in critical science. Hence, neither are there two sets of terms with different meanings nor is there one set of terms with two distinct sets of meanings; there exist rather two sets of symbols with a large area of overlapping phonemes. Moreover, the symbols in reality are themselves to a considerable extent the result of clarifying processes so that the two sets will also approach each other frequently with regard to their meanings and sometimes even achieve identity. This complicated situation inevitably is a source of confusion; in particular, it is the source of the illusion that the symbols used in political reality are theoretical concepts.

This confusing illusion unfortunately has rather deeply corroded contemporary political science. One does not hesitate, for instance, to speak of a "contract theory of government," or of a "theory of sovereignty," or of a "Marxist theory of history," while in fact it is rather doubtful whether any of these so-called theories can qualify as theory in the critical sense, and voluminous histories of "political theory" bring an exposition of symbols which, for the larger part, have very little theoretical about them. Such confusion even destroys some of the gains that already were made in political science in antiquity. Take, for instance, the so- called contract theory. In this case the fact is ignored that Plato has given a very thorough analysis of the contract symbol. He not only established its nontheoretical character but also explored the type of experience that lies at its root. Moreover, he introduced the technical term doxa for the class of symbols of which the "contract theory" is an instance in order to distinguish them from the symbols of theory. Today theorists do not use the term doxa for this purpose, nor have they developed an equivalent—the distinction is lost. Instead the term "ideology" has come into vogue which in some respects is related to the Platonic doxa. But precisely this term has become a further source of confusion because under the pressure of what Mannheim has called the allgemeine Ideologieverdacht, the general suspicion of ideology, its meaning has been extended so far as to cover all types of symbols used in propositions on politics, including the symbols of theory themselves; there are numerous political scientists today who would even call the Platonic-Aristotelian episteme an ideology.

A further symptom of such confusion is certain discussion habits. More than once in a discussion of a political topic it has happened that a student—and for that matter not always a student—would ask me how I defined fascism, or socialism, or some other ism of that order. And more than once I had to surprise the questioner—who apparently as part of a college education had picked up the idea that science was a warehouse of dictionary definitions—by my assurance that I did not feel obliged to indulge in such definitions, because movements of the suggested type, together with their symbolisms, were part of reality, that only concepts could be defined but not reality, and that it was highly doubtful whether the language symbols in question could be critically clarified to such a point that they were of any cognitive use in science.

The ground is now prepared for approaching the topic of representation proper. The foregoing reflections will have made it clear that the task will not be quite simple if the inquiry is conducted in accordance with critical standards of a search for truth. Theoretical concepts and the symbols that are part of reality must be carefully distinguished; in the transition from reality to theory the criteria employed in the process of clarification must be well defined; and the cognitive value of the resulting concepts must be tested by placing them in larger theoretical contexts. The method thus outlined is substantially the Aristotelian procedure.

2

It will be appropriate to begin with the elemental aspects of the topic. In order to determine what is theoretically elemental, it will be well to recall the beginning of this lecture. A political society was characterized as a cosmion illuminated from within; this characterization, however, was qualified by stressing externality as one of its important components. The cosmion has its inner realm of meaning; but this realm exists tangibly in the external world in human beings who have bodies and through their bodies participate in the organic and inorganic externality of the world. A political society can dissolve not only through the disintegration of the beliefs that make it an acting unit in history; it can also be destroyed through the dispersion of its members in such a manner that communication between them becomes physically impossible or, most radically, through their physical extermination; it also can suffer serious damage, partial destruction of tradition, and prolonged paralysis through extermination or suppression of the active members who constitute the political and intellectual ruling minorities of a society. External existence of society in this sense is intended when, for reasons that will appear presently, we speak of the theoretically elemental aspect of our topic.

In political debate, in the press, and in the publicist literature, countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, the Low Countries, or the Scandinavian kingdoms are habitually referred to as countries with representative institutions. In such contexts the term occurs as a symbol in political reality. When a man who uses the symbol would be requested to explain what he means by it, he would almost certainly respond by saying that the institutions of a country will qualify as representative when the members of the legislative assembly hold their membership by virtue of popular election. When the questioning is extended to the executive, he will accept the American election of a chief executive by the people, but he will also agree to the English system of a committee of the parliamentary majority as the ministry, or to the Swiss system of having the executive elected by the two houses in common session; and probably he will not find the representative character impaired by a monarch, as long as the monarch can act only with the countersignature of a responsible minister. When he is urged to be a bit more explicit about what he means by popular election, he will primarily consider the election of a representative by all persons of age who are resident in a territorial district; but he will probably not deny the representative character when women are excluded from suffrage or when, under a system of proportional representation, the constituencies are personal instead of territorial. He, finally, may suggest that elections should be reasonably frequent, and he will mention parties as the organizers and mediators of the election procedure.

What can the theorist do with an answer of this type in science? Does it have any cognitive value?

Obviously, the answer is not negligible. To be sure, the existence of the enumerated countries must be taken for granted without too many questions about what makes them exist or what existence means. Nevertheless, light falls on an area of institutions within an existential framework, even though that framework itself remains in the shadow. There exist, indeed, several countries whose institutions can be subsumed under the adumbrated type; and, if the exploration of institutions is relevant at all, this answer certainly suggests a formidable body of scientific knowledge. Moreover, this body of knowledge exists as a massive fact of science in the form of numerous monographic studies on the institutions of single countries, describing the ramifications and auxiliary institutions which are necessary for the operation of a modern representative government, as well as in the form of comparative studies which elaborate the type and its variants. There can, furthermore, be no doubt about the theoretical relevance of such studies, at least on principle, because the external existence of a political society is part of its ontological structure. Whatever their relevance may prove to be when they are placed in a larger theoretical context, the types of external realization of a society will have at least some relevance.

In the theoretization of representative institutions on this level, the concepts which enter into the construction of the descriptive type refer to simple data of the external world. They refer to geographical districts, to human beings who are resident in them, to men and women, to their age, to their voting which consists in placing check marks on pieces of paper by the side of names printed on them, to operations of counting and calculation that will result in the designation of other human beings as representatives, to the behavior of representatives that will result in formal acts recognizable as such through external data, etc. Because the concepts on this level are unproblematic in terms of the internal self-interpretation of a society, this aspect of our topic may be considered elemental; and the descriptive type of representation that can be developed on this level, therefore, shall be called the elemental type.

The relevance of the elemental approach to the topic is established on principle. The actual extent of its cognitive value, however, can be measured only by placing the type into the previously suggested larger theoretical context. The elemental type, as we said, casts light only on an area of institutions within an existential framework, to be taken for granted without questions. Hence, a few questions must now be raised with regard to the area that hitherto remained in shadow.

3

In raising these questions, again the Aristotelian procedure of examining symbols as they occur in reality will be followed. A suitable subject for such questioning is the representative character of the Soviet institutions. The Soviet Union has a constitution, even beautifully written, providing for institutions which, on the whole, can be subsumed under the elemental type. Nevertheless, opinion concerning its representative character is sharply divided between Western democrats and Communists. Westerners will say that the mechanism of representation alone will not do, that the voter must have a genuine choice, and that the party monopoly provided by the Soviet constitution makes a choice impossible. Communists will say that the true representative must have the interest of the people at heart, that the exclusion of parties representing special interests is necessary in order to make the institutions truly representative, and that only countries where the monopoly of representation is secured for the Communist party are genuine people's democracies. The argument, thus, hinges on the mediatory function of the party in the process of representation.

The issue is too unclear for rendering immediate judgment. The situation rather invites a little deeper stirring, and, indeed, one can easily add to the confusion by recalling that at the time of the foundation of the American Republic eminent statesmen were of the opinion that true representation was possible only when there were no parties at all. Other thinkers, furthermore, will attribute the functioning of the English two-party system to the fact that originally the two parties were, indeed, two factions of the English aristocracy; and still others will find in the American two-party system an ulterior homogeneousness that lets the two parties appear as factions of one party. In summarizing the variety of opinion, hence, one can form the series: a representative system is truly representative when there are no parties, when there is one party, when there are two or more parties, when the two parties can be considered factions of one party. In order to complete the picture, there may be, finally, added the type concept of the pluralistic party state that came into vogue after the first World War with its implication that a representative system will not work if there are two or more parties who disagree on points of principle.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The New Science of Politics by Eric Voegelin. Copyright © 1987 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Introduction
I. Representation and Existence
II. Representation and Truth
III. The Struggle for Representation in the Roman Empire
IV. Gnosticism—The Nature of Modernity
V. Gnostic Revolution—The Puritan Case
IV. The End of Modernity
Index