Fernando Kaskais posted: " German troops march through Vienna on 15 March 1938, after Hitler had entered the city proclaiming Anschluss, the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany. Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Eric Voegelin and Hans Kelsen fled the Nazis. In the US, they clas" WebInvestigator.KK.org - by F. Kaskais
German troops march through Vienna on 15 March 1938, after Hitler had entered the city proclaiming Anschluss, the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany. Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty
Eric Voegelin and Hans Kelsen fled the Nazis. In the US, they clashed over the nature of modernity and government
by David Dyzenhaus is a university professor of law and philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of the British Academy, and lives in Ontario.
In the 1930s, many European academics sought refuge in the United States, escaping the quickly deteriorating political situation in their home countries. Jewish scholars were 'cleansed' from the academy in Germany with the 1933 Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service and could sense that they were likely to lose more than their jobs if they stayed. Non-Jewish scholars of a liberal or Left persuasion also saw no future for themselves in Germany or Austria under Nazi occupation, and often had good reason to fear the same kind of fate that would befall the Jewish population of Europe.
Prominent in these vulnerable groups were philosophers, among them the majority of the Vienna Circle. It is no exaggeration to say that their transplantation to the US transformed philosophy in that country, making English the dominant language of international philosophical enquiry at the same time as depriving Germany and Austria of their best philosophical minds, with consequences for decades thereafter. There is reason for celebrating this European contribution to the academic culture of the US, as well as for mourning the loss to Europe.
It would, however, be a grave mistake to overlook that, within this migration to the US, there was a small minority of scholars who had a profoundly negative effect. They may have little influence on the academic discipline of philosophy, but they have disciples within departments of political science and in some of the most prominent law schools, including Harvard and Oxford. More important is that their influence extends far beyond the academy, and their impact is growing in the time of Brexit, Make America Great Again, Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin.
Eric Voegelin (1901-85) was the most influential member of this group, which gravitated to the intellectual circle around William Buckley and his magazine National Review, and which laid the basis for the toxic and complex blend of militant Christian conservatism, libertarianism and anti-liberalism that drives the Republican Party in the Donald Trump era. Voegelin was German, but studied at the University of Vienna, where he became a professor in the Faculty of Law in 1929. In 1938, he escaped to Switzerland then left for the US. He spent much of his career at Louisiana State University, later at the University of Munich and the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. The website of the Eric Voegelin Institute at Louisiana State claims him as 'one of the most original and influential philosophers of our time'.
Voegelin was neither Jewish nor socialist. The intellectual historian Mark Lilla claims that Voegelin had to flee Austria because, in two books published in the early 1930s, he had attacked the 'pseudoscientific works supporting the Nazis' biological racism'. That made him 'a choice target of Austrian Nazis, who authorised his arrest immediately after the Anschluss in 1938.'
Lilla's claim is misleading. In his 1973 autobiography, Voegelin himself does not state that he feared arrest, only that he had been fired from his academic position and feared the confiscation of his passport, which would make emigration difficult. More important is that Lilla fails to situate his claim in the context in which Voegelin wrote these works, and says nothing about Voegelin's own position at this time, thereby perpetuating the official view of Voegelin's many admirers, which he himself was careful to encourage.
Voegelin was a prominent member of 'Black Vienna', intellectuals who embraced a fascist anti-scientific view
In his autobiography, Voegelin writes that his critique of biological theory as a basis for racism was 'not quite compatible with National Socialism' and that one of his first books on this topic 'was withdrawn from circulation by the publisher and the remainder of the edition was destroyed'. However, Voegelin was an enthusiastic proponent of other equally racist theories, and he advanced a metaphysical and spiritual justification for them. He ends his second book, The History of the Race Idea (1933), with a hymn to race 'not as a scientific concept but a tool for interpreting the meaning of one's own life and the broader life of the community'. He continues:
It is not merely the creation of a passive attempt at 'understanding', but an instrument in service of the future shaping of the community; it is the idea of community as a bodily context as it is projected into the future by its members.
He differed from the Nazis only in that, as Aurel Kolnai put it in the first comprehensive study of Nazi and fascist ideology, The War Against the West (1938)...
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