Eric Voegelin
About the Person

Eric Voegelin is considered one of the most significant—and at the same time most controversial—political thinkers of the postwar period. He is generally associated with “neo-classical” approaches, and occasionally with “normative-ontological” approaches. While these labels do not fully capture the complexity and breadth of his thought, they do reflect Voegelin’s primary concern: to rescue political philosophy from what he diagnosed as the crisis of modernity through a return to a Platonic-Aristotelian understanding.

Voegelin’s work is characterized by the fact that it does not fragment into a series of thematically disparate studies. Rather, all of his major studies—books as well as essays—are connected by a central theme. Over the decades, this theme is pursued and refined in ever-new variations, ultimately culminating in the title of the final volume of his magnum opus: the “search for order.”

Born in Cologne in 1901, Voegelin grew up in Vienna. After study periods in the United States and France, he completed his habilitation at the Faculty of Law and Political Science at the University of Vienna in 1928 and taught social theory and general political theory. In 1938, Voegelin emigrated to the United States, where he held positions at several American universities—beginning in 1942 at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. There he produced the works that established his reputation as a political philosopher: The New Science of Politics (1952) and the first volumes of his main work, Order and History.

In 1958, Voegelin accepted a position at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, where he founded the Institute of Political Science. During this period, alongside his work in political theory and studies on Gnosticism, he produced Anamnesis. On the Theory of History and Politics. After his retirement in 1968, Voegelin returned to the United States and worked at the renowned Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace in Stanford, California. He passed away on January 19, 1985, at the age of 84, shortly before completing the fifth and final volume of Order and History, which was published posthumously in 1987 under the title In Search of Order.

For an initial overview, three contributions by Peter J. Opitz are recommended, available as PDFs: an assessment of Voegelin as a “political thinker,” a sketch of his philosophical project of the “search for order” (both by Peter J. Opitz), and a brief analysis of his philosophical work.