Eric Voegelin Society
History and Aims

In the early 1990s, the Eric Voegelin Archive was established at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich – at the Geschwister-Scholl Institute for Political Science – with the aim of making Eric Voegelin’s philosophical work accessible to a wider audience in Germany and thereby promoting scholarly engagement with it through academic symposia and lecture events. To support the objectives of the archive and the activities required to achieve them, a registered association was founded a few years later on the initiative of former colleagues, collaborators, friends, and students of Voegelin: the Eric Voegelin Archive e.V. Initially focused primarily on Munich, the circle of its members has since expanded significantly and now extends well beyond Germany.

Not least due to the financial contributions and organizational support provided by the association, the archive has in recent years been able to host numerous scholarly events and carry out extensive publication activities. The association played a key role, for example, in supporting the translation of Voegelin’s major work Order and History, which has been available in a 10-volume German edition since autumn 2005. With this edition, as well as the publication of many other previously out-of-print writings by Voegelin, the foundation has now been laid for a solid engagement with and critical examination of his philosophy.

In the coming years, the work of the association (renamed in 2011 as the Eric Voegelin Society e.V.) will increasingly focus on promoting academic conferences and seminars, as well as publishing their results in the archive’s publication series, particularly in the Voegeliniana series.