A Review of “Magnanimity and Statesmanship”

ABSTRACT

This article compares Eric Voegelin's contribution to political science to European émigré scholars of the same period: Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt, Hans Morgenthau, and Leo Strauss. It highlights Voegelin's main contributions to the field, reviews The Eric Voegelin Reader, and how The Reader will help scholars in both the classroom and scholarship.     

Hannah Arendt's Mythology: The Political Nature of History and Its Tales of Antiheroes

Current scholarship has focused on analyzing how Arendt's storytelling corresponds to her political arguments. In following up this discussion, I offer a closer examination of the unusual myth Arendt uses to explain the condition of the modern age, a myth she refers to as the “political nature of history.” I employ literary terms along with the standard vocabulary of political theory in shaping this reading of Arendt. Following Robert C. Pirro, I also consider Arendt's story as a tragedy, but in the broadest sense, that of a collision of two goods, freedom and security. By describing Arendt's thought in this manner, I hope to reveal another way in which Arendt represents the call to action that she believes so crucial to humanity, as a summons to we flawed antiheroes through the device of a heroic myth.     

A Note on a Digression on Arendt in Waller Newell's Tyranny: A New Interpretation

This note explores Newell's instructive digression, in his Tyranny, about Hannah Arendt's reading of Aristotle (in The Human Condition). I supplement his account of Arendt as collapsing the theory/practice distinction as a result of her indebtedness to Heidegger.     

Modern revolutions: An introduction to the analysis of a political phenomenon

This paper provides an interpretation of the movement of Arendt's thought in her Denktagebuch, from 1950 to 1973. This movement results in an incipient political philosophy based on new concepts of freedom, equality, and solidarity. As a contribution to debates on the normative foundations of Arendt's political thought, the paper seeks to show that her incipient political philosophy is based on an ethical understanding of the human condition as constituted by its openness to the divine, the worldly, and the (human) Other. Despite its fragmentary nature and its politically problematic indebtedness to theological traditions, Arendt's private thought nevertheless allows us to rethink her place in the history of European ideas. Beyond that, it also provides a powerful alternative to the view that ethical and political thought must remain ‘political not metaphysical’.     

STALINISM IN RETROSPECT: HANNAH ARENDT

Established writers whose reputation is affixed to a particular line of argument are typically ill disposed to change their minds in public. Some authors sincerely believe that the historical record vindicates them. Others are determined that the historical record will vindicate them. Still others ignore the historical record. Among students of totalitarianism, no one had more at stake reputationally than Hannah Arendt. It is not just that The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) established her as the premier thinker on its topic. It is also that totalitarianism, as she understood it, ribbons through all of her subsequent books, from the discussion of “the social” in The Human Condition (1958) to the analysis of thinking in the posthumously published The Life of the Mind (1978). How ready was she to adapt or to change entirely arguments she had first formulated as early as the mid‐to‐late 1940s? “Stalinism in Retrospect,” her contribution to Columbia University's Seminar on Communism series, offers a rare opportunity to answer, at least partially, this question. Arendt's foil was the publication of recent books on Stalin and the Stalin era by three Russian witnesses: Nadezhda Mandelstam, Roy Medvedev, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. According to Arendt, the books meshed with her own theoretical conception of Bolshevism while changing the “whole taste” of the period: they contained new insights into the nature of totalitarian criminality and evil. “Stalinism in Retrospect” documents Arendt's arguments and challenges to them by a number of the seminar's participants. Of particular note is the exchange between her and Zbigniew Brzezinski, an expert on the Soviet Union, a major interpreter of totalitarianism in his own right, and soon to be President Carter's National Security Advisor (January 1977–January 1981). Notes by the editor, Peter Baehr, offer a critical context for understanding Arendt's argument.     

The “Realism” of Augustine's “Political Realism”: Augustine and Machiavelli

Abstract

Arendt and Tocqueville both celebrate a participatory notion of political freedom, but they have a fundamental disagreement about the role that political education should play in fostering an active citizenry. I contrast Tocqueville's “educative” conception of politics with Arendt's “performative” conception, and I explore an important but little-noted difference between the two theorists: whereas Tocqueville argues that it is the task of statesmen “to educate democracy,” Arendt warns that those who seek to “educate” adults are inappropriately aspiring to be their “guardians.” I argue that although Arendt's warnings about the dangers of intertwining politics and education are at times salutary, Tocqueville is ultimately correct that education must be a key task of democratic leadership, and he is right to suggest that politics can itself be educative in crucial ways.     

KOSELLECK,ARENDT, AND THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE

This essay is the first attempt to compare Reinhart Koselleck's Historik with Hannah Arendt's political anthropology and her critique of the modern concept of history. Koselleck is well‐known for his work on conceptual history as well as for his theory of historical time(s). It is my contention that these different projects are bound together by Koselleck's Historik, that is, his theory of possible histories. This can be shown through an examination of his writings from Critique and Crisis to his final essays on historical anthropology, most of which have not yet been translated into English. Conversely, Arendt's political theory has in recent years been the subject of numerous interpretations that do not take into account her views about history. By comparing the anthropological categories found in Koselleck's Historik with Arendt's political anthropology, I identify similar intellectual lineages in them (Heidegger, Löwith, Schmitt) as well as shared political sentiments, in particular the anti‐totalitarian impulse of the postwar era. More importantly, Koselleck's theory of the preconditions of possible histories and Arendt's theory of the preconditions of the political, I argue, transcend these lineages and sentiments by providing essential categories for the analysis of historical experience.     

Lurching through Public Law: The Unsteady State of the Subfield

Abstract

David Walsh is a student of Eric Voegelin's political thought, and this essay evaluates the influence of Voegelin's work on Walsh, while also suggesting how Walsh deviates from Voegelin's philosophy. The analysis is performed in terms of several key concepts from Voegelin's work, including Gnosticism, metaxy, luminosity, equivalences of experience, and history. It is argued that Walsh makes extensive use of Voegelin's ideas of metaxy, luminosity, and the equivalences of experience, but that he transforms these concepts as he moves beyond Voegelin's philosophy of consciousness and turns to a philosophy of existence that is not subject to the epistemological problems that continue to challenge Voegelin's thought. Finally, it is suggested that, in so doing, Walsh is actually continuing Voegelin's philosophical project, rather than undermining it.     

Existential Failure and Success: Augustinianism in Oakeshott and Arendt

That Oakeshott and Arendt's political works contain Augustinian references is well known. What historians of political thought have had difficulty in is assessing the consistency and importance of the Augustinian themes within their work. It transpires that the traces of existentialism and personalism in Augustine are amplified and clarified by their use in Oakeshott and Arendt, to the extent that they form an important subtext to their work. One stumbling block for scholars attempting to link the ‘mature’ works of Oakeshott and Arendt to Augustine has been a sense of disparity between the eschatological character of Augustine's writings and the civic worldliness of Oakeshott's associations and Arendt's public realm. Returning to several strands of twentieth-century Augustinianism, from the personalist to the existentialist to the liberal, reveals an Augustinianism that is much more credibly linked to the whole of Oakeshott and Arendt's writings.     

The Robot Condition: Karel Čapek's R.U.R. and Hannah Arendt on Labor,Technology, and Innovation

This article reads Karel ?apek's R.U.R. through the lens of Hannah Arendt's critique of technology in The Human Condition. Arendt and ?apek share a suspicion that modernity's attempts to overcome labor through the use of technology undermines the human condition of natality. Indeed, the revolt of ?apek's Robots dramatizes Arendt's warnings of the dangers of a “society of laborers without labor” and “world alienation.” Both thinkers suggest that the dilemmas posed by modern technology cannot be resolved through “practical” means but require loving attentiveness to the fragile conditions in which genuine natality can emerge.     

At Last! The Voegelin Reader

ABSTRACT

The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, one of the great political scientists of the twentieth century, run to 34 volumes. The selection republished in this Reader will provide senior undergraduates and graduate students (and perhaps their teachers) with a wide-ranging introduction to Voegelin's modern but Aristotelean political science. The selection includes excerpts from his Autobiographical Reflections and from his best-known work, The New Science of Politics. There are several examples of his late an alytical essays. Readers unfamiliar with his relationship to Christianity, always a contentious issue, will find his discussions of the relationship of philosophical or noetic symbols and experiences to revelatory of pneumatic ones especially helpful. The editors and the University of Missouri Press have performed a major service to contemporary political science by making this se lection available.     

The polis and the res publica: two Arendtian models of violence

The influence of the ancient Greek world on Hannah Arendt’s thought is well documented, yet her interest in the politics of the Roman Republic is often considered less central to her work. This paper explores Arendt’s analysis of both these political worlds, with a particular emphasis on what this comparison can tells us about her understanding of the role of violence in politics. Arendt has generally been understood to structurally exclude violence from the political, in part due to the claims she makes in her later essay ‘On Violence.’ Yet in her portrayal of Roman politics, and her preference for this political system above the Greeks’ (in certain respects), a genuinely political engagement with violence can be discerned. The paper claims that this particular case study indicates the framework of the vita activa, set out by Arendt in The Human Condition, should be reinterpreted, particularly insofar as ‘fabrication’ or ‘work’ here appears as something that is legitimately part of the political, and incorporates within it some forms of violence. The claims that violence is structurally anti-political, this paper concludes, are temporally specific to a twentieth-century context, rather than constituting a foundational ‘rule’ of political practice for Arendt.     

Teresa de Ávila: Portrait of the saint as a young woman

ABSTRACT

Teresa de Jesús (known as Teresa de Ávila in the English-speaking world) began life in a comfortable, merchant-class family. The daughter and granddaughter of conversos, she was one of twelve children (two from the first marriage of Don Alonso de Cepeda, Teresa's father, and ten from the second). She received a good education for a girl of her period and class, probably learning to read and write from parents and tutors, and then studying at a convent boarding school. She undoubtedly learned the importance of letter writing from her father, as business in early modern Europe was conducted largely through correspondence. Although traditional biographers paint a romanticized view of Teresa's girlhood, a careful reading of her Vida, letters, and other documents reveals that there were many strains on the Cedepa-Ahumada household. Among the causes were the Cepedas' deteriorating financial situation, societal pressures on conversos, the death of Teresa's mother, tensions among the siblings, the departure of Teresa's brothers for the New World, and Teresa's illness.     

Eric Voegelin and the Natural Law Tradition

Eric Voegelin’s criticism of Hans Kelsen’s legal positivism places him closer to the natural law tradition than to other legal traditions. This proximity could be interpreted as a defense of the contemporary relevance, or as an attempt to revive the natural law tradition in the twentieth century. However, Voegelin always avoids using the traditional terminology of natural law in his mature works, and expresses a certain ambiguity regarding its contemporary revival. To understand this problem, this article investigates the evolution of Voegelin's understanding of natural law and his criticism of different natural law traditions from Cicero to John Locke, especially his positive evaluation of Aristotle’s and Thomas Aquinas’s interpretations. Furthermore, it seeks to illuminate his position on the contemporary relevance of this topic, as well as to assess some of the recent interpretations that consider Voegelin as a natural law thinker.     

DEBATING MODERNITY AS SECULAR RELIGION: HANS KELSEN'S FUTILE EXCHANGE WITH ERIC VOEGELIN

This article reviews Hans Kelsen's mysterious and recently published last book, contextualizing it with reference to the little known dialogue between Kelsen and Eric Voegelin. The confrontation between Kelsen and Voegelin, two of the most illustrious émigré scholars who found a new home in America, is important to revisit because it touches upon several axes of debate of crucial importance to postwar intellectual history: the religion–secularity debate, the positivist–antipositivist debates, and the controversy that also led to the famous Voegelin–Arendt debate: how to read the horrors of totalitarianism into a historical trajectory of modernity. Although the Kelsen–Voegelin exchange ended in failure and bitterness, its substance goes to the heart of modern intellectual history.     

The Political Mistress: Intimacy,Emotion, and Parliamentary Politics in the Late 18th Century

Between c.1796 and 1809, Lady Harriet Ponsonby, Countess Bessborough and Lord Granville Leveson Gower were embroiled in a passionate affair. Their liaison created tensions in aristocratic society because they belonged to rival political parties, the Whigs and the Tories respectively. In the early years of their relationship, Leveson Gower was emerging on the political scene, while the countess was already well-versed in the complexities of party politics. Leveson Gower thus solicited her advice and support and Bessborough duly shared her knowledge and insight into the political world, which created an unusual dynamic that scholars have yet to explore. This article examines several letters that Bessborough wrote to Leveson Gower to analyse how she supported her lover's fledgling parliamentary career and how she navigated their political differences. I argue that Bessborough adapted a rhetoric of affection, deference, duty, and loyalty, that was typically used by aristocratic wives, to justify her interest in her lover's career and her passion for parliamentary politics. This article contributes to scholarship that explores aristocratic women's political participation by examining the strategies a political mistress could employ to exert influence over men. It also illustrates the value of using methodologies from the history of emotions to investigate the drives and passions that shaped interactions in the late 18th-century political sphere.     

Poison and romance: Oscar Wilde and the strange case of Edith Thompson

Oscar Wilde considered crime and sin no impediment to art or culture, as the case of the poisoner-artist-critic Thomas Wainewright (1794–1847) allowed him to demonstrate. English society of the time, as George Orwell famously declared, was as fascinated by poisoning as was Wilde. One of Orwell's cases was that of Edith Thompson who, along with her young lover, was convicted in 1922 in London of conspiracy to murder her husband whom it was alleged she had tried to poison. She and her lover were hanged in early 1923. Thompson's preoccupation with poison was entangled with her preoccupation with popular romance fiction of the day which she read copiously and discussed perceptively with her lover in the letters that helped to convict her. Her favourite novelist was Robert Hichens, the acquaintance, imitator and caricaturist of Wilde. She quoted Hichens's novel Bella Donna (1909) in letters to her lover, including on the practical matter of poison, which helped convince the jury of her guilt. Her trial, like Wilde's trials – all involving sexual transgression – raised the difficult question of whether literature could poison and influence for the worse its readers or whether it lay outside both morality and the world of action. Moreover, were Thompson's own letters literature and fantasy or were they oblique discussions of practical intent, including the intent to murder? As in the case of Wilde, a larger question supervened. In part through her reading, in part through her own experience, Edith came to believe, even before the murder, that freedom is an illusion, fate an inescapable reality.     

Baudelaire's “Teacher”: Joseph de Maistre and Le Spleen de Paris

For a total of twenty years (1856–76), Gustave Flaubert corresponded with a woman whom he would never meet and who had first written to him to express her admiration for his novel, Madame Bovary. These forty-five letters are among the most fascinating and important that he was to write, reflecting on his life, on art and esthetics, and on his determined dedication to the practice of writing. The letters to Marie-Sophie Leroyer de Chantepie occupy a central role in Flaubert's Correspondence, between the long series of letters he wrote to two other women, Louise Colet and George Sand. They are all dominated by the idea of the centrality of art, literature, and the activity of writing, and of the subordinate status of all other experiences and interests.