Abstract
This special issue has, as its central concern, the relevance of at least some aspects of theological discussion for international relations. That is, to say the least, an unusual concern in the modern field though it would once have been much more common. In this paper, I want to focus on the parallel arguments of two thinkers who shared a good deal in their analysis of the problems of modern international relations and who root those arguments in a reading that draws heavily on theological concerns, though they come at these concerns from slightly different perspectives: Eric Voegelin and Martin Wight. I will compare and contrast the readings of the modern crisis that Voegelin and Wight offer and their relevance to the contemporary literature of international relations, and I will suggest that there is an ambiguous aspect to their general position which raises important questions about their diagnosis of the ‘crisis of the modern’. Indeed, their perspectives are still worth revisiting today for dwelling on the kind of difficult questions that contemporary international relations scholars have a hard time even posing.
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Notes
Think, for example, of the influence of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr on International Relations thinking from the 1940s to the 1960s. There are other examples as well, perhaps most obviously in the UK Herbert Butterfield and the person I shall discus in a moment, Martin Wight.
A brief biographical note might be helpful here—though I refer the reader to Voegelin’s own Autobiographical Reflections (1989) for a fuller account. Voegelin was born in Cologne in 1901, educated in political science at the University of Vienna, where he took both his undergraduate degree and his doctorate and then taught there. While at Vienna, he became part of a circle that included his thesis advisors, Hans Kelsen and Othmar Spann, the economist Ludwig Von Mises and, among people more his own age, Alfred Schutz, later Professor at the New School, Friedrich Von Hayek, art historian Robert Waelder, and psychoanalyst Felix Kaufman. He was one of the first Laura Spellman Rockefeller foundation scholars and, in that context, spent 1 year at Columbia, then a semester at Harvard and a semester at Wisconsin (where he was influenced by John R. Commons) before finishing his fellowship with a year in Paris (he mentions that two powerful influences during this period were Santayana and Paul Valery). His publications in this period were focused both on American intellectual ideas, a critique of the race doctrines of National Socialism and a study (published in 1938, just before he left) on Political Religions which strongly influenced his later thought. After the Anschluss, he was dismissed from his job and together with his wife left Austria, just ahead of the Gestapo, for Switzerland from where he emigrated to the US after a brief period. He taught at various colleges there before joining Louisiana State University’s Government department in 1942. He remained at LSU until 1958, becoming one of the first Boyd Professors there. In 1958, he moved to the University of Munich to set up the Institut fur Politische Wissenschaft, returning to the US in 1969 to take up the Henry Salvatori Fellowship at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He remained in Palo Alto after retirement, dying there in 1985. The New Science of Politics (1951), Anamnesis (1966) and the five volumes of Order and History (1956‒2000, the last volume published posthumously) are generally considered to be his major works.
I should emphasise that in what follows I am going to largely ignore many of the arguments that make (for example) the five volumes of Order and History so remarkable. Many of them also repay thinking about in the context of international relations: As does Voegelin’s very important—and from the standpoint of 2018 very prescient—exploration of intellectual and political traditions beyond that of the West. Somebody who writes about the significance of Egyptian kingship, the Mongol orders of submission (see Voegelin 1940/1941) and the civilisational nexus of the Axial Age (Voegelin 1987) cannot be accused of taking only a European perspective or of drawing his net narrowly. Much of this work also has significance for thinking about international relations, as I will discuss in the third section of this paper, but I cannot do this in this paper in the detail that it deserves.
The very long gestation was caused in part by Voegelin’s relocating to Munich in 1958 to establish the Geschwister Scholl Institut für Politikwissenschaft, and to the teaching and administrative obligations that brought in its train, in part by the evolving nature of the project—as we will see, he essentially changed his mind fairly fundamentally between volumes 3 and 4—and in part by the sheer scale of what he was attempting. The final volume published in his life time (vol. 4) was published in 1987. The final volume, In Search of Order, was published in 2000, edited by Ellis Sandoz from the versions left incomplete at his death.
His first book, following a sojourn in the US, was published in 1928 as Über die Form des amerikanischen Geistes [On the Form of the American Mind]. Although important as a marker of certain influences on him (especially Santayana), it left no lasting imprint on his later thought.
The use of this term is one of the more controversial aspects of an intellectual trajectory not without controversy. The term is a modern (17th century) rendering of an ancient Greek idea meaning knowledge acquired through direct participation in the Divine. Voegelin’s use of it was contested from the beginning and he changed his own mind about it, especially after a conference in 1972 held at Notre Dame to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the publication of The New Science, and the explosion of interest in the subject after the discovery of the Nag Hammadi scrolls in 1945 (although their contents were not generally know until much later). Three good articles that trace the course of the controversy and Voegelin’s changing attitudes to it are McKnight (2005), Rossbach (2005) and Paipais (2016).
Then also, his own take on it in The New Science was largely influenced by Hans Jonas’ work (2001), although in his later work, and after the translation of many of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts, it is much more nuanced.
There is a similarity here with the argument that Leo Strauss makes to wit that the’ city’ is always based on faith. Which is key to why philosophy is always a threat to the city – because philosophy questions everything. This is what Strauss refers to as the ‘Theo-political problem’. Strauss’ initial statement of this view can be found in Strauss (1930/1997). A very good treatment of it in general is Meier (2006). Voegelin’s treatment of this is not identical to Strauss. They differ a good deal as the correspondence between them shows. See Cooper and Emberley (2004).
Hobbes’ phrase from Leviathan, of course.
Literally μεταξύ in Greek.
Indeed, I would go further and suggest that he was strongly inimical to this sort of historicism, something that comes across throughout Order and History.
Pelagianism is simply the belief that God’s grace is unnecessary for salvation; that humans can achieve salvation through their own efforts. It was named after a monk, Pelagius, about whom we have very little direct knowledge and the view was strongly opposed by Augustine. Pelagianism was formally declared a heresy by the Church at the Council of Ephesus in 431 CE. See Rengger (2017).
Voegelin’s work has, of course, been widely criticised, as well as admired. The criticisms hail from several different sources: for example, Aurel Kolnai, ironically someone who later came to have a much more positive view of Voegelin, but in his 1938 book The War Against the West was very critical. Shadia Drury (2004), in particular in her Terror and Civilization, and Mark Lilla in his The Shipwrecked Mind (2016), to which I shall want to return later on. And while some of the criticisms are not without merit (though Drury is relentlessly and, I would have thought, needlessly hostile) they do not, I think, truly dent the basis of Voegelin’s argument, understood in its own terms. The question is whether we should understand it in those terms.
The best general treatment of Wight is Hall (2006). Hall emphasises the centrality of Wight’s Christianity repeatedly throughout the book and points out that Wight’s conception of history was, as we shall see, very different from the standard model of modernist historiography of his own day and much closer, in fact, to Voegelin’s.
For a defence of the notion of the ‘shape’ of the past, see Graham (1997).
In addition to Voegelin and Wight, one could add many others to the list, though they did not all see the crisis in the same way, of course. One might mention, for example, Christopher Dawson, T. S. Elliott, Arnold Toynbee (at least in some moods) and even (in some interpretations) Carl Schmitt.
For another—and rather more variegated—set of reflections of the significance of the medieval for international relations see Bain (2016).
Though it is worth pointing out that Walsh (1984: 282) quotes a letter written by Voegelin to Alfred Schutz that emphasises what he thinks is valuable about Christianity. As Walsh says, the letter ‘provides an impressive justification of the Christian spiritual and intellectual tradition’ but he also adds one pregnant phrase: ‘They include everything with the single exception of what is most important: the story of Christ’s representative suffering and death to redeem fallen humanity.’
This term is taken from the German Aschenzeit, and refers to the ‘spiritual awakening’ of a pivotal period in world history from the eighth to the third century BCE. The term was popularised by Karl Jaspers in his 1949 book Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte [The Origin and Goal of History]. He argued that during this period Confucius and Lao Tse were teaching in China all the major Chinese philosophical schools came into existence, India produced the Upanishads and Buddha, Iran, Zarathustra, while in Biblical Israel the prophets arose, and in Greece you had Homer and the philosophers who ranged from the pre-Socratics to Plato. In other words, the creation of most of the major spiritual and philosophical systems of the world came into being at the same time across many different cultures and systems.
This is perhaps not the best word to use in that much of what is deemed positivism—for example Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics (Waltz 1979)—is, in fact, very critical of positivism properly called so. But it is so much part of the vernacular now it would be pointless to try and replace it.
His philosophy of consciousness owes a great deal to his long-standing friendship and correspondence with his Austrian contemporary Alfred Schutz.
This term covers, of course, a multitude of sins. See Rengger (2000).
Though, as Hall (2006) notes, he was committed to a certain sort of liberalism, at least for a time, being a member of the liberal ‘Foreign Affairs’ group and working for a period for the impeccably liberal Observer, under David Astor, a close friend.
Collected in Wight (1977).
Now published as part of the University of Missouri Press collected works of Eric Voegelin series.
See, for example, Bell (2015).
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Acknowledgements
The Special Issue editor would like to thank Vanessa Rengger for her permission to publish Nicholas Rengger’s paper posthumously. Nick was a dear friend, an intellectual powerhouse, and a pioneer in bringing theology back into international relations. He will be sorely missed.
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For Correspondence Vassilios Paipais (Special Issue editor): vp31@st-andrews.ac.uk
The Special Issue editor would like to thank Vanessa Rengger for her permission to publish Nicholas Rengger’s paper posthumously. Nick was a dear friend, an intellectual powerhouse, and a pioneer in bringing theology back into international relations. He will be sorely missed.
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Rengger, N. Between transcendence and necessity: Eric Voegelin, Martin Wight and the crisis of modern international relations. J Int Relat Dev 22, 327–345 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-019-00171-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-019-00171-x