Philosopher Eric Voegelin; Wrote ‘Order and History’

Political philosopher Eric Voegelin, 84, has died at his home on the Stanford University campus of congestive heart failure.

A senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, he was internationally famed for his four-volume work, “Order and History.” At his death Saturday he was working on a fifth volume, titled “In Search of Order.”

Born in Cologne, West Germany, and reared in Vienna, Voegelin served on the law faculty of the University of Vienna from 1929 until the Nazis dismissed him in 1938 when they invaded Austria. During this period he managed to publish four books on the race question, constitutional law and political religion. He and his wife fled to the United States in 1938 via Switzerland.

Voegelin taught at Harvard, Bennington and the University of Alabama before taking a permanent position in 1942 at Louisiana State University, where he remained until 1958.

Voegelin’s first book in English, “The New Science of Politics,” was published by the University of Chicago in 1952. The first three volumes of “Order and History,” his major life work, followed in 1956 and 1957: “Israel and Revelation, The World of the Polis” and “Plato and Aristotle.”

In 1958 Voegelin was named to the newly reestablished chair in political science, named after Max Weber, at the University of Munich. There he founded and directed the Institute for Political Science and published his studies of history, politics and consciousness in the 1966 volume “Anamnesis” as well as a work on science, politics and Gnosticism.

He was named Henry Salvatori distinguished scholar at Hoover Institution in 1969. He completed the fourth volume of “Order and History,” entitled “The Ecumenic Age,” in 1974 and also published a collection of his earlier studies, “From Enlightenment to Revolution,” in 1975.

In the spring, 1983, issue of “The Public Interest” magazine, Columbia University Prof. Robert Nesbit said that, with the exception of St. Augustine, Voegelin “has done more than any other philosopher to bring an empirical, reasoned conception of individual consciousness as the dynamo of history.”