Eric Voegelin quotes

Eric Voegelin was an American philosopher and political scientist, widely recognized for his work on the philosophy of history and political order. His writings explored the relationship between society, consciousness, and the search for meaning in the modern world. He became influential through his analysis of totalitarian movements and his critique of ideological thinking. Here are 14 of his quotes:

The death of the spirit is the price of progress.

Eric Voegelin

The course of history as a whole is no object of experience; history has no eidos, because the course of history extends into the unknown future.

Eric Voegelin

The order of history is the history of order.

Eric Voegelin

One can hardly engage in a serious study of medieval Christianity without discovering among its ‘values' the belief in a rational science of human and social order and especially of natural law. Moreover, this science was not simply a belief, but it was actually elaborated as a work of reason.

Eric Voegelin

What was novel in Voegelin's thought was that he wedded that commonplace to a theory of history, suggesting that a universal process of symbolization was surreptitiously at work in human civilization, giving world history a discernible direction.

Eric Voegelin

The great line of demarcation in modern politics, Eric Voegelin used to point out, is not a division between liberals on one side and totalitarians on the other. No, on one side of that line are all those men and women who fancy that the temporal order is the only order, and that material needs are their only needs, and that they may do as they like with the human patrimony. On the other side of that line are all those people who recognize an enduring moral order in the universe, a constant human nature, and high duties toward the order spiritual and the order temporal.

Eric Voegelin

We see again confirmed the correlation between spiritual impotence and antirationalism: one cannot deny God and retain reason.

Eric Voegelin

It is impossible to understand the graveness of the Western crisis unless we realize that the cultivation of values beyond Littré's formula of civilization as the dominion of man over nature and himself by means of science is considered by broad sectors of Western society to be a kind of mental deficiency.

Eric Voegelin

It is not the fear of a particular critical concept, like Hegel's Idea, it is rather the fear of critical analysis in general. Submission to critical argument at any point might lead to the recognition of an order of the logos, of a constitution of being, and the recognition of such an order might reveal the revolutionary idea of Marx, the idea of establishing a realm of freedom and of changing the nature of man through revolution, as the blasphemous and futile nonsense which it is.

Eric Voegelin

The use of method as the criterion of science abolishes theoretical relevance. As a consequence, all propositions concerning facts will be promoted to the dignity of science, regardless of their relevance, as long as they result from a correct use of method. Since the ocean of facts is infinite, a prodigious expansion of science in the sociological sense becomes possible, giving employment to scientistic technicians and leading to the fantastic accumulation of irrelevant knowledge through huge "research projects” whose most interesting features is the quantifiable expense that has gone into their production.

Eric Voegelin

Philosophy springs from the love of being; it is man's loving endeavor to perceive the order of being and attune himself to it.

Eric Voegelin

Enlightened utilitarianism is but the first in a series of totalitarian, sectarian movements to be followed later by Positivism, Communism and National Socialism.

Eric Voegelin