Abstract

In his New Science of Politics, Eric Voegelin offers an analysis of modernity: at its heart, it is a radicalization of Christianity—a radicalization that counts as a betrayal. Like other movements of its time, Christianity judged this world in terms of another—one wherein all of us were brothers and sisters, wherein justice mattered more than victory and mercy more than justice. But rather than endure in patience their own limitations, those whom Voegelin calls “gnostics” tried to build heaven on earth—inevitably, by violence. This serves as his postmortem on the twentieth century: liberalism, communism, and fascism are all, according to Voegelin, trying to do what cannot be done—specifically, to do what Voegelin calls “immanentizing the eschaton.” Each is, in its own way, a revolt against the human condition—and so a revolt against God. But these gnostics would hardly have seen themselves in this demonic light. Indeed, they often called themselves “rationalists” and saw themselves as a brave few who might lead humanity out of the madness of the past. Of course, Voegelin would hardly grant that Plato or Saint Augustine were less rational than, say, Thomas Hobbes. But he would certainly grant that the gnostics hoped to render the world “rational” by abolishing whatever aspects of the human condition were “irrational”—in the case of Hobbes, our capacity for mystical experience of God. Of course, this is hardly how contemporary political scientists would explain Hobbes. In the introduction to his New Science of Politics, though, Voegelin offers an indirect explanation of this. He warns that the social sciences are prisoners of their idolatry of the natural sciences: they ignore any data that cannot be rendered in language that is entirely descriptive—insisting as they do so that this methodology is only “rational.”