Voegelin and Schutz: On the Order of the Cosmion

• In Event: The Centrality of Personal Experience in Politics

Abstract

Eric Voeglin's relation to his interlocutor Alfred Schutz is succintly expressed by the following words: “You know how important your opinion is to me–and even if I have to attribute a good deal of your generous expressions of agreement to a friendship that has lasted a lifetime, enough remains to assure me that, at the very least, you consider the work [Order and History] to be a serious philosophical enterprise.” (Voegelin to Schutz, August 3, 1958) Voegelin and Schutz initiated academic life in Vienna as participants in the private seminar of Ludwig von Mises and the Geistkreis of F. A. von Hayek, and maintained steady contact in the American period, as documented in their correspondence (published in German in 2004, in English 2011). What we see here is personal friendship connected with reciprocally attributed academic excellence and, on the basis of classical philosophy, a critical dialogue of what can be subsumed to “the order of the cosmion,” an expression coined by Voegelin and taken over by Schutz. For the latter, where Voegelin is seeking a general theory of order, Schutz is speaking of the formal problems of relevance. The paper elaborates further along these lines.

Author

• Michael Hanke, Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte