Book Report: Eric Voegelin's 'The New Science of Politics', pt.0
Book Report: Eric Voegelin's 'The New Science of Politics', pt.0
Introduction
In 1951, Eric Voegelin delivered a series of 6 lectures at the University of Chicago, under the auspices of the Charles R. Walgreen Foundation. They were subsequently published a year later under the title, ‘The New Science of Politics: An Introduction’.
Voegelin used these 6 lectures to communicate a vision of political science that could deal with the modern world critically and scientifically. Too often, he says, political science has fallen victim to one or other fallacies that frustrate its purpose, pervert its efforts, and spread misery and ruin outside the Academy. He aims to name these fallacies, diagnose their effects, and prescribe their cure.
I will aim to summarize his argument over the next several posts, with an eye toward expanding and unpacking his rhetoric. The demands of economy placed on him by his form — 6 lectures, forming a relatively-slim paperback — resulted in a product that, in places, attains stupendous information-density through precise application of terminology.
Voegelin’s Introduction
He sets out several goals to be achieved in the subsequent chapters:
A description of representation, “the form by which a political society gains existence for action in history.”
An exploration of the symbols (concepts, ideas, beliefs) by which societies understand their own representation of some truth.
An understanding of how these symbols can be “theoritized” as resulting from a process of historical evolution.
Ultimately, the arrival at a description of a philosophy of history.
The relatedness of political science and philosophy of history is “not fashionable”, he says, but ab origine the two were intimately linked. His scientific project will prove to be more a restoration in philosophy of history than a revolution — but this is not to misunderstood as reactive or reconstructive, in the sense of an unexamined reproduction of historical political forms and concepts.
“… [T]he very historicity of human existence” — that is, the path dependency of human society — “precludes a valid reformulation of principles through return to a former consciousness.” There is no ‘going back’ to the Bronze Age, or the Roman Empire, or France of the 11th century. There is, however, the recovery of their political principles for critical evaluation, “theoretization” (he loves using that word), and creative re-articulation.
The Need for Recovery / Positivism
Why would any principles of political science require recovery? Was there continuity from Plato to Rome, to the Middle Ages — but not through to today? And, if so, whence comes the disruption of continuity?
Voegelin points to positivism, understood broadly as the rush for deconstruction, reduction, and de-intellectualization that occurred in the 19th century. This destructive movement found its origin in two fallacies:
The success of the “mathematizing sciences of the external world” prompted many to suppose that all other sciences would see similar rapid successes if only they would adopt the same methods.
The use of these same “mathematizing” methods was a critical requirement for any theorizing whatever.
These had their consequences, including:
Any questions that could not be dealt with by the approved methods — in particular, metaphysical questions — were not worth asking.
Any object that could not be dealt with was, at best, relegated to the realm of “subjective value”; at worst, it simply did not exist.
But the most serious consequence was “the subordination of theoretical relevance to method” — that is, the removal of any criteria by which a method could be judged relevant to science, and the imposed criterion upon science of “adherence to method”.
If method is subordinate to science, then science can fulfill its original purpose: namely, the development of a dispassionate gaze upon human experience, for the purpose of explicating that experience. If, however, science is made subordinate to method, then that root is severed. Two forms of breakdown result:
As method is prior to science, any fact can be shoe-horned into science provided it were produced by application of the method. This results in an accumulation of useless and trivial detail that obscures relevant facts.
Without a trustworthy judge of relevance, the individual scientist relies less on science than on his own idiosyncrasies, political persuasions, or the Zeitgeist as a judge when selecting facts for analysis. This results in an impoverishment and perversion of theory.
Methodology, Values, and Max Weber
The positivistic impulse led to the rise of “methodology”, the coining of terms like “value-judgement”, and the demand for a “values-free science”. Science must confine itself solely to “objective” ground: statements of “values” have no place in science proper, though they may provide the scientist with relevance-cues prior to commencement of the scientific method.
This was itself an “ambivalent” development, says Voegelin. Insofar as it enabled science to purge itself of idiosyncratic propositions incapable of theoretization, it was a positive. Insofar as it nudged science toward the status of a purely-mechanistic device for the implementation of personal preference, it was a negative.
Methodology was brought to its ultimate (in every sense of the word) development by Max Weber. By bringing the question of “values” in science to its sharpest point — to the scientist as a responsible authority, offering forecasts and predictions to the policy-maker in response to that figure’s “values” — Weber wound up forcing the issue for the scientist. If the scientist is to be “responsible” in informing his students of the foreseeable outcomes of those “values” they had arrived at (in Weber’s terminology) “demonically” — how should the scientist understand those “values”? Are they subject to cross-examination, to be compared with verities of political order observable in history? Are they subject to questioning, even to modification — and if so, to what extent are they really determined by chance environmental factors (“demonic”)?
In short: by bringing the question of positivism in political science to its sharpest point, Weber ultimately exposed its fundamental weakness: that no-one who seriously investigated the actual facts of political order in the ancient and medieval worlds could seriously bring himself to disregard as “illusory” the philosophical propositions that contemporary figures had seen has essential. As Voegelin puts it:
… The attack on metaphysics can be undertaken with a good conscience only from the safe distance of imperfect knowledge. …
Beyond Positivism
With the fulfillment and breakdown of positivism came a new appreciation for the status of political science as a science of order. Weber had smuggled “values” back into science under the guise of “legitimating beliefs”; there remained the question as to why, after all, such objects were not valid subjects of scientific investigation?
What motivations might lead one to reject such philosophical propositions of anthropology, ontology, and metaphysics (these “legitimating beliefs”)? Given that these motivations appear to be very significant, to what extent can they be characterized as religious?
The 1890s saw the beginnings of the investigation into socialism understood religiously, which led to the general question of the relatedness of types of rationality and types of religious experience. These experiences could be rank-ordered to the degree that they enabled rationality to a greater or lesser degree.
… The religious experiences of the Greek mystic philosophers and of Christianity would rank high because they allow the unfolding of metaphysics; the religious experiences of Comte and Marx would rank low because they prohibit the asking of metaphysical questions. …
With the introduction of categories of religious experience comes the investigation of social movements as consequent on particular religious experiences — as forms of theologizing. These religious experiences, too, have historical content, and have a developmental course which can be scientifically understood.
So ends Voegelin’s Introduction. The 1st lecture, on ‘Representation and Existence’, I will describe in a subsequent post.