The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin ─ Selected Correspondence, 1950-1984

This second volume of letters written by Eric Voegelin covers the period from 1950 through 1984. With few exceptions, the originals are to be found in the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University. Correspondents include Leo Strauss, Karl Lowith, Alfred Schutz, Aaron Gurwitsch, Hans Kelsen, Marshall McLuhan, Bertrand de Jouvenel, Arnold Toynbee, and Marie Konig, among others. Beginning at a time when Voegelin was working on a major theoretical breakthrough, reflected in the Walgreen Lectures at the University of Chicago and The New Science of Politics, the correspondence highlights the years of publication of the first four volumes of Order and History; Voegelin’smove to Munich, where he founded and directed the university’s Institut fur Politische Wissenschaft; and his years as Henry Salvatori Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford from 1969 to 1974. Voegelin remained a tireless correspondent until the last years of his life.

Voegelin’s Munich years, while not without controversy, can be seen as the most successful time in his life, as well as his most creative and prolific as a political philosopher. During that time, Voegelin worked on volume IV of Order and History, and the letters written to successive directors of the Louisiana State University Press, as well as to friends and colleagues, give a vivid account of the changing nature of this seminal project.

Voegelin’s letters written between 1969 and 1984 provide compelling evidence of the intellectual vigor that characterized his work throughout his life and continued virtually undiminished until the last weeks before his death. Voegelin’s realism, his sharp wit, and his superbly developed sense of irony remain evident in the correspondence throughout all these years. While letters to Leo Strauss, Robert Heilman, and Alfred Schutz have been published in separate volumes of correspondence, this selection adds an abundance of hitherto unpublished letters, many of them translated from the original German, providing for the first time the outlines of an intellectual biography of one of the most profound thinkers of the twentieth century.

Any reader with a serious interest in Voegelin’s work will find that the freshness and vitality of his thought are perhaps nowhere more evident than in the letters collected here. As a letter writer, Voegelin always challenged his counterparts, and he is bound to challenge the reader of this correspondence.

About the Author

Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) was one of the most original and influential philosophers of our time. Born in Cologne, Germany, he studied at the University of Vienna, where he became a professor of political science in the Faculty of Law. In 1938, he and his wife, fleeing Hitler, immigrated to the United States. They became American citizens in 1944. Voegelin spent much of his career at Louisiana State University, the University of Munich, and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. During his lifetime he published many books and more than one hundred articles. The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin will make available in a uniform edition all of Voegelin's major writings.

About the Editor Thomas A. Hollweck is Associate Professor of German at the University of Colorado–Boulder. He is coeditor of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 25, History of Political Ideas, Volume VII, The New Order and Last Orientation and The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 28, What Is History? And Other Late Unpublished Writings (both available from the University of Missouri Press).