{"id":23599,"date":"2022-09-21T12:22:56","date_gmt":"2022-09-21T19:22:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=23599"},"modified":"2022-09-21T12:22:58","modified_gmt":"2022-09-21T19:22:58","slug":"democracy-or-apocalypse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2022\/09\/21\/democracy-or-apocalypse\/","title":{"rendered":"DEMOCRACY OR APOCALYPSE"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/omicron.aeon.co\/images\/bbcefdd0-732a-49ad-a49b-a14428f06e17\/header_essay-gettyimages-1173808799.jpg\" alt=\"Democracy or apocalypse | Aeon\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Eric Voegelin and Hans Kelsen fled the Nazis. In the US, they clashed over the nature of modernity and government<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><small>German troops march through Vienna on 15 March 1938, after Hitler had entered the city proclaiming&nbsp;<em>Anschluss<\/em>, the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany.&nbsp;<em>Photo by Hulton Archive\/Getty<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/aeon.co\/users\/david-dyzenhaus\">David Dyzenhaus<\/a>&nbsp;is a university professor of law and philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of the British Academy, and lives in Ontario.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Edited by&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/aeon.co\/users\/samdresser\">Sam Dresser<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>20 September 2022 (aeon.co)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Love Aeon?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Support our work<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/aeon.co\/donate?source=article_sidebar_prompt&amp;medium=web\">DONATE<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the 1930s, many European academics sought refuge in the United States, escaping the quickly deteriorating political situation in their home countries. Jewish scholars were \u2018cleansed\u2019 from the academy in Germany with the 1933 Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service and could sense that they were likely to lose more than their jobs if they stayed. Non-Jewish scholars of a liberal or Left persuasion also saw no future for themselves in Germany or Austria under Nazi occupation, and often had good reason to fear the same kind of fate that would befall the Jewish population of Europe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Prominent in these vulnerable groups were philosophers, among them the majority of the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/aeon.co\/essays\/vienna-schoenberg-and-the-advent-of-musical-modernism\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Vienna Circle<\/a>. It is no exaggeration to say that their transplantation to the US&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/aeon.co\/essays\/what-is-truth-on-ramsey-wittgenstein-and-the-vienna-circle\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">transformed<\/a>&nbsp;philosophy in that country, making English the dominant language of international philosophical enquiry at the same time as depriving Germany and Austria of their best philosophical minds, with consequences for decades thereafter. There is reason for celebrating this European contribution to the academic culture of the US, as well as for mourning the loss to Europe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It would, however, be a grave mistake to overlook that, within this migration to the US, there was a small minority of scholars who had a profoundly negative effect. They may have little influence on the academic discipline of philosophy, but they have disciples within departments of political science and in some of the most prominent law schools, including Harvard and Oxford. More important is that their influence extends far beyond the academy, and their impact is growing in the time of Brexit, Make America Great Again, Viktor Orb\u00e1n and Vladimir Putin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Eric Voegelin (1901-85) was the most influential member of this group, which gravitated to the intellectual circle around William Buckley and his magazine&nbsp;<em>National Review<\/em>, and which laid the basis for the toxic and complex blend of militant Christian conservatism, libertarianism and anti-liberalism that drives the Republican Party in the Donald Trump era. Voegelin was German, but studied at the University of Vienna, where he became a professor in the Faculty of Law in 1929. In 1938, he escaped to Switzerland then left for the US. He spent much of his career at Louisiana State University, later at the University of Munich and the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. The website of the Eric Voegelin Institute at Louisiana State claims him as \u2018one of the most original and influential philosophers of our time\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Voegelin was neither Jewish nor socialist. The intellectual historian Mark Lilla&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nyrb.com\/products\/the-shipwrecked-mind?variant=16634265671\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">claims<\/a>&nbsp;that Voegelin had to flee Austria because, in two books published in the early 1930s, he had attacked the \u2018pseudoscientific works supporting the Nazis\u2019 biological racism\u2019. That made him \u2018a choice target of Austrian Nazis, who authorised his arrest immediately after the&nbsp;<em>Anschluss<\/em>&nbsp;in 1938.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Lilla\u2019s claim is misleading. In his 1973 autobiography, Voegelin himself does not state that he feared arrest, only that he had been fired from his academic position and feared the confiscation of his passport, which would make emigration difficult. More important is that Lilla fails to situate his claim in the context in which Voegelin wrote these works, and says nothing about Voegelin\u2019s own position at this time, thereby perpetuating the official view of Voegelin\u2019s many admirers, which he himself was careful to encourage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Voegelin was a prominent member of \u2018Black Vienna\u2019, intellectuals who embraced a fascist anti-scientific view<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In his autobiography, Voegelin writes that his critique of biological theory as a basis for racism was \u2018not quite compatible with National Socialism\u2019 and that one of his first books on this topic \u2018was withdrawn from circulation by the publisher and the remainder of the edition was destroyed\u2019. However, Voegelin was an enthusiastic proponent of other equally racist theories, and he advanced a metaphysical and spiritual&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/scholarworks.iu.edu\/iupjournals\/index.php\/jwp\/article\/view\/2670\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">justification<\/a>&nbsp;for them. He ends his second book,&nbsp;<em>The History of the Race Idea<\/em>&nbsp;(1933), with a hymn to race \u2018not as a scientific concept but a tool for interpreting the meaning of one\u2019s own life and the broader life of the community\u2019. He continues:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><p>It is not merely the creation of a passive attempt at \u2018understanding\u2019, but an instrument in service of the future shaping of the community; it is the idea of community as a bodily context as it is projected into the future by its members.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>He differed from the Nazis only in that, as Aurel Kolnai put it in the first comprehensive study of Nazi and fascist ideology,&nbsp;<em>The War Against the West<\/em>&nbsp;(1938), he \u2018always stayed at a certain refined distance from partisan scholarship\u2019. And as Kolnai notes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><p>if this condemns Voegelin in Hitler\u2019s eyes, it does not by any means acquit him in ours \u2026 In so far as he is on bad terms with official Naziism, he is not the only man to incur such misfortune through stating the Nazi&nbsp;<em>Weltanschauung<\/em>&nbsp;too intelligently.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>In addition, Lilla ignores the fact that in the 1930s Voegelin was a prominent member of \u2018Black Vienna\u2019, the group of intellectuals who&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.cornellpress.cornell.edu\/book\/9781501713606\/black-vienna\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">embraced<\/a>&nbsp;a fascist anti-scientific view of the world against the liberal Left-leaning Vienna Circle sorts. The work that followed his two books extolling the race idea as the key to politics was&nbsp;<em>The Authoritarian State: An Essay on the Problem of the Austrian State<\/em>&nbsp;(1936). His claim there is not that authoritarianism is the problem of the Austrian state; rather, it is the cure for the political problems of the pluralistic state order in Austria, a cure that began when, in the midst of the political crisis of 1934, the fascist politician and federal chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss dissolved parliament and assumed dictatorial powers. The point of the book is how to make the Austrian state into as efficient an instrument of fascist rule as possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Voegelin is less reticent than his disciples in acknowledging what he was up to. In his autobiography, he remarks scornfully that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><p>The Austrian veering toward Mussolini as a protection against the worst evil of Hitler apparently was beyond the comprehension of ardent Marxists, who could do nothing but yell \u2018Fascism\u2019.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>He goes on to say that the book was his \u2018first major attempt to \u2026 understand that an authoritarian state that would keep radical ideologists in check was the best possible defence of democracy.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Voegelin went beyond words to action. He was a member of a secret committee of the community college Ottakring, which recommended and achieved the \u2018political cleansing\u2019 of its staff: that is, firing those academics whose views were opposed to the new state. And there was enough support in the early 1930s in Germany for Voegelin\u2019s more academically refined kind of racism for him to try to get a position after Hitler\u2019s seizure of power by sending his books on race along with supplicating letters to Nazi academics teaching at German institutions. He was rejected the first time because of his relationship with the philosopher of law Hans Kelsen, who had supervised his doctorate in the 1920s and was of Jewish ancestry. That prompted Voegelin to write a long letter proving his \u2018Aryan\u2019 purity and proclaiming his distance, both academically and in other respects, from Kelsen. He was again rejected. But that would not be the last of his dealings with Kelsen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Kelsen was the leading philosopher of law of his time \u2013 perhaps of all time. But proximity to him was fatal to the job prospects of someone who wanted to join the Nazi academy. Kelsen had authored important works defending liberal democracy and the place of judicial review in upholding such a democracy with its commitment to the rule of law. He also had written the 1920 Austrian constitution, still in force today, in the process designing the world\u2019s first dedicated constitutional court, and he sat as a judge on its first bench.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In 1930, Kelsen left Vienna for an academic position in Cologne because of Right-wing attacks on him for his role on the Court. In Cologne, he played an important part in the existentially important debates in late Weimar with his reactionary colleague&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/aeon.co\/essays\/carl-schmitts-legal-theory-legitimises-the-rule-of-the-strongman\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Carl Schmitt<\/a>&nbsp;about who should be considered the \u2018guardian of the constitution\u2019. In a work that is Voegelin\u2019s principal point of reference in&nbsp;<em>The Authoritarian State<\/em>, Schmitt argued that the Weimar Constitution required that the president of the republic and not any court must decide high matters of constitutional politics. Kelsen responded that Schmitt\u2019s argument had nothing to do with the law. It boiled down to the claim that only the head of the executive is capable of guaranteeing the substantive homogeneity of the people, which requires getting rid of parliamentary democracy and social pluralism, and that consequently all legal authority should be located in the head.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Because Kelsen was of Jewish ancestry, he was fired from his position in 1933 (Schmitt was the only colleague who refused to sign a letter of protest). Kelsen made his way via Geneva and Prague to the US and, in contrast to Voegelin, ended up an obscure and lonely figure in the Berkeley political science department.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Kelsen is one of Voegelin\u2019s main targets in his books from the 1930s. In&nbsp;<em>Race and State<\/em>&nbsp;(1933), Voegelin identifies Kelsen\u2019s theory of law as a prime example of the main problem with the German tradition of&nbsp;<em>Staatslehre<\/em>, which takes the abstract explanation of the nature of the modern state as the main task for academic enquiry in politics and law. Kelsen thinks that the task involves understanding the state in a value-neutral fashion as it manifests itself in any social or political context. He deliberately excludes moral, political and social considerations from his attempt to construct a scientific account of legal order as a system of norms, a theory of the authority of the modern legal state. For Voegelin, this attempt must fail since it \u2018purges\u2019 from enquiry consideration of the role of the \u2018person and the community\u2019. The racial theories that he lists in the book are, he thinks, on the right track at least in that they seek to be grounded in social and anthropological reality, where \u2018anthropology\u2019 means not the study of actual groups, so much as a philosophical theory of the person as a social being. He then elaborated this critique of Kelsen in a&nbsp;50-page&nbsp;discussion in&nbsp;<em>The Authoritarian State.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It was politically risky for Kelsen to publish such a defence of Marxism in the&nbsp;McCarthy era<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>However, there was no contact between the two until the early 1950s, when Voegelin wrote to Kelsen because he had learned that Kelsen was engaged in reviewing his&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/press.uchicago.edu\/ucp\/books\/book\/chicago\/N\/bo3622811.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">book<\/a>&nbsp;<em>The New Science of Politics<\/em>&nbsp;(1952)<em>.<\/em>&nbsp;In the testy correspondence that followed, Voegelin attempted to assure Kelsen, who is not mentioned in the book, that he did not consider his former supervisor to be a target of his critiques. Kelsen was unconvinced and deeply troubled by what he took to be the political implications of Voegelin\u2019s work. But both his original response and a longer version were published only posthumously because Kelsen withdrew his review twice after it had been accepted by different presses. (The second time around, he withdrew it at the galley proof stage and had to reimburse the press a large sum to cover its costs.) Why couldn\u2019t Kelsen bring himself to publish?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The Hans Kelsen-Institut in Vienna, which oversaw the publication of Kelsen\u2019s longer response, suggests that the answer may lie in the fact that Kelsen defended Marx\u2019s critique of religion against Voegelin\u2019s charge that Marxism is a secular religion and that it was politically risky to publish such a defence in the McCarthy era. In a detailed account of this saga, Bj\u00f8rn Thomassen&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/onlinelibrary.wiley.com\/doi\/abs\/10.1111\/hith.10723\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">rejects<\/a>&nbsp;this hypothesis. He diagnoses Kelsen\u2019s bid to take down Voegelin as due to the offence of the&nbsp;<em>Doktorvater<\/em>&nbsp;\u2013 the evocative German term for supervisor \u2013 at the revolt of a former student. And he argues that Kelsen\u2019s reluctance to publish was evidence of his inability to confront fully Voegelin\u2019s critique of \u2018Gnosticism\u2019. While Voegelin himself was customarily vague about this idea, he seemed to suppose that it is the belief that, while God has vanished from the world, a select few have access to a vision of the transcendent divine, which they can bring to earth through some apocalypse. Voegelin applies the label \u2018Gnosticism\u2019 promiscuously to any political ideology that seeks to put into practice its vision of the ideal society. On this view, communism, Nazism and liberalism are equally gnostic, that is, secular religions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Thomassen\u2019s first claim can\u2019t be right since Kelsen had ignored Voegelin for many years. But the second raises a puzzle well stated by Lilla. Lilla says that Voegelin was an \u2018amateur historian\u2019 of great range, so great that Lilla says he may seem like&nbsp;Mr Casaubon,&nbsp;the \u2018obsessive polymath\u2019 of George Eliot\u2019s novel&nbsp;<em>Middlemarch<\/em>&nbsp;(1871-72), \u2018whose search for the \u201ckey to all mythologies\u201d left him only torsos of unfinished works\u2019. Lilla finds that Voegelin\u2019s trawls though the history of Western thought did indeed come up with a key of sorts: \u2018guiding all Voegelin\u2019s writing was a basic intuition about the relation between religion and politics, and how transformations in that relation could explain the cataclysms of modern history\u2019. That intuition turns out to be a claim about \u2018immanentising the eschaton\u2019, advanced in&nbsp;<em>The New Science of Politics<\/em>: the history of ideas in the West, according to Voegelin, should be read as a clash between various \u2018Gnostic\u2019 ideologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The 1950s debate shows that Voegelin\u2019s fascist and racist books from the 1930s cannot be brushed aside as a youthful indiscretion. Voegelin himself thought that they laid the basis for his postwar work, and they make explicit what in his postwar work became implicit, as Kelsen clearly discerned and in fact argued in print in \u2018Foundations of Democracy\u2019 (1955), a&nbsp;101-page&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/2378551\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">article<\/a>&nbsp;that took up one whole issue of&nbsp;<em>Ethics<\/em>, a leading philosophy journal. It was this article that most likely obviated the need for Kelsen to publish his reviews of&nbsp;<em>The New Science of Politics<\/em>&nbsp;\u2013 his analysis was so devastating that there was little more to be said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Perhaps because Voegelin\u2019s name is to be found only in the footnotes, this article seems to have escaped the attention of many commentators, despite the fact that Kelsen devotes several pages close to the beginning to a sustained critique of \u2018the new science of politics\u2019. He begins by identifying the central problem of politics after the war as the threat posed by Soviet communism, because it fights \u2018the democratic idea under the disguise of democratic terminology\u2019 in presenting the dictatorship of the Party as the rule of the proletariat. Soon into the article, however, he turns to an analysis of a \u2018quite similar pattern of thought\u2019, using as the exemplar Voegelin\u2019s book&nbsp;<em>The New Science of Politics<\/em>. He notes that it contains the distinction between an \u2018elemental\u2019 and an \u2018existential\u2019 type of representation. He then sets out the point of the distinction. The elemental type, that is, the institutions of representative democracy, is merely formal, lacking any \u2018substance\u2019. \u2018Substance\u2019 can be delivered only by the existential type, which Kelsen disinters from Voegelin\u2019s obfuscations as amounting to the equivalent of a one-party state in which the leader represents the \u2018society as a whole\u2019, and which is identified with the state to the extent that the \u2018state\u2019 as a concept is not present in Voegelin\u2019s reflections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It is this bond between the leader and the people that Voegelin designates as \u2018existential\u2019, one that is corrupted if it is mediated by the institutions of representative democracy. Kelsen argues that the bond is \u2018fascistic\u2019 in nature, though he recognises that this is an implication rather than anything Voegelin directly states. And he makes it clear in a footnote that in his view there is no distance between Schmitt\u2019s fascist theory of democracy advanced in late Weimar and Voegelin\u2019s \u2018science of politics\u2019. Such a theory holds that only a strong leader unfettered by institutional constraints \u2013 a dictator \u2013 can existentially represent the group that counts authentically as \u2018the people\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Kelsen showed how shallow Voegelin\u2019s knowledge was, despite his much-vaunted breadth<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Kelsen\u2019s book-length responses do, however, add something useful. For example, in&nbsp;<em>The New Science of Politics<\/em>, Voegelin closes his book with an analysis of Thomas Hobbes\u2019s&nbsp;<em>Leviathan<\/em>&nbsp;(1651). He says that Hobbes saw the need to found the state on the basis of a civil faith, but did so by \u2018throwing out anthropological and soteriological truth\u2019, that is, respectively, the truth of the correct philosophical conception of the social individual, and the truth offered by religious doctrines of salvation. This leads, he claims, to what he calls the \u2018destruction of the truth of the soul\u2019 and the \u2018fallacious immanentisation of the Christian eschaton\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As Kelsen points out, this is a highly partial, one might say dishonest, interpretation of Hobbes. Hobbes explicitly rejected the idea that there could be a final stage of humankind. Rather, he wished to design a modern legal state in which people could live together peacefully, despite their very different conceptions of the good, and with rulers disabused of the idea that they are able to force belief in any idea of the soul or salvation. This, Hobbes realised, would be a fragile achievement, subject to all sorts of perils, and its design had to take into account and remain open to human experience and nothing more in seeking to build a stable and decent society for any given political community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Hobbes, then, had no aim of creating a world without religion, nor indeed a civil faith beyond one that supposed that careful attention to human capacities to craft institutional solutions to the problem of how to live peacefully together suffices and will bear fruit, as long as we remain open to our collective experience as human beings in this world. When it comes to our common lives, all that transcends human experience is more of such experience, not anything that is claimed by some dreamer of the absolute to have been \u2018revealed\u2019 to them. Kelsen thus showed how shallow Voegelin\u2019s knowledge was, despite his much-vaunted breadth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Kelsen concluded the first draft of his response to Voegelin by noting the apparent irony in the fact that his closing observation in&nbsp;<em>The New Science of Politics<\/em>&nbsp;is that \u2018there is a glimmer of hope\u2019 in that \u2018the American and English democracies which most solidly in their institutions represent the truth of the soul are, at the same time, existentially the strongest powers\u2019. Kelsen failed to quote the next line: \u2018But it will require all our efforts to kindle this glimmer into a flame by repressing Gnostic corruption and restoring the forces of civilisation\u2019. However, he did comment on the implicit claim in it, saying that \u2018[t]his is the \u2013 quite contradictory \u2013 truth of gnosticism as to the nature of modernity. It is in the end Voegelin\u2019s gnostic dream.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What then is the content of the dream? Written in 1951 for the Walgreen Lectures, and then revised and published in 1952, Voegelin\u2019s concluding observations to&nbsp;<em>The New Science of Politics<\/em>&nbsp;were made at a time when one could view these two democracies as not only having triumphed over the Nazis, but also as superior in force to the communist bloc. Within the couple of pages that precede the observations, and which appear at first sight oddly tacked on to the body of the book, Voegelin suggests that what makes democracy distinctive is that it \u2018preserved the institutional culture of aristocratic parlamentism as well as the mores of a Christian commonwealth, now sanctioned as national institutions.\u2019 Similarly, while the American Revolution was \u2018strongly affected by the psychology of the enlightenment\u2019, it also \u2018had the good fortune of coming to its close within the institutional and Christian climate of the&nbsp;<em>ancien r\u00e9gime<\/em>.\u2019 These two democracies had not, as the French and German revolutions had done, brought about \u2018modernity without restraint\u2019, by which he meant liberalism run wild.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>These pages are not as oddly tacked on as they might at first appear. As Kelsen discerned, the content of the dream is have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too. The substantive homogeneity of a majority Christian and white political community is in place, ruled over by an aristocratic elite who will remain in power because of the longstanding institutional arrangements in which people trust. The pages are then a somewhat disguised wink to the cognoscenti. The majority of the population think they have \u2013 and trust in \u2013 rule by the stable democratic institutions that make up the body politic of \u2018we, the people\u2019. But, in reality, they are living in the \u2018Christian climate of the&nbsp;<em>ancien r\u00e9gime<\/em>\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There is then, they suppose, no need to put in place fascism because illiberal democracy suffices<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>However, since the 1950s, the political climate has changed. For Voegelin\u2019s disciples, it has become \u2018modernity without restraint\u2019, in the US, the era ushered in by the Civil Rights movement, the Warren Court, and feminism; the election of a Black president; the&nbsp;Me Too&nbsp;and the Defund the Police movements, and of trans rights. Like Voegelin, his disciples see liberalism as even more pernicious than explicitly authoritarian ideologies. It claims not only to be secular, but also neutral in that the only good it promotes is the good of a stable political order in which individuals can pursue their own conceptions of the good on peaceful terms. Like him, they argue that liberalism\u2019s relegation of the pursuit of the good to the private sphere of individual life is deeply corrosive of many conceptions of the good, especially the authentically religious ones, and through such corrosion it promotes its own version of the millennium at the expense of all others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Unlike Voegelin, they do not see the need to \u2018veer towards Mussolini\u2019 since they have learned a lesson about democracy that was unavailable to the likes of Voegelin and Schmitt in the 1930s. Their main teacher is Hungary\u2019s Orb\u00e1n, and he has taught that the political space need not exclude democracy as long as the version of democracy is \u2018illiberal democracy\u2019. This is a democracy whose institutions have been&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/aeon.co\/essays\/the-new-dictators-speak-for-the-complainer-not-the-idealist\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">hollowed out<\/a>&nbsp;or captured so that, first, the return of the ruler in periodic elections is guaranteed to the extent possible and, second, institutions such as parliaments and the judiciaries are disabled from mediating the promulgation of the common good by the ruler. There is then, they suppose, no need to put in place fascism because illiberal democracy suffices for what the US Senator Joshua Hawley, in a Voegelin-inspired essay, called \u2018A Christian Vision for Kingdom Politics\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It is because Kelsen saw clearly the content of that dream, as set out in his article in&nbsp;<em>Ethics<\/em>, that he was impelled to try to expose Voegelin\u2019s agenda. As our world today tragically shows, he was all too prescient. The enemies of democracy are not just Russia\u2019s Putin and wacky extremist groups. They have been for some time&nbsp;<em>within<\/em>&nbsp;our gates, indeed, the gates of our academies. They are the true gnostics. They are realistic enough to know that the return of theocratic rule according to the dictates of their own militant version of Christianity is not realisable in practice. So they make a pact with whatever&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/aeon.co\/essays\/reports-of-the-demise-of-liberalism-are-greatly-exaggerated\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">anti-liberal<\/a>&nbsp;forces share enough of the tenets of their ideology to make for some common ground; and they disguise their hatred of the achievements of liberal democracy under the pretext of saving us from the control of cosmopolitan, rootless elites, a rhetoric with a frightful past.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The only mistake Kelsen made was to suppose that his theory of the rule-of-law state is value neutral. As Volodymyr Zelensky is&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/aeon.co\/essays\/wars-are-won-by-people-willing-to-fight-for-comrade-and-cause\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">teaching<\/a>&nbsp;us, the liberal democratic state with its commitment to the rule of law rests on profound value commitments, so profound that the people of Ukraine are dying to preserve them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/aeon.co\/philosophy\/thinkers-and-theories\">Thinkers and theories<\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/aeon.co\/philosophy\/political-philosophy\">Political philosophy<\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/aeon.co\/philosophy\/values-beliefs\">Values and beliefs<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Eric Voegelin and Hans Kelsen fled the Nazis. In the US, they clashed over the nature of modernity and government German troops march through Vienna on 15 March 1938, after Hitler had entered the city proclaiming&nbsp;Anschluss, the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany.&nbsp;Photo by Hulton Archive\/Getty David Dyzenhaus&nbsp;is a university&#8230; <a class=\"continue-reading-link\" href=\"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2022\/09\/21\/democracy-or-apocalypse\/\"> Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr; <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23599"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23599"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23599\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23600,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23599\/revisions\/23600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}