Eric Voegelin, “Abschließende Bemerkung” (1953)

This file is a brief concluding remark, not a full treatise or collection. Voegelin writes in response to Hannah Arendt and to an exchange prompted by his criticism of her work. Its scope is deliberately narrow: he does not reopen the whole debate, but isolates the methodological disagreement that remains decisive for political science.

In unseren Tagen passiert es nicht oft, dass in der politischen Wissenschaft ein Werk genügend theoretisches Gewebe hat, um eine Untersuchung der Prinzipien zu rechtfertigen.

English translation: In our day it does not often happen that a work in political science has enough theoretical texture to justify an inquiry into its principles.

Voegelin begins with a compliment that is also a criterion of judgment. Arendt’s book matters because it possesses “theoretical tissue” sufficient to make a discussion of principles worthwhile. His criticism is therefore not dismissive; it treats Arendt as a serious theorist whose account of totalitarianism forces basic questions about how political phenomena are to be constituted as objects of science.

He defines his own intervention as restrained and almost formal:

Mein Schlusswort, um das mich die Herausgeber der Review gebeten hatten, wird deshalb ganz kurz ausfallen – eher zeremoniell als argumentierend.

English translation: My closing remarks, which the editors of the Review had requested from me, will therefore be quite brief—ceremonial rather than argumentative.

The structure of the note follows this modest promise. First Voegelin acknowledges Arendt’s theoretical seriousness and the usefulness of her methodological clarification. Then he identifies the shared problem behind their disagreement. Finally he states the decisive difference: Arendt’s method accepts historically emergent complexes such as “totalitarianism” as ultimate essential units, whereas Voegelin insists that political science must test such units against principles supplied by philosophical anthropology.

Es ist die Frage nach dem Wesen [der Essenz] in der Geschichte, die Frage, wie Erscheinungen der Klasse »politische Bewegungen« eingegrenzt und definiert werden sollen.

English translation: It is the question of the essence [the essence] in history, the question of how phenomena of the class "political movements" are to be delimited and defined.

This is the core thesis of the piece. The dispute is not merely about terminology, nor simply about Nazism, communism, or “totalitarianism” as empirical labels. It concerns the relation between historical appearance and essence: how one decides what counts as a political movement, where its boundaries lie, and whether the units thrown up by history are also valid theoretical units.

Voegelin’s central criticism of Arendt is that she draws her boundaries on the plane of historical facticity:

Dr. Arendt zieht ihre Grenzlinie auf dem, was sie als die Tatsachenebene der Geschichte ansieht, kommt dabei zu gut unterschiedenen Phänomenkomplexen des Typs »Totalitarismus« und ist bereit, solche Komplexe als letzte, wesensmäßige Einheiten zu akzeptieren.

English translation: Dr. Arendt draws her demarcation line on what she regards as the factual plane of history, thereby arriving at well-distinguished phenomenal complexes of the type "totalitarianism," and is prepared to accept such complexes as ultimate, essential unities.

For Voegelin, this gives too much authority to the self-formation of movements and to the visible clustering of historical events. His conceptual move is to separate empirical recognition from theoretical constitution. Political movements may present themselves institutionally and ideologically, but their self-presentation cannot itself decide their essence.

Ich nehme an dieser Methode Anstoß, weil sie die Tatsache außer Acht lässt, dass die institutionelle und ideologische Selbstformierung von Bewegungen in der Geschichte keine theoretische Formierung ist.

English translation: I take exception to this method because it disregards the fact that the institutional and ideological self-formation of movements in history is not a theoretical formation.

The relevance of the note lies here: Voegelin is defending a philosophy of political science against historicist empiricism. Inquiry must begin from phenomena, but it cannot end by treating historically given formations as self-explanatory. The “stream of history” may wash up names, parties, ideologies, and regimes; theory must ask whether these are genuine analytical units.

Die Untersuchung wird unvermeidlich von den Phänomenen ausgehen, aber die Frage nach den theoretisch zu rechtfertigenden Einheiten in der politischen Wissenschaft kann nicht dadurch gelöst werden, dass die Einheiten, die im Strom der Geschichte hochgespült werden, für bare Münze genommen werden.

English translation: Inquiry will inevitably start from the phenomena, but the question of the theoretically justifiable unities in political science cannot be resolved by taking at face value the unities that are cast up in the stream of history.

The concluding implication is striking. If philosophical anthropology supplies the principles by which historical materials are interpreted, then apparent enemies may turn out to share an essence. Political science must therefore penetrate beneath ideological conflict to the anthropological and spiritual structure of movements.

Es kann dann passieren, dass politische Bewegungen, die auf der Bühne der Geschichte einander bitter bekämpfen, sich auf der Wesensebene als nahe verwandt erweisen.

English translation: It may then turn out that political movements which bitterly combat one another on the stage of history prove, on the level of essence, to be closely related.

In this compressed closing statement, Voegelin’s disagreement with Arendt becomes a broader methodological warning: totalitarianism may be a historically meaningful complex, but political theory must not let history’s own groupings become its final ontology.