Eric Voegelin to Hermann Broch, March 30, 1945

Eric Voegelin’s private letter to Hermann Broch, dated March 30, 1945 and reproduced in the 2007 correspondence edition, assesses Broch’s memorandum proposing statutory protection for human dignity. Written in English so that Broch could share it with American readers, it combines personal encouragement with a severe diagnosis of the proposal’s political prospects and a substantive objection to its treatment of war. Its argument moves from the social production of hatred, through the institutional obstacles to punishing incitement, to the necessity of preserving resistance against injustice. Voegelin endorses the protection of dignity while questioning both the willingness of existing powers to enforce it impartially and the identification of violence itself with indignity.

The opening establishes the limits of his intervention. Recalling an earlier discussion in Vienna, Voegelin explains his political inactivity as pessimism rather than indifference or unwillingness to assume responsibility. His image of surviving a historical plague makes intellectual work a means of endurance when effective political action seems unavailable. This disposition frames his response, but it does not amount to rejecting Broch’s ethical purpose:

This pessimism does not mean that I disagree with you on the desirability of a statutory protection for the dignity of man -- I believe that it is an excellent idea.

The distinction between desirability and practicability governs the first part of the letter. Voegelin identifies the proposal’s decisive provision as punishment, following due trial, of those who expose others to contempt and hatred. He agrees that incitement is an immediate source of contemporary conflict. His objection concerns the broader social conditions in which such a prohibition would operate: hatred is neither confined to fascism nor adequately explained by the particular occasions on which it erupts.

Drawing on Max Scheler’s account of circulating waves of hatred, Voegelin locates a persistent mechanism beneath changing political targets:

There are sources of anxiety in our world, which in its turn engenders hate attitudes, which may manifest themselves in mass phenomena on the slightest provocation.

The disproportion between provocation and response is crucial. An immediate event releases hostility whose deeper source is accumulated anxiety; suppressing a particular expression therefore does not remove its generating conditions. Following Scheler, Voegelin identifies competitive society and its insecurity of status as an especially important source. He traces successive waves of hatred through proletarian antagonism toward the bourgeoisie, British hostility toward Germany during the First World War, Western anti-communism, German hostility toward democracy, Bolshevism, and Jews, and the growing campaign against aggressor states. These examples extend the problem across opposing political camps. Their argumentative function is to challenge a remedy focused too narrowly on fascist persecution.

The obstacle becomes sharper when hatred acquires institutional backing. Voegelin asks whether Broch’s rule could actually imprison members of the Dies Committee for inciting hostility toward people who had done nothing unlawful, Stalin for anti-bourgeois and anti-religious propaganda, or British and American political figures for encouraging hatred of Germans and Japanese even after the war. These deliberately provocative cases test the universality of the proposed protection. A general prohibition would implicate governing circles within the Great Powers themselves. The problem is thus not simply inadequate legal machinery: those expected to authorize and enforce the rule are already invested in the conduct it would criminalize.

The letter then turns from feasibility to justice. Broch’s proposition that war itself constitutes the greatest crime against human dignity elicits a direct disagreement. Voegelin argues that it presupposes the availability of peaceful procedural remedies for every serious injustice. Against that assumption, he invokes the right of resistance and the tendency of lawful procedure to protect established possessors of power:

The denial of the right to resistance (and war is after all nothing but resistance on the international scale) is equivalent to the thesis: that the man on top can do what he wants, and the man at the receiving end is a criminal if he expresses his dissatisfaction by violence.

Here the argument turns on the difference between legality and justice. Procedural order can shield injustice rather than correct it; an unconditional prohibition of violent resistance would then secure the position of the powerful. Voegelin expressly allows that particular acts of resistance or aggression may be criminal in their motives. His claim is narrower than a general vindication of force: aggression cannot be condemned solely by its form when violence may be the last available means of challenging entrenched injustice.

After all, there is such a thing as a bellum justum.

This appeal to just war completes the letter’s central distinction between hatred as a source of disorder and force as a potentially legitimate response to injustice. In closing, Voegelin reiterates that Broch’s proposal would confront governments compromised by institutionalized hatred, while its account of violence needs to accommodate resistance. Nevertheless, he grants it a possible educational achievement: even without legislative success, it could direct attention toward hatred’s destructive role. His anticipation of Broch’s mass psychology and pleasure at the approaching publication of “Virgil” restore the personal register. The letter’s significance lies in this conjunction of ethical sympathy, sociological pessimism, and resistance to any legal protection of dignity that would inadvertently make established injustice invulnerable.