Eric Voegelin and Reinhold Niebuhr on the moral resources of democracy.

AT A TIME WHEN the faith and liberty of free men everywhere are challenged by anti-Americanism and the ruthless fanaticism of foreign enemies, public discourse reconsiders the moral underpinnings of democracy and reform movements across different continents and cultures. This discussion benefits to the extent that it builds upon rational and religious insight into the moral potential of human beings who seek through representative government the defense of liberty under law. Few American thinkers have surpassed Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) and Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971)--one a philosopher, the other a theologian--in dissecting the messianic corruption at the core of totalitarian movements. Their diagnosis of the disorder at the root of closed societies was matched by a common concern about the philosophical and ethical resources for the rediscovery and defense of human integrity.

The central argument advanced herein is that Voegelin's characterization of the "open society" is mirrored by Niebuhr's reliance on "Christian realism" for assessing the moral vitality of individuals and groups in democratic regimes. Voegelin's search for the ground of existence in Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy depicts the nature of man in openness toward transcendence. Niebuhr's Augustinian realism exposes a sinful and anxious creature forever tempted to misunderstand the tension between his finiteness and freedom. This tensional relationship, bounded by the polarities of immanent and transcendent divine being, has implications for the moral choices that lie behind the purposes--both pragmatic and ultimate--of democratic government.

Conspicuously absent from many academic debates about the meaning of democracy is the extent to which liberty and freedom are tied to a personal attitude of mind and spirit. Contrary to various ideological perversions, whereby one is forcefully liberated in cultural revolutions or labor camps, the promise of genuine freedom requires an open, receptive, and generous attitude. Part of the resilience of liberal democracy can be explained by the way it leads to the life of the spirit, and ultimate values, without committing us to any dogmatic formulation of those values or to any specific means for their realization. (1) In this context, the term liberal denotes the way in which a person comes by his convictions rather than the convictions themselves.

The open society is the free society. On the one hand, the affirmation of freedom of conscience promotes appreciation for the inviolability of the human personality. On the other hand, the institutions of democratic rule--constitutional government, rule of law, checks and balances--help restrain would-be tyrants. These institutions, however, are not the sole creation of the liberal mind; they have their origins deep in the Middle Ages. (2) Both the English and American Revolutions, while steeped in the language of the Enlightenment, were influenced by remnants of classical and Christian culture that opposed an overly strict reliance on liberal formulae. As Voegelin pointed out:

  In this situation, there is a glimmer of hope, for the 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. But it will require all our efforts to kindle this
  glimmer into a flame by repressing Gnostic corruption and restoring
  the forces of civilization. At present the fate is in the balance. (3)

Voegelin's observation, made at the halfway point of the twentieth century, is no less instructive for the world America and the West confront after September 11, 2001. The way in which democratic institutions are conceived and used will determine their efficacy as instruments of freedom. The lesson for Iraq and Afghanistan, no less than for Russia and the new Palestinian authority, is that government by persuasion and consent can easily degenerate into government by manipulation and reckless majorities. The truth of the liberal idea is that man cannot be confined to his political relationships. The rise of Christianity underscored this truth based on the positive understanding of man as a creature of God, with his life reaching out to an eternal world, thereby affecting his life in the secular sphere. (4) In a similar vein, Voegelin remarked:

  The death of the spirit is the price of progress. Nietzsche revealed
  this mystery of the Western apocalypse when he announced that God was
  dead and that He had been murdered. This Gnostic murder is ...
  committed by men who sacrifice God to civilization. The more fervently
  all-human energies are thrown into the great enterprise of salvation
  through world-immanent action, the farther the human beings who
  engaged in this enterprise move away from the life of the spirit. And
  since the life of the spirit is the very source of order in man and
  society, the very success of a Gnostic civilization is the cause of
  its decline. (5)

Voegelin, The Open Society, And Political Ethics

The meaning of openness in the experience of men and political societies invariably leads to the mysterious encounter with divine reality and, more particularly, how divine reality is to be delineated by language symbols. Voegelin's magnum opus, Order and History (1956-1987), demonstrates that openness of inquiry demands receptivity to the experience of theophany (i.e., the awareness of divine presence in the consciousness of men) as it is reflected in the history of philosophy and culture, in the experience of our contemporaries, and in our own lives. Openness to the "truth of existence" involves an experience of tension and dissatisfaction with a condition of imperfection and of a possible fulfillment beyond time and the world. (6) Henri Bergson's The Two Sources of Morality and Religion had a major influence on Voegelin's political thought. Bergson incorporated philosophy and revelation as the twin sources of the open society and the open morality in history. Indeed, "it is only through God ... that religion bids man [to] love mankind"; similarly, "it is through reason alone ... that philosophers make us look at humanity in order to show us the pre-eminent dignity of the human being." (7)

Bergson's portrayal of the open society, as Ellis Sandoz notes, is laid out in terms roughly analogous to Voegelin's discussion of the "leap in being" and change in the structure of being: from static to dynamic man, from closed to open society, that follows from the opening of the soul through the mystical experience. (8) Voegelin claimed that "the history of mankind ... is an open society--Bergson's not Popper's--comprehending truth and untruth in tension." While different periods may well witness a shift toward one or the other of the poles, the "social predominance of one pole does not abolish the other pole and together with it the tension." (9) As Voegelin pointed out in The Ecumenic Age, the physical separation of men into a multiplicity of societies does not alter the fact that mankind has "one history by virtue of participation in the same flux of divine presence." (10)

Elsewhere, Voegelin explained that this fundamental tension, as stated abstractly, is experienced concretely in a variety of modes.

  Existence has the structure of the In-Between, of the Platonic metaxy,
  and if anything is constant in the history of mankind it is the
  language of tension between ... immortality and mortality, perfection
  and imperfection, time and timelessness; between order and disorder,
  truth and untruth ... between amor Dei and amor sui ... between the
  virtues of openness toward the ground of being such as faith, love,
  and hope and the vices of ... closure such as hybris and
  revolt.... (11)

Attempts to separate these symbols, hypostatizing the poles of experience as independent entities, destroy the reality of existence. Political ethics in a society robbed of consciousness and intellect find expression through an "activist conformity" or "quiet despair" that promises to substitute as a "value" for reality lost.

The application of gnosticism to modern ideologies--posing as a revolutionary liberation from metaxy existence--transforms the role of ethics in classical and Christian thought. Gnostic movements do share certain common political attitudes: the belief that salvation from the evil of this world is possible; that the order of being will have to be changed in an historical process; and that this change in the order of being lies within the realm of human action. The ethical calculation of intentions and consequences will be affected by the political expedience of those who simply cannot endure the uncertainty of knowing their place in history. The life of the soul in openness to God--"the very lightness of this fabric may prove too heavy a burden for men who lust for massively possessive existence." (12) And far from being a capitulation to "pessimism" or "conservatism" in politics, Voegelin's understanding of existence as a state of tension between good and evil does not, and need not, eviscerate the "possibility of leavening our existing political structures and practices with the experience of openness and of the open morality." (13) At issue here is how the unrest or tension involved in the truth of existence leads to an individual's self-realization.

Due caution must be taken in attributing ethical positions to Voegelin's understanding of political reality. Voegelin played his cards close to the vest; he was reluctant to assign too much content to the experiences of the Ground in whatever mode. He kept his remarks lean and athletic as stated in The New Science of Politics: "... the fact of revelation is its content." (14) Yet the evidence is clear enough that Voegelin was never casual, though routinely careful, about the role of ethics in statecraft. In his Autobiographical Reflections, recalling Max Weber's lectures on Wissenschaft und Politik, Voegelin saw what was at stake in differentiating between an ethics of intention (Gesinnungsethik) and an ethics of responsibility (Verantwortungsethik). Voegelin, like Weber, was on the side of taking responsibility for the consequences of one's action. Expropriating the expropriators, for example, entails responsibility for the misery of those expropriated. (15) Political action "involves [one] in guilt, and ... the responsibility for political effects rests squarely on the man who makes himself a cause." (16) Politicians who vouchsafe the moral quality of their acts by categorical ideals flirt with a sort of demonism in having "associated the quality of a divine command to a human velleity." (17)

The righteous man maintains his desires and his responsibilities in balance, and so it is with the state. The statesman may teach as much by what he is as by what he says. Voegelin's analysis of Solon's reforms is a case in point.

  He created the type of lawgiver, the nomothetes, in the classical
  sense, not for Hellas only, but as a model for mankind. He was a
  statesman, not above the parties, but between them; he shared the
  passions of the people and thus could make himself accepted as one of
  them in politics; and he could act with authority as the statesman for
  the people, because in his soul those passions had submitted to
  universal order. The Eunomia he created in the polis was the Eunomia
  of his soul. (18)

The difficulties Solon encountered in grasping "the invisible measures of right judgment" reflected the statesman's need for an existential power, a special quality, if his action is to mediate between the poles of the tension.

Voegelin cited Aristotle's characterization of phronesis--the understanding that guides ethical virtue--as that special quality for the adjustment of existential tension. This process of adjustment "has not received much attention" and, insofar as Voegelin was aware, represents the driving force "that gives weight to any understanding of ethics, not only Aristotle's." (19) Following a discussion of virtue as a mean between extremes, Aristotle attributes to concrete action a higher degree of truth than to general principles of ethics. The mark "of a man with high moral standards is his ability to see the truth in each particular moral question, since he is ... the standard and measure for such questions." (20) Ethics in politics, then, is not merely announcing moral postulates or retreating before the complexities of the world. What matters, said Voegelin, are

  not correct principles about what is right by nature in an immutable
  generality, nor the acute consciousness of the tension between the
  immutable truth and its mutable application (possibly even with tragic
  overtones), but the changeability, the kineton itself, and the methods
  to lift it to the reality of truth. The truth of existence is attained
  when it becomes concrete, i.e., in action. (21)

In classical and Christian ethics, the first of the moral virtues is sophia or prudentia because without adequate understanding of the structure of reality, including the conditio humana, moral action with rational coordination of means and ends is impossible. (22)

Voegelin's characterization of the spoudaios (who sees the "truth in concrete things") carries an important moral message for the democratic statesman. No amount of single tangible facts imparted through education can substitute for the type of experience that pushes great men to the limits of their human possibilities. The knowledge of the statesman grows out of the eternal laws by which man moves in the social world. The validity of those laws, the Aristotelian truth that man is a political animal, does not derive from "objective" facts in conformity with the mathematizing models of the natural sciences. The key to those laws of man lies in the practical wisdom through which the statesman elevates his experiences into universal laws of human nature. (23) Historical examples of statesmanship, as Henry Kissinger has written, involve the leader in what is "essentially a moral act: an estimate which depended for its validity on a conception of goals as much as on an understanding of the available material, which was based on knowledge but not identical with it." (24) Such a leader finds in the contingencies of the social world the concretizations of eternal laws. The statesman's historic task is seeking victory while situated at an uneasy juncture between fate and freedom, necessity and chance.

Niebuhr, Christian Realism, and Democracy

One of Reinhold Niebuhr's lasting contributions to American intellectual life was recognizing the obligation of individuals in a democracy to bring their thoughts and actions under the guidance of moral law. To his powers of moral suasion was added a reminder from the theologian that inherent defects of the human will operate inevitably to thwart that ongoing obligation. We must strike a balance between excessive optimism about the motives of men and an excessive pessimism about their potentialities. Niebuhr wrote:

  A free society requires some confidence in the ability of men to reach
  tentative and tolerable adjustments between their competing interests
  and to arrive at some common notions of justice which transcend all
  partial interests. A consistent pessimism in regard to man's rational
  capacity for justice leads to absolutistic political theories; for
  they prompt the conviction that only preponderant power can coerce the
  various vitalities of a community into a working harmony. But a too
  consistent optimism in regard to man's ... inclination to grant
  justice to his fellows obscures the perils of chaos which perennially
  confront every ... free society.... If these perils are not
  appreciated, they may overtake a free society and invite the
  alternative evil of tyranny. (25)

He averred that it is "man's capacity for justice" which "makes democracy possible" and "man's inclination to injustice" which "makes democracy necessary." (26)

Attention must now turn to how Voegelin's defense of the open society finds expression in Niebuhr's recourse to Christian realism as a way to understand the moral underpinnings of democracy. Discussion about the role of realism in American politics and diplomacy typically occurs at the intersection of political theory and public policy. Niebuhr's rejection of "moralistic" and "scientific" schemes that bear no relationship to contingent political realities; his indictment of those who would substitute the formulation of humanitarian principles for the ambiguities of day-today statesmanship; his recognition of the national interest as a primary fact of international politics; his refusal to seek an island of purity in history; his critique of utopian liberal illusions which treat "power politics" as a temporary phenomenon soon to be eradicated through the force of vigorous "crusades"--all this takes place within the realist school of politics. (27) Christian realism, in the Niebuhrian idiom, is neither cynicism nor ruthless Machiavellianism. His faith drew upon a vision of the Kingdom of God, a beatific vision which is the judge and lure of all human action. By illuminating both the misery and grandeur of man, Christian realism can serve as a textbook for the wise politician and diplomat. (28)

Niebuhr never presumed to be a systematic thinker or a formal theologian. He spoke self-mockingly of his "bastardized theology." His thought, as Martin Marty points out, was grounded in the perception that he was a servant and, in some ways, a prophet to America-in-praxis. His life and work confirmed Tocqueville's testimony to "the strong pragmatic interest of American Christianity in comparison with European Christianity." (29) For Roger Shinn, Niebuhr "was a spirited polemicist, and he built a reputation as a scourge of utopians." (30) Niebuhr's social ethics cannot be isolated from his Biblical faith in God who transcends history but who also is active in history as creator, judge, and redeemer. The justification for his faith inheres in the revelation of God in Christ; the range of his Christology is centered on the cross, understood as the revelation of the forgiving love of God in relation to man's sin. Niebuhr's theological teaching about human nature speaks to the limits of what should be attempted in society, thereby becoming one of the factors which determine the direction of ethical action. (31)

Niebuhr's Gifford Lectures, delivered at Edinburgh in 1939, centered upon a realistic theory of human nature. He began with a question: "Man has always been the most vexing problem. How shall he think of himself?" (32) Any affirmation he makes involves him in contradictions. A consistent emphasis on man's unique and rational endowments is betrayed all too easily by man's brute nature and lust for power. Similarly, if man comes to pessimistic conclusions about himself, his very capacity for such judgments would appear to negate the content of those judgments. How can man be "essentially" evil if, indeed, he knows himself to be so? The vantage point from which man indulges his insignificance turns out to be a rather significant vantage point. "When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained; What is man that thou art mindful of him"? (Psalms 8:4). The paradoxes of selfhood raise the question of doing justice, at one and the same time, to the uniqueness of man as well as to his affinities with nature.

According to Niebuhr, the antinomies of human nature are to be distinguished from the manner in which mind and body are separated in classical rationalism, that is, the mind being the seat of virtue and able to bring all impulses into order; the body, from which come lust and ambitions, being the cause of evil. (33) Augustine's realism treated the self as an integral unity of mind and body, certainly something more than mind and able to use intellect and reason for its purposes. The self ultimately has a mysterious identity and integrity transcending its functions of mind, memory, and will. "These three things, memory, understanding, and love, are mine and not their own," Augustine declared, "for they do what they do not for themselves but for me: or rather I do it by them. For it is I who remember by memory and understand by understanding and love by love." (34)

In addition, Augustine's conception of evil which threatens the human community on every level is a corollary of selfhood. (35) Self-love, rather than being some residual impulse which the mind has not yet fully mastered, is regarded as the source of evil. Excessive love of self, conceived as hubris or superbia, is the consequence of the self's abandonment of God as its true end. Niebuhr's political thought draws extensively on the Augustinian precept that the power of self-love is more spiritual than the "lusts of the body," and that this love corrupts the processes of the mind more than Greek thinkers imagined. "For he who extols the whole nature of the soul as the chief good and condemns the nature of the flesh as if it were evil, assuredly is fleshly both in the love of the soul and in the hatred of the flesh." (36) Augustine's position had two important consequences for Niebuhr's Christian realism. First, it bolstered his refutation of modern charges that the Christian faith is dualistic and generates contempt for the body. Second, it gave expression to the spiritual dimension of those forces of recalcitrance which manifest themselves on all levels of human community.

Voegelin also pointed out that the experience of tension towards transcendent being carried over into the vocabulary of love, hope, and faith in St. Paul and the Letter to Romans. (37) "Anxiety," Kierkegaard declared, "is the dizziness of freedom," but it is significant that the same freedom which tempts to anxiety also contains the ideal possibility of knowing God. The anxiety of unbelief is not merely the fear which comes from the ignorance of God. St. Paul observed that man is without excuse inasmuch as "the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead" (Romans I:20). Faith in the providence of God is a necessity of freedom because, without it, the anxiety of freedom tempts man to seek a self-sufficiency and self-mastery incompatible with his dependence on forces which he does not control. (38)

Hope, a form of faith, looks to the future where infinite possibilities are realized and which would otherwise be a realm of terror if not under the providence of God. The world of freedom, in which spirit must meet spirit, is so obscured (due to man's individuality and uniqueness) that human beings constantly sink to the level of things in their imagination. The injunction, "love thy neighbor as thyself," is preceded both by the commandment, "love thy Lord thy God," and by the directive, "be not anxious." Christian ethics, Niebuhr believed, are not counsels of perfection or theological virtues of the sort which simply complete an already incomplete natural goodness or virtue. (39) The presence of sin neither destroys the structure of virtue by which man fulfills his rational and intellectual potential nor dispenses with the moral obligation toward the essential nature of his being.

The experience of anxiety signals the tension intrinsic to the spiritual state of man, standing in the paradoxical situation of freedom and finiteness. Human capacities for good and evil are derived from this spiritualization. Analyzing the survival impulse at the core of human ambition, Niebuhr explained how this impulse cannot be easily disentangled from its two forms of spiritualization. One form is how the will-to-live, to fulfill the potentialities of life, is transmuted into the will of self-realization. This awareness is itself subject to the further paradox that the highest form of self-realization results from self-giving (though, as Niebuhr advised, not as an intended consequence without there being a certain degree of moral impairment to the integrity of the act), for: "He that findeth his life shall lose it; and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it" (Matthew 10:39). (40)

A second dimension of this spiritualization is how the will-to-live is transformed into the will-to-power. Having the intelligence to anticipate the perils in which he stands in nature and history, man seeks security by enhancing his power, individually and collectively. Those who attain the pinnacle of power and glory easily deceive themselves by assuming they have conquered insecurity. However, the price of invulnerability is purchased with an escalating fear of tumbling from eminence. (41)

  The will-to-power is ... an expression of insecurity even when it has
  achieved ends ... which seem to guarantee complete security. The fact
  that human ambitions know no limits must ... be attributed ... to an
  uneasy recognition of man's finiteness, weakness and dependence, which
  become the more apparent the more we seek to obscure them.... [and]
  there is no level of greatness and power in which the lash of fear is
  not at least one strand in the whip of ambition. (42)

The fact that the two contradictory impulses are compounded with each other, on all levels of human life, makes simple ethical distinctions between good and evil, between selfishness and altruism, unconvincing.

But lust for power, if universal, cannot be normative, for man is also a being who transcends himself indefinitely and is saved only as love draws him from self-love. (43) In Moral Man and Immoral Society, Niebuhr quoted Shelley's Prometheus, advocating

  hope, till hope creates
  From its own wreck the thing it contemplates. (44)

To know both the law of love as a final standard and the law of self-love as a persistent force enables moral man to build "a foundation for a pragmatic ethic in which power and self-interest are used, beguiled, harnessed and deflected for the ultimate end of establishing the highest and most inclusive possible community or justice and order." (45) Niebuhr, on a par with Voegelin, argued that no political decision should be reached solely in terms of broad principles, whether of "liberalism" or "conservatism," of "freedom" or "justice." History attests to the damage inflicted upon society by general, abstract programs, serving as weapons of warring groups and classes. Niebuhr hoped that Christianity could aid in the quest for political justice by setting "all propositions of justice under the law of love, [thereby] resolving the fruitless debate between relativists and legalists and [by] creating the freedom and maneuverability necessary to achieve a tolerable accord among men and nations...." (46) Love serves the prophetic function of inspiring self-criticism of political actions and assists in the identification of mutual interests which reason corrupted by passions might otherwise obscure.

Niebuhr, also like Voegelin, gravitated toward Max Weber's ethics of responsibility and developed a pragmatic conception of political ethics that never lost sight of higher ideals. Since human motives are the most illusive of psychological data, the social consequences of an action or policy should be regarded as more adequate tests of its morality than hidden motives. Good motives had to be judged according to circumstances of time and place. At the same time, Niebuhr's realism avoided a narrow consequentialism expressed in mechanical terms of the greatest good of the greatest number. A political action cannot "be said to be wholly good merely because it seems to make for ultimately good consequences." (47) Immediate consequences must be weighed against long-term consequences. For example, the destruction of a life, or the suppression of freedom, results in the immediate destruction of moral values. The pragmatic and moral statesman, however, must "consider all the factors in asocial situation and ... have a flexibility in tactics which does justice to momentary contingencies while maintaining an inflexibility in strategy which does justice to the basic principles of human society." (48)

Niebuhr's Christian realism reflected his enthusiasm for the virtues of an open society, one which allows freedom to all religious traditions, and also encourages the freedom to criticize these traditions through the disciplines of an empirical and historical culture. (49) Democracy undergirds the open society as a valid form of political organization which does justice to the two dimensions of human existence: to man's spiritual stature and his social character. While the libertarian character of democracy may exalt the individual at the expense of the community, the emphasis on liberty contains a valid element, which transcends excessive individualism. Both the individual and the community prize freedom "so that neither communal nor historical restraints may prematurely arrest the potencies ... in man's essential freedom and which express themselves collectively as well as individually." (50) On the eve of America's entry into the Second World War, Niebuhr offered a classic defense of the open society:

  ... a democratic or open society is not a perfect society; on the
  contrary, it allows its imperfections to be published abroad. It is a
  society which permits and even encourages criticism of itself in light
  of universal standards.... Such a society keeps alive the concern for
  objective truth. Such a society enables persons to keep their
  integrity as persons without ... fear of the secret police. Such a
  society permits minorities to organize for the purpose of changing its
  policies.... The reasons [why] this ... democratic freedom is right is
  that there is no historical reality, whether it be church or
  government ... which is not involved in the flux and relativity of
  human existence; which is not subject to error and sin; and which is
  not tempted to exaggerate its errors and sins when they are made
  immune to criticism. (51)

Conclusion

The works of Voegelin and Niebuhr illustrate how ethical judgments about open and democratic societies are shaped by inquiry into the structure of reality and hierarchy of being. Voegelin's discussion of the truth of existence as one of tension in what Plato called the metaxy, or "Between," and Niebuhr's explication of the anxiety man experiences from being both a creature and creator of history, illumine the range of moral potential in human nature.

True freedom requires both the knowledge of the good and the will to choose the good when known. The denial of either is a denial of freedom, and a denial of freedom is the rejection of that moral agency in which man fulfills his humanity. The general principles in terms of which we search for proximate solutions to our problems ought, then, to be the same for all times and for all peoples. That we will inevitably fall short of knowing the good in its completeness and acting upon it unselfishly in every instance--so much we must concede to our intellectual and moral infirmities--but only in the ever constant effort to transcend our limitations with the help of God can man's freedom be harvested. (52) When applied to political life, this freedom requires the exercise of practical reason (Aristotelian prudence) by mature men of common sense (the spoudaioi).

Democracies, if truly open, also recognize that there are aspects of human life which the state may not legitimately control; and that recognition has its roots, when it is recognized, in the teachings of the Christian religion. As Niebuhr would remind us, however, the form in which the authority of God is recognized is perhaps less important than the recognition of the authority itself. Michael Polanyi pointed to the temperance of moral aspiration at the core of the open society:

  ... a free society is not simply an "open one," a society in which
  anything goes. It is a society in which men, being engaged in various
  activities whose ends are considered worthy of respect, are allowed
  the freedom to pursue these ends. A free society is ... one whose
  citizens are committed to ... various ideal ends (such as truth) and
  therefore one that is able to respect the free activities of its
  citizens in pursuit of such ends. It cannot be a free society by being
  open on matters such as these, that is by being neutral with respect
  to truth and falsehood, justice and injustice, honesty and fraud. (53)

In short, Voegelin and Niebuhr cannot teach us what we must think and do today, but they can teach us something that is more difficult to learn and more worth learning: how to think and how to act and how to bring our thinking to bear upon the issues of the day. They teach us not by examples to be mechanically repeated, but through the intellectual and moral qualities that have gone into their work.

1. Thomas M. Greene, Liberalism: Its Theory and Practice (Austin, Tex., 1958), 23. 2. Charles H. McIlwain, Constitutionalism: Ancient and Modern (Ithaca, N.Y., 1940). 3. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago, 1952), 189. 4. V. E. Demant, Theology of Society (London, 1947), 64-66. 5. The New Science of Politics, 131. 6. Eugene Webb, Eric Voegelin: Philsopher of History (Seattle, 1981), 159-60. 7. Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. A. Andra and C. Brereton (New York, 1935), 25. 8. Ellis Sandoz, The Voegelinian Revolution (Baton Rouge, 1981), 121n. 9. Eric Voegelin, "Immortality: Experience and Symbol," Harvard Theological Review 40 (July 1967), 239. 10. Eric Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, Vol. IV of Voegelin, Order and History (Baton Rouge, 1974), 350. 11. Voegelin cited by Dante Germino, "Preliminary Reflections on the Open Society: Bergson, Popper, and Voegelin," in The Open Society In Theory And Practice, ed. Dante Germino and Klaus von Beyme (The Hague, 1974), 20-21. 12. The New Science of Politics (Chicago, 1952), 122. 13. See Germino, "Preliminary Reflections," 25. 14. I am grateful to Ellis Sandoz for his helpful comments on this feature of Voegelin's thought. Letter to Author, 19 June 1996. See also Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, 78. 15. Eric Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections, ed. Ellis Sandoz (Baton Rouge, 1989), 11-12. 16. The New Science of Politics, 15. 17. Ibid., 17. 18. Voegelin, The World of the Polis, 199. 19. Voegelin, Anamnesis, trans. Gerhart Niemeyer (Notre Dame, 1978), 62. 20. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (New York, 1962), 64. 21. Voegelin, Anamnesis, 63. 22. The New Science of Politics, 169. 23. See Hans J. Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (Chicago, 1646), 219-20. 24. Henry A. Kissinger, A World Restored (New York, 1964), 325. 25. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (New York, 1944), xii-xiii. 26. Ibid. 27. Gordon Harland, The Thought of Reinhold Niebuhr (New York, 1960), 192-93. 28. Kenneth W. Thompson, "Prophets and Politics," Christian Century 15, No. 8 (May 16, 1955), 61. 29. Martin Marty's comments on Niebuhr and Tocqueville can be found in "Reinhold Niebuhr: Public Theology and the American Experience," in The Legacy of Reinhold Niebuhr, ed. Nathan A. Scott, Jr. (Chicago, 1975), 12. 30. Roger Shinn, "Realism, Radicalism, and Eschatology in Reinhold Niebuhr: A Reassessment," in The Legacy of Reinhold Niebuhr, 85. 31. John C. Bennett, "Reinhold Niebuhr's Social Ethics," in Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious, Social, and Political Thought, ed. Charles W. Kegley and Robert W. Bretall (New York, 1956), 46, 48. See also Bennett's Christian Realism (New York, 1952), xi, 18n, 27-28, 44, 47-48, 56, 75, 97. 32. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, Vol. 1, Human Nature (New York, 1943), 1. 33. Voegelin would take exception with Niebuhr's tendency to make rigid distinctions between the so-called natural reason of the Greek philosophers and the theology of the Christian Fathers. Voegelin explained how Plato coined the term theology as well as important revelatory dimensions in the tradition of Hellenic philosophy. 34. St. Augustine, The Trinity, 15.5. 35. Reinhold Niebuhr, Christian Realism and Political Problems (New York, 1953), 152-53. 36. St. Augustine, The City of God, 15.5. 37. See Voegelin's discussion of this point in Conversations With Eric Voegelin, ed. Eric S. O'Connor (Montreal, 1980), 9. 38. Human Nature, 271. 39. Ibid., 272. 40. The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, 19. 41. Ibid., 20. 42. Human Nature, 194. 43. Largely absent from Niebuhr's analysis is any sustained attention to the noetic self of Hellenic philosophy. For Aristotle, the first existential virtue in the self-treatment of man is to have some respect for the organ (or psyche) in himself by which he is aware of, and desires a life towards, the Ground of existence. "Self-love, in the sense not of a satisfaction of passions but of having due respect for the cultivation of the noetic self--that is the divineness, the divine part, in man." See Conversations With Eric Voegelin, 9-10. 44. Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York, 1932), 25. 45. Reinhold Niebuhr, "Christian Faith and Social Action," in J. Hutchison, ed. Christian Faith and Social Action (New York, 1953), 241. 46. Niebuhr, Christian Realism and Political Problems, 110-11. 47. Moral Man and Immoral Society, 170-71. 48. Reinhold Niebuhr, "The Limits of Liberty," Nation 154 (January 24, 1942), 88. 49. Reinhold Niebuhr, Man's Nature and His Communities (New York, 1965), 15. 50. The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, 3-5. 51. Reinhold Niebuhr On Politics, ed. Harry Davis and Robert Good (New York, 1960), 185-86. 52. See John H. Hallowell, The Moral Foundations of Democracy (Chicago, 1973), 112-13. 53. Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch, Meaning (Chicago, 1975), 196-97.

GREG RUSSELL is Chairman of the Department of Political Science at the University of Oklahoma, Norman.