The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin

Published in Vienna in 1936, The Authoritarian State by Eric Voegelin has remained virtually unknown to the public until now. Sales of the German edition were halted following the Nazi invasion of Austria in 1938, & the entire printing was later destroyed by wartime bombing. In this volume, Voegelin offers a critical examination of the most prominent European theories of state & constitutional law of the period while providing a political & historical analysis of the Austrian situation. He discusses the dismissal of Parliament in 1933, the civil war, the murder of Federal Chancellor Dollfuss, the adoption of the "Authoritarian Constitution" of 1934, & the predicament of being sandwiched between Hitler & Mussolini. A radical critique of Hans Kelsen's pure theory of law lies at the heart of this work, marking Voegelin's definitive departure from Neo-Kantian epistemology. For the first time, Voegelin elaborates on the important distinction between theoretical concepts & political symbols as a basis for explaining the nontheoretical & speculative character of ideologies, both left & right. He shows that total & authoritarian are symbols of ideological self-interpretation that have no theoretical value, a distinction basic to his later work in The New Science of Politics. Available for the first time in English, The Authoritarian State is a valuable addition to the Voegelin canon & to the field of intellectual history in general.