The Comparative Politics of Eric Voegelin (Part V)
Voegelin’s Comparative Politics
Voegelin’s concepts of life of reason (noetic and pragmatic), viability, clarity of awareness, size, the entrepreneurial economy, the relationship between elites and the masses, and the compatibility between an industrial economy and constitutional democracy all formed a preliminary model of comparative politics. From these essays Voegelin had developed a model of society that consisted of three main components–spiritual and cultural, political, and economic–for analysis. The spiritual and cultural component comprised of the ideas and habits defined from noetic reason, ideology, or anti-complexes; the political adopted institutions of constitutional democracy or dictatorship; and the economic was the realm of pragmatic reason that sought industrial and technological development which could either be an entrepreneurial economy or a state-controlled one. The normative ideal for society, the “good society,” was a constitutional democracy and an entrepreneurial economy because it preserved the classical and Christian traditions; protected the life, freedom, and property of its citizens; and provided a material standard of living for all of its citizens.
Given this model, Voegelin explored how a society could achieve this normative ideal, which in turn raised a series of sub-questions: 1) the “viability” (suitability) of a society to adopt constitutional democracy and/or an entrepreneurial economy given its spiritual, cultural, and economic conditions; 2) the” clarity of awareness” (mass social effectiveness) of certain ideas and habits in the public to make constitutional democracy and an entrepreneurial economy possible; 3) the relationship between elites and the masses with respect to noetic and pragmatic reason; 4) the civic education of a society in preserving and transmitting the classical and Christian traditions of power, reason, and revelation; and; 5) the “size” (resources) of material, population, and territory available for a society to develop an industrial economy that could compete internationally. These issues must be addressed first before any western society considered embracing constitutional democracy and the entrepreneurial economy.
Although grounded in The New Science of Politics, Voegelin’s model of comparative politics–comparing other countries like Germany to the normative ideal of the United States–was fundamentally an empirical account of political reality that one can find in mainstream comparative political science. The problems of size required for economic development, the compatibility between political culture and democratic institutions, how much social capital is needed in societies to function as a democracy, the role of civic education and political socialization for political stability, and the relationships between elites and the public are common topics in mainstream comparative political science. Furthermore, the concepts and theories Voegelin employed in these essays have their equivalents in political science: viability (compatibility among cultural, institutional, economic factors), clarity of awareness (political socialization, social capital, and civic education), and the entrepreneurial economy (rationality of the entrepreneur). In these essays Voegelin was more the political scientist than the political theorist or philosopher.
However, Voegelin’s concepts also provided a normative flavor to his empirical model of comparative politics. While most comparative political scientists also prefer constitutional democracy (but less so with the industrial economy), Voegelin offered philosophical reasons to explain his preference: it preserved the insights of the western classical and Christian traditions of power, reason, and revelation. Such an account is absent among political scientist today, even those who strongly support constitutional democracy in their studies.[i] Rather than providing an explanation why constitutional democracy is preferable to other types of regimes, these political scientists start from the assumption that democracy is the normative standard for all political societies–something that even Voeglein would not assume, particularly for non-western civilizations.[ii]
Voeglein’s explanatory account of his normative approach towards politics therefore is a lesson that mainstream political scientists can learn from and adopt in their own studies. Instead of dividing political science into interpretivist and positivist accounts, political scientists should follow Voeglein’s example of marrying these two approaches–philosophical ideas and arguments with empirical models and political data–to provide a richer and fuller account of political reality.[iii] Granted that Voegelin’s model of comparative politics is limited to western civilization, it nonetheless provides a more robust account and realistic approach to politics by both explaining and describing ideas and facts. To do one or the other is only to provide half of the story and does a disservice not only to public but to political science itself.
[i] For example, the literature on democracy and democratization in comparative politics makes the assumption that liberal democracy is the normative standard for regimes. O’Donnelll et al. Transitions from Authoritarian Rule; Przeworski, Democracy and the Market; Huntington, The Third Wave, Rueschemeyer et al., Capitalist Development and Democracy; Putnam, Making Democracy Work; Boix and Stokes, “Endogenerous Democracy”; Acemoglu and Robinson, Economics Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy.
[ii] For more about non-western civilizations, refer to twenty-first and thirty-second footnotes.
[iii] For more about this divide in political science, refer to Stephen Welch, The Theory of Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Bates, The Centrality of the Regime; and Trepanier, “The Relevance of Political Philosophy and Political Science.”