Hans-Jörg Sigwart
Some Principles of Voegelinian Hermeneutics –
Eric Voegelin´s Reading of Jean Bodin
Paper presented at the 21
st
annual meeting of the Eric Voegelin Society, at the annual
conference of the American Political Science Association, 2005, Washington, D.C.
(PROVISIONAL VERSION)
How did Eric Voegelin read texts? In which way and to what extend did his reading of
other authors influence his own thinking? Or to put it in a more analytical question: Is it
possible to identify certain hermeneutical principles of what could be called Eric Voegelin´s
philosophical art of understanding? These questions periodically reappear in discussions on
Eric Voegelin. That it seems to be particularly difficult to answer them may be partly due to
Voegelin´s work itself. For while other hermeneutical philosophers (and I think Voegelin can
be rightfully labeled this way) explicitly and more or less elaborately addressed these
questions, Voegelin himself seems to remain rather silent in this respect. It seems as if in
order to identify such general principles of Voegelin´s hermeneutics they have to be
hermeneutically extracted from his numerous material studies. In the following very tentative
reflections I want to suggest a few aspects that may be worth considering regarding such
possible principles of “Voegelinian hermeneutics”.
I want to consider some early texts in
which Voegelin at least incidentally reflects on “methodical” questions, and I want to
primarily focus on Voegelin´s reading of Jean Bodin. For Voegelin´s interpretation of this
thinker in my opinion is particularly instructive in this respect.
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I thus pick up a question that in a similar way was treated (yet in a much broader perspective than intended
here), for instance, already by Thomas Hollweck in his 1981 article on the method of Voegelin’s scholarly work
(Thomas Hollweck, Gedanken zur Arbeitsmethode Eric Voegelins, in: Philosophisches Jahrbuch, Vol. 88
(1981), p. 136-152), by Jürgen Gebhardt (see, for instance, Gebhardt’s article Eric Voegelin und die neuere
Entwicklung der Geisteswissenschaften, in Zeitschrift für Politik, 36 (1989), p. 251-263) and Barry Cooper (see
his chapter on „Method: Voegelin, Strauss, and Arendt in: Barry Cooper, Eric Voegelin and the Foundations of
Modern Political Science, Columbia and London (Univ. of Missouri Press) 1999, p. 120 ff.). I owe these texts
various hints and informations.
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