The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 1
On the Form of the American Mind
Edited with an Introduction by Jürgen Gebhardt and Barry Cooper
Translated from the German by Ruth Hein
In 1924, not quite two years after receiving his doctorate from the
University of Vienna, Eric Voegelin was named a Laura Spelman
Rockefeller Memorial Fellow and thus given the opportunity to
pursue postdoctoral studies in the United States. For the next
twenty-four months, Voegelin worked with some of the most creative
scholars in America and at several of the country's great
universities, an experience that undoubtedly influenced his
scholarly and personal perspectives throughout his life. A more
immediate result was the publication in 1928 of On the Form of
the American Mind, the young philosopher's first major work,
in which his acute perceptions and analyses combine with a
conceptual vocabulary struggling to find its own coherence and
form.
Voegelin begins his inquiry into the form of the American mind with
a complex discussion of the concepts of time and existence in
European and American philosophy and continues with an extended
interpretation of George Santayana, a study of the Puritan mystic
Jonathan Edwards, a presentation on Anglo-American jurisprudence,
and a consideration of the historian, economist, and political
scientist John R. Commons (Voegelin was particularly interested in
Commons' views on the mental, political,social, and economic
aspects of democracy in modern urban and industrial America).
Although admitting that this diversity of themes seems only
loosely connected," Voegelin demonstrates the actual overall unity
of these various subjects: each concerns linguistic expressions of
a theoretical nature.
Analysis of On the Form of the American Mind indicates that
Voegelin integrated the approaches of Lebensphilosophie into
what Georg Misch called the "philosophical combination of
anthropology and history," which characterized contemporary trends
within the discourse of the Geisteswissenschaften and
finally resulted in a theoretical paradigm of philosophical
anthropology.
Jürgen Gebhardt and Barry Cooper provide access to this brilliant
study with their two-part introduction. The first part considers
On the Form of the American Mind in the context of
methodological debates ongoing in Germany at the time Voegelin was
writing the book; the second describes Voegelin's American
experience and compares his work with similar studies written
during the post-World War I period.
About the Author
Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) was one of the most original and
influential philosophers of our time. Born in Cologne, Germany,
he studied at the University of Vienna, where he became a
professor of political science in the Faculty of Law. In 1938, he
and his wife, fleeing Hitler, emigrated to the United States.
They became American citizens in 1944. Voegelin spent much of his
career at Louisiana State University, the University of Munich,
and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. During his
lifetime he published many books and more than one hundred
articles. The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin will make
available in a uniform edition all of Voegelin's major writings.
About the Editors
Jürgen Gebhardt is professor of political science at
the Institute of Political Science of Friedrich-Alexander
University at Erlangen-Nuremberg.
Barry Cooper is professor of
political science at the University of Calgary.
1995. 336 pp. 6 x 9. ISBN 0-8071-1826-5. $42.50s.
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