Modern Age - Fall 2014 - 91

REVIEWS

continental freedom
Meins G. S. Coetsier
Eric Voegelin and the Continental Tradition: Explorations in
Modern Political Thought, edited by Lee Trepanier and Steven F.
McGuire (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2010)

O

riginality and independence of thought
are evident within the continental
tradition. Yet the search for freedom and for
truth has been marked by growing concerns
about the possible collapse of modern West-
ern society. Conscious reflection on the social
order and on the philosophical foundations of
world civilizations has increased steadily since
the middle of the twentieth century. A crisis
within modernity was detected when the
fundamental structures of reality were shaken
by "revolutionary political movements" and
by "totalitarian ideologies" (1). Man's quest
for autonomy in experiences of existence,
transcendence, and truncated reason were
ever more regarded as private and often sus-
pect beliefs. The willed separation of modern
man from "the community of being"-that
is, from God, man, society, and world-by an
act of intellect had now turned into a "sec-
ond," arguably "deformed" reality (4).
The political and philosophical conse-
quences of modernity's predicament and of
the deformations and intrinsic skepticism
of "postmodernity" were severely criticized
by the twentieth-century German-born
Meins G. S. Coetsier is affiliated scholar at Zurich
University and staff member at the Etty Hillesum
Research Centre. He is author of Etty Hillesum and
the Flow of Presence: A Voegelinian Analysis and The
Existential Philosophy of Etty Hillesum: An Analysis of
Her Diaries and Letters.

American political philosopher Eric Voege-
lin (1901-1985). Much of his work argues
against what he called modernity's "Gnostic
Revolt" (4). Voegelin supposes that man's
spiritual freedom and consciousness of
the "fundamental structure of reality" are
threatened by the tendencies of secular or
Gnostic ideologies that attempt to refashion
the world in man's own image. Voegelin
rejects the belief in a transformed reality
through "secret knowledge and social action"
(4). Moreover, he is strongly convinced that
such action toward social-political freedom
is ultimately doomed to failure. Experienc-
ing the rise of National Socialism in Europe
in the 1930s and '40s, Voegelin was alerted
to the consequences of the inherent failure of
modernity's attempt to transform "the order
of reality into some sort of magical utopia"
(5). This not only truncated the experience-
symbolization of man's spiritual freedom; it
cost the price of millions of lives.
Voegelin witnessed how European civili-
zation had fallen into a "spiritual and intel-
lectual malaise" that echoes the prophetic
words of the nineteenth-century German-
Jewish poet Heinrich Heine: "Dort, wo man
Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am
Ende Menschen" ("Where they burn books,
in the end they also burn people"). The
"phenomenon of Hitler" and his success in
the context of an intellectually or morally
ruined society had made religious faith,
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