Eric Voegelin - A Critic of Karl Marx's “Gnostic Socialism”

Abstract

The article is devoted to the criticism of the revolutionary idea of Karl Marx by the great political thinker of the XX century Eric Voegelin (1901-1985). The article shows that Voegelin's criticism of the Marxist doctrine consists of several successive stages. In his works of the late 1930s, he develops the idea of Marxism and communism, which grew up on its ideological basis, as one of the main "political religions" of the XX century. In the 1940s, when Voegelin was living in exile in the United States, he continued to criticize Marxism of Marx, but on a new theoretical basis, at the center of which is the concept of "gnosticism" as the essence of Western modernity. Since the 1950s, Voegelin's interest in Marxism of Marx gradually fades away, and the Marxist doctrine itself is mentioned in his works written in the last decades of his life, rather as an example of one of the variants of "gnosticism" of the XX century in politics. As a theoretical horizon of Voegelin's criticism of the Marxian revolutionary idea, a brief reconstruction of the main propositions of his political theory as an experimental and critical science of the correct order of the soul and society is presented. Voegelin's thesis that the rise of "gnosticism" is the essence of Western modernity is also analyzed in detail, since it serves as the central point of his interpretation of modern intellectual history. The article shows that the spiritual basis on which the development of the Marxian revolutionary idea took place was the revolt of the young Marx against God and his desire to eliminate the higher, transcendent and creative divine principle from the picture of the world of modern man. Voegelin's final conclusion, proposed by him in the framework of criticism of the Marxian revolutionary idea, is that the political success of Marxism in the XX century is one of the most significant symptoms of the spiritual decline of Western civilization.