Eric Voegelin (12)

Liberalism: station on the road of disintegration

From From Enlightenment to Revolution, ed. John H. Hallowell, Duke University Press, 1975 (pp 140, 143–144):

It is impossible to understand the graveness of the Western crisis unless we realize that the cultivation of values beyond [the classical liberal] Littré's formula of civilization as the dominion of man over nature and himself by means of science is considered by broad sectors of Western society to be a kind of mental deficiency.

... [W]e can lay our finger on the principal structural problem of the Western crisis. Its structure is that of a gradual decomposition of civilizational values, consummated historically by repeated upheavals which destroy, or intend to destroy, the social bearers of the condemned values. Between the upheavals we find periods of stabilization at the respective levels of destruction. The attitudes toward this ... crisis may differ. In the case of Comte we see the great intramundane eschatologist ... who anticipates its end, and who 'plans' the new age. On the other side ... the liberal ... is satisfied by the amount of destruction worked up to this point and ... is ready to settle down in the ruins .... He is willing to participate in revolution until civilization is destroyed to the point which corresponds to his own fragmentary personality.

... Since the process of decomposition does not stop, [the liberal] is pressed more and more into a conservative position, until, in our time, the few surviving specimens of the genus are labelled as reactionary .... The liberal Positivist reduces the meaning of humanity to the dominion, by science, over nature and man, and thereby deprives man of his spiritual life and freedom; the dictatorial eschatologist collects the castrates and grafts his own spirit on them. The one plays into the hands of the other ...

Eric Voegelin (11) and (10)