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Race and State (CW2) (Hardcover)
Eric Voegelin; Volume editing by Klaus Vondung; Translated by Ruth Hein
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Discovery Miles 17 130
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Race and State is the second of five books that Eric Voegehn wrote
before his emigration to the United States from Austria in 1938.
First published in Germany in 1933, the year Hitler came to power,
the study was prompted in part by the rise of national socialism
during the preceding year. Yet Voegelin neither descended to the
level of contemporary debates on race nor dismissed these debates
by way of value judgments. Although still young when he wrote this
book, Voegelin already demonstrates his singular analytical
capacity as well as his ability to put political phenomena into a
new perspective. In Part I Voegelin analyzes contemporary race
theories by placing the question of race in the context of the more
comprehensive philoiophical problem of the interrelationships of
body, mind, and soul. He demonstrates the intellectual shortcomings
and theoretical fallacies of current theories; more important, he
contributes to the development of a modern philosophical
anthropology that aims, as Helmuth Plessner put it in a review of
Race and State, "at a concept of the human being that does justice
to its multilayered existence as a physical, vital, psychic, and
intellectual being, without making one of these layers the measure
and explanatory basis for the others." In Part II Voegelin deals
with race ideas, which he distinguishes from race theories. Race
ideas, like other political ideas, form a part of political reality
itself, contributing to the formation of social groups and
societies. Voegelin shows that the modern race idea is just one
"body ideal" among others, such as the tribal state and the Kingdom
of Christ, each offering a different symbolic image of community.
He traces the rise of the modem race idea, analyzes its function to
structure community, and offers an answer to the question of why
race ideas became successful in Germany. Voegelin's meticulous
sifting of all the Nazi race literature finally arrives at this
blunt statement regarding its overall validity: "In order to
preclude even the slightest possibility of a misunderstanding, let
us again point out emphatically that the contrasting descriptions
of the Semitic and the Aryan, the Jewish and the German character .
. . contain little that is true about the nature of Jewishness.
In The History of the Race Idea: From Ray to Carus, Eric Voegelin
places the rise of the race idea in the context of the development
of modern philosophy. The history of the race idea, according to
Voegelin, begins with the post-Christian orientation toward a
natural system of living forms. In the late seventeenth century,
philosophy set about a new task--to oppose the devaluation of man's
physical nature. By the middle of the eighteenth century the effort
of philosophy was to place man, with his variety of physical
manifestations throughout the world, within a systemic order of
nature. Voegelin perceives the problem of race as the epitome of
the difficulties presented by this new theoretical approach. Part I
covers the development of race theories from the English naturalist
John Ray to Blumenbach and Kant. Voegelin, anticipating fairly
recent genetic insights, explains that human beings must be seen as
one species, different races must not be interpreted as emerging
from separate species. In Part II, Voegelin discusses the evolution
of the concepts of the body, the organism, and the person. The
finite image of the person as a body-mind unit in which body is
equal to mind in value provides the basis for Carl Gustav Carus'
theory of race, the first significant racial ideology, in
Voegelin's estimation. Voegelin's complex analysis levels a
scathing critique at Nazi pretensions. He writes: "Compared to its
classical form, the current condition of race theory is one of
decay. . . . [T]hese men, with no eyes for the brilliance of the
German spirit, want to interfere in human relations and ultimately
presume to explicate the German nation to us and to the world--an
undertaking with evil consequences. . . . [The] great thinkers of
the past would have been horrified at somebody finding in himself
all the traits of the Nordic race with the help of a book on
anthropology and then imagining himself to be somebody special who
does not have to do anything else. "Let us now take a look at
contemporary race theory--we will see an image of destruction. . .
. It is a nightmare to think that we should recognize the people
whom we follow and whom we allow to come near us not by their
looks, their words, and their gestures, but by their cranial
index." Ultimately, Voegelin dismisses any attempt to reduce the
human being-his existence, appearance, or actionsto a lower level:
"Man as mind-body and historical substance cannot be explained' by
an element that is less than man himself.
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