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Krise und Zukunft des Sozialstaates, 3. Auflage
The Authoritarian State:
of the Austrian State
Ruth Hein, Translator
Gilbert Weiss, Editor
A N E S S AY O N T H E P R O B L E M
O F T H E A U S T R I A N S TAT E
e;  d i t o r i a l b oa r d
The Editorial Board wishes to give grateful acknowledgment to
those who have contributed to support publication of this book
and series, including the Earhart Foundation, the Foundation for
Faith in Search of Understanding, the Liberty Fund, Robert J.
Cihak, M.D., and John C. Jacobs Jr. A special thanks for support
h i s t o r i c a l c o m m e n t a ry o n t h e p e r i o d b y
Originally published in 1936 as
Der autoritäre Staat: Ein Versuch über das österreichische
by Verlag von Julius Springer in Vienna
Translation and new material copyright © 1999 by
[Autoritäre Staat. English]
The authoritarian state : an essay on the problem of the Austrian
State / translated from the German by Ruth Hein ; edited with an
introduction by Gilbert Weiss ; editorial commentary on the period
by Erika Weinzierl.
p. cm. — (The collected works of Eric Voegelin ; v. 4)
ISBN 0-8262-1235-2 (alk. paper)
1. Austria—Politics and government—1918–1938. 2. Constitutional
history—Austria. 3. Authoritarianism—Austria. I. Hein, Ruth.
II. Weiss, Gilbert. III. Weinzerl, Erika, 1925– . IV. Title.
V. Series: Voegelin, Eric, 1901– Works. 1989 ; v. 4.
B3354.V8813 1989 v. 4
[JN2012]
193 s—dc21
[320.9436]
98-24586
™ This paper meets the requirements of the
Historical Commentary on the Period by
Part I. “Total” and “Authoritarian” as Symbols
Symbols “Total” and “Authoritarian”
2. The Foundation of Austrian Constitutional
Theory: Baron Eötvös
3. The Constitutional Situation of 1848–1849
4. The Cycles of the Constitutions
5. The Founding of the State in 1918–1920
6. Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law and the Problem of
an Austrian Theory of the State
May 1934)
8. The Core of the Authoritarian State
9. The Authoritarian Chambers
Agencies of the Federal and Provincial Legislatures
Appendix: The Changes in the Ideas on
Goverment and Constitution in Austria since 1918
This edition of The Authoritarian State presents Eric Voegelin’s
fourth book to an American public for the first time. Two years after
its 1936 publication in Vienna by Springer Publishers, when Hitler
invaded Austria in March 1938, sale of the book was stopped immediately. During the war the Springer publishing house was bombed,
and with its destruction the entire edition of The Authoritarian
State was lost. It was not until 1997 that Springer finally reissued
this important early work by Voegelin. It is a happy coincidence that
this American edition can follow so soon after the first reprinting
of the German original.
The Authoritarian State is divided into three parts. Part I provides
a critical examination of the symbols “authoritarian” and “total”
with regard to the most prominent European theories of state and
constitutional law of the time. Part II offers a historical analysis
of the problems specific to the founding of the Austrian state in
1918–20 and connects these problems to constitutional development in the nineteenth century. Part III presents an investigation
into the Austrian situation in the 1930s, the so-called authoritarian
constitution of 1934, its theoretical context (Verfassungslehre), and
the sociopolitical reality underlying these theoretical ideas (Verfassungswirklichkeit). This third part of Voegelin’s book opens with
an in-depth discussion and radical criticism of the pure theory of
law of Hans Kelsen, Voegelin’s early mentor and the “father” of the
Austrian Constitution of 1920. Since Erika Weinzierl’s introduction
to this volume provides detailed information on the historical and
political context of The Authoritarian State, I will limit myself
here to a few remarks concerning its significance within the larger
context of the development of Voegelin’s political theory.
In his Autobiographical Reflections (1973), Voegelin characterizes The Authoritarian State as his first serious attempt to understand the role and structure of ideological systems, both left and
right. For this attempt, the distinction between theoretical concepts
on the one hand and political symbols on the other was of crucial
importance. In the first part of The Authoritarian State, Voegelin
elaborates that distinction as a conceptual basis for explaining the
nontheoretical and speculative character of ideologies. In this context it is shown that “total” and “authoritarian” are symbols of
ideological self-interpretation, but that they have no theoretical
value. This distinction between theoretical concept and political
symbol worked out in 1936 becomes essential to Voegelin’s later
work. In The New Science of Politics (1952), it is reformulated and
further elaborated in terms of the Aristotelian episteme and doxa,
the “language symbols of political science” and the “symbols used
in political reality.”1 In his final writings, after having developed
a highly differentiated philosophy of consciousness as the basis of
his political theory, Voegelin ultimately refines the distinction between theoretical and nontheoretical symbols in terms of “noetic”
and “non-noetic” modes of knowledge2—then entering a field of
experience in which the theoretical concepts are strengthened as
symbolizations of transcendental and cosmic experiences (referred
to by the Platonic metaxy and the Aristotelian metalepsis). This
experiential philosophy of the “late” Voegelin, of course, goes far beyond the original distinction between scientific concept and doxic
symbol. However, Voegelin’s approach to political symbols and
their ideological constructions as elaborated in The Authoritarian
State was not as new for him in 1936 as it might seem after one
reads his Autobiographical Reflections. Already in Race and State
(1933) he had framed his analysis of the political “race idea” and its
adoption in theories of the state with the thesis that “race theories”
and “race ideas” have to be sharply distinguished from each other.
The conclusion of Race and State was therefore a clear criticism
of race (especially in its National Socialist, i.e., racist meaning) as
a theoretical concept.
1. Eric Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections (Baton Rouge, 1989), 41; Voegelin,
The New Science of Politics (Chicago, 1987), 28ff.
2. See, for instance, Eric Voegelin, “Was ist politische Realität?” in Anamnesis:
Zur Theorie der Geschichte und Politik (Munich, 1966), 318ff.
Besides the basic distinction between theoretical concepts and
political symbols, other important elements of the later Voegelin
can be seen in The Authoritarian State. With regard to the content
of the political symbols under investigation, Voegelin uncovers in
the fascist and National Socialist speculations on a “total” state a
“religious idea”3 in which the individual human being is subsumed
into a transpersonal being, that is, a collective totality like Hitler’s
Deutsches Volk or Mussolini’s Italita. This is further explained,
with reference to the Arabian philosopher Averroes (1126–1198), as
an “Averroist” form of speculation that replaces the singularity and
immortality of the individual soul by a collective intellectus uno
in numero.4 Two years later, in 1938, Voegelin extends the argument and describes these political movements, as well as Russian
bolshevism, as “political religions” constructing an intramundane
corpus mysticum, i.e., as replacing the transcendental by a worldlyimmanent summum bonum.5 During the 1940s, in his History of
Political Ideas, Voegelin scrutinizes this thesis in extensive historical studies, which then leads him to his famous definition of
modern gnosticism as an “immanentistic eschatology” in The New
From the perspective of the development of Voegelin’s early political theory, however, the most significant aspect of The Authoritarian State is his fifty-page-long critical discussion of Hans Kelsen’s
pure theory of law and its neo-Kantian frame. This discussion reveals not only Voegelin’s radical departure from his former teacher’s
theory but also his definitive break with neo-Kantian epistemology
in general. Without a doubt, this part of the book can be considered
its theoretical heart. Günther Winkler, in his illuminating introduction to the 1997 reissue of the German original, even notes that
one cannot help feeling that, for Voegelin, the emergence of the
authoritarian constitution in Austria functioned merely as a vehicle
for expressing his criticism of Kelsen.6 Although there were other,
3. Eric Voegelin, The Authoritarian State, 73 herein. Further citations will be
given parenthetically in the text.
4. See also Voegelin’s essay “Siger de Brabant,” in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, IV, No. 4, p. 524.
5. Eric Voegelin, Die Politische Religionen (1938), ed. Peter J. Opitz (Munich,
1993), 49ff.
6. Günther Winkler, “Geleitwort,” in Eric Voegelin, Der autoritäre Staat (Vienna,
1997), xv. This “Geleitwort” is an important biographic source because it focuses
particularly on the personal relationship between the teacher and the student.
professional reasons why Voegelin dealt with the topic—he wanted
to extend his venia legendi from sociology to the field of political
science—this observation definitely bears some truth. Let us briefly
summarize the main points of Voegelin’s criticism.
Already in various writings before 1936, Voegelin had taken an
increasingly negative stance toward Kelsen’s theoretical approach.7
This criticism is most explicitly formulated at the beginning of
Race and State, where Voegelin argues that Kelsen had reduced the
theory of state (Staatslehre) to a theory of law (Rechtslehre), thereby
banishing all sociological, philosophical, and cultural dimensions
from that field. Problems that could not be treated within the realm
of positive law were declared sham problems (Scheinprobleme). In
this context, one aspect completely neglected by Kelsen seems to be
especially crucial for Voegelin: the tracing back of the “normative
sphere” to its roots in the nature of man.8 Because it is still man
who creates and organizes the state, Voegelin regards this point as
a major task of all future theories of state and law; a goal, by the
way, that he set for himself in Race and State. In The Authoritarian
State, he radically strengthens his criticism of Kelsen by extending
it to the entire epistemological framework of the pure theory of
law, culminating in his verdict of a “positivist metaphysics.” What
does Voegelin mean by this? And what consequences does it have
for his own work?
For Voegelin, Kelsen’s “purification” of a theory of state includes
two reductive steps: first, the reduction of state to law, and second,
the reduction of law to a logical system of norms. This limitation
of the object of a theory of state is epistemologically based in neoKantian preassumptions or, rather, in the specific form of neoKantianism developed by the Marburg school (Hermann Cohen,
Paul Natorp).9 Very much simplified, the main point of this neoKantian epistemology is the following: the scientific method constitutes the object of science, and the unity of a scientific object—in
7. See, for instance, Eric Voegelin, “Die Einheit des Rechtes und das soziale
Sinngebilde Staat,” in Internationale Zeitschrift für Theorie des Rechts, V (1930–
31), 58–89, and particularly, Eric Voegelin, “Die Verfassungslehre von Carl Schmitt,”
Zeitschrift für öffentliches Recht, XI (1931), 89–109.
8. Eric Voegelin, Race and State (1933), trans. Ruth Hein, ed. Klaus Vondung
(Baton Rouge, 1997), 7.
9. For more details on neo-Kantianism and its different schools, see Jürgen Gebhardt and Barry Cooper’s introduction to Eric Voegelin, On the Form of the American
Mind (1928), trans. Ruth Hein, ed. Jürgen Gebhardt and Barry Cooper (Baton Rouge,
1995), ix–xlii.
other words, its exact delimitation from other objects—is guaranteed by the unity of a methodological system of categories. As a
consequence, (a) the object, i.e., a certain segment of reality (depending on what discipline is referred to), is always subordinate to
the method that is used to approach it, and (b) since methodology
is a closed system of categories, the object, which is determined
by this closed unity, turns into a “closed” phenomenon as well.
Those aspects of the object that do not fit into the categorical
system are simply not relevant. From the scientific perspective, the
object does not exist before the method with its specific categorical
apparatus comes into play. Ontology is replaced by methodology. To
be sure, neo-Kantianism does not neglect the prescientific reality;
but, and this is the decisive point, it is not relevant to scientific
knowledge and therefore can be ignored. In the context of Kelsen’s
theory of law, this means that the object “state” is constituted
by the normative-logical (normlogisch) method, and its unity is
ensured by the logical unity of the system of categories. This theory
finds its ultimate ground (Letztbegründung) not in reality itself,
i.e., in the reality of state, but in the constitutive act of a transcendental subject of knowledge. Consequently, questions about
the ontological basis (Seinsgrundlagen) of norms are eliminated.
Purity of method means a radical separation of the realm of what
ought to be (Sollenssphäre) from the realm of being (Seinssphäre).
Voegelin calls this theorem “positivist” because it applies the
categorical logic of the natural sciences to the realm of Geisteswissenschaften. That there is no prescientific constitution of meaning
might be true for the reality investigated by the natural sciences. In
this arena, reality becomes meaningful only through the very fact
of the investigation itself, that is, through the description and categorization done by the natural scientist. The phenomenon “man
in society and state” is, however, different. In the social world,
meaning is already there before the social or political scientist starts
an investigation. The state is a meaningful phenomenon existing
independently from the science that investigates it. In this respect,
the later Voegelin speaks of human society as a “cosmion”: “a little
world . . . illuminated with meaning from within by the human beings who continuously create and bear it as the mode and condition
of their self-realization.”10 In 1936, this concept is not yet fully
10. Voegelin, New Science of Politics, 27.
developed; it is still framed by friction with Kelsen’s neo-Kantian
For Voegelin, the transfer of the categorical logic of the natural sciences into the field of the social sciences—which Kelsen
calls “purification”—has further consequences: Kelsen’s object is
indeed a “pure” object, “since by definition it cannot be grasped
under different categories simultaneously, since it is precisely such
categorization that constitutes an object distinct from all others.”
In Voegelin’s view, this clearly represents a prohibition of the discussion of all aspects of the object “state” that go beyond the one
categorical system established by Kelsen. When the state is reduced
to law, and law to an order of norms, then the problems of what
things like demos, nation, and rule mean are theoretically excluded.
But, for Voegelin, it is precisely these problems or rather the neglect
of these problems that has played a crucial role in the creation and
development of the Austrian constitution. As he points out in a
short piece written as a memorandum for the International Studies
Conference on Peaceful Change, held in Paris in 1937 and included
as an appendix to this volume because, written some eight months
before the Anschluss, it shows very well the dramatic character of
the Austrian situation: “The Austrian constitutional problem may
be put in one sentence: Austria is a nationally uniform state without
being a national State. The population of the present territory of
Austria has never formed in history a political unit. Austria has
a long and glorious history, but it is not the history of the present
Austria as an independent body politic; it is the history of Austria as
part of the mediaeval Empire or as an integral and dominating part
of the old Austrian monarchy.” For Voegelin, these problems culminating in the question of “the will to common and independent
political existence” are the problems of the reality and indeed the
very existence of the Austrian state. They become apparent to the
theorist only when state and constitution are seen as phenomena
deeply embedded in the tension between history and society. Since
Kelsen denies the theoretical relevance of that tension, Voegelin
accuses him of “eliminating the state reality from the object of the
theory of the state.”
Voegelin’s interpretation of Kelsen’s system as positivist and
metaphysical is grounded in the fact that, on the one hand, Kelsen
in effect denies historical and social manifestations of the human
mind, but, on the other, makes one major exception to that denial:
the legal norm. “The mind is recognized, but only insofar as it
is a norm.” For Voegelin, this position can hardly be rationally
argued, and that is why Kelsen needs to develop an entire system of
“metaphysical battle concepts” (metaphysische Kampfbegriffe) to
defend his position. As a result, critical questions concerning other
phenomena of the human mind, such as democracy and rule, are
suppressed. In Wissenschaft, Politik, und Gnosis (1959), Voegelin
describes the prohibition of questions in more detail by analyzing the theoretical constructions of Hegel, Marx, and Comte. His
criticism of Kelsen in The Authoritarian State presents only a
first attempt to explain the contradictory combination—typical for
modern ideologies of—a positivistic denial of the existence of the
mind (Seinsleugnung des Geistes) and, at the same time, a metaphysical claim on the mind needed to defend this position, i.e., to
defend the denial.
To properly understand Voegelin’s intellectual position in the
mid-1930s, we should say a few more words about his stage of
theory development at that time. Voegelin started his academic career in the early 1920s as a hermeneutic sociologist in the tradition
of Max Weber. Weber focused on the construction of a categorical
apparatus (Idealtypen) as a necessary medium for “understanding”
social reality; an immediate, direct grasping of reality seemed not
possible for him. This involved a certain degree of theoretical abstraction from reality based on the skeptical attitude of the scientist
toward the object of science. Voegelin’s early writings were very
much influenced by this epistemological attitude. It was primarily
his intense contact with American pragmatism and common sense
philosophy during his stay in the United States from 1924 to 1926
that revealed to him a less abstract, more direct—in other words,
pragmatic—approach to the problems of social and political reality.
When he returned home from the United States, he felt considerably
freer of the neo-Kantian limitations of Weber’s thinking as well
as of the abstract discourses of the German-speaking intellectual
world in general, which increasingly were becoming ideological
discourses. The skeptical position toward reality now turned into
a profound skepticism about the abstract and closed theoretical
constructions themselves. A provisional result of that turn was his
elaboration of the category of the “open self” in contrast to the
construction of a “closed self” in the tradition of transcendental
epistemology.11 This was Voegelin’s first step in moving away not
only from certain epistemological categories but from the modern
epistemological model as a whole. He then began to radically question the strict separation between subject and object, between consciousness and reality, as entities closed from each other. During
those years, he discovered “new” theoretical resources that were
crucial in helping him overcome the cognitivist model of objectification (Vergegenständlichung) and its adoption by the social sciences: these were, on the one hand, the philosophical anthropology
of Helmuth Plessner, Georg Misch, and, particularly, Max Scheler,
and, on the other, the classic and Christian philosophy of Plato,
Aristotle, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas.12 Providing the tools
to understand man as radically open to all realms of being, these resources became the philosophical and anthropological foundations
of Voegelin’s increasingly experiential approach to historical and
social reality. As a consequence, he started to grasp the mutual
relations between man, nature, society, and God without reducing
one sphere of human experience to another. Reality was no more an
external object determined by the a priori structure of a neo-Kantian
subject of cognition but a process in which man participates in a
Later, in his American years, Voegelin further elaborated the
“specifically human mode of participation in reality”13 by developing an “anamnetic” approach to the constitution of the “concrete” consciousness instead of theorizing about consciousness as
an abstract entity. The result was the ultimate reversal of modern epistemology: consciousness is not an inner entity separated
from the outer reality, but an event within reality, and, accordingly, consciousness is constituted by reality, and not the other
way around.14 Something like a transcendental consciousness or
subject has no ground in the “reality of common experience.” The
11. Voegelin, On the Form of the American Mind, 9ff.
12. With regard to Plessner, Misch, and Scheler, see these major writings: Helmuth
Plessner, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch (1928; rpr. Berlin, 1975); Georg
Misch, “Die Idee der Lebensphilosophie in der Theorie der Geisteswissenschaften”
(1924), in Materialien zur Philosophie Wilhelm Diltheys, ed. Frithjof Rodi and Has
Ulrich Lessing (Frankfurt, 1984), 132–46; Max Scheler, Die Stellung des Menschen
im Kosmos (1928; rpr. Munich, 1947).
13. Eric Voegelin, “Remembrance of Things Past,” in Voegelin, Published Essays,
1966–1985, ed. Ellis Sandoz (Baton Rouge, 1990), 306.
14. Ibid., 312ff.
only thing we know from experience, and therefore can talk about,
is the consciousness of concrete human beings living in concrete
social and historical settings. Theories of a pure consciousness are
“imaginative constructions” replacing the reality we experience by
a “second reality.”
In 1936 this distinctive terminology of the later Voegelin was
not yet developed, of course. Nevertheless, the foundation was
sketched out already in The Authoritarian State. Voegelin’s criticism of Kelsen’s pure theory of law and the formative role it played
in the development of the Austrian constitution during the 1920s
and 1930s shows very well the strategies of a “second reality”
construction as well as its consequences—even if it is not yet
Historical Commentary on the Period
by Erika Weinzierl
English translation by Fred Lawrence
When Eric Voegelin as a ten-year-old moved with his family from
his birthplace in Cologne to settle in Vienna, Vienna was still the
capital of a multinational empire whose collapse many of its elite
members either feared or expected in the foreseeable future.1 It
occurred when the defeat in the First World War made possible
the formation of those “succession states” to whose nationalities
the Habsburg monarchy had not accorded the desired autonomy
earlier.2 The political and economic future of the new small republic, which had been prohibited by the victorious powers from
joining with the German Reich (Anschluss), seemed very uncertain.
This uncertainty affected the climate at the universities, especially
at the University of Vienna. Until 1918 its faculty had for the
most part been of a liberal orientation. In the Herrenhaus (Upper
House), whose members had been appointed by the Kaiser, of the
forty-six University of Vienna professors belonging to it between
1861 and 1918, thirty-four were members of the German Liberal
Constitutional Party. The law faculty constituted the largest group,
which is explained by the affinity between law and politics.3 In the
1. For biographical data on Voegelin, see Herbert A. Strauss and Werner Roeder,
eds., International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés, 1933–
1945, Vol. II (Munich, 1983), 1193; and Eric Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections,
ed. Ellis Sandoz (Baton Rouge, 1989).
2. See Robert A. Kann, Das Nationalitätenproblem der Habsburgermonarchie,
1848–1914 (2 vols.; Graz, 1964).
3. Erika Weinzierl, “Universität und Politik in Österreich,” Universitätsreden,
XXXIII (Salzburg, 1969), 6.
First Republic as well, the leading professors—not in terms of party
leadership but in those of sociopolitical influence—were members
of the faculty of law, which indeed is also true of Voegelin.
In the last years of the nineteenth century, particularly the dueling fraternities had become not just increasingly German nationalist, but also more and more anti-Semitic. In 1895 they accepted
the Waidenhofer Resolution, which denied Jewish students the
right to fight a duel. The German nationalist students also opposed
the Habsburg state composed of many nationalities for nationalist
reasons. Hence at the beginning of October 1918 they supported
the proclamation of the Republic and the annexation to the German
Reich. On October 30, 1918, there gathered in the presence of Rector
Beck in the grand ballroom of the University of Vienna about three
thousand students, who demonstrated against Austria’s proposal to
the Entente for a separate peace as a “betrayal of the Habsburgs”
and for annexation to the German Reich. Afterward the students
marched to the parliament, where some of them tore down the
black and yellow flags hoisted there.4 Thus they furnished a precedent for the oft-cited act of the members of the Red Guard, who tore
the white middle stripe out of the flag of the new Austrian nation
on November 12, 1918, during the proclamation of the Republic.5
Under the influence of their war experiences, the German nationalist and Catholic student associations, which had up until then
feuded bitterly, resolved to work together in the universities. In
July 1919 in Wurzburg the general association of “German Student
Corporations” was constituted on a pan-German, nationalist basis,
of which the Austrian Student Corporations formed the Eighth
Administrative District. The association’s central committee in
Berlin was in charge of their business affairs. Nevertheless, the
most important corporate structure was the Deutsche Studententag
(German Student Assembly) that met each year. Like the Wurzburg
Constitution of the several associations, the first district assembly
of the Austrian Student Corporations resolved that only “GermanAryan” students could become members of the German Student
Corporations by matriculation and called for a numerus clausus
4. Paul Molisch, Geschichte der deutschnationalen Bewegung in Österreich von
ihren Anfängen bis zum Zerfall der Monarchie (Jena, 1926); Molisch, Politische
Geschichte der deutschen Hochschulen in Österreich (2nd ed.; Vienna, 1939), 255.
5. Wiener Zeitung und Reichspost, November 13, 1918.
(limited admission) for Jewish students.6 Like the National Socialist
German Student Union, the Waffenring, and the Styrian Home
Defense, a militia group, the German Student Corporations were
dissolved by the Federal Ministry for Education in July 1933.7
Many professors adopted this attitude of the students, whose
anti-Semitic excesses assumed terrorist proportions in the following years8—if they did not already share it anyway. What other
explanation is there for the large participation on the part of the
academic senate and the faculty at the placement of the “Head of
Siegfried” in the university auditorium in 1923,9 or the application
of the term “odd ones” (Ungeraden) to the Jews in committee
meetings of the law faculty in 1925, which was directed against
Jewish colleagues,10 or the introduction of the numerus clausus for
Jewish students through the Student Law of 1930, sponsored by
rector and criminologist Wenzel Graf Gleispach,11 which was only
prevented by a decision of the constitutional court?
The course offerings also were in line with the “interests” of the
majority of the students—the Socialist Student Union was always
only a small minority.12 Although there were abundant offerings
in the departments of history, German, art history, ethnology, and
others in the philosophy faculty that had only to be expanded in
1938, in what follows here we can discuss only the courses in the
departments of law and political science,13 where Eric Voegelin
6. Franz Gall, “Alma mater Rudolphina, 1365–1965,” Die Wiener Universität
und ihre Studenten (3rd ed.; Vienna, 1965), 90.
7. See, among others, Minna Lachs, Warum schaust Du zurück: Errinnerungen,
1907–1941 (Vienna, 1986), 152ff.
8. Erich Witzmann, Der Anteil der waffenstudententischen Verbindungen an den
völkischen und politischen Entwicklung, 1918–1938 (Vienna, 1940), 151ff.
9. Ulrike Davy and Thomas Vasek, Der “Siegfried-Kopf”: Eine Auseinandersetzung um ein Denkmal in der Universität Wien (Vienna, 1991), 10ff.
10. Oliver Rathkolb, “Die Rechts- und Staatswissenschaftliche Fakultät der Universität Wien zwischen Antisemitismus, Deutschnationalismus, und Nationalsozialismus 1938, davor, und danach,” in Willfährige Wissenschaft: Die Universität
Wien, 1938–1945, ed. Gernot Heiss et al. (Vienna, 1989), 197ff.
11. Brigitte Lichtenberger Fenz, “Deutscher Abstammung und Muttersprache”:
Österreichische Hochschulpolitik in der Ersten Republik (Vienna, 1990), 79 ff.
12. Helge Zoitl, “Kampf um Gleichberechtigung: Die sozialdemokratische Studentenbewegung in Wien 1914–1925” (Ph.D. dissertation, Salzburg, 1976), passim.
13. Gernot Heiss, “Von Österreichs deutscher Vergangenheit and Aufgabe: Die
Wiener Schule der Geschichtswissenschaft und der Nationalsozialismus”; Sebastian Meissl, “Wiener Ostmark-Germanistik”; Peter Haiko, “ ‘Verlust der Mitte’ von
Hans Sedlmayr als kritische Form im Sinn der Theorie von Hans Sedlmayr”; Olaf
Bockhorn, “Der Kampf um die ‘Ostmark’: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der national-
studied and taught, and we will focus particularly on Kelsen and
Spann, those antipodes who most interested Voegelin.
In the summer semester of 1919 the new Vienna-born full professor for national economy and social sciences, Othmar Spann
(1878–1950),14 having just come from the Technical University in
Brünn, lectured for one hour per week on the nature and history
of socialism, in addition to his regular main course on finance.
We may conclude on the basis of his published works that in
those lectures he radically rejected socialism.15 Beginning with the
winter semester of 1921–22, Spann entitled the course he had by
then taught several times “History and Critique of Socialism.”
Nevertheless, in those days there was still a certain pluralism of
teaching, thanks to some of the faculty. Already in the winter
semester of 1919–20 two Marxists, Karl Gruenberg (1861–1940) and
his student Max Adler (1873–1937), who had already been teaching
during the monarchy, each also held an hour-long weekly course on
socialism in the same department. In addition, Adler began holding
regular lectures of several hours per week on the theory and history
of socialism, and he continued these until the winter semester
of 1932–33. In the summer semesters of 1922–24 the professor of
constitutional law Hans Kelsen (1881–1973),16 the “father” of the
Austrian Constitution of 1920 and of the “pure theory of law,” dealt
with the political theory of socialism. During those same semesters
he gave a lecture entitled “On Democracy” for an hour a week. Thus
he was the only Vienna professor of the entire period between the
wars to devote a whole series of courses exclusively to democracy,
which he still defended passionately in 1932 when he had already
been teaching for two years at the University of Cologne.17
With Kelsen as well, we may infer that the fundamentals of
the above-mentioned courses coincide with those in his relevant
sozialistischen Volkskunde in Österreich,” all in Willfährige Wissenschaft, 39–76,
133–95, 77–88, 17–38, respectively.
14. J. Hans Pichler, Othmar Spann oder die Welt als Ganzes (Vienna, 1988).
15. Especially Othmar Spann, Der wahre Staat (Jena, 1921), and Hauptpunkte der
universalistischen Staatsauffasung (Berlin, 1931).
16. See especially Rudolf Aladár Metall, Hans Kelsen: Leben und Werk (Vienna,
17. Hans Kelsen, Sozialismus und Staat (1920, 1923, 1965); Vom Wesen und Wert
der Demokratie (1920, 1929).
books.18 In his books, Kelsen, who belonged to no political party and
who was not a Marxist, submitted the Marxist conception of the
death of the state and its anarchist and utopian tendencies to empirical social criticism.19 On the other hand, he defended democracy
and the parliamentary system against the “partisan dictatorships of
left and right,” against “bolshevism and fascism,” as he put it more
succinctly in 1929. In doing so he derived the majority principle of
democracy from freedom and saw in the parliamentary system “the
only real possibility of doing justice to the idea of democracy.”20
After the collapse of the two great totalitarian systems of the
twentieth century the validity of Kelsen’s statement for modern
democracy has been as little refuted as the definition of democracy he presented at the Fifth Sociologists’ Convention in Vienna
in 1926.21 However, Kelsen declared relativism the world view
“which the idea of democracy presupposes”; and he defined democracy itself not as the content of a state but as describing a method
of production.22 Thus, at that time—before the horrors of National
Socialism and bolshevism—he deprived democracy, as well as his
pure theory of law, which could ultimately legitimate every state,23
of its appeal for personal engagement, from which the political
radicalism and mysticism of that period benefited so richly.
This is especially true of Othmar Spann. According to their own
statements, at least four generations of students listened to his
radically antidemocratic and antiparliamentarian lectures on the
universalist society and on the “true, organic corporative state”
“full of enthusiasm, captivated, convinced.”24 Law students were
not the only ones paying attention when Spann expounded: “One
shouldn’t count the votes, but weigh them; not the majority, but
only the best, ought to rule. . . . Only the corporative organization
makes possible in its form the rule of the best. . . . Only those
18. “Verteidung der Demokratie,” published first in the Blättern der Staatspartei,
April 2, 1932 (Berlin); now in Hans Kelsen, Demokratie und Sozialismus: Ausgewählte Aufsätze, ed. Norbert Leser (Vienna, 1967), 60–68.
19. Kelsen, Sozialismus und Staat (3rd ed.), 79.
20. Kelsen, Vom Wesen und Wert der Demokratie (2nd ed.), 2, 9ff., 28ff.
21. Hans Kelsen, Verhandlungen des 5. Soziologentages vom 26.–29.9.1926 in
Wien (Tübingen, 1927), 37ff.
22. Kelsen, Vom Wesen und Wert der Demokratie, 101, 98ff.
23. Kurt Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik
(2nd ed.; Munich, 1983), 75.
24. Hans Raeber, Othmar Spanns Philosophie des Universalismus (Hildesheim,
1961), 155ff.
who are individualists, wanting mechanization and equality, can
be democrats; but those who want a civilized state, who demand
something spiritual of the state, cannot be democrats any more.”25
Spann’s influence upon the Catholic and German nationalist students and some militia groups, with which especially his students
Walter Heinrich and Walter Riehl were in close contact,26 was
considerable. In the 1920s and 1930s students of Spann, such as
Jakob Baxa, Wilhelm Andreae, and Ferdinand Westphalen, taught at
the Universities of Vienna and Graz. However, Spann disapproved
of the Christian corporative state proclaimed by Federal Chancellor
Dollfuss and his government on May 1, 1934, after the civil war of
February 1934. Its constitution will be discussed in more detail
below. For Spann that state was not the realization of his “true”
state.27 In contrast to his students, Spann discontinued his special
courses on corporative issues. During that time he tried—in vain,
alas—to make the National Socialists in Vienna and Berlin understand his ideas,28 which were, however, rejected by the National
Socialists as too intellectualistic and theocratic.
Since 1933 the Gestapo had been keeping an eye on Spann’s
followers living in the German Reich. Immediately after the Anschluss he was arrested at the very moment he was about to empty
a bottle of champagne with his family “to celebrate the finest day of
my life.” For five months he was imprisoned in Munich before being
released for poor health and other reasons. Thereupon he withdrew
to his Mariasdorf property in Burgenland, where he died in 1950.
The National Socialists regarded him as an opponent because he had
openly criticized their primitive racism and radical centralism.29
He was removed from his university chair on April 22, 1938. On the
same day Voegelin’s venia legendi (license to teach) was canceled.30
In part because of the constitutional amendment of 1929, Kelsen
accepted a professorship in Cologne in 1930, and in April 1933 he
25. Othmar Spann, Der wahre Staat (Leipzig, 1921), 109ff., 208, 118.
26. Josef Hofmann, Der Pfrimer-Putsch (Vienna, 1965), 16.
27. Klaus-Jörg Siegfried, Universalismus und Faschismus: Das Gesellschaftsbild
Othmar Spanns. Zur politischen Funktion seiner Gesellschaftslehre und Staatskonzeption (Vienna, 1974), 140ff.
28. Klemens von Klemperer, Konservative Bewegungen zwischen Kaiserreich
und Nationalsozialismus (Munich, n.y.), 222ff.
29. Ibid.; J. Hans Pichler, Othmar Spann oder Die Welt als Ganzes (Vienna, 1988),
63ff.
30. Rathkolb, “Rechts- und Staatswissenschaftliche Fakultät,” 208.
was removed from his office as a “Marxist.” His student and friend
Adolf Merkl, a professor of administrative law, tried in vain to have
him recalled to Vienna. Then Kelsen accepted a chair at the Institut
Universitaire des Hautes Études Internationales in Geneva and a
professorship at the university in his native city of Prague before
emigrating to the United States in 1939.31 World-famous and highly
respected, he died there at Berkeley in 1973 at the age of ninety-two.
The unsettled history of the Austrian Republic in the years between the wars—including the plight of the economy in the early
1930s, 600,000 persons out of work—is assumed here as essentially known to readers. The strength or weakness of democracy
in Austria can be gauged from the Constitution of the Republic of
October 1, 1920, its amendment in 1929, and the corporative state
constitution of May 1, 1934.
One of the most important tasks of the National Constitutional
Assembly elected on February 19, 1919, was to create a new constitution for the young republic. For this purpose a special committee was established to which Chancellor of State Renner, ViceChancellor Fink, Secretary of State Michael Mayr, and the scientific
consultant to the chancellor of state, Hans Kelsen (professor of
constitutional and administrative law at the University of Vienna
since 1919) belonged. Initially, at any rate, the preparations began
only hesitantly. A proposal introduced by the Christian Social Party
in May 1919 was never debated. In the same month, Chancellor
of State Renner, prior to his travels to the peace negotiations at
St. Germain, asked Kelsen to prepare, together with the constitutional department of the state chancellory, a draft of a federal
constitution. During the summer Kelsen drew up several drafts in
cooperation with Froehlich, department head and director of the
division for constitutional issues, who later became vice-president
of the constitutional court, and with the director of the division
for administrative reform, and their staff. Within the framework
of the instructions he had received, Kelsen himself strove to take
the Swiss Federal Constitution, on the one hand, and the Constitution of the Weimar Republic, on the other, as models. In addition,
useful ideas were adopted from the Provisional Constitution of
1918 and also from the Constitution of the Monarchy of 1867,
31. Metall, Hans Kelsen, 68ff.
among them the institutions of the higher administrative court
and the supreme court of the Reich. Kelsen turned the latter into
the constitutional court, the first in Europe,32 as was specifically
mentioned on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of the
Constitution of 1920; “Austria’s pioneering role” in this area was
expressly acknowledged.33
After the breakup of the coalition between the Social Democratic
and Christian Social parties on June 10, 1920—owing to parliamentary controversy over the rights of the confidential agents of the
popular defense forces—no consensus could be arrived at within
the government. Consequently, in June 1920 the negotiations about
the constitution were transferred to the special constitutional committee of the National Constitutional Assembly. The Social Democrat Otto Bauer chaired this special constitutional committee. He
set up a seven-member subcommittee made up of representatives
of the three great parliamentary parties—the Social Democratic,
the Christian Social, and the Pan-German parties—and the experts
Kelsen, Froehlich, Mannlicher, and Merkl. The Christian Social
Party’s representative on this subcommittee was Ignaz Seipel. The
subcommittee began its deliberations on July 11, 1920, and on the
basis of the results achieved by the two provincial conferences, in
Salzburg in February 1920 and in Linz in April of that year, it drew
up a federal constitution with a strong parliament.
At the request of the Social Democrats, the Federal Assembly
(the Bundesrat, or Upper House of Parliament, and the National
Council, or Lower House) was to elect the federal president. After
the breakup of the coalition, agreement about basic rights was no
longer possible because of the resistance of the episcopacy. Therefore those from the Basic State Law of 1867 were adopted, and they
are still in effect to this day.
The subcommittee finished its work on September 23, 1920. On
the following day at the behest of the subcommittee, Seipel reported
to the special constitutional committee, which also elected him to
report to the plenary session. The National Assembly debated the
constitution from September 29 to October 1, 1920. On that date
32. Hans Koja, ed., Hans Kelsen oder Die Reinheit der Rechtslehre (Vienna, 1988),
33. Gerald Stourzh, “Festvortrag: Verfassungsgerichtsarbeit und Grundrechtsdemokratie, die historischen Wurzeln,” in 70 Jahre Bundesverfassung, ed. Verfassungsgerichtshof der Republik Österreich (Vienna, 1991), 32.
the constitution was adopted unanimously.34 The president of the
National Assembly paid special tribute to Kelsen for his services.35
Unlike in the elections of February 1919, the Christian Social Party
gained a relative majority on October 20, 1920. From 1920 to 1933
the Social Democratic Party was the opposition party.
In the second half of the 1920s, antidemocratic and fascist tendencies increased all across Europe. This was true especially in the
Weimar Republic, but it is true of Austria as well. Only the Republic
of Czechoslovakia remained democratic until September 1938. In
Austria the militia, patterned on the example of fascist Italy, gained
ground after the burning of the courthouse (Justizpalast) in 1927.
The Social Democrats found themselves on the defensive. The antidemocratic forces also demanded a “reform” of the Constitution
of 1920. Their attacks were joined not only by professors but also
by the prelate Ignaz Seipel (1876–1932),36 who had founded the
1922–32 coalition of the Christian Social and Pan-German parties
and been federal chancellor several times. However, he preferred
to launch his attacks from the setting of the German universities.
In 1929, before students in Munich and Tübingen, he harshly criticized the abuses of “formal democracy,” which he hoped—at that
time at any rate—the militia would eliminate. It was a bad omen
that a person such as Seipel, formerly a professor of moral theology
and the most significant Catholic politician of the First Republic, in
1929 emphasized his faith in a “higher” democracy, not expecting or
hoping for very much from a corporative parliament, and declared:
“In my opinion, the one who will salvage democracy is the one who
purges it of party rule and restores it.”37
For that reason, Seipel led that part of the “bourgeois block” that
set about reforming the Constitution of 1920.38 Yet because the
“bourgeois block” and the militia had only a relative majority in
parliament and a two-thirds majority was required for a change in
34. For the precise course of the deliberations and the text, see Die Bundesverfassung vom 1. Oktober 1920, ed. Hans Kelsen in conjunction with Dr. Georg Froelich
and Dr. Adolf Merkl (Vienna, 1922).
35. Koja, ed., Hans Kelsen, 18.
36. Klemens von Kemperer, Ignaz Seipel: Staatsmann einer Krisenzeit (Graz,
1976). Also, Friedrich Rennhofer, Ignaz Seipel, Mann und Staatsmann: Eine biographische Dokumentation (Vienna, 1978).
37. Ignaz Seipel, Der Kampf um die österreichische Verfassung (Vienna, 1930),
167ff., 177ff., 181ff.
38. Ibid., 113ff.
the constitution, the consent of the Social Democrats had to be
obtained by way of negotiation. Thanks to the skill of the chief negotiator for the Social Democrats, Robert Danneberg, this consent
was attained, and in fact for a very sensible amendment: the federal
president in the future was to be elected directly by the people and
was given more powers (the power to issue emergency decrees, the
power to appoint and dismiss members of the federal government,
the power to disband the National Council, supreme command of
the federal army, and the power to appoint the president of the constitutional court) than before.39 With this amendment, the Constitution of 1920–29 became the Constitution of the Second Republic
through the Transitional Constitution Law of May 8, 1945.
In contrast, the constitution of the corporative state of May 1,
1934, marked the end of the most turbulent year of Austrian domestic politics in the between-the-wars period, and at the same
time also the “official” end of the First Republic. Because of a
voting error regarding a motion of no-confidence on the part of
the Pan-Germans against the Dollfuss government, which had only
a one-vote majority in the National Council, on March 4, 1933,
all three presidents of the National Council resigned. The coalition between the Pan-German and the Christian Social parties
had ceased to exist in 1932, and since the November elections of
1930 the Social Democrats had been the strongest party in terms
of votes and seats. Federal Chancellor Dollfuss used this blunder
that had not been included in the Parliament’s order of business,
and which could have easily been redressed with some good will,
to dismiss the Parliament.40 Henceforth he ruled with the aid of
the Wartime Enabling Act of July 24, 1917 (RGBl 307). This gave
the government the power to decree laws concerning wartime economic measures without consulting Parliament. Although members of Parliament from the Pan-German and Social Democratic
parties had tried several times since 1919 to get this law repealed,
their attempts remained unsuccessful.41 Department head Robert
39. Resolved by the National Congress on December 7, 1929, with the votes of
the government and of the Social Democrats. BGBl Nr. 392/1929.
40. Gerhart Botz, “Die Ausschaltung des Nationalrates und die Anfänge der
Diktatur Dollfuss im Urteil der Geschichtsschreibung von 1933–1937,” in Vierzig
Jahre danach, ed. G. Botz (Vienna, 1973).
41. On this and for what follows, see Peter Huemer, Sektionschef Robert Hecht
und die Zerstörung der Demokratie in Österreich (Vienna, 1975), 138ff.
Hecht, until 1932 legal counsel to Vaugoin, the Christian Social
party’s minister of the army, and legal counsel to Dollfuss from
the inception of the Dollfuss government, drew the chancellor’s
attention to the possibilities this law offered an authoritarian government beyond merely economic measures. Under this aspect on
October 1, 1932, Minister of Justice Kurt Schuschnigg, in concert
with the minister of finance, issued an emergency decree on the
basis of the Wartime Enabling Act according to which financial
penalties could be imposed on those responsible for the collapse of
the Creditanstalt. This was popular with the people at large, and
to oppose it publicly was difficult even for the Social Democrats,
even though they clearly realized the significance of the form of
the decree. On October 4, 1932, the Arbeiter-Zeitung printed on its
front page the bold headline, infringement of the constitution.
Because of criticism from various sides the law would have “sunk
into oblivion and would perhaps never again have been applied, had
it not been for the events of March 4, 1933.”42
From then on until April 30, 1934, Dollfuss issued more than four
hundred emergency decrees on the basis of the Enabling Act. Any
intervention by the constitutional court had become impossible,
because those of its members belonging to the Christian Social
Party had resigned their mandate according to the wishes of the
government and no one had replaced them. Thus, according to a
resolution of the Council of Ministers of May 23, 1933, the court
was incapable of acting. Nevertheless the government regarded
the ongoing application of the Enabling Act as only an emergency
measure and as only an interim solution.
In addition, the victory of the executive branch and the militia
over the Republican Defense Corps in the civil war of February
12–15, 1934,43 the immediate ban on the Social Democratic Party
and its organizations, and the annulment of all Social Democratic
seats on all levels, from the National Council down to the district
councils, also prepared the way for a new corporatist-authoritarian
The groundwork for the new constitution was already in place,
42. Ibid., 139, 150.
43. See Erich Froeschl and Helge Zoitl, eds., Februar 1934: Ursachen, Fakten,
Folgen. Beiträge zum wissenschaftlichen Symposium des Dr. Karl Renner Instituts
13.–15.2.1984 (Vienna, 1984).
and Federal Chancellor Dollfuss had on July 19, 1933, charged Otto
Ender, former federal chancellor and the head of the government of
the province Vorarlberg, with the agendas concerned with constitutional and administrative reform, making him a minister without
portfolio. Although a convinced federalist and thus not entirely
without democratic ideas, Ender was immediately ready to work
out an authoritarian constitution. This task, however, exceeded
his strength owing to the conflicting interests even within the
government and to the demands for consideration for the various
“estates” brought to him from outside the government. Therefore
he often consulted Dr. Hecht, vice-governor of the Austrian Postal
Bank since November 1933. The higher county officials of Vorarlberg were his assistants. In March and April 1934 the Council of
Ministers deliberated for twenty-seven and a quarter hours and
thirty-two hours respectively the final proposal presented by Ender.
On April 24, 1934, the Council of Ministers resolved to decree the
new Constitution of the Federal State of Austria on the basis of
the Enabling Act. This decree was issued on April 30 (BGBl I Nr
239/1934) on Hecht’s advice, and on the same basis the Christian
Social and Pan-German party members were convened by the former Christian Social president of the National Council, Dr. Ramek,
on April 30, 1934. According to Hecht’s reckoning there should
have been ninety-one delegates. Nonetheless, at the first and last
session of this “rump parliament” only seventy-six delegates were
present. Of these, seventy-four voted in favor of the draft; that is
to say, they “sanitized” retrospectively all the laws issued by the
government since March 1933, and they accepted the “Constitution
1934” along with the Concordat of June 5, 1933, embodied in it.
Foppa and Hampel, the two Pan-German delegates, voted against
the draft. Foppa made a speech in which he accused the government
of “violating the constitution for more than a year and of suppressing the expression of the will of most of the Austrian populace.”44
The Constitution of 1920 was made up of 152 articles; the “Constitution 1934” had 182. The Constitution of 1920 began with the
declaration that Austria was a democratic republic and its laws
issued from the people. The “Constitution 1934” had the following preamble: “In the name of God the Almighty, from whom all
laws proceed, the Austrian people receives this Constitution for its
Christian, German federal corporatist state. Article 1. Austria is a
federal state. Article 2. The federal state has a corporatist organization and consists of the federal city of Vienna, and the provinces of
Burgenland, Kärnten, Niederösterreich, Oberösterreich, Salzburg,
Tyrolia, Vorarlberg.”45
In his comments on the most important elements of the new
constitution—from the abolition of parliament and its replacement
by corporative councils down to the election of the federal president
by the mayors from a triple proposal of the Federal Assembly (Council of State, Council of the Provinces, Federal Cultural Council,
Federal Economic Council [Article 52]) and the restriction of basic
rights (for instance, freedom of press and assembly)—Ender left
no doubt about the authoritarian character of this constitution.
But he referred to the people in his explanation: “The people no
longer expected any help from the Parliament in their dire need
and longed for a strong, authoritarian government.” According to
Ender, the “authoritarian line” runs through the entire constitution: “Throughout, there are confirmations and the revocability
or dismissibility comes from above downward.” At the close of
his commentary even Ender poses the question: “How long will
this constitution last? . . . Will the curtailing of popular rights, of
local autonomy—which is undeniable—will the limitation of popular representation with respect to the right of questioning and of
initiating laws be lasting?” As an answer Ender hoped for the full
unfolding of the estates.46 History’s answer was more precise: the
constitution lasted not even four years.
In Peter Huemer’s painstakingly compiled relevant chronicles,
Voegelin’s name does not come up either as an adviser or as a
coworker on the “Constitution 1934.” And yet even before the
publication of his book The Authoritarian State in 1936 he had
published on April 27, 1934, an article entitled “Making a Constitution for Austria” in the Wiener Zeitung. In it he conjectured
that the German “revolution” of 1933 brought about a renewal of
Austrian political life.47 In my opinion, at any rate, the dismissal
45. Die neue österreichische Verfassung, eingeleitet und erläutert von Bundesminister Dr. O. Ender (Vienna, 1984), 33ff.
46. Ibid., 4, 21, 32.
47. Cited by Huemer in Sektionschef Robert Hecht, 198n117.
of parliament in March 1933 was more likely to have been a consequence of the nomination of Hitler as German Reichschancellor
on January 30, 1933. At that time the “Constitution 1934” was not
yet under discussion.
Before turning our attention entirely to The Authoritarian State,
we ought to say something about Voegelin’s situation from the
start of his studies until 1938. Since Eric Voegelin did not come
from a wealthy family—his father was a civil engineer—he decided
in 1919 on the shortest possible course that still agreed with his
interests in studying political science in the department of law and
political science. In the shortest possible time, as early as 1922,
he received the degree of Doctor rerum politicarum. Looking back,
he depicts the atmosphere at the university as we did here in the
beginning. He also used the three years of studies to build up a
circle of friends whom he had met in the private seminars of Spann,
Kelsen, and von Mises. All were highly intelligent and later on had
internationally acclaimed careers as scholars and scientists. The
national economists and political scientists Friedrich August von
Hayek, Oscar Morgenstern, Fritz Machlup, Gottfried von Haberler,
Alfred Schütz, the psychoanalyst Robert Waelder, the art historian
Johannes Wilde, and the historian Friedrich Engel-Janosi formed
the so-called Geistkreis. This circle of friends met once a month,
with one of the participants giving a presentation on a theme of
his choice but not pertaining to his specialty.48 The group was
interdisciplinary and elitist; throughout its existence, from 1921
to 1938, it was limited to only twelve active members. Aside from
the wife of the person giving the presentation, women were not
admitted. According to the opinion of more than one of the participants, Voegelin was “the only one of us who could be named
practically a true genius.”49
As a young student and academic, Voegelin was already marked
by the unrelenting drive for encyclopedic knowledge and the capacity for learning that marked his entire life. Over the years he learned
Greek, Russian, Hebrew, and Chinese so that he could study the
sources in the original. After completing his studies, he took part in
a summer school in Oxford. With the aid of a Weininger scholarship
48. Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections, 3, 5ff.
49. Cited by Friedrich Engel-Janosi in “Aber ein stolzer Bettler”: Erinnerungen
aus einer verlorenen Generation (Graz, 1974), 117.
he was able to study in Berlin and Heidelberg from January until
July, 1923. In Berlin the lecture course of Eduard Meyer on Greek
history particularly impressed him. In Heidelberg it was especially
the sociologist Alfred Weber who attracted him. He was able to hear
Weber’s first course on the sociology of culture in 1929. Weber’s
work had a decisive influence upon Voegelin, although the two did
not become personally acquainted. Studying Weber made it clear
to Voegelin that the comparative method, which had already been
employed by August Comte, was most important to his growing
research in political philosophy and cultural criticism, research that
took on ever more global contours throughout his life.50
We must also stress what Voegelin himself often emphasized: his
growing sensitivity for purity of language thanks to Stefan George
and Karl Kraus. The more Voegelin studied ideologies, the more he
regarded ideologies of any kind as harmful.
Finally, Voegelin was of the opinion that gnosticism is the essence
of modernity, which has led to the gnostic revolution and to the fall
of Puritanism. He placed his hope for the future in the revival of the
conservative American and English democratic tradition.51 Positive
references to this tradition can already be found in The Authoritarian State of 1936. Before this Voegelin was scientific assistant
to Hans Kelsen, the chair of government and administrative law
in 1923. With the help of a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, Voegelin attended the American universities of Columbia,
Harvard, Wisconsin, and Yale from 1924 to 1926, and was at the
Sorbonne in Paris in 1926–1927. Thus Voegelin spent the relatively
calmest and economically best years of the First Republic abroad.
When he returned to Austria in 1927, he came back to a tense
situation—as described above—in domestic politics, one already
characterized in part by violence. He perceived this immediately
and was especially open to Karl Kraus’s linguistic and political
criticism;52 Voegelin then took a more lively interest in politics
Voegelin’s professional prospects—in 1927 he was again scientific assistant in the department of law and political science—did
50. Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections, 8ff., 14.
51. Eric Voegelin, Die neue Wissenschaft der Politik: Eine Einführung (Munich,
52. Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections, 17ff., 40.
not match his constantly growing list of scholarly publications.53
The result of his penetrating work on “race theory” was an analytic history of its diverse forms down to the publications, so
prized by the National Socialists, of “Rasse-Günther.”54 Although
Voegelin’s books were published in Germany, no sympathies for
German racism are to be found in them; instead Voegelin sets forth
in calm, objective language the unreality and danger of the “German
Nordic idea”: “The German tension between cosmopolitanism and
the nation-state is reflected in the sphere of body ideas.”55
In 1928 Voegelin qualified as lecturer at the law faculty for social
theory under Spann and Kelsen with the book On the Form of the
American Mind.56 In 1932 the badly paid assistant—until 1930
with Kelsen, afterward with Merkl—became assistant professor.
In 1935 he attained the title of associate professor. He taught a
course at the Geneva Institute for Higher International Studies
in 1931. In contrast to those scholars, such as the historian Ludo
Moritz Hartmann,57 who were prohibited from scholarly careers
on political grounds, Voegelin also taught adult evening classes
in Vienna to improve his financial situation.58 From 1936 to 1938
53. That list included Über die Form des amerikanischen Geistes (Tübingen,
1928); Rasse und Staat (Tübingen, 1933); Die Rassenlehre in der Geistesgeschichte
von Ray bis Carus (Berlin, 1933, 1938). American editions of these books are now
available from the University of Missouri Press: On the Form of the American Mind,
trans. Ruth Hein, ed. Jürgen Gebhardt and Barry Cooper (1995); Race and State, trans.
Ruth Hein, ed. Klaus Vondung (1997); The History of the Race Idea: From Ray to
Carus, trans. Ruth Hein, ed. Klaus Vondung (1998). The young Catholic conservative
historian Alexander Nowotny (professor of modern history in Graz after 1945) wrote
a critical review of Voegelin’s work, faulting Voegelin for not making use of the works
of ethnologists Father Wilhelm Schmidt, SVD, and Father Wilhelm Koppers, SVD,
an omission that led to a certain one-sidedness in his work. Reichspost, January 22,
1934, p. 7.
54. A work used by Voegelin in his Race and State: Hans F. K. Günther, Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (1930).
55. Voegelin, Race and State, 222.
56. He was confirmed by the Ministry for Culture and Education on November
19, 1928. Personalakt Voegelin (University Archives, Vienna).
57. Günter Fellner, Ludo Moritz Hartmann und die österreichische Geschichtswissenschaft (Vienna, 1985), 239ff.
58. See Eric Voegelin, “Volksbildung, Wissenschaft, und Politik,” Zeitschrift für
Politik und Kultur (1936), 504–603; “Meinungsäusserung und Meinungsbild,” Neue
Freie Presse. The Viennese educational system also was altered by the corporative
state in 1936. An educational council was established by the security service and
by Mayor Schmitz, which was responsible for expert opinions, requests, advice
regarding content, and important questions. The council consisted of one director
and four members, including Eric Voegelin. See Walter Goehring, Volksbildung
in Ständestaat und Ostmark: Österreich, 1934–45, Schriftenreihe österreichische
he was also secretary of the Austrian Coordinating Committee for
From the summer semester of 1929 until 1938 he taught the
following courses and seminars at the University of Vienna:
Interpretative and Cultural Sociology
2 hrs. summer semester 1929
Systematic Problems of Sociology
2 hrs. winter semester 1929–30
Sociology of the Constitution
1 hr. summer semester 1930
1 hr. winter semester 1930–31
Sociology of Power Relationships
2 hrs. summer semester 1931
Principles of Political Theory and
the Political Theory of Race
2 hrs winter semester 1931–32
1 hr. winter semester 1931–32
Principles of Political Theory
1 hr. summer semester 1931
2 hrs. winter semester 1932–33
1 hr. summer semester 1933
General Theory of Politics. I.
2 hrs. winter semester 1933–34
German Ideas of the State at the
Close of the 18th and The Beginning
of the 19th Centuries
1 hr winter semester 1933–34
Constitutional Theory with Special
Consideration of Technical
1 hr. summer semester 1934
Imperial People and National State
1 hr. winter semester 1934–35
Jean Bodin and the Cosmological
Political Theory of the 18th Century
1 hr. summer semester 1935
1 hr. winter semester 1936
Modern French Political Theory
(Institutionalism)
1 hr. winter semester 1936–37
Political Theory and Austrian
4 weeks summer semester 1938
Voegelin did not teach in the summer semester of 1928 and in
the winter semesters of 1928–29. Seminars he regularly taught on
Gesellschaft für Schule und Erwachsenenbildung (Vol. 2, Vienna, 1985), May 30,
1937, pp. 1ff.
sociology and in government and administrative law are not listed
here.59 The connection between his research projects and his course
offerings is quite evident.
Voegelin himself has summed up his political development in
those years in terms of having voted for the Social Democrats in
the October 1920 election. After 1927 and especially after 1933, he
drew ever closer to the Christian Social Party. In this, two factors
were decisive: The first was that the politicians of the Christian
Social Party represented the traditions of European culture, something that, in Voegelin’s opinion, the Social Democrats did not do.
However, he expressly regarded the Austro-Marxist tradition as
eminently democratic and “habit-forming.” Nevertheless, the majority still believed in the Socialist revolution. But what disturbed
Voegelin most “was the stupidity of ideologists as represented by
the leaders of the Social Democratic party. While I agreed with
them regarding economic and social politics, the silliness of their
apocalyptic dream in face of the impending Hitlerian apocalypse
was simply too much to stomach.” His stance at that time was
identical with that of Karl Kraus, who after the courthouse fire in
1927 had posters demanding the resignation of Vienna police chief
Schober printed at his own expense, and from 1934 until his death
in 1936 supported Dollfuss and Schuschnigg. Voegelin was clearly
aware of the consequences for himself and for Kraus: “Ideological
intellectuals who survived the disaster have not forgiven Kraus
for being too intelligent to sympathize with their foolishness. Of
course, they have not forgiven me either.” The outcome of the
political tensions after 1933 was his study The Authoritarian State,
which also served to broaden his qualifications to teach political science at the university. In retrospect this book was his first attempt
to investigate the role of the ideologies of the left and right in the
situation at that time and to understand “that an authoritarian state
that would keep radical ideologists in check was the best possible
defense of democracy.”60
In Voegelin’s opinion the book was “heterogeneous.” In Part I
he discusses the symbols “total” and “authoritarian.” According
to Voegelin, theretofore no one had dealt with problems of this
type and there was no intellectual apparatus or method in place
59. Vorlesungsverzeichnis der Universität Wien, 1928–1938.
60. Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections, 41, 51.
for the examination of such terms. This is true, but just as true is
Kurt Sontheimer’s diagnosis, made almost thirty years later, that
in the practically identical authoritarian and corporatist states—as
has already been remarked—the idea of the authoritarian state “has
to result in a totalitarian practice”61 under existing conditions. It
must nevertheless be conceded that after 1945 it was easier to come
up with such a diagnosis than in 1936.
Voegelin’s hatred for National Socialism had its roots in the
1920s. He wanted to preserve what Max Weber called intellectual
honesty. Since for Voegelin National Socialism was a phenomenon
of intellectual dishonesty, it was out of the question for him. The
second reason for his hatred: “I have an aversion to killing people for
the fun of it.” For him people of this type were always “murderous
swine.” The third reason for his hatred was the National Socialist vulgarization, indeed, destruction of language. Voegelin’s turn
toward the Christian Social or anti-National Socialist corporatist
state therefore was closely connected with his rigorous rejection
of National Socialism. In Part I of The Authoritarian State, which
he devotes to the critique of ideology, Voegelin distinguishes between topoi and concepts. For him this distinction is the basis for
an adequate treatment of language problems in politics. Then he
makes the distinction between political symbols as theoretical or
nontheoretical concepts. “To this class of political symbols, which
are definitely not theoretical concepts, belong such symbols as total
and authoritarian.”62
Voegelin based his interpretation of the Austrian state on, among
others, the work of Maurice Hauriou on institutionalism.63 He
acknowledged that the acceptance of a collective unity would legitimate treating its members as subordinates who agree with the
ideas of the representatives of the unity. In this he saw certain
parallels with Averroes’ (1126–1198; the most famous Arab philosopher) conception of the intellectus unus as the unity of a worldimmanent nation or race,64 whose representatives would be murderous for humanity, and Voegelin was aware of the significance
of this insight. Hauriou and his school assumed that the power of
61. Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken, 206.
62. Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections, 45ff., 52.
63. Maurice Hauriou, La théorie de l’institution et de la fondation: Essai de
vitalisme sociale (Paris, 1925).
64. Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections, 52.
a ruler or of a government is based on the function of the ruler as
a representative of an institution, i.e., the state. “For Hauriou the
state is a national community in which a central sovereign power
conducts the enterprise of the res publica. The central sovereign
power performs the feat first to produce the unity of the nation
politically by turning the disorganized national community into
an organized body capable of taking action.”65
According to Voegelin, the concept of the total state emerged
for the first time in a theoretical-systematic context in a highly
rationalized form in Carl Schmitt’s Hüter der Verfassung (Defender
of the Constitution).66 In this connection, Voegelin also cites two
other works by Schmitt from the years 1933 to 1936, in which the
author was trying to establish himself as the “chief jurist” of the
Third Reich.67 Schmitt, the famed legal scholar, who just a few
weeks after the murder of his own friends during the so-called
Röhmputsch on June 30, 1933, published a horrifying “justification” of Hitler’s crimes,68 came from a Catholic Conservative milieu. Prior to 1933 he had built up a reputation that was again celebrated relatively soon after 1945 not merely by reason of significant
works of scholarship, but especially by his astute and severe critique
of democracy in general and of the Weimar Republic in particular.
There is no doubt that his critique, which had broad repercussions,
contributed to the downfall of the Weimar Republic.69 Voegelin,
always a relentless opponent of National Socialism, nevertheless
made use of many of Schmitt’s analyses. Today Schmitt still has
followers among German law professors, but also a great number
of opponents. That the highly gifted conservative Voegelin at the
age of thirty-five made the same mistake as many equally honorable
65. Page 99 herein. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
66. Carl Schmitt, Der Hüter der Verfassung (Tübingen, 1931); p. 58n herein.
67. Carl Schmitt, Staat, Bewegung, Volk: Die Dreigliederung der politischen
Einheit (Hamburg, 1933); Staatsgefüge und Zusammenbruch des Zweiten Reiches
(1934). These works are cited by Voegelin herein, p. 62n.
68. Carl Schmitt, “Der Führer schützt das Recht,” Deutsche Juristenzeitung,
1934, col. 945ff.
69. See Bernd Ruethers, Rechtslehrer und Kronjuristen im Dritten Reich (Munich,
1988), especially 103ff. On Schmitt’s conduct at the University of Cologne during
the National Socialist period, see Frank Golscewski, Kölner Universitätslehrer und
der Nationalsozialismus: Personengeschichtliche Ansätze (Cologne, 1988), 298ff.
Likewise on the contemporary Schmitt renaissance among groups on the right in
the German Federal Republic and Austria, especially in the Free Austrian Party,
see Klaus Richter, “Freunde und Feinde: Über Rezeption und Einfluss von Carl
Schmitt,” Juridikum-Zeitschrift im Rechtsstaat, II (1992), 11ff.
conservative enemies of National Socialism and tried to rob Peter
to pay Paul, replacing one evil with another, is easier to see for
later generations than it was for contemporaries. Nonetheless, this
should not be concealed in a critical commentary. After all, under
certain circumstances yesterday’s mistakes can become those of
Part II of The Authoritarian State contains a brilliant history
of the Austrian constitution since 1848. In Part III, devoted to
the “Constitution 1934,” Voegelin includes a critical discussion,
running to almost fifty pages, of Kelsen’s pure theory of law and
its connection to a specifically Austrian theory of politics. That he
did not uncritically accept the positivistic, neo-Kantian theory of
his teacher had already become clear earlier.70 But never before had
he explained in such detail and so comprehensively that the pure
theory of law cannot be a substitute for a political theory. “I had to
stress the inadequacy of a theory of law for understanding political
problems and the destructive consequences of the claim that one
should, or could, not deal significantly with political problems.”
This critique affected Kelsen deeply. His relationship with Voegelin
was never again what it had been earlier, although they still kept
in touch in the United States. Many years later, when Voegelin’s
The New Science of Politics appeared in the United States in 1952,
Kelsen wrote a book-length critique. He sent Voegelin the manuscript to read and in the end did not publish it. Possibly a letter
from Voegelin, cautiously indicating that the publication of this
manuscript would harm Kelsen more than Voegelin, was a decisive
factor in Kelsen’s decision.71
In 1938 the sale of The Authoritarian State was forbidden immediately upon the Anschluss. During the capture of Vienna by Russian troops in 1945, a bomb fell on the headquarters of the Springer
Verlag in Vienna, and all that was left of the edition burned in the
cellar. Voegelin was of the opinion that for this reason the book did
not attract much attention before 1938 and after 1945.72 However,
as a document of contemporary history and a testimony of high
intellectual value, it still merits today the interest of historians,
70. Eric Voegelin, “Reine Rechtslehre und Staatslehre,” Zeitschrift für öffentliches Recht, IV (1924); Voegelin, “Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law,” Political Science
Quarterly, XLII (1927).
71. Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections, 33, 53.
philosophers, experts in constitutional law, and political scientists
Voegelin starts from the assumption that Dollfuss set forth his
theory about authority several times both orally and in writing:
in the Trabrennplatz speech during the Catholics’ Convention on
September 11, 1933, in a lead article in the Christian Social paper
the Reichspost of December 24, 1933, and in a radio address of May
1, 1934. Voegelin summarized the contents of this theory as follows:
1. The government has authority because it is the representative of
2. the authoritarian function of the government, in the literal sense
of authorship, is the arrangement of the multitude of society’s intellectual and material interests into a unified whole;
3. the authoritative effort puts the government into a relationship
of representation with regard to the state as a whole;
4. therefore authority is not despotism or dictatorship, but is defined
as ordered power in accordance with authorial representation;
5. the state is to be given a hierarchic-authoritarian structure by
concentrating the power of sovereign jurisdiction more strictly than
before in the hands of the government, while more than before, the corporative authorities are granted greater freedom of self-administration;
6. the consentement coutumier at the foundation of the institution
is to be given the greatest possible sphere of spiritual freedom; it
should grow freely from the historical community of the people rather
than being the consequence of a totally imposed ideology. (102)
The authoritarian ideas of Dollfuss came so close to the French
ones that there were even some formulations similar to those of
Hauriou, and Voegelin attributed this to the situation of Dollfuss.
The latter had to reflect upon “the fundamental questions of the
state’s existence and of the authority of government.” Such a reflection, if it was consistent, had to lead directly back to the classical
European ideas of the state as they have been developed, for example, in France since the sixteenth century. “The revolution from
below against state authority, the last phase of which we know as
Central European postwar parliamentarianism, can never be more
than an episode and a symptom of decline as long as the type of
the modern state has the power to shape history” (103). In this
context Voegelin mentions Ernst Jünger’s “total mobilization” just
as he had already cited Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile.73 In the
73. Ernst Jünger, “Die totale Mobilmachung,” in Krieg und Krieger, ed. Ernst
Jünger (Berlin, 1930); Benito Mussolini, La Dottrina del Fascismo (Rome, 1933);
modern state it is also impossible in the long run to do without
the apparatus of psychological influence, and, Voegelin continues,
“To play with arguments of freedom of thought in the current
technological milieu is a matter for the opposition; for the ruler
it means suicide” (105).
In line with these theses, Voegelin points out in his summary
that trying to define the concept of a “total” or “authoritarian”
state is a task wrongly put. For him, today these adjectives are
political symbols that can be understood “only based on a particular
situation of struggle.” Moreover, Voegelin considered it pointless
to compare the English or French liberal state of his time with
the Italian or German totalitarian one. The former instances have
already gone through their struggle with totalitarianism and do not
need a new one. This first part of the book, on the theory of state and
politics, is an unequivocal attempt at support for the authoritarian
state. Not here, but only in the third and final section does Voegelin
examine the corporative order of society propagated in the 1931
encyclical of Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo anno.74
Part II deals with the evolution of the Austrian constitution,
and here Voegelin tackles the problem of nationalities with logical
consistency based on the history of the Habsburg monarchy since
1848. Voegelin concludes that the principle of nationality is not
compatible with the liberal and democratic principles of freedom
and equality, with the dynastic state, with the continued existence
of transnationally oriented privileged strata of society, or with the
principle of sovereignty of the people and majority within existing
This and Voegelin’s other conclusions can be read in the text
following this introduction, and so here we will examine only
some aspects of the intentions he has clearly stated. We already
mentioned that his historical diagnoses for the Austrian past are
accurate. Amazingly, however, Voegelin’s statement that “unfreedom in the political sphere can be accompanied by considerable
latitude for the nonpolitical existence of the citizens” (116) came
true at least in part in the collapsing Communist systems prior
to 1989. Furthermore, Voegelin rightly cites formulations of the
Giovanni Gentile, “Origini e del Fascismo,” in Quaderni dell’ Istituto nazionale
fascista di cultura (Vol. 3; Rome, 1934).
74. See pp. 275ff. herein.
Hungarian historian Joseph von Eötvös from the mid-nineteenth
century, according to which the Revolution of 1848 was primarily
a national affair. Where this principle was not involved, the majority of the participants were fighting for the elimination of class
privileges, but not for the abolition of the monarchy in favor of a
republic of the Austrian people, for “there was no such entity as an
Austrian Volk that could embody the claims of a sovereignty of the
Volk” (123).
Also astonishing is Voegelin’s statement that with the period of
the founding of the First Republic (1918–1920) a period of “undemocratic state leadership under the guise of democracy” (153) came to
an end. In terms of a grass-roots democratic decision, this is as true
of 1918 as it is of the founding of the Second Republic in 1945. In
each case the founders of the government were representatives of
political parties that had been elected in 1911 or 1930 respectively
and that were politically free of the burden of either Austro-fascism
or National Socialism. The decisive difference is that the First
Republic had almost no democratic tradition, which, as already
mentioned above, drew more and more publicly vocal opponents,
while the Second Republic was and is affirmed by almost the whole
of its citizenry.
Historians also can agree only in part with the closing sentences
of Part II, where Voegelin formulates only the arguments in support
of the authoritarian government: “The nonexistence of a national
people expressed itself in the Social Democrats’ politics of class
struggle and in the conflicts between a party organization and the
state, which were pushed to the point of civil war . . . the beginnings
of an Austrian national consciousness showed itself in the militia
movement, . . . which had its first, though still weak, success in the
constitutional amendment of 1929, and since the German revolution, in the movement for the establishment of an authoritarian
and corporative Austrian state” (159).75
Part III, entitled “The Authoritarian Constitution Since 1933,”
as we already mentioned, contains the comprehensive discussion
of Kelsen’s theory of state and law, which Voegelin thinks leads
to the elimination of the reality of the state, to the dissolution of
the person and of the constitution. Only with chapter 7, entitled,
75. Compare C. Earl Edmondson, The Heimwehr and Austrian Politics, 1918–
1936 (Athens, Ga., 1978).
“Constitutional Transition (March 1933 to May 1934),” does Voegelin begin the problematical reconstruction of a “legal continuum,”
the explication of legality and legitimacy. This of necessity had
to include his evaluation and examination of the legality of the
Enabling Act. In Voegelin’s view, the issue of the authorization of
the Enabling Act as praeter legem and contra legem is not highly
significant in legal terms since the existence of any decrees that do
not alter existing laws is hardly likely.76 “The legal order in force
provides an ordering of being that may be more or less satisfactory
to us; but from its point of view, there is no being that is not ordered.
From the standpoint of the legal order in force, there is no realm of
being praeter legem” (228).
An important line of Voegelin’s argument was already anticipated in March 1933 by Federal President Miklas, although no
contact between Miklas and Voegelin can be proved. In a session on
March 17, 1933, of the Upper House of parliament—that is, before
its dismissal—the following motion was introduced by the Social
Democratic delegate and vice-mayor of Vienna, Emmerling:
The Bundesrat wants to lodge a protest against the government’s
violation of the constitution in this time of economic hardship. Furthermore the Bundesrat protests against Dr. Dollfuss’ government
taking away its right to participate in federal legislation and against
the government’s attempt to prevent a session of the National Council by sending a contingent of armed police. Finally, the Bundesrat
demands that all decrees and injunctions of the federal government be
repealed. The chairman is charged with communicating to the Federal
President that the federal government no longer has the confidence of
the Bundesrat or that of the Styrian provincial government and thus no
longer has the confidence of the overwhelming majority of the people
of the Austrian federal state. The Federal President is requested to
remove the government from its office.77
This motion was accepted, as were the motions to rescind the
dissolution of the Tyrolian Defense Corps, to abolish the penalties
imposed on the railroad employees whose strike had been the topic
of the day of the March 4 session of the National Council, and to
present a vote of no-confidence to the federal government and to
order new elections, and ask for the quickest possible activation of
the National Council by the Federal President.
76. See pp. 226ff. herein. On this, see Huemer, Sektionschef Hecht, 154f.
77. Cited according to Huemer, Sektionschef Hecht, 174.
The government responded on the very same day, declaring the
Bundesrat an assembly not authorized to legislate on its own and
therefore not empowered to present motions of no-confidence, its
resolutions thus being of no importance in terms of constitutional
law.78 Bundesrat Emmerling took the resolutions to Federal President Miklas on March 20. This federal president from the Christian
Social Party was not elected by the people in spite of the constitutional amendment of 1929; he was not malicious but weak.79
Before responding to Emmerling, he obtained the approval of the
federal government. Then he rejected out of hand the accusation
of having violated the constitution, claiming that such a serious
accusation could be brought only if one could also prove that the
government “had imposed” one or several acts “knowing them
to be unconstitutional; in other words, that it consciously and
deliberately, against its own knowledge of the law, undertook a step
that clearly and obviously violated the constitution.”80 Miklas also
rejected all the other motions, since what they concerned was done
on the basis of the Enabling Act or that of precedents, which are
part of “diametrically opposed conceptions of law” (the resignation
of the three presidents of the National Council on March 4, 1933).
In no such case would he as federal president agree to make any
decisions, even though he also regretted the serious conflict over
the parliament’s capacity to act.
On May 23, 1933, the government resolved to dismiss a constitutional judge from his office on the basis of the Enabling Act.81
Others had resigned of their own accord, whereupon the government, based on its own view, which was already then criticized
by authoritative jurists, dismissed the constitutional court—as we
have already mentioned above—calling it incapable of acting.82
The only law scholar who stood behind this opinion, although not
without qualifications, was Voegelin:
Though the decree did not formally rescind the constitutional court’s
authority to review regulations but merely through a technical stipulation made it impossible for the court to carry out its function, from
78. Ibid., 174.
79. See Hilde Verena Lang, “Bundespresident Miklas und das autoritäre Regime,
1933–1938” (Ph.D. dissertation, Vienna, 1972).
80. Huemer, Sektionschef Hecht, 175.
81. Decree of May 23, 1933, BGBl Nr. 191.
82. Huemer, Sektionschef Hecht, 216ff.
the overall political situation it was quite clear that for the foreseeable
future there was no intention of enabling the constitutional court
again to review the wartime statutory regulations, which proved to
be the case. From the day this decree was issued in the given political
situation the unlawfulness or unconstitutionality of the wartime regulations could no longer be determined. Quite aside from the political
dubiousness of such a ruling, it was also wrong from a scientific point
of view, because the basis in reality for such a determination had been
removed, namely, the possibility of identifying the constitutional
court as the forum for reviewing regulations. (232)
Following this critical description of the situation, Voegelin introduced some not fully convincing possibilities for a scientific
assessment of the Enabling Act and then arrived at the following
summation: “The regulations were lawful and constitutional, and
there was no ‘error’ in their interpretation” (234–35). The federal
government’s concept of law was the valid constitutional law; science had only to register this historical fact. From this Voegelin inferred that the dismissal of the constitutional court by the Austrian
federal government rendered the latter the supreme legislator and
constitution-maker, “and it held this position legitimately” (235).
However, these explanations were preceded by a footnote warning readers to see this argument “as restricted to the Austrian
situation” (232) and not to generalize it. In any case, according to
Voegelin, with the decree of May 23, 1933, on the inadmissability
of the constitutional court’s review activity, Austria found itself
not in a “normal” situation, but in an “exceptional” one: “In the
concrete case of Austria, we believe that a very crucial indication of
the existence of an exceptional situation is given by the regulation
of May 23, 1933, cited in the text. Assessment of the wartime
economic regulations after this date seems to us impossible, but
not because the constitutional court was prevented from reviewing
the regulations, but because we regard the act that made review
impossible the decisive symptom for the abolition of the ‘normal
situation’ ” (232–33).
Peter Huemer sees this as a “circular argument,” but does not
deny the coherence and logic of Voegelin’s argumentation.83 In
accordance with the sophistic interpretation of the situation after
May 23, 1933, Voegelin had no other choice but to justify also
the federal government’s decree of April 24, 1933, concerning the
constitution of the Austrian state (“Constitution 1934”) with undertones not fully cited by Huemer:
The federal government had become the supreme legislator and author
of the constitution for Austria, and held this position legitimately
because it had prevailed as such and was sufficiently supported by its
practical means of physical power and the consentement coutumier
of the population. According to this view, there were no longer any
problems of legality. The regulations served as a means for creating
provisions of ordinary law and constitutional law. And even extending
their scope to a complete revision of the constitution—whose legality,
aside from the questions of the content of the Enabling Act, could be
questionable in a formal sense because the National Council itself was
not authorized to this—presented no problems, for the new legislative
authority was after all no longer delegated by the federal constitutional law of 1920–1929. The regulation dated April 24, 1934, BGBl I,
No. 239, concerning the constitution of the federal state of Austria,
drew the necessary conclusions from the situation and issued a new
constitution for Austria. Reference to the Enabling Act was just as
superfluous for this regulation as it was for all the others that were
issued after May 23, 1933.
For Voegelin this legal situation was completely clear. Therefore
he considered the attempt of the federal government to establish
a “legal continuity” with the Federal Constitution of 1920–1929
through the Enabling Act an unnecessary complication. He saw
the solution of this issue in ascertaining that the National Council
of April 30, 1934, was “no longer a national council as defined in
the B-VG [Federal Constitution] of 1920–1929 but a new legislative organ” (245). Thus there was no possibility of challenging the
resolutions of this organ. Consequently for him the question of
the constitutionality of the April 30, 1934, session of the National
Council and the decision on the constitution taken in that session
are legally moot questions and of a “purely theoretical nature”
(237). The discussion simulates the possibility of judicial review
for the sake of being able, with the aid of this fiction, to present “an
interesting issue from Austria’s constitutional problematic” (237).
The contents of the “Constitution 1934” are also criticized by
Voegelin. On the issue of legal control there is “a vacillation in
style among constitutional, authoritarian, and dictatorial forms”
(344). Voegelin found an explanation for this “peculiar mixture of
styles” (344) in the history of the review of decrees, which dates
back to 1867. He considered the mechanism of the plebiscite “for
the present and immediate future . . . difficult to apply because of
the nonexistence of a political people that is called upon to render
its plebiscite—unless, that is, the positivist concept of the Volk is
used as the basis of the interpretations; according to this concept,
the people in the political sense is identical with the sum of those
citizens enfranchised in accordance with the constitution and the
administrative law to be issued” (359). According to Voegelin, the
organization of the estates stipulated in the constitution was not
sufficiently secured against representation of interests, and in this
context he referred to Hauriou’s criticisms against any syndicalist
chamber. In the process Voegelin hit upon a sentence that captures
the sum and substance of the Austrian parliamentarianism of the
day and which, in my opinion, ought to be relativized, just like
the above-cited statement about the consent of the majority of
Austrians to the “Constitution 1934”: “Under the constitution of
1920, the Austrian parliament was not a parliament in the Western
European, especially the French, sense but precisely an instance
of that type of representative council that Hauriou describes as
the utmost contrast to representation of the people based on the
principle of political freedom. It was what he called ‘la tyrannie, la
plus rédoutable de toutes.’ No one who does not keep in mind this
phrase can understand the problem of the Austrian parliament”
(327–28, italics in original).
Voegelin closed his deliberations, which at his time were as
brilliant as they were antidemocratic, by pointing to freedom and
basic rights, which for him were bound up with the metaphysics of
the person. They are relevant for any—even the authoritarian—type
of government organization: “Their discussion, however, would
open up basic questions of philosophy of the state that we do not
want to address in a study of the particular problems of the Austrian
state” (362).
The conclusion needs no further commentary.
§1. Political Symbol and Theoretical Concept
§2. Carl Schmitt’s Concept of the Total State
the State (Lorenz von Stein, Maurice Hauriou)
§5. The Averroist Factor in Speculations on Totality
§8. The Historical Significance of the Symbols
French Race Idea (Hauriou, Martial)
of the People (Rousseau)
§12. Elite and the Masses: Authoritarian Leadership
§13. Blanqui’s Theory of the Elite (1869)
§14. Elite and Authority in Renan (1871)
(Renan, Hauriou)
§16. The Austrian Theory of Authority (Dollfuss)
§18. Summary
Baron Eötvös
6. Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law and the Problem of an
Austrian Theory of the State
§1. The Guiding Idea of the Presentation: Kelsen’s
Positivist Metaphysics
§2. The Neo-Kantian Demand for Purity of Method
§4. The Unity of Obje