Eric Voegelin and Robert Musil: Literary Approaches to Spiritual Pathology

nations to totalitarian regimes, the exterminations of class and race, the world wars and revolutions, and also the apparent cultural degeneration of elites in democratic countries, whose members accommodated themselves one way or another to the power of these external regimes and to the movements that instigated them, to the geopolitical claims of the regimes over territory and the dogmatic claims of the movements over science and the human spirit. This "why" is the pragmatic and theoretical question giving rise to the political philosophy of Eric Voegelin. By 1965, the problems of culture and the spirit were problems that had not been studied very deeply within the academic discipline of political science, when Voegelin said, "If, for instance, one wishes today to gain information about the great problems of thinking about order in Germany, one would be well advised to read the literary works of Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, Thomas Mann, Heimito von Doderer... rather than the professional literature of political science."1 [1] Elsewhere Voegelin gives partial credit to creative writers such as Proust, Val�ry, and Joyce, for opening the field of consciousness to him.2 [2] In an age of spiritual closure, realms of experience that are ideologically closed for academic and political elites