REVIEWS 305

VOEGELIN'S THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Eric Voegelin: Anamnesis. Translated and edited by Gerhart Niemeyer.

(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978. Pp. 217. $11.95.)

At its 1978 annual meeting in New York the American Political

Science Association honored Eric Voegelin with the Benjamin Evans
Lippincott Award for his books, The New Science of Politics: An Intro-
duction (1952) and Order and History, whose fourth volume ap-
peared in 1974, with a fifth volume yet to come. The bridge between
the former and later publishing events was the collection of essays
published by R. Piper & Co. Verlag in Munich in 1966 entitled
Anamnesis: Zur Theorie der Geschichte und Politik. The volume
before us is a translated and edited version of this important collection
which, while omitting substantial portions of the German original,
will nonetheless be welcomed by the English reader as supplying a
major hiatus in Voegelin's new science of politics.
The hiatus supplied by Anamnesis is the exposition of the theory
of consciousness presupposed in The New Science of Politics and
further developed in The Ecumenic Age, as volume four of Order and
History is entitled. For, as Voegelin says in the new first chapter writ-
ten for this edition, by 1943 his analysis of modern ideologies and mass
movements "had made it clear beyond a doubt that the center of a
philosophy of politics had to be a theory of consciousness." Attention
to the problem already had absorbed him in the 1920's, as is shown by
the comparative studies of perception and consciousness in Hodgson,
Brentano, Husserl, Peirce, and especially in William James and George
Santayana given in Voegelin's first book, The Form of the American
Mind (1928). A breakthrough came in response to deficiencies he and
his friend Alfred Schuetz found in the "apodictic horizon" of phi-
losophy proclaimed in Husserl's later work, the Cartesian Meditations
(1931) and, especially, the Crisis of European Science (1936). For
the phenomenological analysis of intentionality in consciousness, while
valuable in itself, was only the exploration of a substructure within the
comprehensive consciousness of a reality which becomes luminous for
its truth in the consciousness of a man. "Reality, it is true, can move
into the position of an object-of-thought intended by a subject-of-
cognition, but before this can happen there must be a reality in which
human beings with a consciousness occur." In short, Voegelin dis-
covered the "historical dimension" of consciousness which Husserl
had excluded; and he found this dimension to be the process of reality
which is permanently present as that in which men participate in
their conscious existences.
The task then set was not only to show the deficiencies of
phenomenology but also to provide a viable alternative to that theory.
Voegelin's initial formulation was completed in the summer of 1943
as is exhibited in the essay "On the Theory of Consciousness" and in
the charming accounts of anamnetic experiments which he then con-
306 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

ducted into the formation of his own consciousness through the recol-
lection of childhood experiences down to the age of ten. Its full fru-
ition is displayed in the other major essays from the original German
edition of the book, "Eternal Being in Time" and the revolutionary
analysis "What Is Political Reality?" and in "Reason: The Classic
Experience," here reprinted from the spring 1974 number of the
Southern Review. The cumulative result, which can only be hinted in
a brief review, is nothing short of startling. For what emerges is no
less than a new ontology and a new epistemology to ground the claim
to a new science of politics in continuity with Aristotle's science of
human affairs. Not merely an alternative to Husserl's theory of con-
sciousness has been provided by Voegelin, but a coherent alternative
to the whole of positivist social science—the still-dominant mode of
thinking about man's political existence. Voegelin's differentiation
of the noetic science of man as the exploration of the In-Between
reality tensionally experienced in the several modes of participation,
as here elaborated, constitutes another Copernican revolution, this one
in the sphere of the science of human existence.
Any translator of Voegelin's work must face formidable problems
of accurately rendering concise and technical language, even if the
translation is only from the English works to the parlance of American
undergraduate students. Professor Niemeyer as editor and translator
is to be congratulated for his judgment and craftsmanship and for a
generally reliable if not always elegant rendering of the masterful
German of the original. The achievement is a commendable one, even
if in detail it is not flawless either because of the translator's slip or
the publisher's carelessness. It is, for instance, unsettling to have such
misprints as "unwordly world" (p. 79) and "wordly time" (p. 133)
for unweltlichen Welt and Weltzeit, and more distressing to find
"present" for Zukunft (p. 20), "corollary" for Gegenstuck (p. 143),
"scientist claims" for szientistischen Anspriiche (p. 146), and "com-
pact-oblique" for kompakt-undurchsichtig (p. 169). But such lapses
are infrequent and virtually inevitable. Less inevitable, however, is
the rudimentary index which lists only persons mentioned in the text,
particularly by comparison with the German edition and its invalu-
able inventory of concepts set in an analytical format.
—ELLIS SANDOZ

GOVERNING THE UNGOVERNABLE CITY

Douglas Yates: The Ungovernable City: The Politics of Urban Problems
and Policy Making (Cambridge, Mass.: and MIT Press, 1977. Pp. 219.
$15.00.)

A decade ago American cities erupted violently and the force of

those events produced the massive overflow of books we conventionally
call urban studies. In this slim volume, Douglas Yates weaves the