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A condensed version of this article has appeared at the Voegelinview website, edited by Fritz Wagner (http://www.voegelinview.com/). I am grateful to Céline Jouin, Dominique Weber, and Bruno Godefroy for helping me to locate certain references in this article pertaining to Schmitt and Löwith. I would also like to thank both the reviewers of this article, whose insights I have incorporated as far as is possible, and Johanna Louw for translating this article into English.
In his work Politics as Religion, Emilio Gentile credits Eric Voegelin with having invented, if not the expression itself, then at least the concept of "political religion" which the latter would use consistently throughout the 1960s to describe totalitarian regimes.2In his Autobiographical Reflections, drawn from an interview recorded in 1973, Voegelin revisits the use of this expression3and gives an indication of the sources that inspired him to adopt it:
When I spoke of the politischen Religionen, I conformed to the usage of a literature that interpreted ideological movements as a variety of religions. Representative of this literature was Louis Rougier's successful volume on Les Mystiques politiques.4
Besides the work by Louis Rougier, it is highly likely that Voegelin is thinking of the French Catholic "personalist" philosophers, such as Jacques Maritain, Henri de Lubac, and Joseph Vialatoux,5who also interpreted the emerging totalitarian movements less in terms of social and political phenomena than as a profound spiritual disorder. These readings are also enriched by Bergson's work (which proved decisive for Voegelin) The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. It may appear surprising that Voegelin does not refer to the emblematic work by Carl Schmitt, the Political Theology of 1922. Schmitt had also invented, if not a term, then at least a concept destined for a productive career.6Moreover, Political Theology and Voegelin's Political Religions (1938) have similar objectives, namely, to show that all political doctrines involve a relationship between mankind and the sacred in one form or another--even (and perhaps especially) those that claim to have eliminated the religious element entirely.
How do we explain this omission, when Voegelin even cites Schmitt several times in his earlier works? The first answer that comes to...