Voegelin Center for Politics, Culture and Religion

The Voegelin Center was founded with the aim of facilitating and expanding in-depth academic examination of the subject area of politics, culture and religion in research and teaching at the Geschwister-Scholl-Institute of Politicial Science. The Center emerged from the Eric Voegelin Archive founded by Peter J. Opitz in 1990, which over the years has become a flagship of international Voegelin research. Accordingly, the center will pursue two thematic focuses in the future.

Firstly, the Center will continue the very successful work of the Eric Voegelin Archive, i.e. intensive research into the philosophical work of Eric Voegelin. Writings by Eric Voegelin that have not yet been published are being translated and edited; new contributions to Voegelin research are being published in the Voegeliniana series and in the Periagoge series published by Wilhelm Fink Verlag. In addition to primary and secondary literature on Voegelin, the holdings of the Voegelin Library include the microfilm collection of the Hoover Institution as well as numerous articles, manuscripts and correspondence that are otherwise difficult to access.

Secondly, the center also pursues an intensified examination of the interrelationsship between politics, culture and religion. This topic has gained enormous importance and attention in recent years, for example in the context of debates about a "return of religion" or with regard to new forms of religious fundamentalism. The Center is dedicated to the relationship between politics and religion from a primarily political-theoretical perspective, but is expressly committed to an interdisciplinary approach.