?
Эрик Фёгелин – критик «гностического» социализма Карла Маркса
The article is devoted to the criticism of the revolutionary idea of Karl Marx
by the great political thinker of the XX century Eric Voegelin (1901-1985).
The article shows that Voegelin’s criticism of the Marxist doctrine consists
of several successive stages. In his works of the late 1930s, he develops the
idea of Marxism and communism, which grew up on its ideological basis,
as one of the main “political religions” of the XX century. In the 1940s, when
Voegelin was living in exile in the United States, he continued to criticize
Marxism of Marx, but on a new theoretical basis, at the center of which is
the concept of “gnosticism” as the essence of Western modernity. Since the
1950s, Voegelin’s interest in Marxism of Marx gradually fades away, and the
Marxist doctrine itself is mentioned in his works written in the last decades
of his life, rather as an example of one of the variants of “gnosticism”
of the XX century in politics. As a theoretical horizon of Voegelin’s criticism
of the Marxian revolutionary idea, a brief reconstruction of the main
propositions of his political theory as an experimental and critical science
of the correct order of the soul and society is presented. Voegelin’s thesis
that the rise of “gnosticism” is the essence of Western modernity is also
analyzed in detail, since it serves as the central point of his interpretation
of modern intellectual history. The article shows that the spiritual basis on
which the development of the Marxian revolutionary idea took place was
the revolt of the young Marx against God and his desire to eliminate the
higher, transcendent and creative divine principle from the picture of the
world of modern man. Voegelin’s final conclusion, proposed by him in the
framework of criticism of the Marxian revolutionary idea, is that the political
success of Marxism in the XX century is one of the most significant
symptoms of the spiritual decline of Western civilization.