Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Nazism And Eric Voegelin’S Politische Religionen: An Approach To Exploring Nazism’S Roots In Modern Thought, Cody R. Babcock

CMC Senior Theses

The Holocaust shook the core assumptions many held regarding human progress and human nature. This paper seeks to track how the ideas of modernist philosophers may have laid the fundamental political and moral assumptions that allowed the Holocaust to occur. I will offer an analysis of 20th century German-American political scientist and philosopher Eric Voegelin’s theory of Political Religions to assess whether philosophy emerging from the Modern era led Germany to eschew Christianity, a world-transcendent religion as the source of the West’s “first principles,” and adopt the world-imminent religion of Nazism in its place. If this proves to be the …