202 Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume 1
After 1901, Landauer re-immersed himself in political activism,
attempting to realise his envisioned community in various proj-
ects. Notably, he founded the Sozialistische Bund (Socialist Union)
in 1908, seeking to create small, independent, artistic coopera-
tives and settlements as the basic cells of a new, socialist culture.
Yet, like most of his projects, the Sozialistische Bund was dis-
solved in 1914 due to lack of commitment amongst its members.
Landauer’s probably best known and more ambiguous activist in-
volvement was his participation in the Bavarian Democratic and
Social Republic,^16 following the German Revolution. Despite his
Antipolitik he became the Minister of Culture and even drafted
the constitution of the Bavarian Council Republic.^17 Landauer ap-
pears to have hoped that Bavaria could become the germ cell for
the federalised Germany he envisioned, based on grass-roots de-
mocracy and communities that would form according to historical
and cultural background, and in which all members of the public
could be involved in decentralised councils. Yet, his enthusiasm
soon gave way to disillusionment when he realised that many par-
ticipants merely sought to prepare for the dictatorship of the pro-
letariat. In 1919, the SPD sent military units into Munich to arrest
the opposition, and Landauer was assassinated on May 2, 1919.
Voegelin’s life, at first sight, appears to be antonymous to that
of Landauer. Having lived through World War I as an adolescent,
through Austria’s political, economic and cultural turmoil as a
doctoral candidate under Hans Kelsen, and through the rise of
Nazism in Germany and Austria, Voegelin tasked himself with
the exploration of the causes of what he considered to be the
twentieth century’s great spiritual degeneration,^18 made manifest
in the various forms of political violence and ideological mass
movements. Decisive for Voegelin’s later work was his encounter
with common sense philosophy during a scholarship in America
in 1924. While political science at the University of Vienna was
preoccupied with methodological questions about epistemology,
common sense philosophy confirmed Voegelin’s assumption that
the reality of experience was self-interpretive.^19 He argued that
all people share a type of rationality based on the ordinary, direct
experience of reality without any technical apparatus, being the
everyman’s natural ability to grasp truth and order, which is then