A Reflection on Mystical Anarchism in the Works of Gustav Landauer^199conception of community. Although seemingly little connects
those two thinkers, an exploration of their respective critiques of
political practice and science, both rooted in mystical philosophy,^1
reveals a significant degree of cohesion. Since their work has not
yet been brought into contact with one another, this chapter seeks
to articulate a comprehensive outline of the above theme. While
there exist differences in aim, scope and argumentation between
Landauer and Voegelin, differences that invite further investiga-
tion, the following reflections focus on the similarities and general
coherence in their work, with the aim of thereby contributing to a
discussion on mystical anarchism.
At the centre of Landauer’s and Voegelin’s critique of politics
lies a theme reoccurring throughout their works: the separation of
the experience of being from the knowledge of being, severing the
direct link that connects the individual to the world within which
she finds herself. Politics, both thinkers argued, emerges from this
situation of separation to create, through a system of thought and
practices, a second, imaginary reality that encompasses a people’s
new interpretation of the world. Simultaneously, politics seeks to
ensure, through its various norms, discourses and techniques, the
foreclosure of reality so that a restoration of the link between
experience and knowledge remains deferred. Politics thus func-
tions as a surrogate for what both Landauer and Voegelin iden-
tified as the true commune of the individual with herself, others
and the world. Consequently, the condition of politics can only be
overcome through deep experience of the individual’s unmediated
relationship with reality. Both Landauer and Voegelin based this
argument on the claim of a unity of existence, whose multiplicity of
existents issues from a single, common source^2 which reveals itself
within each being and the world and yet extends infinitely beyond
it. As the world is already within each being, the quest for order
does not lead via ordering the world from the outside through
politics, but inside the self, becoming the world. Community, from
this perspective, is not situated in the particularity of an extrin-
sic self-interpretation, but is, rather, the situating “alliance of the
plenty”^3 originating within the cosmos.^4 This chapter argues that
anarchism in the works of Landauer and Voegelin is concentrated
in the argument that the self is the primary reality by which the