204 Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume 1
Voegelin’s life work was dedicated to philosophy, which he con-
sidered the critical clarification of the present disorder, bringing to
consciousness the true order of reality and persuading others to
join in the quest, forming communities of the spirit which may,
eventually, achieve social effectiveness.^22
At the core of both philosophers’ projects lies the attempt to
restore order through experience of and participation in the locus
of the world’s self-revelation within oneself. Landauer’s work was
predominantly concerned with the political perpetuation of the
division between the individual’s personal experience of reality, its
desire for “purity, beauty and fulfilment” on the one hand, and the
exterior, political circumstances with their “philistine limitations”
on the other, with which it “permanently collided.”^23 Landauer
found, in other words, a reality within the individual, and one
outside of it, both disconnected by (and outside reality governed
by) political regiment. Similar to Landauer, Voegelin’s work re-
volved around the separation between two realities: the first re-
ality which society refused to apperceive (the reality in between
whose existential poles consciousness is caught) and the second
reality created from within this refusal with the purpose to per-
manently separate imaginary reality from reality, so that the imag-
inary could become absolute. Politics, for Landauer and Voegelin,
is merely symptomatic of the individual’s division from reality.
Thus, both dealt, albeit in various ways that will be explored be-
low, with the separation of experiencing reality from knowing
about reality, and with the role politics plays in upholding that
separation. The following section will highlight how Landauer
and Voegelin envisioned politics, in particular the state and politi-
cal ideology, as imaginary reality and how they concluded that its
true purpose lay in separating the individual’s experience from its
knowledge of reality.
Politics and political science as imaginary reality:
Disappointed with the theories and practices of contemporary an-
archists, Landauer published an essay critiquing the misconcep-
tion of the state as a reified institution that can be overcome by
violent revolution. Published in 1910 as Schwache Staatsmänner,