A Reflection on Mystical Anarchism in the Works of Gustav Landauer^207a magistracy, a government office.”^36 Arche is the creation of a
world of appearances, curtailing open and fluid reality with the
aim to obliterate it. The state is merely symptomatic of arche. In
fact, Landauer reiterated that he opposed any arche, “any fight
that is led for or against word-constructs as if they were reality.”^37
Voegelin discussed a similar problem in his 1933 work Race
and State.^38 Therein, he argued that the particular community,
for example the racially defined community, is not constituted
through an outside (such as the state), but that, on the contrary,
particularity begins as an idea. Just as Landauer found that the
state consists of social relationships, Voegelin argued that the par-
ticular community is “a thought construct in the minds of the peo-
ple sharing in it, and precisely by appearing in the subjective idea
the community also becomes objective reality.”^39 Like Landauer,
who argued that the state emerges as a solution out of “spirit-
lessness and chaos,” arising when experience no longer produces
meaningful knowledge, Voegelin found that the particular com-
munity emerges as an expression of a feeling of separation from
humanity and of a lack of essential social experience. The loss
of the unity of humanity under God,^40 he argued, gave rise to
the first institutions that sought to conserve at least partial unity
and provide meaning under the banner of a certain particularity.
However, as particularity always contains the experience of a loss
of the world, each people sees their own particularity reflected in
that of other communities, and begins to flee from this sight “by
claiming for itself the status of the ‘world’ and regarding all others
as ‘non world’”. Fear of the other, then, becomes “the deepest root
of the new idea of community”, and the claim of superiority and
uniqueness grows ever more exaggerated.^41 Only later, during his
Hitler and the Germans lectures, did Voegelin refer to this false
image of reality, or Ersatz-reality which eclipses genuine reality, as
“second reality.”^42 Simply put, a second reality is the construction
of a system; but “since reality has not the character of a system,
a system is always false; and if it claims to portray reality, it can
only be maintained with the trickery of an intellectual swindle.”^43
Voegelin’s 1936 publication The Authoritarian State discussed
to what extent political and legal sciences were complicit in this
intellectual swindle, when they researched the phenomenon of the