Researcher ORCID Identifier
0009-0000-2182-4314
Graduation Year
2024
Date of Submission
12-2023
Document Type
Open Access Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Reader 1
Professor Hans Rindisbacher
Reader 2
Professor Friederike von Schwerin-High
Terms of Use & License Information
Rights Information
2023 Cody R Babcock
Abstract
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 case, with Nazism showing the problem of rights derived from the State, then Voegelin’s work can help us understand the shortcomings of modern thought through a novel philosophical and anthropological lens.
Recommended Citation
Babcock, Cody R., "Nazism and Eric Voegelin’s Politische Religionen: An Approach to Exploring Nazism’s Roots in Modern Thought" (2024). CMC Senior Theses. 3466.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/3466
