Individuelles Handeln und politische Erkenntnis in Eric Voegelins Neuer Wissenschaft der Politik.

This essay discusses the relevance of Aristoteles’s conception of human action and its metaphysical underpinnings for the new methodology of political science that Eric Voegelin presents in his 1952 book The New Science of Politics. This book questions traditional positivist and post-positivist approaches to the analysis of political reality: Voegelin starts by criticizing the underlying Humean dichotomy between facts and values. Instead, Voegelin proposes an approach based on Aristotle’s anthropology, which in turn is based on his metaphysics (which Voegelin does not explain in detail). In the following, this procedure is analyzed by following a train of thought in Voegelin’s book. In doing so, I want to show that more Aristotle would help Voegelin: I argue that a metaphysics of human action such as that developed by neo-Aristotelian analytical metaphysics can strengthen Voegelin’s approach, since it allows a better understanding of his political science.