Joseph De Maistre's Insufficient Response to the Crisis

Abstract

This is the spoken summary of a draft paper surveying congruences in the thinking of Joseph de Maistre, Eric Voegelin, and Benedict XVI in his Regensburg Address of 2006—in their fundamental theological approaches, their attitudes towards history and providence, and (for Maistre and Voegelin) the "two powers" theory of European order. The question of "who is the pope" with respect to international order is approached through Maistre's 1819 work Du Pape and its effect on the founding of the modern papacy. Distortions of the image of Maistre by modern critics are touched on, and Voegelin's judgment on Maistre in his History of Political Ideas is questioned.

Keywords: Maistre, Voegelin, Regensburg, Benedict XVI