Eric Voegelin Library

Welcome to the Eric Voegelin Private Library!

Eric Voegelin is one of the outstanding representatives of a comparative, historical and hermeneutically oriented theory of politics. An assistant of Hans Kelsen at the University of Vienna, he emigrated to the United States in 1938 where he taught at various universities. In 1958-69 he accepted the offer of Max Weber’s former chair in political science at the University of Munich. He returned to the United States in 1969 as Henry Salvatori Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution where he worked until his passing away in 1985.

In 1986 Prof. Dr. Jürgen Gebhardt acquired the Library for the Institute of Political Science at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. The library contains the following collections:

• The Private Library: contains the books of the private library of Eric Voegelin with around 4,900 titles with a focus on philosophy and religious studies.
  • Catalog Voegelin Library
• The Voegelin Papers: contains the only available copy in microfiche of the Voegelin-Papers archived in the Hoover Institution at Stanford University (California, USA)
  • Register of the Voegelin Papers
• Reprints Collection: contains short publications by colleagues of Voegelin sent to him by their authors
  • Voegelin Reprints Collection
• The Gebhardt & Vondung Collections: contains publications by different scholars on Voegelin, lecture notes of Voegelin lectures by Prof. Dr. Jürgen Gebhardt, copies of manuscript notes and correspondence between Eric Voegelin and other scholars. Some of the materials are originals. The smaller “Klaus Vondung” Collection contains seminar syllabi and the lecture notes of Klaus Vondung who studied with Eric Voegelin at the University of Munich.
  • Gebhardt & Vondung Collections
• The University of Erlangen Voegelin Collection: contains Eric Voegelin’s published complete works and much of the international secondary literature on the work of Voegelin as part of the University Library Collection.
  • OPAC

The Eric Voegelin Library is supervised by the Department of Intellectual History at the Institute of Political Science. The library holdings are available to interested researchers for scholarly work by appointment.

Interested scholars should contact Dr. Eno Trimcev.