ESOTERICISM AND DEMOCRACY: SOME CLARIFICATIONS

Abstract

The text we are translating, originally a lecture, is a fundamental contribution to the historical and sociological understanding of esotericism and its relationship with politics. Wouter Haanegraff, professor of History at the University of Amsterdam and first president of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE), presents a didactic synthesis about the difficulties of conceptualizing esotericism and taking it seriously as an object of study. The challenges begin with the characteristic of esotericism itself: knowledge rejected by the “internal Eurocentrism” of the West; rejected as the opposite of the rational and the public, especially since the fundamental and condemnatory theses of the Frankfurt School on the subject. Haanegraff raises questions about how the disqualification of esotericism, as an occult history, is part of a selective view of the very contours of the West, which led to the exclusion of knowledge and religiosity, including Islam, as part of Western history. But is esotericism, in itself, the cause of problems for democracy? To this question, Haanegraff proposes a critical perspective on the right-wing esotericisms emerging in current politics - Traditionalism, neopaganism and conspirituality - but, at the same time, pertinently, directs the causality of democratic problems not to esotericism itself, but to hegemony of neoliberalism and its consequences.