IN SEARCH OF ORDER
Order and History: Volume Five
Eric Voegelin
Baton Rouge & London: Louisiana State University Press, 1987
120 pp., $14.95
THE POLITICAL THEORY OF ERIC VOEGELIN
Barry Cooper
Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1986
250 pp., $40.95
Eric Voegelin, perhaps the greatest political philosopher of our century, died January 19, 1985, some two weeks after his eighty-fourth birthday. In Search of Order is the final volume of his masterwork, Order and History, whose first three volumes appeared in the mid-1950s and whose fourth, The Ecumenic Age, was published, after a hiatus of seventeen years, as long ago as 1974. The gaps in publication are significant. They reflect, not a straying from the intention of the original project, still less any lapse of interest on the author's part, but rather a scrupulous determination to think through the issues raised in the course of an unfaltering effort to understand the nature of human existence in the world. Time and again the progress of Order and History was slowed--though never halted--by Voegelin's wish to evaluate the full range of evidence available and to present its significance with the highest possible degree of theoretical clarity. The years separating the volumes were not periods of silence, but were marked by the appearance of a series of substantial and thematically related essays; each indicated either a new area of data to be analyzed and elucidated or a more theoretically adequate reformulation of the guiding questions of Voegelin's life and work.
So scrupulous an approach exacts a price. The studies that were to have been coordinated as part of the final volume of Order and History remain disjointed. Death took the philosopher before the work of integration could be completed. And took him at a point where, in spite of his physical age, his intellectual powers were quite undiminished--as evidenced by the content of In Search of Order and, perhaps more extraordinary still, by the recently published essay "Quod Deus Dicitur," whose final, luminous pages were dictated only three days before his death.
A Transcendental Empiricism
Is Order and History, then, an unfinished work? In one sense, yes; for the fifth volume is only a fraction of its intended length. But there is another, more important, sense in which Voegelin can be seen as having completed his task--at least insofar as such a project can ever be fulfilled. In Search of Order shows us a way of formulating, as precisely as their character permits, some of the most searching questions that man can ask about the fundamental conditions of his existence. There is undoubted truth as well as understandable reverence in the words of Voegelin's widow, which appear in the foreword: "There pages are the key to all his other works …. [I]n these pages he had gone as far as he could in analysis, saying what he wanted to say as clearly as it possibly could be said."
Admittedly, In Search of Order is not an easy book, but, at the risk of sounding paradoxical, its difficulties derive
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