Beginning the Quest:

Law and Politics in the Early

Work of Eric Voegelin 

by Barry Cooper

Professor Cooper has edited three volumes of the Collected Works. He has authored numerous essays and books relating to Voegelin, including a volume of reminiscences, Voegelin Recollected, and most recently, a volume about Voegelin's early life, Beginning the Quest, which is discussed in this presentation, taken from a talk Professor Cooper delivered at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., on February 17, 2009.

“Inside baseball” has become a metaphor to describe sports reporters who rely on locker room gossip rather than what happens on the playing field. There is an equivalent temptation for those who report on the playing-fields of academe. In literary criticism, for example, one often finds arguments developed at great length and with a highly refined technical vocabulary that refer not to literature but to other critics. Likewise, in political science one can find plenty of examples of articles, books, and papers that do little more than situate themselves in relation to other arguments rather than to political reality. This is true with respect to studies devoted to the exegesis of the writings of political scientists such as Eric Voegelin as well. If to some extent inside baseball is inevitable, that does not mean it must be the focus.

The book I recently wrote, Beginning the Quest, deals with a specific period of Voegelin’s work. If it holds the interest of a reader, that reader is likely already to be familiar with Voegelin’s best known writings, all of which were written at a later date than were most of the materials covered in it. In an earlier book, Eric Voegelin and the Foundations of Modern Political Science, I tried to make the case, as have many others, that Voegelin was a major thinker of the twentieth century. I do not make that case again in Beginning the Quest, which may mean for some readers that it is such inside baseball that it carries no interest at all for them. Even people familiar with Voegelin’s later writing, in The History of Political Ideas, The New Science of Politics, Order and History, or his meditative interpretations of consciousness, might wonder whether an exegesis of positions and arguments that Voegelin discarded is worth the trouble, either of reading or of writing. In any event, that an author once considered a book worth writing is not necessarily persuasive to readers.

There is, however, continuity in Voegelin’s work. This is not to say that he did not change his mind on several major problems, because the evidence is overwhelming that he did. More importantly, he explained his reasons for so doing—and in such reasoning lies continuity. In other words, the argument of Beginning the Quest is that Voegelin’s early writing on law or on method was motivated by the same quest for understanding that is found in the rest of his work, including those reflective and meditative studies of what his own questioning consciousness was up to when it was actually questioning. There is a consensus among students of Voegelin’s work that he was a radical thinker in the old and original sense of the term. This book deals with the beginning of his quest for understanding reality.