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Order and History (Volume 5): In Search of Order (Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 18)

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Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) is one of the most well-known of modern political philosophers and theorists, but his massive five-volume series "Order and History," as well as the posthumously published eight-volume History of Political Ideas (Volume 8): Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man (Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 26), put forward a coherent and somewhat influential philosophy of history. In the Preface to Volume II, Voegelin says, "Order and History is a philosophical inquiry concerning the principal types of order of human existence in society and history as well as the corresponding symbolic forms."

This volume was published in 1987, after Voegelin's death. The Introduction by Ellis Sandoz tells us that "the concluding volume of Order and History is devoted to the elucidation of the experiences of transcendence that Voegelin has widely discussed..." The Epilogue by Jurgen Gebhardt also provides additional information. For myself, however, this was an anticlimactic end to Voegelin's original project, and one is left wishing that he had been able to complete the original four volumes according to their original design.

Here are some quotations from the final volume:

"Whatever the order of history may ultimately be, there is a history of order because the truth of consciousness is documenting itself as a historical process through the reflectiveness of symbolizing consciousness. The history of consciousness, as I have formulated it, is internally cognitive."
"the God who is declared dead is alive enough to have kept his undertakers nervously busy by now for three centuries."