This analysis of Voegelin s legal and political writings during the 1920s and 1930s opens with Voegelin s efforts, following the trauma of defeat in World War I, at understanding the relation of law and the study of law (Staatslehre) to what he then called sociohistorical reality. Cooper examines Voegelin s The Authoritarian State (1936), which argues that Austria was more an administrative unit than a body politic. As a final point, Cooper deals with the concept of political religions that Voegelin developed in the 1938 book of that name. The crisis resulting in World War II led Voegelin to develop ever-more-comprehensive accounts of the disorder and political convulsions of the day. The quest of the title of this study continued until Voegelin s death....