The Seekers: The Story of Man’s Continuing Quest to Understand His World was published by Random House in 1998, completing the trilogy. Where The Discoverers traced the effort to know the physical world and The Creators traced the effort to make new worlds through art, The Seekers traces the effort to find meaning — the philosophical, religious, and scientific attempts to answer the question “Why?”
Boorstin begins with the ancient prophets (Moses, Zoroaster, Buddha, Confucius) who established the great religious frameworks that have governed human meaning-making for millennia. He follows the Greek philosophers (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle) who proposed that reason, rather than revelation, could answer ultimate questions. The story continues through Christianity’s synthesis of Hebrew prophecy and Greek philosophy, the Islamic golden age, the Renaissance rediscovery of classical thought, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment.
The modern sections address the great system-builders of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — Marx, Darwin, Freud, Einstein — each of whom proposed a comprehensive framework for understanding human experience, and each of whose frameworks has been partially confirmed and partially undermined by subsequent evidence. The book concludes with what Boorstin calls the modern “crisis of meaning”: the recognition that no single framework can explain everything, combined with the human inability to stop seeking one.
Collecting The Seekers
First edition (Random House, New York, 1998): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $10–$25
- Very good/very good: $5–$12