The title of Ronald Beiner's new book suggests something of its quite old-fashioned character. For the idea of a dialogue between great thinkers across time and space on themes of common and pressing concern was, for a very long time, the way in which most histories of political philosophy were written. And while he is certainly not given to using much old-fashioned scholarship in this book, Beiner's more immediate reflections upon a great swath of texts is what comes to the fore, in this tracing and retracting of a grand sweep of ideas across time and space. His concern, obviously, is the interplay of political philosophy and civil religion, and the somewhat idiosyncratic aim is to foster an approach to great texts on the topic of religion and politics with reverence, and not a little humility.

Within this remit, he seeks to do several things. To begin with, and perhaps oddly in a resolutely “textualist” approach to the field, a de facto assertion is delivered that “political philosophy is generally a response to underlying crisis” (p. 4). With this claim in place, he develops the argument that religion is clearly one of the principal and “inescapable problem[s] of politics,” and “therefore it is a perennial question for political philosophy” (p. 2). Armed with the belief that “there exists some possibility of conducting an intellectual inquiry in such a way that transcends differences of historical context to pursue the kind of dialogically motivated political philosophy proposed” in his book (p. x), he is forced into a series of moves that are occasionally enlightening on an individual basis, but singularly odd as a procedure for an entire book.

Taking us through, back, and forth on a tour of various (and variously celebrated) authors, beginning with Rousseau, moving back to Machiavelli and then forward to Hobbes, and then returning to Rousseau, we are shown different versions of the “civil religion project.” The next section takes us back to Spinoza, then forward once more to Locke and Toland and Bayle, still onward toward the liberal uplands of Montesquieu, Rousseau (again), Kant, Smith, Hume, Tocqueville, and Mill, culminating in a genealogy of Rawls's political liberalism. The lesson of the liberal paradigm, after the discussions of Locke's toleration and liberalism, Bayle's society of atheists, and Montesquieu's pluralized civil religions is, ultimately, that it is best to “stick with what you have got” (p. 195), according to Beiner. His third section, focusing on the “theocratic” response to liberalism, deals with de Maistre (and Rousseau), and Schmitt (on Hobbes). Finally, the “postmodern” or “hypermodern” critique of modernity in Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, and Heidegger brings us full circle with another rejection of liberalism equally as vitriolic as theocracy.

With these four principal positions outlined, it is claimed that the “civil religion” theorists seek to “domesticate” religion and make it safe for the state. In related fashion, the liberal tradition seeks to disarm religion and to distance it from politics. The more militant and theocratic writers claim that religion is a necessary bulwark to political order (the sort of claim found in both de Maistre and James Fitzjames Stephen, but also considered in different ways by Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Nietzsche particularly). Alternatively, with Schmitt in mind, one might claim that modern political concepts are merely secularized theological ones. Finally, the hypermodern tradition exemplified by Nietzsche and Heidegger suggests, according to Beiner, that (Christian) modernity as such is weak in comparison to the powerful religious forces it has undermined, and this explains its support for theocracy over Enlightenment (pp. 393f).

In trying to show how this multitude of authors aim to solve, or dissolve, what he calls the “civil-religion paradox,” that is to say the paradox that ensues from embracing civil religion because of its political benefits but recognizing that this must undermine the truth claims of most religion itself, the author offers the reader some intriguing suggestions (pp. 116f). For instance, because of Hobbes's identification of Moses and the “Father,” his arguments apparently become an intriguing prefiguring of Freud (pp. 43, n. 23). Similarly, Kant's version of autonomy and enlightened Protestantism is the beginning of “an intellectual and cultural trajectory that has its end point in Freud's view of religion” (p. 217). In a different register, the Christian aspects of the refounding of polities in Machiavelli are given greater space here than is usual. Nevertheless, the question of “what we can learn from this whole extended dialogue” suggests that not “any one of the thinkers covered … could trump all the others in intellectual authority and comprehensiveness of insight” (p. 414).

Over such vast terrain, one cannot pick out general heroes or villains of the peace (so to speak), but both Rousseau and Tocqueville loom large. The former sees the problem most clearly, and tries to adopt a civil (rather than civic) religion. This is, according to Beiner, the result of hesitancy about the viability of a “civic-republican utopia” (p. 83; cf. pp. 415f, 418). Rousseau therefore opens up the space for the dialogue that is the focus of the book, and his apparent solution (in the Geneva manuscript) to the practical problems of religion for politics, which involved recognizing the force of Protestantism, is updated and revived by Tocqueville. It was Tocqueville who found the possibility as well as the plausibility of a “Christian republicanism,” the likes of which Rousseau had thought impossible. And its roots lay in the “historical reality” of Protestant America (p. 250).

One can see here how, individually, quite radical claims are fitted together in a wider, thematic narrative. Along the way, other points of interest include the genealogy of Rawls's liberalism. Here, Beiner claims that part of Rawls's honest worry about what theodicy would or could do to derail political liberalism forced him to confront a genealogy of the religious origins of liberalism, which he, of course, located in the early-modern European wars of religion. The payoff of Beiner's genealogy of Rawls's own project is that the development of Rawls's political liberalism is itself seen to be a continual reiteration of an original thought, that comprehensive doctrines that insist on a monopoly of legitimate validity claims and reject compromise will in fact eventually turn into “reasonable” comprehensive doctrines (p. 290). Rawls's own development of a reasonable form of liberalism, therefore, is both a logical and historical culmination of that historical and conceptual claim in practice.

Such interpretative claims suggest that the search for tension or paradox in a doctrine or author can uncover something like a hidden-meaning. Indeed, Beiner argues that these thinkers were not always clear and direct about their views on religion and politics, because it was too dangerous to be. This sort of move recalls rather obviously the ambiguities of Leo Strauss's assertions about persecution and the art of writing, and the associated oddities behind that claim are equally manifest in the procedure of this book. Absent wider justification, we finish the book still wondering whether we can really compare meaningfully across time and space in the absence of the sort of intellectual history that Beiner has refrained self-consciously from offering. He has certainly made the case for thinking that questions of religion mattered hugely for the canon of early-modern and modern political thought. Whether we can say precisely why they mattered by the end of this book remains a matter for another dialogue.