This erudite book would ideally require a reviewer with knowledge of both classical Greek and Sanskrit. Possessing only the former, I focus on the Preface and Introduction, Chapters 1 and 2 on Homer and Hesiod, respectively, Chapter 5 offering “Comparative Considerations on the Meaning of Rule,” and the Conclusion, with only summary remarks about Chapters 3 and 4 on a range of Vedic texts.

Thematically, A Defense of Rule is focused on comparing and contrasting two broadly distinct conceptions of rule associated with archaic Greek and archaic Vedic Indian traditions, though variations within each conception are also identified. The contrast is deployed to argue, first, that the concept of rule itself deserves more attention in political thought than it typically receives, and second, that Vedic approaches in particular offer a more capacious conception of rule that accommodates the nonhuman world by attending not only to what Stuart Gray calls “ruling-over,” “ruling-with,” and “ruling-for” (the purpose of rule), but also, more cryptically, to “ruling-in,” or ruling within the “context of human–nonhuman communities of interests” (p. xiii). Rule itself is defined as “a power that human beings have to make decisions that always already, in both hierarchical and horizontal ways, implicate them to varying degrees in affective relations to broader communities of human and nonhuman beings whose interests are fundamentally intertwined” (p. xiv).

Gray’s emphasis is not on the nature of power, coercion, or the structure of decision making so much as on relationships of rule as they feature within wider cosmological, metaphysical, and ontological understandings (he distinguishes among these on p. 22). Refreshingly, he pushes back against an Arendtian tendency to denigrate hierarchical relationships, stressing at least for most of the book that “ruling-over,” or hierarchical subordination, is both a necessary and potentially productive dimension of political relationships that can also encompass appropriate care for the nonhuman world. However, his introduction of the idea of “panocracy” as involving the notion of “ruling by all” (p. 212) in the Conclusion seems to me to blur this focus in a less helpful way. The thought may be that there are ways in which each of us as an individual is a ruler with respect to aspects of the nonhuman world, at least, but the relationship of this thought to a more standard model of political hierarchy is left somewhat unclear. Confusingly, Gray also formulates and invokes the expression “the rule of connectedness” in which “rule” means “regulation or principle,” rather than naming the substantive ideal on which most of the book is focused (p. xix and passim). Nevertheless, the thematic concerns of the book are broadly productive and stimulating.

Methodologically, Gray works within literature advocating “comparative political theory,” and with the effort to rectify “the general neglect of non-Western traditions” within political theory as a discipline (p. 2). In the Introduction, he sketches and defends a “historical-comparative approach to political theory” (p. 2) explained as “a qualitative one that focuses on the historical, textual, and philosophical analysis of concepts in different traditions” (p. 3). The approach depends on deploying a set of broad “intercultural categories,” in this case “hierarchy, individuality, and the concept of rule,” while also using more specific concepts and terminology drawn from within each tradition, and attending to changes in the meaning and use of these across the texts considered within a given tradition. The payoff of the approach is primarily analytical in the sense of serving present-day theoretical purposes, seeking “enhanced analytic leverage” and “new avenues for concept formation”: comparison serves to “reveal unforeseen background assumptions” and to “dismantle false universals” (p. 1). The choice to compare archaic Greek and Vedic texts in particular is justified in terms of their common Indo-European origins (p. 15), and the importance of identifying the sources from which Greek (and so much Western) and Classical Hindu (as an important non-Western set of traditions) diverge (p. xx). By focusing on the fact that both archaic traditions foreground cosmological and theological contexts, Gray may further mean to suggest that some such parallel contexts must still be identifiable (if in very different form) today, but this is not spelled out; for example, the notion of “sacrifice” that is appropriated in modern ecological contexts in Chapter 5 is very different from a Vedic cosmological context in ways that are not fully explored.

Schematically, the arc of the argument is that Homer and Hesiod primarily understand rule as a form of “distinction” (p. xxii; emphasis omitted), by which is meant distinguishing oneself in terms of honor and glory from others, though in Hesiod a substantive independent standard of justice for human interactions (only) begins to emerge. In contrast, Vedic texts primarily understand rule as “stewardship,” focusing on the “connectedness and intertwined well-being between the human and nonhuman” (p. xxiii; emphasis omitted). Throughout the four chapters on particular texts and traditions, Gray generally engages with relevant literature and offers careful linguistically attentive readings of the primary texts in Greek and, so far as I can tell, in Sanskrit.

To be sure, in the Greek case he is more interested in the vocabulary for the figures of rulers (the meaning of basileios in archaic Greek societies and texts, for example) than in the vocabulary for the activity of ruling; there is virtually no discussion of the verb archein or other relevant verbs, rather oddly. This said, his treatment of Homer is sensitive to the ways in which Zeus and the other Olympian gods, as well as other divine beings, do and do not model human rule, and brings out the roles of anger, competition, honor, glory, and reputation effectively. The part of the interpretation that I find most questionable is the insistence that Homer’s idea of personhood for humans and gods evinces “self-possessed individuality” (p. 28; emphasis omitted). While Gray is surely right to reject older ideas of Homeric agents as being entirely fragmentary (as do A. A. Long, Greek Models of Mind and Self, 2015, and Christopher Gill, Personality in Greek Epic, Tragedy, and Philosophy: The Self in Dialogue, 1996—neither cited by Gray), the idea of an enduring mortal self with a single “psychosomatic identity,” as Long argues (per the chapter title, and at p. 15), does not equate to being “self-possessed” in this context. The force of desire or erōs, for example, is indistinguishable in Greek from the God Erōs (the typographical distinction is made by modern editors). That said, Gray is sensitive to the way that justice itself as a standard is presented in Hesiod as embodied in a daughter of Zeus, and his general contrast between Homer and Hesiod is illuminating.

As for the two chapters focused on the Vedic texts, these offer a rich exploration of relevant vocabulary. Gray argues against scholars who assimilate the pictures of rule in these texts to electoral or social contract Western models, emphasizing instead the ontological nature of those humans designated as rulers in relation to the priests, and both of their roles against a cosmological and metaphysical backdrop. While critical of the immutable hierarchies among humans in the Vedic texts, he emphasizes the stewardship of and connectedness to the nonhuman world that they portray. This is a richly rewarding book.