The post-revolutionary intellectual world was vibrant. It was also profoundly divided in terms of politics and religion. As politicians debated what would take the place of the Old Regime, memories of the Terror – or, expressed more theoretically, arguments over the relationship between individual liberty and state authority – lurked behind disputed ideologies, as did questions about the nature of progress and of social change. Although secularization and its proponents have frequently allowed academics to behave as if religious beliefs can be separated from philosophical modernity, Religion and the Post-Revolutionary Mind resists that temptation. Rather, Arthur McCalla makes the argument that religious conflicts and identities were fundamental to the construction of the post-revolutionary order and should be understood as central, not parenthetical, to histories of this era. To make that argument, McCalla ably recaps the ways in which various French thinkers such as de Bonald and Constant (as well as a number of less well-known French intellectuals), relied on their conceptualizations of religion and “revelation” to imagine the post-revolutionary order.

McCalla is conversant in the nuances of early to mid-nineteenth-century political and philosophical battles and uses theological and apologetic texts alongside political and social debates to demonstrate that post-revolutionary arguments about social organization cannot be understood without reference to religion and epistemology. Certainly, a wide variety of monographs already engage the intellectual environment for post-revolutionary thought by engaging the religious beliefs of a single author or his circle (Lamennais, Constant, etc.) A smaller number place philosophers from one tradition in conversation with those from another of opposing religious views. McCalla's meticulous and wide-ranging research, on the contrary, weaves between a diversity of different intellectual and political contexts, demonstrating how religious ideas were central to thinkers from a wide variety of perspectives, in a number of social and political spaces.

The six parts of the book outline how religion and revelation shaped particular post-revolutionary theorists or groups of theorists. Each part is further subdivided into chapters. In general, the first chapter in each section places theorists into biographical and historical context and then analyzes the philosophical foundations of the theorists’ conceptualization of religion. The next chapter engages in a thorough analysis of this conceptualization by focusing on important and specific texts, and the final chapter elaborates on the social and political implications of the religious philosophies. The three chapters thus work together to demonstrate how thinkers were shaped by their social, cultural, and political settings even as they were embedded within them.

More broadly, when taken together, the first three parts of the book help the reader to see how a wide variety of nineteenth-century thinkers, whether Idéologues (one), Traditionalists (two), or Liberals (three), were in conversation with each other, with religion, and with modernity. Parts four and five deepen the reader's ability to see nuanced distinctions between liberal philosophers, liberal religious philosophies, and liberal politics. Part six, which focuses on Orientalist Traditionalism, examines how Orientalism and political theology must be understood in contemporary context. Although this is primarily in dialogue with the views of liberals, it also demonstrates that religious modernization writ large relied on an understanding of history that was racist, anti-semitic, and Orientalist.

When each of the parts is put together, the book details the process by which religion was transformed by new conceptualizations of the relationship between individual/faith/reason in the post-revolutionary era. Although some religious thinkers were reacting against Revolutionary changes and some were in favor of them, the collective impact of debates spurred by Enlightenment and Revolutionary transformations altered society. Thus we can see that intellectual modernity, which was based on competing visions of the world, was no less central in reaction and redefinition for religion than for other socially-contested contexts in the post-revolutionary era. Indeed, McCalla traces the origins of religious debates that are still fought today: the historical or psychological origins of religious belief, the civil and political roles (if any) that ought to be allotted to religion and its representatives, and the relationship between religion and reason. In the end, McCalla convincingly demonstrates that groups with dramatically-opposed beliefs were all engaged in similar projects of intellectual modernity. Although Idéologues believed that religion should be eliminated from the civil order, Traditionalists wanted to find ways to ensure that social organizations were subordinated to spiritual principles, and Liberals wanted a spiritual rationalism, numerous components of these disparate ideologies developed in conversation with and against each other. Intellectual modernity thus cannot be understood without reference to theological and apologetic texts, nor can it be understood through a lens that only considers some of these movements, as “the various conceptualizations display a number of common elements. . .including a concern for epistemology, a specific sort of historical-mindedness, demeaning attitudes toward the non-Western other, and religious modernization” (6). They were all rivals in the battle for redefining the place of religion in the new order, and the “selective pluralism” of today's liberal democracies is best understood as the product of a set of particular histories (406–407).

It is impossible to do justice to the level of specificity available in this book in a review of this length, or even to mention all of the philosophers considered (though Bonald, Lamennais, Constant, and Eckstein get particularly detailed treatment). However, Arthur McCalla's thorough research and fully interdisciplinary approach undergird his argument with laudable detail and make this book a valuable resource for scholars interested in the interplay of religious ideas, revolutionary change, and modern political culture.