For those interested in the state, its origins, development, and continuing relevance in theory and practice, Engster's book will provide much food for thought. He considers canonical political theorists (Bodin, Filmer, Hobbes, Locke, Montaigne); lesser known—to most political theorists, at least—but no less important thinkers (Naudé, Henri de Rohan, Charron, Lipsius); and important political actors of the period (Louis XIV, Richelieu, James I of England). In doing so, Engster traces the development of an important set of ideas in two contexts over the course of two important centuries. Successive chapters consider the development of state theory in France, focusing on Montaigne (whom he intriguingly reads against Machiavelli, suggesting a “Montaignian moment” rivaling J. G. A. Pocock's more famous formulation), Bodin, Richelieu and his circle, and Louis XIV. In doing so, Engster illuminates the work of a number of thinkers and practitioners who played an essential role in laying the foundations for the state as we know it today.

The book is much stronger on the French case, where the author takes especially seriously his claim that “lesser theoreticians played a seminal role in formulating and legitimizing the principles of executive prerogative, administrative regulation, and rationalistic rule [and] many of these lesser-known works deserve attention on their own merits” (p. 6). In Chapter 5 on English state theory, he reverts to the “big names,” focusing on Hooker, James I, Filmer, Hobbes, and Locke, all in just 45 pages. The result reads more like the “great books” approach that Engster so carefully avoids in the first four chapters, and fails to do justice to the important differences between France and England, and thus between French and English state theory. In extending his scope to England in such a cursory way, Engster loses much of the nuance and complexity of his historical account, since he drops the views of lesser-known theorists and actors intimately involved with developing notions of state and sovereignty (one thinks of Harrington, Oliver Cromwell, Marchamont Nedham, and Anthony Ascham, to name just a few). He is also forced to minimize some of the most distinctive features of the English theorists he does consider, in order to preserve the coherence of his overall narrative regarding the development of state theory from France to England. Hobbes, he says, “simply shifted [the immutable basis of the state] from divine right to human law” (p. 170). In addition, Hobbes “did not destroy or undermine prophetic authority. He merely relocated it in the ‘sovereign prophet”’ (p. 187). Locke “simply coupled the ideas of legislative sovereignty and executive prerogative with the notion of popular consent” (p. 199). But there is nothing “simple” or “mere” about these three theoretical moves, as if they involved offhand changes of punctuation or syntax. Each denotes a central and important departure from the thinkers who come earlier in Engster's account, on issues central to the basic political and philosophical commitments of their authors.

Pinpointing the influence of earlier thinkers on later ones proves elusive in this account: Locke and Montesquieu, according to Engster, “borrowed their ideas of executive prerogative … from Richelieu and his cohorts” (p. 111). The textual evidence for this claim about Montesquieu seems convincing, but in the case of Locke it turns on Locke's possession of a copy of Naudé's Considérations philosophiques sur les coups d’etat. Locke “appears to have borrowed his notion of executive prerogative from [Naudé],” even though he “made no mention” of his French precursor (p. 192). Despite the promise that Chapter 5 would “show the relevance of the statist ideology discussed in earlier chapters to the Anglo-American tradition” (p. 152), no American figure appears in the chapter. In other cases, Engster seems to equate resemblance or similarity with influence. He claims that Hobbes's theory “can be situated directly in a line of development from the Montaignian moment” (p. 37), and that Hobbes “adopted the position of Montaigne and other sixteenth-century skeptics” (p. 180); yet Hobbes does not mention Montaigne or any other sixteenth-century skeptic in the text Engster adduces. Locke's theory of executive prerogative “would not have been unfamiliar” to French theorists (p. 112). Hadrian Saravia, who played an important role in the development of English state theory, held views that “if not directly inspired by Bodin, at least closely resembled his ideas” (p. 158). But there is a great difference between being inspired by a thinker and merely holding views that look similar, especially if one is looking to establish the enduring influence of an important thinker, set of thinkers, or tradition of thought.

Given the care with which Engster explicates his primary sources, especially the French ones, it is surprising and somewhat disappointing to reach the final sentence of Chapter 5 and find the remarkable claim that “[w]ithout the foundation of divine and natural right and the goal of instituting a universal moral order, there is no good reason to organize political power around the principles of modern state theory” (p. 195). The six-page concluding chapter that follows has the odd effect of undermining the interpretive task of the previous five chapters. For in this concluding chapter we learn that “[it] is incumbent upon us to formulate a new political theory consistent with the presuppositions of a secular social environment” (p. 201, emphasis added). Now clearly Engster is right to say that executive prerogative, for example, “was originally founded upon divine right theory [and] was invented in particular circumstances for particular reasons” (p. 114). Also undeniable is the notion that “one cannot fully understand modern state theory without some knowledge of the theology behind it” (p. 196). To reach the conclusion about the need for a new theory of the state, and the obsolescence of state theory in the twenty-first century, though, one would need a far more developed discussion and defense of the interpretive, methodological, and historiographical presuppositions undergirding the author's analysis, as well as some basic historical information. Do authorial intentions exhaust a text's transhistorical meaning(s)? What, specifically, happened between Locke's time and our own that leads to such a radical disjuncture in the ability of texts and theorists to speak to each other, even if in highly mediated ways?

Ironically, then, it seems that only if Engster's concluding chapter is wrong are the theoretical riches he has uncovered available to us as we struggle with the state's role in the present and future. If his conclusion is correct, then the care with which he has explicated the arguments of these thinkers seems to have been for naught. This latter possibility is one that I continue to resist, having learned so much from the careful exegesis that he offers in the book's first five chapters.