In We Are Kings: Political Theology and the Making of a Modern Individual, Spencer Jackson reads a variety of literary texts written during the long eighteenth century in order to examine the role that religion played in the intertwining development of nationalism and individualism. In particular, he argues for a process of democratization in this literature—even in texts written by avowedly conservative authors—as individuals took up forms of divinely ordained sovereignty once reserved for the monarchy (and, in some chapters, patriarchy). To make this case, Jackson takes up the political theology framework that has proven increasingly influential over the past three decades. In this revival of political theology, scholars have generally appropriated Carl Schmitt's authoritarian conception of sovereignty in order to revitalize popular sovereignty, and Jackson's overall argument for democratization resembles the work of scholars like Chantal Mouffe (The Democratic Paradox, 2000), Julia Lupton (Citizen Saints, 2005), and Graham Hammill (The Mosaic Constitution, 2011). Jackson allows these precursors, however, little attention and in fact works very little with Schmitt himself. Instead, he combines the political theology of Ernst Kantorowicz and Giorgio Agamben with the accounts of modern subjectivity provided by Michel Foucault and Max Weber (among others) to offer expansive readings of texts by John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Samuel Richardson, and Maria Edgeworth.

In the book's first chapter, Jackson asserts the essential modernity of Dryden and argues, surprisingly, that royalist panegyrics like “Astraea Redux” and “To His Sacred Majesty” channel the radicalism of mid-century England despite their obviously conservative bent. In Jackson's reading, such poems reorient traditional political theology to imagine the monarchy's divine authority as residing in the royal blood itself and not in anointing or any action of the church: thus construed, the state's own seemingly secular side becomes the focus of theology. Jackson then argues for later innovation in “To My Honour'd Kinsman,” a poem of praise for a country gentleman that Dryden wrote after the fall of James II. Jackson sees this praise as “democratizing” (50), though “classical republicanism” might be a safer way to categorize a text that never disperses political authority beyond the sort of elite gentleman under discussion. Jackson's juxtaposition of this poem with the earlier panegyrics, however, does usefully reveal how Dryden's “patriot” does indeed take the place of the king in dispensing divine grace (55–56).

The book's second chapter remains within the ambit of Augustan poetry, and Jackson offers a multifaceted reading of Pope's Windsor Forest (1713). Jackson is interested in how this poem sacralizes the English nation, and he argues for understanding the poem's political orientation not as Jacobite, but as advocating an ecumenical nationalism with a particular eye toward England as a rising imperial power. An important component of this argument is Jackson's interpretation of the poem's hunting imagery through the lens of Foucault, Agamben, and other theorists. In this reading, the hunting imagery draws a religious and protoracial distinction between sacred life and life that may be killed with impunity, and as the royal right to hunt shades into the general human right to kill animals, Jackson sees a dispersal of monarchical sovereignty through English subjects more generally. Jackson ultimately sees these reflections on national politics as interwoven with a new, individualistic use of language to maintain personal integrity against the forces of modernization. The figure of the poet imagined in the latter half of Pope's sylvan pastoral thus provides a key connection between Dryden's patriot and the heroines of the domestic novels to which Jackson next turns.

In the third chapter, Jackson turns to Clarissa (1748) and provides an extended reading of the titular character's quasi-monastic seclusion at the end of the novel. While classic criticism has often seen this strongly devotional turn as either apolitical or anachronistic, Jackson identifies it with the contemporary political theology of a “holy nationalism” inherent in the connection between marriage and the state church. (Jackson introduces this connection on page 109, but readers may find it helpful to skip ahead to the fuller articulation of this marital political theology in the final chapter, particularly at pages 142, 157–58.) For Jackson, Clarissa embodies a democratizing Protestant antinomianism founded on Martin Luther's A Treatise on Christian Liberty (1520) and transmitted through eighteenth-century evangelical movements, though Jackson himself has to acknowledge that neither Luther nor the evangelicals intended to foster antinomianism (133, 134). More persuasively, Jackson suggests that the end of Clarissa supplements Weber's theory of Protestant individualism by proposing a “sentimental protagonist” who can join Weber's Puritan and capitalist as an example of modern individuals who “subject their everyday lives to the internalized rule of abstract principles” (127).

Jackson concludes with a chapter on Edgeworth's depiction of characters who are politically, racially, or religiously marginal, particularly in “The Grateful Negro” and The Absentee (1812). Jackson understands Edgeworth to be writing before the consolidation of racist colonial ideology, and he sees in these figures the development of a Kantian or Foucauldian “hegemonic political subject” who “wills his or her own subjection as if it were freedom” (142). Jackson sees this new subjectivity as basically emancipatory: he notes, for example, that “hegemony can never be absolute, because it depends upon the will of its subjects” (143), and he relates this hegemony to classical republicanism. Conversely, however, Jackson admits that such self-possession depends on self-sacrifice, as in the choice of an enslaved African character to betray an uprising in Jamaica. This subjectivity is thus at best an ambivalent move toward a more democratic future. The part of this chapter that may prove of most interest to students of Edgeworth is Jackson's reading of the letter by an Irish laborer that ends The Absentee. Although this letter is often seen as confirming an absorption of Ireland into imperial Britain, Jackson draws on a variety of revisionist historical work and scriptural allusion to argue instead that Edgeworth asserts here the possibility of a disciplined, self-mastering working class well positioned to throw off the trammels of both English and Irish masters.