In this published version of her 2006 Gifford Lectures, Jean Bethke Elshtain revisits themes from her earlier writings while turning her attention more directly to the subject of sovereignty. While not the first to probe the concept of sovereignty, Elshtain's contribution lies in her ability to view sovereignty and its historical development through the lenses of both theology and political theory. Elshtain is modest about her qualifications as a theologian, but her attention to theology, political theory, and political realities enables her to offer a unique narrative of the development of political sovereignty and self-sovereignty through the centuries.

An overarching concern within this narrative is how sovereignty came to be understood as monistic, with power considered singular, absolute, and limitless, when its source lies in a Trinitarian God whose sovereignty was not originally so conceived. In chapters one and two, Elshtain begins the story by tracing theological shifts that impacted views of God's sovereignty. Drawing on St. Augustine, she describes his understanding of God, humanity, and politics, noting the ways in which his thoughts on human finiteness limit (in helpful ways) emulation of God and domination within the earthly city. Elshtain notes other influential sources of thought on Western Christianity, such as the Justinian synthesis of law that assumed the existence of a law of the peoples and a natural law which were both accessible to all rational people and provided a means by which earthly power was limited. With this understanding of law, “the king or emperor is not free to do anything he wills, for that which runs counter to the law lacks legitimacy” (15). St. Thomas Aquinas builds on this idea, so that both earthly rule and the law are to be directed toward the common good; anything done contrary to this end is a perversion and the ruler under whom it is done a tyrant. To Elshtain, Aquinas and Augustine describe a God who maintains a relational connection to humanity and in whom “divine reason enjoys a priority over divine will” (21). Subsequent theological developments, associated with Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, shifted this understanding so that divine will came to be seen as having priority over divine reason; concomitantly, God is not bound by anything other than his will. This theological shift toward voluntarism had political ramifications: “God's power in this vision is not only absolute but arbitrary … This vision helped to lay the basis for the juristic conception of the strong sovereign state as a political entity” (30).

In the next five chapters, Elshtain uses the lens of sovereignty to offer an alternative narrative of the emergence of the modern state. Overall, the story that Elshtain tells is one in which “the Thomistic denial of absolute sovereign power to any of the component communities of Christendom, including papacy and empire, gives way to the construction of a perpetual, supreme power, first in incarnated form as the king's body which could not be dismembered and, second, in its recognizably modern form as an institutionalized, juristic entity that defines, both legally and normatively, the modern state” (114). As Elshtain explores the thought of Jean Bodin, Dante Alighieri, Marsilius of Padua, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Richard Hooker, Niccolo Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and G.W.F. Hegel, some significant developments in the story emerge: the idea that supreme authority needs to reside in a single source began in support of a centralized monarch but continues to be influential; the basis for the law shifted from justice to effective power, rooted in the king's absolute authority; unity became a priority, for the sake of the state, so that all other institutions and alternate sources of authority, including the church, were to be absorbed into the state. In all of these developments, Elshtain notes the movement toward monistic, unbounded notions of authority. As contrasts to these various consolidations of power, Elshtain offers the thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (who challenges the sacralization of the state), the natural law tradition (which limits or binds political power), and the American experiment (“one could quite easily interpret the American experience … as a vast exercise in binding sovereign power” [152]). Overall, Elshtain concludes this section by noting that sovereignty, in limited, constitutional forms, is the best option available to us, while acknowledging that political sovereignty has attendant dilemmas that are without “foreseeable historic resolution” (158). Here the reader would have benefited from more discussion of these dilemmas and some possible ways forward, given the very real ways in which questions related to sovereignty continue to plague us today.

In her final section, Elshtain turns to the question of self-sovereignty, based on her hunch that just as the God of will triumphed over earlier conceptions of God, so the “willing” aspects of the self have triumphed in our contemporary notion of self-sovereignty. Elshtain begins with Augustine's understanding of the self as a contrast model, noting that classic Christian thinkers would never have conceived of associating the idea of sovereignty with the individual self. Before exploring different thinkers who were influential in or provide telling examples of the development of self-sovereignty (René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Friedrich Nietzsche), Elshtain introduces today's two reigning notions of self-sovereignty. Hard sovereignty is a “maximal” version focused on the self as “a kind of law unto itself” (172), while soft sovereignty is more of a therapeutic notion with an emphasis on validation and affirmation. Despite their differences, each offers a monistic, voluntaristic notion of the self which Elshtain would like to see bound or limited. In this section, Elshtain draws into her discussion areas of significant contemporary controversy, such as abortion, stem cell research, and eugenics. At first blush the reasons for this do not stand out as plainly as they might, while her convictions on these issues clearly emerge, but at root is her concern that defining selves primarily in terms of the ability to will runs the grave risk of encouraging practices that eliminate selves who are not able to will. In contrast, and in closing, Elshtain provides an alternative to unlimited self-sovereignty by offering a vision of a self defined and bound by relationality and love. Here she draws inspiration from writers (Czeslaw Milosz, Marilyn Robinson, and Albert Camus) who emphasize living with fellow human beings and enjoying the quotidian realities of life.

In this account of sovereignty, Elshtain is intentionally, and ambitiously, trying to retell the story of Western political thought by emphasizing theological developments and implications alongside political ones. In one sense, this effort is reminiscent of thinkers from the theological world such as John Milbank and William Cavanaugh, who have argued for the social and political implications of the triumph of the will in theology and told the story of the rise of the state as an alternative to the church in their respective works. In another sense, the work is dissimilar, in that Elshtain's background in political theory provides different lenses and legitimacy to her explorations. Elshtain raises an impressive array of points, engagingly drawing into her theological and political discussion cultural references ranging from the Beatles and Talking Heads to Nathaniel Hawthorne and Cormac McCarthy. At times, however, the reader would have benefited from a more consistent narrative or methodology from chapter to chapter, as the forest was sometimes obscured by the trees. Elshtain concludes the book by offering an alternative to reigning notions of self-sovereignty; one wishes that she would also have provided an alternative to today's political notions of sovereignty. She hints at the problems we face and gestures toward sources that might help us think about solutions, but this reader was left longing for more. That being said, Elshtain was uniquely qualified to undertake this interdisciplinary exploration of sovereignty and the result is an engaging, readable, and necessary engagement with an idea that has tremendous implications for current political realities and contemporary conceptions of the self.