The unwary reader may be disconcerted by the complexities of the argument and the scarcity of references to Augustine's texts in comparison to the abundance of references to the modern secondary literature. He would be well advised to reread the Introduction with some care. His conceptual analysis, the author tells us, ‘can swing free from the quest for the historical Augustine’. For his purposes, ‘what Augustine actually meant is less central than the ways in which the relevant passages from his works have been interpreted (and applied to politics) in the modern period. I will selectively appropriate readings and misreadings alike’ (p. 7). The book does indeed provide something like a reception history; but it has a more positive aim: ‘to reconstruct a kind of Augustinian civic virtue that might in turn encourage a more ambitious political practice’ (p. 8, italics in original).

For half a century and more the debates over both the liberal tradition and the Augustinian legacy have produced a vast literature. Gregory identifies three general types of Augustinian liberalism, which he labels ‘Augustinian realism’ (such as Reinhold Niebuhr's), ‘Augustinian proceduralism’ (John Rawls et al.) and ‘Augustinian civic liberalism’ (Martin Luther King et al.). His discussion includes interpretations of the Augustinian tradition that reject liberalism (such as that of Radical Orthodoxy). Gregory describes the brand of liberalism he wishes to commend and to place within an Augustinian tradition as a ‘moderate form of liberal perfectionism’ (p. 9) which avoids more procedural versions and gives weight to civic virtues.

In his exposition and critique of rival versions of Augustinian liberalism, as well as of the arguments of those who reject it, Gregory is scrupulously fair, even generous. He sees Augustinian realism, which has been the principal strand in our time, in large measure inspired by Reinhold Niebuhr, as dominated by the stress it lays on sin and on the limitations of the political sphere imposed by sin: government exists to limit its effects and to protect people against it. It is powerless to eliminate sin and should not seek to do so. The virtue he regards as the citizen's characteristic virtue on this view is hope; the resolution of the tensions and conflicts endemic to social living will be healed only in the eschatological community. This version of liberalism is ultimately unsatisfactory because it leaves too much of political action and discourse, before the eschaton, rudderless. Our deepest longings and commitments lie outside the sphere of politics thus restricted. This objection also holds against some variants of Augustinian proceduralism, for which the characteristic civic virtue is justice or fairness. In so far as they would advocate moral neutrality and outlaw reference to fundamental conceptions of the human good and flourishing, banishing them from the realm of public discourse, these versions of liberalism restrict the sphere of politics unduly.

Gregory wishes to give more weight to the motivational aspects of his version of Augustinian civic liberalism, for which he takes Martin Luther King as his model. Its characteristic civic virtue is love. His primary object is, indeed, to avoid the schizophrenia that has separated sin and love in the dominant modes of Augustinian political thought, and to emphasise a dialectical relation between them. A whole chapter is devoted to feminist political thinking which, it is argued, can enrich a Christian social ethics, stressing the role of care for others in politics.

In the final chapters Gregory's attention shifts away from Augustinianism towards Augustine. He defends Augustine's conception of love against critics such as Anders Nygren and Hannah Arendt, defending convincingly a reading of Augustine which does not imply that love of God instrumentalises love of neighbour, and that passion and emotions should not be excluded from the realm of politics. Doing less than full justice to Martha Nussbaum's rehabilitation of Augustine's view of the emotions, Gregory endorses a conception of ‘eudaimonistic loving that is other-regarding without domination . . . not merely an affect of the agent but an intersubjective movement of self and others’ (p. 318). In these chapters Gregory also considers the well-aired problems of freedom and paternalism, the just war, use of force and coercion. They contribute little to the old and familiar debates over these questions.

The book as a whole, however, although not easy reading (not helped by an idiosyncratic and confusing use of abbreviations), is an impressive though complex dialogue with a wide range of modern interpretations of Augustinian thought. On the whole it seems to succeed in its claim to rehabilitate a neglected strand of the Augustinian tradition by defending a ‘dynamic Augustinian civic liberalism that avoids theocracy and status quo defeatism’ (p. 364).