“There have been so many writers who dominated a period and then slipped off,” said the playwright Arthur Miller. “History is like some gigantic beast—it simply wriggles its back and throws off whatever is on it.”

I read that quotation in a biography of Thomas Paine (Craig Nelson, Thomas Paine, 2006), but it could just as well have served Adriana Alfaro Altamirano in her excellent book, The Belief in Intuition: Individuality and Authority in Henri Bergson and Max Scheler. In fact, in Alfaro Altamirano’s case, the quotation has the advantage of being doubly true. She takes on two authors whom, until very recently, history had wriggled off: Henri Bergson (1859–1941) and Max Scheler (1874–1928). Bergson was the preeminent French philosopher of the early twentieth century, and Scheler was a leading German philosopher and phenomenologist. Alfaro Altamirano’s wager is that these authors, never before paired in an in-depth study, offer paths not yet taken for political theory. As she puts it, “they can help us to avoid seeing the twenty-first century exclusively through the eyes of the twentieth” (p. 11).

The gamble pays off. The Belief in Intuition is an outstanding work of political theory. Its scholarship is impressive and Alfaro Altamirano writes clearly, often with verve and humor. What I especially admire is how determined she is to bring Bergson and Scheler into dialogue with the canonical authors and mainstream debates of political theory. I recommend it to a wide readership interested in the fields of intellectual history, normative political philosophy, critical theory, democracy and authoritarianism, affect studies, moral psychology, and the future of liberalism.

The guiding thread of the book, as its title indicates, is intuition. In philosophy and political theory, that word is typically associated with one of two things: either a Rawlsian approach, in which theories of justice begin by appealing to the considered moral intuitions of citizens, or a school of British moral philosophy that defines intuitions as self-evident moral propositions. For Bergson and Scheler, however, intuition means something else. Rather than serving as datum for theory building (Rawls and company) or as being an object of thought (the British tradition), intuition is a method—or more precisely, a human ability or power used to access things and experiences in a way that conceptual thinking and sense perception cannot.

Intuition is used by Bergson and Scheler to illuminate a wide array of phenomena in the natural and human sciences. To consider only Bergson, he brought his method of intuition to problems of psychology and brain science, laughter and comedy, evolution, special relativity, and morality and religion. Alfaro Altamirano does not survey all these applications. She instead develops a politico-philosophical interpretation of intuition in relation to topics pertinent for political science: Individuality and Diversity (Chapter 1), Agency and Freedom (Chapter 2), Uncertainty (Chapter 3), Sympathy (Chapter 4), and Authority (Chapter 5). In each chapter, Bergson and Scheler, usually in that order, are interpreted and discussed in relation to one another and also to contemporary interlocutors (except for Chapters 3 and 4, respectively dedicated to Bergson and Scheler). Generally speaking, what binds Bergson and Scheler as a coherent team is that they both adopt a phenomenological (or as Alfaro Altamirano calls it, a “personalist”) perspective on the topic at hand. What that means is that they treat individuality, freedom, uncertainty, and the rest from an internal first-person perspective, such that their characteristic question is not, for example, “What is freedom?” but rather, “How is freedom experienced by and disclosed to the subject him or herself?” According to Alfaro Altamirano, Bergson and Scheler’s main contribution to contemporary political science is that they bring a first-person perspective to the conversation yet maintain a commitment to ideals of truth, reality, and objectivity.

The space of a short review does not allow me to gloss each chapter of The Belief in Intuition. Let me, then, jump to my favorite: Chapter 5, on moral and political authority (though Chapter 2, on free choice and temptation, is a close second). The problem Alfaro Altamirano addresses is real and urgent: all around the world, populist authoritarian leaders are on the rise. Yet, modern political thought—almost by design—is ill equipped to deal with this reality. As Judith Shklar observed long ago (Ordinary Vices, 1984, p. 214ff.), the difference between Renaissance and modern political thinkers is that the former conceives of politics in personal terms, whereas the latter deals strictly in systems and institutions. For authors such as Machiavelli and Montaigne, the virtues and vices of individual rulers are what counts, whereas from Montesquieu onward, the real problem of politics concerns the “rule of law” rather than “the rule of men.” This development has been fateful for political science. Its practical and theoretical benefits are too many to count. But it has had an important cost: a neglect by political thinkers of the anthropological, moral, and political significance of individual leaders and the influence that their character can have—for better or worse—on their subjects.

Here is where Alfaro Altamirano shows that Bergson and Scheler are a perfect fit for our times. Both authors focus their ethical and political philosophy on what she calls “emulation”—that is, imitation of great spiritual and political figures. But as Alfaro Altamirano makes very clear (and in contrast to Weber’s notion of charismatic authority), the kind of emulation Bergson and Scheler champion has nothing to do with copying or slavishly obeying a leader. It has, instead, a democratic and emancipatory aspect: the example great leaders set has the potential to inspire subjects to realize their own individuality and agency in a way that is entirely their own. As Alfaro Altamirano puts it, “Behind such an ethics rests the idea that when one imitates or emulates an exemplar, that exemplar’s authority can not only be consistent with one’s freedom but also even contribute to it, because it fosters the development of one’s individual personality” (p. 121). The point, of course, is not that a politics of emulation inspired by Bergson and Scheler would support the kind of populist leaders we see today. It is, rather, that Bergson and Scheler are so valuable because they are two modern political thinkers who refused to cede the appeal of charismatic leaders to opponents of democracy.

This is a rich, engaging study of Bergson and Scheler that will interest a wide readership in political science. The Belief in Intuition represents the best kind of work in historical political thought. Alfaro Altamirano is perfectly attentive to the context and concerns of the authors she treats, but always with an eye to how they can speak to our own questions and needs.