Greg Forster's John Locke's politics of moral consensus is a spirited and often incisively written argument for an implausible conclusion. Forster strongly endorses the historical reconstruction of the religious basis of Locke's political theory which has been carried out over the last half century, following largely the interpretation set out most painstakingly by John Marshall in his John Locke: resistance, religion and responsibility (Cambridge 1994). Most of his book is devoted to setting out this theory as a systematic and powerfully integrated construction which marked an impressive intellectual advance over Locke's contemporaries and most of his predecessors. His treatment of the philosophical basis of Locke's political thinking is clear and confident, if a trifle brisk, but oddly neglects the outstanding analysis by Michael Ayers. As a whole his book provides a potent affirmation of the scale of Locke's intellectual achievement as a political thinker. On this basis, more ambitiously, Forster argues in his concluding chapter that that achievement still furnishes a viable recipe, intellectually and practically, for the conduct of politics in the world today, and that no rival which lacks its foundation in the rectificatory sanctions of an afterlife enforced by a concerned and adequately equipped deity or deities can hope to do so. This final chapter is more perfunctory. As with Jeremy Waldron's God, Locke and equality (Cambridge 2002), it is compelling enough in its dismissal of the political force of contemporary secular liberal political philosophy. But its positive conclusions will scarcely convince anyone who has not already reached them on quite other grounds. It is also revealingly offhand when it comes to specifying just which parts of the world can hope to be pacified through religiously grounded moral consensus and which for the present, for one reason or another, cannot. (Pakistan for example would be a hard case in the near future.) For all its freshness and illumination as an introduction to Locke's political thinking and its prospective efficacy as an American political tract, it scarcely offers a compelling political approach to the travails of most of the world today.