The book gives a very clear and readable introduction to the whole history of political ideas, or better, as the author himself immediately adds, the whole Western history of political thought. Although Dick Howard begins his survey with the Greeks and ends with the French Revolution, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are presented as well, even if less directly. He reads the past from the perspective of its outcome for the present, identifying as “political” those authors who have retained their relevance throughout the centuries. To better understand both political philosophers and ourselves, we have to read Plato, Aristotle, Montesquieu, or the American Founding Fathers as our contemporaries who assist us in attempting to resolve our most urgent political problems.

As an introduction, The Primacy of the Political is brilliant and useful because it is much more than an introduction. Its author has a strong systematic and theoretical interest of his own, and the whole representation of the past follows one leading idea or conceptual scheme that is oriented to the diagnosis of our own times. The idea is that “the political” that emerged with the old Greek polis is under threat of the antipolitical temptation at all times. From the beginning and throughout the book, this idea is followed by the strong thesis that there is one and only one alternative to the temptation of antipolitics, and that is democratic politics. Democracy is the only way out, but seldom is it realized in history and appreciated adequately in political thought. Even if democracy is established successfully—such as in old Athens, in a very restricted way in the Roman republic and other city-states, in the modern world since the late eighteenth century, and finally in the established and institutionally hardened democracy of our days—it remains under threat of a backlash into antipolitics. Therefore, democracy is at once the great “exception within” “Western political history” and its very essence, or at least “an essential part of it” (p. 7).

The clear-cut conceptual scheme of democratic politics versus antipolitics provides the book with a compelling logical structure. It allows the author to bring order to a highly complex body of political thought. The story begins with the rise and fall of Athenian democracy such as it is reflected in philosophy: All basic elements of democracy were already developed in classical times. The denaturalization of all institutions and the invention of political equality was already the achievement of Sparta, as Howard rightly emphasizes. But only Athens combined both elements with the ideas of a juridification of politics (“rule of law”) and “individual freedom” (pp. 27–30).

To present only the highlights of the story, Plato (not surprisingly) is the bad guy, presented as the founder of all antipolitical thinking—this has long been the objection of theorists like Karl Popper and Hannah Arendt—and Aristotle is the good guy. Even if he was not a democrat, he invented some important preconditions of democratic politics. These preconditions consisted of the negation of Plato's antipolitics and the affirmation of an alternative concept of reason that is Phronesis: practical, empirical, and pragmatic knowledge that is unstable, flexible, and open to change.

The impressive journey that Howard creates through our intellectual past then goes farther on these tracks. Rome established on its rise the first “republican democracy,” which, through the historically unique invention of Roman civil law, for the first time realized the idea of rule of law. With that step, the crucial preconditions for the separation of powers and representative government were fulfilled, because laws “do not put an end to conflict; they regulate it” (p. 101). To be sure, Polybius is the hero of Roman political thought and Cicero its tragic figure, longing for the political, knowing about its virtues, but resigning himself to the fact of the fall of the republic within his lifetime, hence turning to the antipolitical intellectual utopia of cosmopolitanism where reason alone makes the law. The author's interpretation of Paul is fascinating, because, like Cicero, he also stands in between the political and the antipolitical forces of history, but from the then-fresh point of view of Christianity. On the one hand, there is antipolitical failure, programmed by Christian inwardness. But on the other hand, “in a secular world where politics had lost its legitimacy, Christianity as the source of a new kind of legitimacy was drawn almost in spite of itself to take its place within the world” (pp. 122–23).

Unfortunately, in the chapter on the Christian age that follows, Howard does not take into account that the legal revolution of the eleventh and twelfth centuries changed the perspective of inwardness into a new “outwardness.” The philosophers and jurists of canon law of that time understood the doctrine of incarnation as the incarnation by law and legal reform. Together with the separation of the sacred from the secular (here is the focus of Howard's analysis, and rightly so), a juridification of politics only now became possible, combining law with universal claims for justice, equity, and freedom in the light of a biblical theology of suffering and salvation. Only that enabled the intellectual turn from the antipolitical bad guy, Augustine, to the rehabilitation of politics by the good guy, Thomas.

On the one hand, Howard is right to argue that the final outcome of the Christian age was a new kind of individualism that separated and alienated the human individual not only from nature but also from the political community, hence creating modern man, and as a side effect freeing up “the sphere of politics as an arena that has to create its own rules and institutions” (p. 161). But on the other hand, Howard neglects to say that modern democratic politics was enabled not only by a) the Greek heritage of political equality, active citizenship, and individual freedom; b) the Roman heritage of legally institutionalized conflict; and c) the Christian heritage of modern individualism but also by d) the other Christian heritage of “law that is freedom” (Kant).

The narrative goes on, however. Luther wins the battle in history and in Howard's book against the antipolitical temptation of Thomas Münzer and the revolutionary peasants; the republican Calvin wins the battle against Luther and his antipolitical freedom of a Christian; and then Machiavelli as the first true political thinker of modernity rules out all of the Christian anti-, quarter-, and half-political thinkers. Finally, Rousseau and the Jacobins are losing the contest with the American Revolution and the discourse of the Founding Fathers, who created a republic that enabled a mighty rebirth of the political.

Writing in the era of George W. Bush, the author faces a new age of antipolitics. There are now the Platonic and modernist powers of unity, on the one side, and the postmodern powers of diversity, on the other side, and both are antipolitical. It is time to go back to the roots: “the rediscovery of the political as the framework of meaning that makes room for the legitimate conflict between the proponents of unity and diversity” (p. 331). Here at last, Howard seems to go for a dialectical mediation of the two dualistic, separated forces of political thought, the political and the antipolitical.

A critical point is left, however. Even if we buy the old story of the two revolutions, the American that was political and the antipolitical French (which I do not), Howard explains the American Revolution and its constitutive religious and enlightened, Christian, and deistic sources without recourse to an egalitarian idea of justice that is universal, and that in terms of political thought belongs equally to the heritage of Platonism and the Prophets. Plato was not wrong in “refusing to accept anything less than justice” (p. 40). And what precisely was Plato's “mistake”? Was it that only the “rule of reason can create power that is legitimate and authority that is just”? Or was it that he—different from the Prophets—coupled reason structurally to social hierarchy, and hence did not exhaust the critical potential of reason?