In this impressive exercise in revisionist history, Carolina Armenteros concludes her work by stating, ‘it is partly to Maistre … that we owe our shaken yet enduring conviction that reflecting on history, retrieving historical facts, and practicing history as a discipline can improve us as human beings’ (p. 324). According to Armenteros, Joseph de Maistre – a man noted for his elegant literary style – mediated ‘the rise of an autochthonous Francophone tradition of historical thinking that historicized Enlightenment social and political philosophy, transporting ancient arguments to modern contexts’ (p. 4). She repositions Maistre, presenting him as an early conservative who combatted the Enlightenment with historical reasoning that employed a theory of human development. Insisting that moral progress is evident in human history, Maistre shared with Rousseau optimism in human perfectibility. Yet for Maistre, this Pelagian principle (in Armenteros's analysis) rejected the pessimism of Augustine and his early modern heirs (ch. v). Though humans may use their freedom badly, it was this human propensity, combined with divine providence at work in human experience, which redeemed human fallibility to achieve God's purpose. As his thought matured, Maistre's Bodinian tendencies (evident in works from 1794 to 1796), were significantly modified by 1819, when he published his ultramontane manifesto, Du pape. While Armenteros acknowledges the counter-intuitive nature of this conclusion, it was his elevation of papal authority that in fact diminished monarchical authority in significant respects. Perhaps most surprisingly – and intriguingly – this work traces out Maistre's intellectual heirs, who included traditionalists, socialists and positivists. Though Maistre neither practised the craft of history nor produced a comprehensive philosophy of history, he exercised such an influence over early nineteenth-century historical reasoning that echoes of his thought are still felt into our own time. Yet until this work, Maistre's lasting impact has rarely been acknowledged. Carolina Armenteros's book is of critical importance, and should be studied by anyone interested in issues related to the modern Christian appropriations of historical reasoning.