Theocratic movements are on the rise. But what does it actually mean for God to rule? This Element offers one answer by recovering the theocratic project of medieval Judaism's most important thinker, Moses Maimonides. Theocracy is often thought to quash human agency, evoking an overpowering deity and clerical domination. Yet by reconsidering Maimonides' debt to the Islamic philosopher al-Fārābī, and challenging Leo Strauss' influential reading, the author argues that among Maimonides' aims was to elevate humanity's role in divine rule. In its highest form reason is identical with revelation, action with providence. God's governance is delegated: theocracy requires human agency-the imitation of God. Maimonides focuses on philosophical-religious leaders. But he also broadens imitatio dei to anyone whose knowledge of God inspires love of God: By emulating God's goodness, we can become agents of divine rule. In this way, Maimonides' ideas suggest ways by which theocracy and democracy might, counter-intuitively, be reconciled.

In recent decades, prominent political theorists have responded to perceived flaws in liberalism by proposing more “radical” forms of democracy. What might a radically democratic state look like? I argue that we can find one answer, counterintuitively, by looking back to the thought of Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes’ secularized theory of language introduces into political life a new way of conceiving human agency, one in which the commonwealth fills not only the negative role of stemming conflict, but the positive task of actualizing self-determination. By collapsing the distance between the true source of man’s politics and the nature of governance, Hobbes inaugurates a tradition of radical democratic thought that seeks to close the oppressive rupture of word and deed, maker and made. Yet rather than diminishing religious experience, Hobbes reconstitutes it in a new, profane, and political form. He invites us to acquire a capacity long reserved for God alone: the power to create human nature itself.

From Christian dominionists in the United States to far-right Jewish nationalists in Israel to Hindu supremacists in India, theocratic movements are on the rise. For liberal democrats the stakes seem clear: on one side, reason, secularism, and Enlightenment; on the other, a new dark age. Yet consider a discomforting thought: What if this framing gets the danger all wrong? What if the very democratic systems to which theocracies are counterposed were never actually secular? What if theology has always been constitutive, in some form, of political order—if politics, no matter how modern, must rely, explicitly or covertly, on elements of religion?

ISIS, QAnon, Putin: as Ben Jones remarks at the beginning of his fascinating and intrepid study, " [a]pocalypse, it seems, is everywhere" (p. xi). A political theorists natural response to apocalypticism might be to dismiss it—as an eruption of the irrational, a response to inequality, or a coping mechanism for social change. Jones takes a laudably different path. Even beliefs as outlandish as end-times prophesies should be taken seriously. They speak to something deep in our nature. We might even learn from them.

Liberal democracies need solidarity. They need citizens who sacrifice for their country, rally for justice, and help their neighbors. Yet according to critics of liberalism like Carl Schmitt, the solidarity liberal democracies need comes from sources they cannot themselves produce, like religion. Thus in a time of declining religiosity and rising nationalism, how can we form strong social bonds without racism, demagoguery, and xenophobia? Can we have not only solidarity, but liberal solidarity, in a secular age? In Solidarity in a Secular Age, Charles H. T. Lesch responds to Schmitt's challenge, proposing a new liberal-democratic solidarity rooted in personal sacrifice, shared fate, and moral destiny. Through readings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and Jürgen Habermas, he uncovers religion's underlying role in Western thinking about solidarity since the Enlightenment. Turning next to Emmanuel Levinas, Martin Buber, and George Eliot, he shows how Jewish ideas can contribute to reimagining our social bond for the twenty-first century. Lesch provides a new language for restoring our fractured unity while staying true to core liberal values. He shows how theological ideas influence even outwardly secular philosophical and political theories. Radically revising political theory's relationship to religion, he challenges us to rethink and rebuild our social bond.

"The person is the pivot around whom everything revolves," David Walsh tells us toward the beginning of this rich, fascinating, and ardently moral book. "There is nothing higher in the universe" (p. ix). It is this supreme priority of the person, for Walsh, that forms the core of our normative vocabulary. It is what we attempt to express via "dignity" and "inviolability" in ethics and defend via "rights" and "freedom" in politics. It is what the Hebrew Bible means in describing human beings as created in the divine image. All of these formulations, Walsh suggests, gesture toward the truth. Yet they always—indeed inevitably—fall short. For the ultimate source of the human being's priority, in his view, can only be found in Christianity: "Through Christ the invitation to partici-pate in the transcendent Being of God is extended to every human being. From this we derive a sense of the unique unfathomability of every single one" (p. 34).