Lee Ward’s purpose in Modern Democracy and the Theological-Political Problem is to explore the relationship between the increasingly secular character of politics and the success of democracy, long maligned but now broadly posited as the best and most legitimate regime type. In so doing, he offers intriguing close readings of the book’s titular figures on the intersections of democratic thought and the theological-political. Composed of an introduction, three substantive chapters, and a brief conclusion, the author argues that Spinoza, Rousseau, and Jefferson are responsible for setting democratic thought in a rationalist framework, one that specifically denies political authority to revelation, but which nonetheless makes space for a metaphysics based in natural law.
For these thinkers, the decline of clerical rule in political life left a vacuum formerly filled by divine will. Modernity is thus marked by a shift from clerical rule dictated by revelation to a democratic politics increasingly shaped by popular sovereignty. Yet even if one accepts the account of early modernity as subject to the relentless onslaught of secularism, democratic politics in the hands of Spinoza, Rousseau, and Jefferson does not fully reject the premises of faith-based politics. Instead, the three share a “confidence in popular government and a concomitant commitment to subject religious authorities to secular rule [and] a fundamentally similar conception of nature and the nature of power,” as well as the belief that “nature reasserted its moral claim in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries against orthodoxies of various kinds” (p. 2). In other words, secularization does not completely dismiss religion; rather, it establishes a new hierarchy in which religion is subordinate to politics and civil society.
For Ward, Spinoza, Rousseau, and Jefferson determine that revelation-based politics is not only unnecessary and stultifying but normatively undesirable—it encourages people’s worst tendencies toward intolerance. In revelation’s place, the titular thinkers cultivate the belief that democracy is grounded in natural rights, granted by God. Ward terms this belief a kind of metaphysics, specifically a metaphysics capable of the “ennobling of democracy,” in Thomas Pangle’s phrasing. Ward argues, chiefly in the conclusion, that post-modernism’s noncommittal attitude toward democracy—what he memorably terms a “curious mixture of triumphalism and malaise” (p. 188)—overlooks both the centrality of metaphysics to the democratic project and the self-critical nature of modernity. The book’s three chapters are thus tasked with dually establishing what we might call a secular metaphysics and the contributions of Ward’s three thinkers to that line of thought.
According to Ward, who focuses on the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Spinoza believes religious authority claimed by the state—what Ward calls “the institutional problem of theocracy” - undermines several principles necessary for a people to thrive, such as reliance on individuals’ rational judgment, toleration, and freedom. Such qualities are only realizable through a democratic government grounded in natural, and explicitly not anthropocentric, laws. Following the work of Jonathan Israel, Ward argues that Spinoza grounds democracy in natural law and seeks to eliminate reliance on religious authorities and their insistence on the centrality of revelation. Early modern democracy, with its privileging of reason over superstition, advances human happiness and civic toleration—but only insofar as it is “regulated by certain metaphysical principles that endorse cosmic justice and order” (p. 189).
The chapter on Rousseau all but drops the language of metaphysics, though it offers a provocative interpretation of one of the most thorniest aspects of the Genevan’s political thought: the legislator. Ward argues that Rousseau’s discussion of civil religion, though it does not appear until the end of Book IV of the Social Contract, offers readers a means of reinterpreting the role of the Legislator, of whom Rousseau writes in chapter 7 of Book II. Ward proposes that a modern legislator need not resemble Moses, with the latter’s ability to claim divine inspiration. Rather, referring to Rousseau’s own attempts at drafting legislation for the Corsicans and the Poles, Ward points out that a Christian inheritance is simply a fact of life with which a would-be legislator must contend. Yet in the eyes of Rousseau, Christianity has proven a dangerous source of intolerance and civil exclusion. Rousseau’s solution to this paradox comes in his well-worn phrase, a “purely civil profession of faith.” Ward goes on to imagine how a modern legislator, eager to achieve a secular state, might engender such a faith. In doing so, he thinks beyond the inherent tensions—or, unkindly, contradictions - of Rousseau’s Legislator, a figure who must dissemble in order to persuade his flock.
The third chapter, also the weakest, focuses on Jefferson, who, like Rousseau, is said to bring “democracy down from the heavens to earth” (pp. 2, 83, 138). Ultimately, the chapter is largely descriptive, with Ward promising to show “how Jefferson was instrumental in changing American perceptions about democracy” (p. 137), a claim with which few would disagree. Setting out to reveal how Jefferson attempted to realize his ideals within practical party politics, specifically with regard to toleration, Ward’s shift in focus from theory to practice underserves both. (This is in spite of a captivating section on the Jefferson Bible.) Jefferson is as much an inheritor of Locke as of Spinoza or Hobbes, which Ward acknowledges—but Locke does not fit comfortably in the story that has so far been told.
Taken together, the three main chapters alternately offer insights into an unconventional trio, a few of which I have summarized, and raise a number of concerns. With regard to the latter, one might ask to what degree increasing state secularism during the early modern period was a rejection of revelation, rather than a rejection of religion, tout court. The two are troublingly conflated at times (pp. 42, 125). Similarly, democracy is sometimes equated with, and reduced to, popular sovereignty (pp. 2, 88, 189). With popular sovereignty elsewhere identified as “the underlying theoretical connection between liberalism and modern democracy” (p. 8), this leaves the reader somewhat uncertain as to how the author defines democracy.
More pressingly, if it is already agreed upon by most historians of political thought that Spinoza, Rousseau, and Jefferson are, to varying degrees, democratic thinkers, then what is the particular contribution of this work? Is it the claim that they are the triumvirate of central importance? What is at stake in selecting these three thinkers and not, for example, Pierre Bayle, Benjamin Franklin, or Thomas Reid? This is not to suggest that I wish the author had written a different book entirely. Rather, the reader would like to know why she ought to read about these figures in particular. Is there some significant ‘interaction effect’ of Spinoza, Rousseau, and Jefferson that is meaningful to contemporary politics?
There are some gestures toward these questions in the introduction but Ward’s view ultimately remains oblique. The book’s format—distinct chapters that do little to thread their main ideas into a complete tapestry—contribute to these ambiguities. The absence of a concluding chapter bringing the individual thinkers into dialogue with one another is felt. The three chapters that constitute the majority of the work ultimately feel more like thematically linked essays than a sustained argument. Nonetheless, there are rich explorations of the titular thinkers that will be of interest to those working in early modern thought and the intersection of the religious and the political.
