In a sweeping way throughout Apocalypse, the sociologist John R. Hall (University of California at Davis) covers the range of the apocalyptic imaginary from its onset in Zoroastrian Persia and ancient Israel through the incipiency of Christianity, the emergence of Islam, medieval Europe, and the early modern centuries to the totalitarian regimes of terror in the twentieth century, and the new manifestations of apocalyptic end times in the Islamic and Western worlds in the twenty-first century. Hall isn't bothered by the contemporary talk about the secularization of the sacred, the disenchantment of the world, and the withering away of religion. He considers the transcendental longing for the transfiguration of historical reality a visionary constant in the history of all civilizations. In fewer than three hundred pages, his study provides a richly textured and intelligently substantiated discussion of apocalyptic times.

Hall distinguishes this apocalyptic time frame and the anticipation of rapture in being from other modes of temporality. He speaks about the immediacy of the “here-and-now” experiences in primary societies; the socially ritualized “synchronic time” of societies anchored in tradition and remembered memory; the “diachronic time” of routinized time management that enables modern political economies to function in a rationalized way; the “strategic time” component in long-range policy or expansion designs; and the “pre- and post-apocalyptic time” modalities that envision the conditions leading up to rapture and finally illustrate the utopian end realm. The reader occasionally gets the impression that the knowledge interest in the apocalypse and its various historical formations becomes overwhelmed by the author's fascination with the phenomenology of time scenarios throughout history. The two lines of inquiry that compete for attention in this extremely informative book have found two distinctive styles of literary representation, a more analytic one for the time frames and a comparative hermeneutic narrative approach for the apocalyptic imaginary.

The engaging language of the comparative chapters becomes obvious, for example, when Hall sums up the apocalyptic moment at the height of the medieval Islamic expansion, a few centuries before the fury of Europe's crusading Christian backlash:

Unlike social scientists and historians who would be satisfied with this “objective” characterization of historical configurations, Hall doesn't abstain from expressing succinct “subjective” observations when he concludes: “These temporal possibilities are still with us today. They play out within a world that we call ‘modern’ (or, sometimes, ‘postmodern’)” (44).

Hall's major intellectual motivation for the book is certainly to promote a different reading of modernity. Coupled with a vivid portrayal of the radical and violent features of the revolution in England in the seventeenth century, his account of the French Revolution makes us see that the Reign of Terror was part of “the utopian pursuit of the new sacred civic order.” He writes: “A founding moment of political modernity was apocalyptic in its logic” (119). He traces this apocalyptic logic from the Puritan radicals in England and the Jacobins in France to the bloody revolutions in the twentieth century in Russia, China, and Cambodia and the establishment of regimes of terror in those modern societies. It remains a mystery why he touches on Nazi Germany only in passing and fails to mention Hitler or the Holocaust and its planners and executioners. With the exception of Carl Schmitt, whom Hall quotes, there are no figures in the book with Nazi credentials.

This exclusion of the fascist imaginary from the apocalyptic map may be justified, up to a certain point, when it comes to Italy and the other Mediterranean and fascist regimes in the Balkans. After all, they started out as rather antiliberal and anticommunist authoritarian regimes, which became radicalized when they joined forces with Nazi Germany and began to execute their respective ethnic cleansing projects. But that Nazi Germany itself is not included in Hall's discussion makes no sense, since much of the original literature on the apocalyptic or religious dimension of the Third Reich—an apocalyptic symbol in itself—emerged in Germany during the reign of the Nazis or, at least, in response to it. The concept of “political religion” was coined in the 1930s and developed by Eric Voegelin in 1938 in the book Die politischen Religionen, which was originally published in Vienna and then one year later, after Voegelin's escape to the United States, in Stockholm. In this book the author deals with the apocalyptic nature of the Nazis and other mass movements, and it has been available in English translation for many years. The ideas of this book were influential in launching the journal Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions in 2000—coincidentally, the same year that the book The Political Religions was republished in Voegelin's Collected Works. Hall does not mention Voegelin's book, the concept of political religion, or the literature on it that has appeared in the interim (see Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion [Princeton University Press, 2001, 2006]).

Despite this inexplicable gap in an otherwise extraordinarily erudite and readable book about the apocalyptic imaginary and its range over three millennia, Hall has succeeded in making us understand “how the apocalyptic has been shaped, contained, rechanneled, and reasserted in relation to modernity, and, conversely, how modernity has been affected by apocalyptic epochs” (200). The currency of his apocalyptic view becomes obvious for even the most antireligious mind when reading this comment on George W. Bush: “it would seem mistaken to focus solely on his individual faith and his connections with the Christian Right. Bush simply signaled his alliance with the millennial tradition in American religion that has long framed American history” (187).