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This essay offers an interpretation of Alfarabi's Book of Religion, in which the tenth-century philosopher addresses more directly than in any of his other works the relationship between human and divine wisdom. I argue that, despite his apparent silence about the orthodox view of divine law, Alfarabi's primary purpose in the work is to challenge precisely that view, along with the theological opinions on which it depends. To this end, the Book of Religion encourages the examination, by political science, of religion's claim to lead men to happiness. Previous scholarly work has not explored the extent to which the Book of Religion contains a confrontation with orthodoxy and is therefore unable to explain how Alfarabi justifies his thoroughly rational account of religion. Based on the interpretation presented here, Alfarabi comes to light as a philosopher open to the most fundamental alternatives, rather than a dogmatic rationalist.

Political conflicts around the world increasingly reflect a religious challenge to liberal rationalism. Given the tendency of modern political rationalism to underestimate the power of religion, it seems reasonable to consider the classical analysis of religious antirationalism set forth with great clarity in Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus. The play seeks to demonstrate that religious antirationalism—as exemplified by Oedipus—is self-contradictory and self-destructive, but also that it is rooted in such enduring human traits as our awareness of our mortality, our hope for immortality, and our angry refusal to accept our mortality. Sophocles advocates a sober and cautious political rationalism that recognizes the dangers of religious passion to political life, but also the permanence of religious passion within political life. Such a political rationalism, embodied by Theseus, constitutes a middle way between a blind piety which rejects reason and an excessively hopeful political rationalism which underestimates the power of religion.

Alexis de Tocqueville is not easily characterized as either a liberal or a conservative. In this respect he resembles Edmund Burke. Both may be best understood as “liberal conservatives”—figures who straddled both camps. On a number of specific dimensions, including their attitudes toward aristocracy, colonialism, property, rationalism, the tyranny of the majority, pluralism, and the meaning of history, they are remarkably similar. Their thinking foreshadows the rapprochement between liberals and conservatives in the latter half of the twentieth century reflected in the prominence of right-of-center parties and leaders and in the work of such political thinkers as Raymond Aron and Michael Oakeshott.

This study argues that the self-described “malaise” in the study of political development theory is in part the product of the early attempt to strip judgments of value from those of fact in the interests of a more scientific comparative politics; that the resulting science has been inclined to ignore or neglect what may be the most fundamental difference between the modern and premodern worlds, namely the elimination of all religious concerns from those of politics proper (the “separation of church and state”); and that this neglect is in turn linked with the crisis in self-confidence characteristic not only of the science of comparative politics but of science or rationalism simply.