This essay examines the way that Miguel Vatter’s Divine Democracy theorises the relationship between authoritarianism and democracy. It notes that Vatter concludes Chapter One by opposing liberal democracy to totalitarianism on the grounds that the former is based upon consent while the latter is rules through ideology and terror. Vatter makes this point, in part, by pointing to Giorgio Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory, and he uses it to launch his own investigation into democratic political theology. However, in the final chapter, Vatter also draws on Agamben to argue that liberal and totalitarian forms of government are two sides of the apparatus of glory that has been inherited from Christianity. I problematise the first of these interpretations, arguing that it has the potential to occlude the complicity between Christianity, the “consensual” form of government that one finds in liberal democracy, and the forms of authoritarian democracy that have repeatedly emerged from its crisis. I argue that the latter analysis is also more fruitful for the anarchist republicanism with which Vatter concludes the book, and that he has developed more thoroughly in other works.
