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the tension at the heart of the argument, with its insistence that goodness, truth and beauty occupy the goal of human striving, the end to which democratic charisma aims. There is, it turns out, a monarchy of ideas in that the transcendentals occupy an authoritative place, and this presumably also finds expression in political ideologies and modes of government that preserve their pre-eminence. The tension here with democratic liberalism needs to be brought to the surface. Cannot the horizontality of democratic charisma be held in check only in the context of hierarchies both political and metaphysical? This is not a point Lloyd sufficiently draws out: ‘hierarchical mediation’ and ‘authoritarianism’ are not clearly delineated, despite that tension being implicit in the stories of Moses, Atticus Finch and Martin Luther King Jr. While hierarchical mediation in ideas and political practice may be a necessary condition for authoritarianism, it is also essential to any polity committed to fostering democratic charisma. Proposals in virtue ethics always imply a metaphysic and an enabling polity, and Lloyd’s argument may be more compelling if both were further acknowledged and explored. Lloyd writes with flair and his proposals are beguiling. My efforts to probe possible weaknesses answer the challenge implicit in their boldness, and in so responding I affirm the value of the book as a stimulating provocation. It is hard to disagree with the conclusion that democratic charisma is preferable to authoritarian, given the way the binary is set up. But there is a need to interrogate and challenge further the binary itself. Beyond this, In Defense of Charisma may serve as an invitation to other political theologians to develop accounts of charisma that begin with the way the God of the Bible combines both the charisma of a monarch and the wild democratising charismata of the Holy Spirit, while not neglecting the fact that Christ’s messianic charisma was not authoritarian or democratic in any simple sense.