Many of the classics of medieval Jewish philosophy begin with a lament about the state of Jewish thought in their time. I would never have written this, they plead, but for the confusion of our generation, who have forgotten what they once knew, or who have been led astray by foreign ideas, or who simply wander about in a maze with no one to guide them. Contemporary academic philosophy and theology tend to be more modest, usually claiming only that a particular subfield has failed to appreciate a narrow point about some individual thinker or tradition. But Randi Rashkover powerfully and effectively revives the old lament in her latest work, Nature and Norm, which argues that “a good deal of modern and contemporary Jewish and Christian thought” suffers from “an inability to articulate clear and meaningful claims, an inclination towards utopian theopolitical positions, a vulnerability to skepticism, a tendency for coercion, and an overall inability to advance effective platforms for theopolitical change” (xiii).These “calamitous results” have come about due to modern and contemporary Jewish and Christian thought’s adherence to the fact-value divide, defined here as “the belief that statements of facts concerning the objective world alone may be considered true or false, whereas claims about values are subjective or strictly relative to those who hold them and are devoid of intelligibility or validity” (xiii). In the wake of Galileo, Bacon, and Newton, the practical successes of the New Science seemed to provide clear evidence that the method used by science to investigate the empirical world offered the only rational standard or criterion of objective validity. This is true, Rashkover argues, even for Jewish and Christian thinkers, who accepted the fact-value divide despite the fundamental challenges it posed to central tenets of their thought. Yet they clearly felt that such a price had to be paid. It seemed to solve other problems that were pressing at that time, including the violence of inter-religious warfare and sectarianism. More deeply, it could be that many thinkers simply did not feel that they had a choice: the paradigm was too powerful. It literally could not be denied.In our time, however, this is no longer the case. As Rashkover sees it, we (“we” in Nature and Norm is always “Jewish and Christian thinkers,” so I adopt this usage for this review) are now aware of the deleterious consequences of the fact-value divide for our intellectual projects. We are also in a position to critique its arbitrary grounding, without falling into the traps that bedeviled previous thinkers who attempted to free themselves from its grip. Instead, we can undertake immanent critiques, which begin by admitting that we have a problem making our Jewish and Christian theopolitical claims intelligible and relating them to the world and to other claims we make. Reflecting on this problem, we are moved to articulate the “who,” “how,” and “when” of our theopolitical claims in ways that mitigate their potential arbitrariness. We are authorized to do this because we understand that all claims about the world—claims of “fact” as well as claims of “value”—have their meaning only to particular communities, in particular ways, and at particular times. Knowing this, we can avoid the temptation to articulate our own claims in universal (and necessarily, therefore, also arbitrary) ways, even as we are no longer threatened by challenges that are grounded in similarly universal (and therefore also arbitrary) ways. We thus gain the “authority and freedom to advance [our] claims as reasonable hypotheses that hold the potential for enacting effective change in our current historical moment” (xxviii).These are Big Claims, and the main pleasure of reading Nature and Norm is the sense that you are under the tutelage of someone qualified to make them, clearly and forcefully. Nature and Norm is never opaque about its claims or goals, frequently drawing parallels between its own intellectual moves and those of the central figures it discusses, while at the same time making clear where the differences are. The book has a personality and a sense of itself—it refers to itself more often than the Qur’an does, and the effect is a powerful one, less Bob Dole and more a rap star in a freestyle battle (“Nature and Norm motivates Jewish and Christian thinkers to perform an immanent critique of the failure of their thought systems. . . . Nature and Norm uncovers a new standard of logic” [xxviii]). Rashkover’s confidence in this project is infectious, and readers who, like me, very much want and have been waiting for an epochal work of philosophical theology that has the potential to change everything should absolutely study Nature and Norm, consider its claims carefully, and refer to it in their future work. It deserves serious attention and engagement from its Jewish and Christian intended audiences, and furthermore from Muslim ones too (although in accordance with the book’s rigorous scruples about contextual specificity, Rashkover herself never cavalierly adds Muslims to Nature and Norm’s sphere of concern in the way I just did).For a book so grand, however, Nature and Norm is also bracingly brief. To be sure, at six chapters and just over two hundred pages, it is certainly no pamphlet or manifesto. But neither is it a massive doorstop of a book like Robert Brandom’s Spirit of Trust, which it cites. Rashkover’s argument is sweeping, yet concise. This means that there is plenty of room for specialists to quibble with her particular readings. For example, after the introduction in which she lays out the general problem of the fact-value divide, she illustrates the thesis in a chapter on theology and subjectivism in Kant and Rosenzweig. The choice of these two quite disparate thinkers is intended to demonstrate the power of the fact-value divide, which is internalized by the thought of both theological skeptics like Kant and theological realists like Rosenzweig. The former denies us access to the “in itself” of God, reinstating God only as a postulate of practical reason, whereas the latter claims we can and do enter into direct relationship with God. Yet, for Rashkover, both thinkers wind up identifying God with our own subjective desires, unable to escape the shadow of skepticism. Nagging skepticism is a symptom of arbitrary anchoring, and both are consequences of embracing the fact-value divide. To make this argument in a single chapter, Rashkover needs to present and dispose of Kant in four pages, and Rosenzweig in ten. I am not the reader who will take issue with the readings she offers in that space of Kant’s “fact of reason” or Rosenzweig’s negative transcendental deduction, because Rashkover has persuaded me with her larger argument that too much is made of the liberal/post-liberal binary, and that the fact-value divide provides an explanation for why this is so. Nonetheless, I expect that in this book’s future reception these pages and their particular readings will be subject to intense scrutiny.Similarly, the subsequent chapters illustrate the central thesis by contrasting supposedly opposed thinkers in a way intended to demonstrate surprising similarities, and then attributing these similarities to the attempt by each thinker to appropriate the fact-value divide. Rashkover structures the text to move through a spectrum of different forms of such appropriation, from total acceptance (Benedict de Spinoza and Thomas Hobbes) to increasing resistance. The initial form of resistance is what Rashkover calls “redescription” or “the turn to the ‘more.’” Here, the thinker posits a realm of transcendence outside or above empirical investigation, and makes this realm the special province of religion, thus insulating the latter from scientific critique. However, this move clearly cedes most of the world to the fact-value divide, admitting that it can only preserve religion by asserting its special otherworldly status. Rashkover sees this trend stretching from Schleiermacher to the main subjects of her chapter, Martin Buber and Carl Schmitt, who are united in their “appeal to an irreducible theopolitical ‘more’ that, despite making claims on worldly political systems, remains arbitrarily anchored” (61). The fact-value divide thus unites Buber and Schmitt despite the “traditional narrative of their thematic opposition” along theopolitical lines (61). As one of the scholars cited here as advancing that narrative, I can say that I find the larger critique of Buber here compelling, even as I might disagree with certain local readings (and with Gillian Rose, from whom Rashkover takes her bearings in this chapter as at several other key points in Nature and Norm).The failure of redescription is followed by a more intense and sophisticated attempt to resist the fact-value divide, which Rashkover calls “external critique” and exemplifies through Leo Strauss and Karl Barth. Strauss, the advocate of medieval rationalism and political philosophy, would normally be ranged against the anti-philosophical crisis theologian Barth, yet Rashkover sees them as united by their failed attempts to confront the fact-value divide head-on. Strauss famously claims that neither Athens nor Jerusalem, reason nor revelation, can successfully undermine the fundamental ground of the other as an arbitrary starting point for thinking; he thus leaves us in the position of being forced ourselves to choose one or the other, arbitrarily. Barth, by contrast, eloquently articulates the standpoint of revelation, but only by giving up the ability to persuade outsiders that they too should be persuaded. Thus, even though both Strauss and Barth recognize the problematic of the fact-value divide clearly, “Barth’s believer cannot justify [their] commitment to a non-believer, any more than the Straussian philosopher can justify his philosophical stance to the religious person” (107). Skepticism’s reign continues unchallenged, indicating the arbitrary anchoring of knowledge claims for both thinkers.The last two chapters of Nature and Norm turn to the move beyond the fact-value divide by describing the form of immanent critique. First, Rashkover repeats the formula of the previous chapters by contrasting a Jewish and Christian thinker, only this time to demonstrate how immanent critique allows contemporary moves to overcome the fact-value divide. Following a fascinating exposition of John Dewey’s Logic, Rashkover lays out four criteria for “warranted assertability,” or claims that “satisfy the transcendental conditions of sustaining meaning for a particular community who holds particular claims in a particular setting and time” (126). These are: 1) direct relation to a problem or situation of need; 2) plausible ability to address and resolve that problem; 3) inferential relations to already established knowledge claims relevant to that problem; and 4) commensurability with existing facts involved in that problem and other common-sense judgments held by the community in question. Rashkover then proposes the work of Peter Ochs and Nicholas Adams as satisfying these criteria for contemporary Jewish and Christian communities.The final and lengthiest chapter of Nature and Norm consists of a careful parallel between the story told here of Jewish and Christian attempts to appropriate, resist, and reject the fact-value divide and the story about European philosophy told in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Just as the consciousness Hegel narrates moves from naïve realism about the external world and scientific facts through a complex series of questioning states about the relationship between its own understanding and the validity of its judgments, so do Rashkover’s Jewish and Christian thinkers, and over the same time period (assuming the interpretation of Hegel in which he is either “really” or “usefully” talking about modern European philosophy and not all of humanity). Both conclude with an “awareness that the transcendental condition of our knowledge is historically conditioned and communal” (163), or in other words, that “knowledge is something that we use and for which we are responsible” (205).Rashkover’s discussion raises a number of questions that are larger than the specialist quibbles and local readings I have alluded to so far. First, there seems to be a missing element following the conclusion in which the (“new”) Hegelian Absolute Knowing has once again been achieved, albeit in the pragmatist form of the ongoing activity of justificatory reflection on our communal standards of validity. That missing element is that other than Spinoza, Hobbes, and Kant, nearly every other thinker considered by Rashkover positions themselves in relation to Hegel in some way. Yet, presumably, they failed to understand him, or else they would not have maintained their flawed appropriations of the fact-value divide. This creates a somewhat stronger need for Rashkover to justify her reading of Hegel than her readings of some other figures. In other words, why does the contemporary Hegel of Brandom, Pippin, Pinkard et al. “win” over the Hegel that Rosenzweig, Buber, Strauss, and Barth thought they knew? All these thinkers believed that Hegel was somehow deeply wrong about reason; why should we think that in fact, it was they who were wrong about Hegel? Rashkover doesn’t get explicit about this; perhaps we can expect that in future work. But it is important because of her repeated claim that only now, “at this historical juncture” (165), are we in a position to properly undertake immanent critique of the fact-value divide. This is a slightly different claim from her other claim that we can only do this “now” because we can only ever undertake properly rational projects “now,” i.e., when we relate them to problems and situations that currently exist for “us,” i.e., particular communities of thought and practice.Another major and related question has to do with the “us.” Rashkover’s “us,” as stated above, is “modern and contemporary Jewish and Christian thinkers.” But in what sense does this community really exist? For which Jews, for example, does it really not matter that Hegel considers Christianity the absolute religion, and which Christians are undisturbed by the way that the abolition of the correspondence theory of truth troubles the whole tradition of Christian reasoning? Rashkover considers philosophers and theologians who have various troubled or untroubled relationships to the fact-value divide, but they’re all—to put it bluntly—the sophisticated ones. What about those who simply never stopped maintaining the predominance of the supernatural, or were never bothered by the scientific claim to superiority to begin with? Are they in the same community of “modern and contemporary Jewish and Christian thinkers” as the ones discussed here?A final question I will offer has to do with Rashkover’s inclusion of a tendency to polemic among the symptoms of the appropriation of the fact-value divide. She attributes this tendency to Buber and Schmitt, since the redescription of the fact-value divide in the form of the “turn to the ‘more’” is ultimately arbitrary and resorts to polemicism and coercion to compensate. Barth’s non-polemicism, by contrast, is a sign of his having moved past the stage of redescription, even though he is then caught on the horns of the dilemma of “external critique.” But more needs to be said about how one can refuse polemic in a situation in which one is actively being warred upon. It only takes one side declaring war for a state of war to exist. Is the logic of immanent critique the logic of the Sermon on the Mount, so that we are being instructed to turn the other cheek? What if this isn’t the relationship “we” have to our community’s tradition of thinking about justice and injustice, or war and peace? Wouldn’t that then create a problem for meeting Rashkover’s fourth criterion of warranted assertability?The questions I have raised here do not begin to exhaust the potential of this rich and provocative book to generate conversation. If we are lucky, Nature and Norm will call the community it addresses into being, and enable future generations of Jewish, Christian, and perhaps other communities of thinkers to reason better together.