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Abstract
Since the passing of same-sex marriage legislation in 2017, religious freedom has become a prominent feature of Australian public debate. Overwhelmingly, such debates are conducted within a human rights framework where principles such as individual autonomy and protection from discrimination are prioritized over the communal and associational elements of religious life. This in turn tends to augment the power of the state vis-à-vis religious communities and institutions. In important respects, the dominance of human rights represents a new manifestation of the kind of "liberal-statism"—a public philosophy of liberal individualism that accepts the primacy of the state in the management of cultural and religious diversity—that has been a central feature of Australian religion–state relations over time. After some historical discussion of Australian church–state practice, this article argues for a reconsideration of a largely overlooked approach deriving from the English pluralists of the early twentieth century, which promoted greater degrees of group autonomy in relation to a rapidly growing state. It is argued that this tradition has greater potential in responding to the religious diversity of our time than does the current human rights approach with its tendency to reinforce an individualistic or privatized conception of religion, diminish associational life, and thereby reinforce state power.

Freedom's Progress? A History of Political Thought. By Gerard Casey (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2017), pp. × + 960. £45.00 (hb).

Australian Religious Thought. By Wayne Hudson (Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2016), pp. xxiv + 248. AU$39.95 (pb).

Time and Politics: Parliament and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and the British World. By Ryan A. Vieira (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp.vi + 199. £60.00 (cloth).

This article makes the case that politics, understood as a particular kind of public action, presupposes a notion of time marked by the three temporal states of past, present, and future. Political deliberation and judgment are future‐oriented activities that, more or less explicitly, draw on the past for guidance. Aristotle's discussion of deliberative rhetoric in the Art of Rhetoric, which recognizes the inherent contingency of political decision making, is the classic treatment of the topic and is given some attention. Throughout western political theory this view of politics has been contested, most notably by figures such as Plato and Marx, whose respective attempts to transcend the contingency and unpredictability of politics, it will be argued, is connected to the endeavour to overcome the imperfections and conflicts bound up with the temporal order itself. Finally, the article examines two modern expressions of the desire to transcend politics in a timeless world of pure model building or universal morality. The first of these can be found in much contemporary neo‐classical economic theory, and the second in the a‐political politics of the international human rights movement.