Agamben has described contemporariness as ‘a singular relationship with one's own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it’. He suggests that the way that one maintains such a disjunction to the present is by ‘perceiving the indices and signatures of the most archaic in the most modern’. The archaic does not, however, simply mean that which is chronologically distant: it is what is ‘close to the origin’, an arche that remains an operative force within historical becoming.

The Kingdom and the Glory attempts to perceive the archaic amidst the ‘current triumph of economy and government over every other aspect of social life’. It does so through a genealogy of the thought and practice of the Church. The first half of the book traces the use of the term oikonomia from its Greek roots in the art of household management, through Christian theology, up to its influence on modern political concepts and governmental practices. The last three chapters develop a genealogy of rituals of glorification, from the acclamation of magistrates in Republican Rome, to the liturgical rituals of the Church, the mass rallies of fascism and the society of the spectacle. Drawing these two analyses together, Agamben argues that power in ‘the West’ has assumed the form of a governmental machine whose ‘ultimate structure’ lies ‘in the relation between oikonomia and glory’.

The early volumes of Homo Sacer were often criticised for focusing too much on sovereignty and failing to analyse capitalism and the forms of liberal governmentality central to the contemporary operation of power. Agamben's ‘theological genealogy’ of economy and government is, then, a major development in his political thought, deepening his account of the operation of power, and addressing contemporary capitalism for the first time within the confines of the Homo Sacer project. However, there appear to be some important limits to any attempt to understand the contemporary victory of economy through Agamben's genealogy of economy. The Kingdom and the Glory says little directly about the present world, apart from its comments about the society of the spectacle, which are rather brief.