Rough political partisanship, having now officially supplanted baseball as America's favorite pastime, has raised its feral literary head and, like the pixilated elephant who walked through the wrong door and wound up in a donkey show, is making an obscene ass of itself.True Compass by Edward M. Kennedy is getting the treatment usually associated with Karl Rove in his Nixon dirty tricks days, and a book store has had to lay down the law and order:"CONSERVATIVES! PLEASE STOP FLIPPING OVER AND DEFACING THE BOOKS ABOUT LIBERAL POLITICIANS. THIS BOOKSHELF IS NOT YOUR BLOG"Now, lest Conservative readers of Book Patrol have...
Subversive Book Asserts Rule By Law, Not King
In 1644, Samuel Rutherford, a Presbyterian theologian, published Lex, Rex, the now excessively scarce, enormously important treatise on limited government and constitutionalism. Only four copies have fallen under the hammer within the last thirty-five years.Lex, Rex is the first treatment of rule by law, not by men, based upon the separation of powers and covenant between king and subjects, (foreshadowing the social contract). It laid the foundation for the later thinking of political philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. As such, this volume sowed the seeds for modern political systems, including that of the United States."The title, Lex, Rex, is...