Reviews

John David Lewis reviews Sun-tzu: Art of War, translated with an introduction and commentary by Ralph D. Sawyer.

Larry Salzman reviews The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law, by Steven M. Teles.

Reviews Tara Smith’s latest book, Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist, and finds it to be a welcome addition to the existing literature on the Objectivist ethics—and a sizable challenge for critics of egoism.

Analyzes Bernard H. Siegan’s Economic Liberties and the Constitution, showing the first edition of the book (not the second edition) to be a valuable source for those seeking to understand how legal protections for property rights in America were gradually lost. Salzman also shows that, although Economic Liberties has certain virtues and is one of the best scholarly books on the subject, it fails to provide a proper philosophical grounding of property rights, and thus cannot stand on its own in defense thereof.

A new book, Solon the Thinker: Political Thought in Archaic Athens (London: Duckworth, 2006) deals with the poetry of perhaps the earliest political thinker in history, Solon of Athens. Selected as Chief Official in Athens in 594 BC, he is often credited with laying the groundwork for the political constitution…