Book Review

It is getting harder and harder to judge a book by its title, much less its cover. This book's title suggests a biography of Abraham Lincoln or perhaps a study of Lincoln's approach to the Constitution. It is neither. Instead, it is a collection of seventeen essays (more than that, actually, if one counts some of the multipage discursive endnotes) that use the words of Lincoln and his generation to give voice to the distinctive political views of George Anastaplo, a professor of law at Loyola University of Chicago. The essays, which have been published or delivered as talks during the last four decades, form an eclectic collection. One essay criticizes Alexis de Tocqueville for overemphasizing Americans' rampant individualism, another diagnoses John C. Calhoun as suffering from "governmental insanity," and another praises Abraham Lincoln's poetry. Lincoln is the ostensible link joining the essays, but he is a marginal figure in a number of them. The real link is Anastaplo's plea for "prudence," which he describes as a kind of transhistorical wisdom acquired in large part by reading canonical authors such as Aristotle.

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