Bates Review of Rosenthal’s Crown under the Law | got Alexander Rosenthal’s Crown under Law: Richard Hooker, John Locke, and the Ascent of Modern Constitutionalism (Lexington Press, 2008) recently and read it twice over the night. Here are my thoughts about it Rosenthal is ultimately about making a case for a Lockeastotle interpretation by his attempt to reframe the role of Hooker in Locke. informed by the animus of Tierney and the early Tuck before he repented and admitted Strauss was right on the modems, (We see this in the two appendices where he tackles Strauss and the Hobbes problem.) Here are my main criticisms of Rosenthal. They aretthat 1. Heis insensitive to rhetoric and how itis used to mask unpopular and possibly disruptive aspects of an argument. 2. He fails to see that meaning from a context that is brought in can be reshaped and re-presented by the artist to create a different meaning or message from what was previously being suggested or implied, 3. He refused to see aspects of Locke's argument is trying to mask the Hobbesian foundation of Locke's political project and thus he dlothes his product with the symbols of the common law and earlier tradition and their authorities, but in to detract the reader from the inner logic of his position and how it repudiated the older views and authorities that he seems to be embracing, Now on Rosenthal on Hooker.... I think he is rather on the mark about him. Hooker was very much a Christian Aristotelian and a moderate Protestant, very threatened by the philosophical challenges the reformation presents classical rationalism and it's metaphysics. | think Rosenthal makes a case for Hooker as a political thinker who an attempted to frame the new Tutor order via a Christian Aristotelianism. To make a case for a political protestant order that did not require a rejection of political tradition of Christian Aristotelianism. But there is a problem with Hooker and his late Aristotelianism, in it attempts to read the mixed constitution argument on the English body-politic. The mixed constitution view emerges from St Thomas and other scholastics following Morbek's Latin translations with its several important mis-ques. Rosenthal makes the casethat Hooker is to be seen as someone who is not following the path of Bodin and Suarez-both of whom have taken and adopted some frame of Machiavelli's rejection of the classical political order that Christian Aristotelianism seeks to reaffirm. Yet Rosenthal error isto try to argue that Locke follows from and upholds the Whiggish strain of Hooker's Christian Aristotelianism.