Kill the King, Love Your Neighbor (To Kill the King: Post-Traditional Governance and Bureaucracy‪)‬

Can we love our neighbors as ourselves? Though never stated explicitly in this form, I believe that this is nevertheless the central question or problem posed by David Farmer (2005b) in To Kill the King. No doubt love, we know, has figured prominently in much of Farmer's other work (Farmer, 2002a, 2002b, 2003a, 2003b, 2005a). But does neighbor-love warrant such pride of place in a text that incites symbolic regicide? Can killing the king--which entails "changing the symbolic systems in citizens' heads" (p. xix)--create conditions for loving our neighbors and open us to a poetics of post-traditional governance? I believe (or hope) so.