Take Me to Your Government: Four Fables

When political science professor James Payne first began the Princess Navina stories in the late 1970s, they were an amusing diversion, an inside joke for colleagues, written under the pen name “Count Nef.” These colleagues urged him to publish them because they raised provocative questions about modern government. Like Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, they provide perspective on existing institutions by transporting us to imaginary countries.

How strange that a volume published in 2008 entitled Modern Political Thought should feature as its most recent thinker a philosopher who wrote in the 1870s (Nietzsche). Since his time, a welfare state has been born, grown, and metastasized, and big brother regulation reaches into every cranny of personal life. The arguments about socialism and fascism are passé: We have drifted into the age of the inadvertent megastate, a system no one devised or intended—or likes. It’s time to go beyond 19th century debates and question today’s political reality. Take Me to Your Government embraces this challenge with four brief, witty fables about the travels of Princess Navina to zany, mind-stretching countries:

Author: Count Nef (pseudonym for James L. Payne)
Artist: Diana Schuppel
Publisher: Lytton Publishing Company
ISBN: 9780915728152
Publication date: November 1, 2013

Genre: Political philosophy; political satire
Binding: Paperback
Pages: 161 + vii + 30 B/W drawings
Size: 5 7/8 x 8 ¼
List price: $9.95
Book web site: www.PrincessNavina.com

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More information can be found at the dedicated Take Me to Your Government: Four Fables website.