Abstract
How public administrators and ideologically-re-constructed "New Public Managers" interrogate the social world and build their assumptive domains depends on epistemological predispositions (relating to propositions about what is knowable) and ontological predispositions (relating to propositions about the phenomena to which causal capacity may be ascribed). One of the most erudite authors of Public Administration the US field has produced, David Farmer (2005) renders in To Kill the King: Post-traditional Governance and Bureaucracy, his leanest and most cutting treatment, yet, of a field paradoxically as tailor made for his incisive commentary as it is morbidly resistant to Farmer's more penetrating insights. This work is as much song as it is analytic treatise; an engaging feat of scholarship assimilating a lifetime of professional service and intellectual endeavor by the author, presented with cagey sensibility to a field rather tone deaf for the poetic cadence it might otherwise assimilate. This is a book only David Farmer could write.