Letters to Power
eBook - PDF

Letters to Power

Public Advocacy Without Public Intellectuals

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Letters to Power

Public Advocacy Without Public Intellectuals

About this book

Although the scarcity of public intellectuals among today's academic professionals is certainly a cause for concern, it also serves as a challenge to explore alternative, more subtle forms of political intelligence. Letters to Power accepts this challenge, guiding readers through ancient, medieval, and modern traditions of learned advocacy in search of persuasive techniques, resistant practices, and ethical sensibilities for use in contemporary democratic public culture. At the center of this book are the political epistles of four renowned scholars: the Roman Stoic Seneca the Younger, the late-medieval feminist Christine de Pizan, the key Enlightenment thinker Immanuel Kant, and the Christian anti-philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Anticipating much of today's online advocacy, their letter-writing helps would-be intellectuals understand the economy of personal and public address at work in contemporary relations of power, suggesting that the art of lettered protest, like letter-writing itself, involves appealing to diverse, and often strictly virtual, audiences. In this sense, Letters to Power is not only a nuanced historical study but also a book in search of a usable past.

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Yes, you can access Letters to Power by Samuel McCormick in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Languages & Linguistics & Communication Studies. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. COVER Front
  2. CIP Page
  3. Table of Contents
  4. Acknowledgments
  5. Chapter 1: Minor Political Rhetoric, Major Western Thinkers
  6. Notes to Chapter 1
  7. Chapter 2: Remaining Concealed: Learned Protest Between Stoicism and the State
  8. Notes to Chapter 2
  9. Chapter 3: Mirrors for the Queen: Exemplary Figures on the Eve of Civil War
  10. Notes to Chapter 3
  11. Chapter 4: Performative Publicity: The Critique of Private Reason
  12. Notes to Chapter 4
  13. Chapter 5: Hidden Behind the Dash: Techniques of Unrecognizability
  14. Notes to Chapter 5
  15. Notes
  16. Index
  17. COVER Back