Awards

• Winner of Everett Lee Hunt Award 2012
• Winner of Franklyn S. Haiman Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Freedom of Expression 2014
• Winner of James A. Winans-Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award 2012
• Winner of Marie Hochmuth Nichols Award 2013

Overview

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 Soren 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.

Full Product Details

9780271050744

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Reviews

The category of the public intellectual is fraught with contradictions: politics and culture, theory and practice, philosophy and rhetoric. If only there were a genre to mediate these tensions to good effect. Letters to Power reminds us that there was, and is: the 'minor rhetoric' of the public letter. Samuel McCormick's skillful readings provide numerous insights regarding the predicaments and strategies shaping learned advocacy. By focusing on things small and sly, he shows how public culture can be improved by careful thinkers doing humble work. --Robert Hariman, Northwestern University, editor of Prudence: Classical Virtue, Postmodern Practice (Penn State, 2003)

Complex, though succinct, scholarship often yields succinct, though complex, lessons. Put succinctly, Samuel McCormick's Letters to Power teaches that to contend with power one must live and endure. . . . As McCormick's well-footnoted and emphatic arguments suggest, rhetoric's capacity to disarm power resides with an accepted, intricate methodological framework from which one recognizes varying capacities for deference and dissent. --James H. Collier, Rhetoric & Public Affairs

The category of the public intellectual is fraught with contradictions: politics and culture, theory and practice, philosophy and rhetoric. If only there were a genre to mediate these tensions to good effect. Letters to Power reminds us that there was, and is: the minor rhetoric of the public letter. Samuel McCormick s skillful readings provide numerous insights regarding the predicaments and strategies shaping learned advocacy. By focusing on things small and sly, he shows how public culture can be improved by careful thinkers doing humble work. Robert Hariman, Northwestern University, editor of Prudence: Classical Virtue, Postmodern Practice (Penn State, 2003) Complex, though succinct, scholarship often yields succinct, though complex, lessons. Put succinctly, Samuel McCormick's Letters to Power teaches that to contend with power one must live and endure. . . . As McCormick's well-footnoted and emphatic arguments suggest, rhetoric's capacity to disarm power resides with an accepted, intricate methodological framework from which one recognizes varying capacities for deference and dissent. --James H. Collier, Rhetoric & Public Affairs The category of the public intellectual is fraught with contradictions: politics and culture, theory and practice, philosophy and rhetoric. If only there were a genre to mediate these tensions to good effect. Letters to Power reminds us that there was, and is: the 'minor rhetoric' of the public letter. Samuel McCormick's skillful readings provide numerous insights regarding the predicaments and strategies shaping learned advocacy. By focusing on things small and sly, he shows how public culture can be improved by careful thinkers doing humble work. --Robert Hariman, Northwestern University, editor of Prudence: Classical Virtue, Postmodern Practice (Penn State, 2003) Complex, though succinct, scholarship often yields succinct, though complex, lessons. Put succinctly, Samuel McCormick s Letters to Power teaches that to contend with power one must live and endure. . . . As McCormick s well-footnoted and emphatic arguments suggest, rhetoric s capacity to disarm power resides with an accepted, intricate methodological framework from which one recognizes varying capacities for deference and dissent. James H. Collier, Rhetoric & Public Affairs The category of the public intellectual is fraught with contradictions: politics and culture, theory and practice, philosophy and rhetoric. If only there were a genre to mediate these tensions to good effect. Letters to Power reminds us that there was, and is: the minor rhetoric of the public letter. Samuel McCormick s skillful readings provide numerous insights regarding the predicaments and strategies shaping learned advocacy. By focusing on things small and sly, he shows how public culture can be improved by careful thinkers doing humble work. Robert Hariman, Northwestern University, editor of Prudence: Classical Virtue, Postmodern Practice (Penn State, 2003) Complex, though succinct, scholarship often yields succinct, though complex, lessons. Put succinctly, Samuel McCormick s Letters to Power teaches that to contend with power one must live and endure. . . . As McCormick s well-footnoted and emphatic arguments suggest, rhetoric s capacity to disarm power resides with an accepted, intricate methodological framework from which one recognizes varying capacities for deference and dissent. James H. Collier, Rhetoric & Public Affairs The category of the public intellectual is fraught with contradictions: politics and culture, theory and practice, philosophy and rhetoric. If only there were a genre to mediate these tensions to good effect. Letters to Power reminds us that there was, and is: the minor rhetoric of the public letter. Samuel McCormick s skillful readings provide numerous insights regarding the predicaments and strategies shaping learned advocacy. By focusing on things small and sly, he shows how public culture can be improved by careful thinkers doing humble work. Robert Hariman, Northwestern University, editor of Prudence: Classical Virtue, Postmodern Practice (Penn State, 2003) The category of the public intellectual is fraught with contradictions: politics and culture, theory and practice, philosophy and rhetoric. If only there were a genre to mediate these tensions to good effect. Letters to Power reminds us that there was, and is: the 'minor rhetoric' of the public letter. Samuel McCormick's skillful readings provide numerous insights regarding the predicaments and strategies shaping learned advocacy. By focusing on things small and sly, he shows how public culture can be improved by careful thinkers doing humble work. --Robert Hariman, Northwestern University, editor of Prudence: Classical Virtue, Postmodern Practice (Penn State, 2003)

The category of the public intellectual is fraught with contradictions: politics and culture, theory and practice, philosophy and rhetoric. If only there were a genre to mediate these tensions to good effect. Letters to Power reminds us that there was, and is: the minor rhetoric of the public letter. Samuel McCormick s skillful readings provide numerous insights regarding the predicaments and strategies shaping learned advocacy. By focusing on things small and sly, he shows how public culture can be improved by careful thinkers doing humble work. Robert Hariman, Northwestern University, editor of Prudence: Classical Virtue, Postmodern Practice (Penn State, 2003)

The category of the public intellectual is fraught with contradictions: politics and culture, theory and practice, philosophy and rhetoric. If only there were a genre to mediate these tensions to good effect. Letters to Power reminds us that there was, and is: the minor rhetoric of the public letter. Samuel McCormick s skillful readings provide numerous insights regarding the predicaments and strategies shaping learned advocacy. By focusing on things small and sly, he shows how public culture can be improved by careful thinkers doing humble work. Robert Hariman, Northwestern University, editor of Prudence: Classical Virtue, Postmodern Practice (Penn State, 2003)

Author Information

Samuel McCormick is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at San Francisco State University

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