Letters to Power: Public Advocacy Without Public Intellectuals (Rhetoric and Democratic Deliberation Book 2)
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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.


Sticky notes: On Kindle Scribe
Language: English
File size: 963 KB
Publisher: Penn State University Press
Publication date: December 15, 2011
ISBN-13: 978-0271050737
Edition: 1st
subtitle: 1st Edition, Kindle Edition
author: Visit Amazon's Samuel McCormick Page search results Samuel McCormick