Full Description
This book aims to recover from ancient and modern thinkers valuable arguments about statesmanship, leadership, and tyranny which illuminate reassessments of political science and practice after the election of Donald Trump. Like almost everyone else, contemporary political scientists were blind-sided by the rise of Trump. No one expected a candidate to win who repeatedly violated both political norms and the conventional wisdom about campaign best practices. Yet many of the puzzles that Trump's rise presents have been examined by the great political philosophers of the past. For example, it would come as no surprise to Plato that by its very emphasis on popularity, democracy creates the potential for tyranny via demagoguery. And, perhaps no problem is more alien to empirical political science than asking if statesmanship entails virtue or if so, in what that virtue consists: This is a theme treated by Plato, Aristotle, and Machiavelli, among others. Covering a range of thinkers such as Confucius, Plutarch, Kant, Tocqueville, and Deleuze, the essays in this book then seek to place the rise of Trump and the nature of his political authority within a broader institutional context than is possible for mainstream political science.
Contents
1. Leadership, Statesmanship and Tyranny: The Character and Rhetoric of Trump.- 2. Truth, Trump, Tyranny: Plato and the Sophists in an Era of "Alternative Facts".- 3. Portraits of Ignobility: The Political Thought of Xenophon, and Donald Trump.- 4. Demagogy and the Decline of Middle-Class Republicanism: Aristotle on the Trump Phenomenon.- 5. Democracy, Demagogues, and Political Wisdom: Understanding Trump in the Wake of Thucydides' History.- 6. The Strongman, the Small Man, and the Gentleman: Confucius and Donald Trump.- 7. Trump, Alfarabi, and the Open Society.- 8. Machiavellian Politics, Modern Management and the Rise of Donald Trump.- 9. Donald Trump: Shakespeare's Lord of Misrule.- 10. Knave, Patriot, or Factionist: Three Rousseauian Hypotheses About the Election of President Trump.- 11. Trump and the Federalist on National Greatness in a Commercial Republic.- 12. American Constitutionalism from Hamilton to Lincoln to Trump.- 13. Lincoln, Moral Conflict, andHerrenvolk Democracy in the Age of Trump.- 14. The Great Emancipators Oppose the "Slave Power": The Lincolnian—and Aristotelian—Dimensions of Trump's Rhetoric.- 15. Charisma, Value and Political Vocation: Max Weber on the 2016 US Election.- 16. The Common Sense of Donald J. Trump: A Gramscian Reading of Twenty-First Century Populist Rhetoric.- 17. "I Alone Can Solve": Carl Schmitt on Sovereignty and Nationhood under Trump.
