The Burden of Office: Agamemnon and Other Losers - Softcover

Tussman, Joseph

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9780889222656: The Burden of Office: Agamemnon and Other Losers

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0889222657 ISBN 13: 9780889222656

Publisher: Talonbooks, 1989

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Joseph Tussman's "The Burden of Office" is a book about the nature of political authority. Consider the symptoms of our present dilemma: leadership reduced to media "sound bites," legitimate public power sold off to the marketplace in the name of "privatization," citizens transformed into dubiously literate consumers in a Global Village. Can we make sense of any of this? To do so, Tussman turns to some of the oldest and greatest stories in our tradition. He re-reads and re-tells the tales of Moses, Oedipus, Orestes, Antigone and King Lear. The re-tellings, as it quickly becomes apparent, are really new tellings that explore the deepest meanings of our social institutions. Tussman traces the tension between passion and puritanism in an effort to make sense of public office and public authority in a way that leads to neither blind obedience nor fashionable cynicism. Lucid, original and ultimately wise, "The Burden of Office" is as much a work of literature as it is of philosophy.

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About the Author:

Joseph Tussman
Joseph Tussman is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of California in Berkeley. He is one of America’s pre-eminent constitutional philosophers, and has nurtured a generation of constitutional scholars and social activists. Tussman is the author of The Burden of Office (1989), a volume of timely political meditations.

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