Author Meets Critics: Dan Kapust's Flattery and the History of Political Thought

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

If inequality in the U.S. and elsewhere has continued to rise, and if economic and political power has become increasingly centralized—often in single individuals—then political theorists are right in seeking to better understand the ways in which inequality and power is expressed in language and rhetoric. Particularly considering the peculiar character of America’s current presidential politics, it is altogether curious that theorists have not devoted much attention at all to that “glib and oily art” by which power is often redirected: the art of flattery.

It is this lacuna that Daniel Kapust fills in his new book, Flattery and the History of Political Thought: That Glib and Oily Art (Cambridge University Press, 2018). In it, Kapust interrogates the common sense view that flattery is an inherently malicious technique of manipulating others. While acknowledging long-held fears of the skilled flattery of shrewd political actors—not to mention more recent fears related to the role of emotional and untruthful appeals in public reason—Kapust encourages us to think more subtly and skillfully about the place of flattery in a political world that is often far messier than theorists imagine.

To this end, Kapust distinguishes between “cunning” flatterers—the archetypal political operator—and “dependent” flatterers—those who turn to flattery as a way of negotiating the power asymmetries that characterize everyday life. Flattery, Kapust argues, can be evaluated like any other rhetorical technique—we ought to judge its merits based on who, how, and to what ends it is being deployed, and we ought not dismiss its potential as a weapon of the weak out of hand. In five substantive chapters that survey the place of flattery in political thought from Cicero and Pliny to Hobbes and Mandeville to the Federalist debates of early America, Kapust demonstrates the varied and suggestive uses of flattery in a political world that is often messy and characterized by arbitrary power.

To consider this rich new account of flattery, the panel brings Kapust into conversation with scholars whose work considers a range of topics related to speech, its uses, and its place in the history of political thought. Elizabeth Markovitz, Professor of Politics at Mount Holyoke College, is the author of Future Freedoms: Intergenerational Justice, Democratic Theory, and Ancient Greek Tragedy & Comedy (2018) and The Politics of Sincerity: Frank Speech, Plato, and Democratic Judgment (2008), and is particularly well-suited to comment on the critical contrast between flattery and frankness, and their role in the political life of a democracy. Ted Miller is Associate Professor of Political Science at University of Alabama, and the author of Mortal Gods: Science, Politics, and the Humanist Ambitions of Thomas Hobbes (2011); Miller’s work on Hobbes and the rich field of court politics and absolutist regimes puts him in position to comment on Kapust’s sustained account of Hobbes’s views on the dangers of flattery. Gianna Englert is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Southern Methodist Univeristy, and is currently working on a manuscript titled Capacity for Democracy: French Liberalism and the Language of Citizenship. Englert’s work on the often strange mechanics of democratic participation under conditions of historical inequality gives her purchase on the notion of flattery as a “weapon of the weak.” The final panelist, Christina Noriega Bambrick, will start in the Fall as Assistant Professor of Political Science at Clemson University; Bambrick’s work has recently appeared in Publius and Polity. Her work on comparative political and constitutional thought offers the potential of comparing modern western views on the place of flattery in political life in a more comparative light. The panel organizer and chair, Brandon Turner, is Associate Professor of Political Science at Clemson University. His current manuscript on Mandeville’s social and political thought will prompt interesting discussion on the role of flattery in everyday interactions in civil society.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 1: Political Thought and Philosophy: Historical Approaches

Chair

• Brandon Turner Clemson University

Presenters

• Gianna Englert Southern Methodist University

• Ted H. Miller University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa

• Christina Bambrick Clemson University

• Daniel J. Kapust University of Wisconsin, Madison

• Elizabeth Markovits Mount Holyoke College