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To which institutions or social practices should we grant authority? When should we instead assert our own sense of what is right or good or necessary?

In this book, James Boyd White shows how texts by some of our most important thinkers and writers--including Plato, Shakespeare, Dickinson, Mandela, and Lincoln--answer these questions, not in the abstract, but in the way they wrestle with the claims of the world and self in particular historical and cultural contexts. As they define afresh the institutions or practices for which they claim (or resist) authority, they create authorities of their own, in the very modes of thought and expression they employ. They imagine their world anew and transform the languages that give it meaning.

In so doing, White maintains, these works teach us about how to read and judge claims of authority made by others upon us; how to decide to which institutions and practices we should grant authority; and how to create authorities of our own through our thoughts and arguments. Elegant and accessible, this book will appeal to anyone wanting to better understand one of the primary processes of our social and political lives.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• I The Claims of the World on the Self, the Self on the World
• 1 Plato's Crito: The Authority of Law and Philosophy
• II Creating a Public World
• 2 Shakespeare's Richard II: Imagining the Modern World
• 3 Hooker's Preface to the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie: Constituting Authority in Argument
• 4 Hale's "Considerations Touching the Amendment or Alteration of Lawes": Determining the Authority of the Past
• 5 Planned Parenthood v. CASEY: Legal Judgment as an Ethical and Cultural Art
• III The Authority of the Self
• 6 Austen's Mansfield Park: Making the Self Out ofùand Againstùthe Culture
• 7 Dickinson's Poetry: Transforming the Authority of Language
• IV Reconstituting Self and World: The Creation of Authority as an Act of Hope
• 8 Mandela's Speech from the Dock and Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address: Giving Meaning to Life in an Unjust World
• Afterword
• Additional Notes
• Index

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CHOICE Review

This powerfully rich, intriguing, and provocative book makes an important contribution to the study of authority and of the politics of language. White (law, English, and classical studies, Univ. of Michigan) sets out "to explore the way authority is thought about and constituted in a series of texts, chosen from different cultural contexts and different generic types. Each of them contains arguments that assert, or deny, that a person should submit to the authority of an institution or a set of social practices." In reading a text, he argues, we need to understand that what it "offers us is a whole way of thinking and talking and being, a way of acting in relation to one's language and one's audience; it is this for which authority is ultimately claimed ...." In doing this, he provides excitingly fresh readings of Plato, Shakespeare, Richard Hooker, Matthew Hale, the majority opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, and speeches by Abraham Lincoln and Nelson Mandela. On the whole his project is successful, and the book should soon become the standard reference in the field. It is must reading for anyone interested in the politics of language and should also be of value to students of political theory and politics and literature. An essential acquisition for libraries; upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and general readers. G. L. Jones; University of Nevada, Las Vegas