Letters to Power: Public Advocacy Without Public Intellectuals (review)

A few semesters back, I asked my students to revise persuasive articles that they had already written. They had to rewrite opinion articles as open letters ostensibly addressed to hostile audiences though intended for national publication. The assignment was too clever by half. Many struggled with the simple distinction between the ostensible and the actual audience; few could imagine the power dynamics at play whenever a novice student addresses a venerable magnate in a public setting. If only I had read Samuel McCormick’s new book before inventing the assignment. I would have better understood the rhetorical tensions and possibilities shaping such a letter.

The first chapter of McCormick’s book captures the complexity of a “letter to power” by offering a taxonomy of audience and a discussion of generic potential. McCormick explains that public letters written by the disempowered to the powerful really address three “wider publics”: auditors (those “known and ratified, but not directly engaged”); witnesses (those “neither ratified nor addressed”); and eavesdroppers (those “neither known nor ratified nor addressed, their identities being strictly potential”) (7). Not only must the letter juggle these three audiences (in addition to their ostensible addressees), but they must also manage a persuasive potential peculiar to the genre. Letters to power “are productively split between the exigencies of specific historical events and the prescripts of broader moral theories.” This divided rhetorical situation allows for “casuistic stretching” between specific needs and “new principles of conduct” (14). A short eighteen pages exhibits helpful tools for rhetorical analysis.

McCormick’s four substantive chapters address particular letters and their authors, audiences, and historical circumstances: Seneca’s Letters to Lucilias (64 CE); Christine de Pizan’s letter to Queen Isabeau (1405); Immanual Kant’s prefatory letter to Friedrich Wilhelm II in The Conflict of the Faculties (1798); and Søren Kirkegaard’s “The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress,” which was addressed to the public during the Corsair affair (1848). While McCormick attends to each letter’s fourfold audience and its unique casuistic stretching, such attention does not detract from more traditional factors in any rhetorical analysis. Each chapter, for example, deftly describes the rhetorical situation and the specific exigency.

In chapter 2, we learn about Nero’s assault on Stoicism and its role in his increasing refusal to give the Roman Senate even a public veneer of influence on imperial politics. Nero denied the Senate authority but also did not allow senators to publicly withdraw from government, since senators openly absconding would disrupt the “illusion of a Roman diarchy” that legitimated Nero’s rule (26). In this context, Seneca’s decision to withdraw but not fully absent himself appears to keep him in public view while allowing a philosophical, albeit oblique, public engagement. Presented this way, Seneca’s rhetoric of withdrawal in the Letters to Lucilius seems likely to preserve a political, philosophical, and biological life amid perilous circumstances. Chapter 3 presents another strategy for negotiating intellectual agency in dangerous times. On the eve of civil war between the dukes of Orléans and Burgundy, Christine de Pizan pleaded with Queen Isabeau to negotiate peace between the hostile parties. A social inferior, Christine could not directly advise the queen and opted instead for a rhetorical strategy of exemplary figures. She showed the queen laudable historical actors, logos appeals functioning as both paradeigmata (which present abstract qualities of leadership) and exempla (which present specific instances of leadership). Christine’s exemplary figures held up “mirrors” that reflected back a “mediated subjectivity” to guide Queen Isabeau’s judgment (71).

Chapter 4 discusses the late eighteenth-century crackdown on freedom of the press under Freidrich Wilhelm II, then king of Prussia, and his minister of domestic affairs Johan Christopher Wöllner. Immanuel Kant, ordered not to write on religious matters, prefaced a collection of “minor essays” with a letter promising to follow the king’s orders. The Conflict of the Faculties (1798) also included Kant’s epistolary correspondence with...