The Politics of Pictures is a history of looking, from Aristotle to TV audiences, from the invention of photography to the meaning of picnics, from Leviathan to synchronised swimming, Dr Johnson to the sexualization of war. John Hartley's wide-ranging and sometimes bizarre journey of discovery looks for the public in the realm of media, where citizens are now literally represented on screen and page. The book investigates popular media reality by showing how pictures and texts are powerful political forces in their own right, using a variety of primary texts to explore the way publics have been created, and exploring the political uses of media audiences. The unconventional approach is designed to show how popular reality looks to itself, and how its peculiar forms and connections actually challenge some venerable political and philosophical truths.
Author Biography:
TERENCE BALL received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and is now Emeritus Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Arizona State University. He taught previously at the University of Minnesota and has held visiting professorships at Oxford University, Cambridge University, and the University of California, San Diego. His books include Transforming Political Discourse (Blackwell, 1988), Reappraising Political Theory (Oxford University Press, 1995), and a mystery novel, Rousseau’s Ghost (SUNY Press, 1998). He has also edited The Federalist (Cambridge University Press, 2003), James Madison (Ashgate, 2008), Abraham Lincoln: Political Writings and Speeches (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and coedited The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
RICHARD DAGGER earned his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and has taught at Arizona State University and Rhodes College, and the University of Richmond, where he is currently the E. Claiborne Robins Distinguished Chair in the Liberal Arts. He is the author of many publications in political and legal philosophy, including Civic Virtues: Rights, Citizenship, and Republican Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 1997) and Playing Fair: Political Obligation and the Problem of Punishment (Oxford University Press, 2018).
DANIEL I. O’NEILL holds a Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles and is now Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida. He is the author of The Burke-Wollstonecraft Debate: Savagery, Civilization, and Democracy (Penn State University Press, 2007), coeditor of Illusion of Consent: Engaging with Carole Pateman (Penn State University Press, 2008), and author, most recently, of Edmund Burke and the Conservative Logic of Empire (University of California Press, 2016) .
