Politics & Policy Writing as Literature
Study classics in political writing & learn how to do what the authors do.
The penultimate week of the Political Studies Program examines statesmanship. Statesmanship is distinct from ordinary political leadership. It suggests a certain quality of excellence in leadership, character, and judgment.
The first section will examine the thought and political strategy of two of America’s most consequential presidents – Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan – with a particular emphasis on how national leaders assemble electoral coalitions and then use those after the election to change the country’s trajectory. The second section will consider a range of classic and contemporary authors – from Aristotle to Churchill, Edmund Burke to Václav Havel – to explore the phenomenon of statesmanship as it relates to other political phenomena including virtue, founding, revolution, war, and dissent. Both sections will conclude by considering the statesman’s role in a democracy and whether political greatness is still possible today.
Image: Winston Churchill at the Europa Conference in The Hague, 1948
Flagg Taylor on Havel & dissent
This course is part of our residential Political Studies Program. Fellows participate in morning seminars and meet prominent men and women in public life over afternoon and evening sessions. Up to 32 fellows will be selected.
Faculty
Henry Olsen
Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, studies and provides commentary on American politics. Mr. Olsen is an opinion columnist for The Washington Post, where he writes daily pieces focusing on politics, populism, foreign affairs and American conservative thought.
Henry Olsen
Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, studies and provides commentary on American politics. Mr. Olsen is an opinion columnist for The Washington Post, where he writes daily pieces focusing on politics, populism, foreign affairs and American conservative thought. He is also the author of The Working Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue-Collar Conservatism and The Four Faces of the Republican Party, co-authored with Dante Scala.
His predictions of the 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018 elections were particularly praised for their remarkable accuracy. In the 2016 campaign, he accurately identified the factors fueling the rise of Donald Trump early in the race, and his election-eve predictions were among the most accurate of any major analyst or commentator.
Mr. Olsen started his career as a political consultant at the California firm of Hoffenblum-Mollrich. He then worked with the California State Assembly Republican Caucus before attending law school. He served as a law clerk to the Honorable Danny J. Boggs on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and as an associate at Dechert, Price & Rhoads. He has a B.A. from Claremont McKenna College and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School, where he served as Comment Editor for the University of Chicago Law Review.
Flagg Taylor
Flagg Taylor is an Associate Professor of Government at Skidmore College, and serves on the Academic Council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. He is editor most recently of The Long Night of the Watchman: Essays by Václav Benda, 1977–1989. He is currently writing a book on Czech dissent in the 1970s and 1980s.
Flagg Taylor
Flagg Taylor is an Associate Professor of Government at Skidmore College. His research specialty is in the history of political thought and American government, especially the question of executive power. He serves on the Academic Council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
He is the co-author of The Contested Removal Power, 1789-2010, author of numerous articles, and editor of The Great Lie: Classic and Recent Appraisals of Ideology and Totalitarianism and The Long Night of the Watchman: Essays by Václav Benda, 1977–1989. He holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in political science from Fordham University and a B.A. from Kenyon College.
Preview the Syllabus by Week/Session
FDR & Reagan
Syllabus coming soon
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Democratic Statesmanship
Syllabus coming soon
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