Chapter 1 The Modern and the Postmodern; Chapter 2 Re-imaging the Presidency; Chapter 3 The Fragmented Presidency; Chapter 4 The Shape-Shifter; Chapter 5 The Hyperreal President; Chapter 6 Horizontal Politics; Chapter 7 The Juxtaposed Presidency;
John F. Freie
"Drawing on the ideas of postmodernist thinkers, John Freie has
written a strikingly innovative and provocative study of
presidential politics. Teachers and students of the presidency will
greatly enjoy this book."
-Bruce Miroff, SUNY Albany
“Understanding the contemporary presidency is difficult, especially
if we are using the wrong conceptual tools. Freie makes a powerful
and convincing argument that this is precisely what we are doing.
If we are to remove our intellectual blinders, Freie argues, we
must see the presidency as a postmodern institution.”
--Michael Genovese, Loyola Chair of Leadership, Professor,
Political Science, Loyola Marymount University and Director,
Institute for Leadership Studies
“Professor Freie’s meticulous analysis of the emerging postmodern
presidency is the most thorough to date. Using case studies with
rich detail about different presidencies, he makes a persuasive
case that the contemporary presidency is more about manipulating
images than creating and implementing policy. Freie’s careful
analysis of this paradigm shift obliges presidential scholars to
pay more attention to the significant role of postmodernism in
driving and explaining presidential behavior. I'll certainly be
assigning this in my presidency course.”
--Caroline Heldman, Occidental College
“The ‘modern presidency’ paradigm, the dominant model for
explaining US presidential behavior, is no longer convincing,
argues Freie (political science, Le Moyne College), who proposes
that by looking to postmodernism, no one can find better
understanding of what presidents actually do (in other words, his
task is descriptive and not normative). This application of
postmodernism, one he contends, allows one to see that presidents
react to the irrational elements of political life, utilize
discourses separate from any fixed reality, recognize the electoral
significance of personality over character, and operate in an
environment of fragmented polity and policy. This shift from the
modern presidency to the postmodern presidency has been relatively
gradual, he notes, taking the reader through the presidencies of
Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and
Barack Obama in order to show how it has developed.” --Eithne
O’Leyne, June 2011 Reference and Research Book News
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