Public Characters

Public life today is crowded with figures cast as heroes, villains, victims, and minions, and the stakes of these roles have grown alongside television and social media. Groups and individuals alike compete to control their own reputations and to damage those of rivals. Persuading an audience that you are capable, brave, and well-intentioned while your adversaries lack these traits is one of the surest routes to influence. Character, then, is not a matter of plain factual assertion. Communities form their unity and their policies partly from admiration for heroes and partly from anger at villains.

Scholars of politics have recently tended to set aside long-standing character types in favor of frames, shortcuts for reasoning, cultural codes, and group identities. Against this trend, James M. Jasper, Michael P. Young, and Elke Zuern contend that personal images and reputations shape political and social life, because they stir people to act and carry their emotions along with them. The book first examines how public characters are openly built and contested, and how they serve to assign praise and blame, name social problems, strengthen identities and loyalties, guide policy, and express shared moral instincts.

The authors trace these characters through a varied set of examples, including Shakespeare, Game of Thrones, Renaissance sculpture, modern comic books, Alexander the Great, and the financier Bernie Madoff, showing how such figures appear in political argument. They also consider how characters change over time, such as when a victim comes to be seen as a hero, and how traditional moral types shift to reflect what different cultures esteem, reject, or pity.

Written for sociologists and political scientists interested in the cultural side of political life, the book offers a detailed and wide-ranging study of reputation and image in public affairs.