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| Politics as a Vocation |
 Politics is a strong and slow
boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective. Certainly all historical
experience confirms the truth—that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had
reached out for the impossible. But to do that a man must be a leader, and not only a
leader but a hero as well, in a very sober sense of the word. And even those who are
neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves with that steadfastness of heart which can
brave even the crumbling of all hopes. This is necessary right now, or else men will not
be able to attain even that which is possible today. Only he has the calling for politics
who is sure that he shall not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid
or too base for what he wants to offer. Only he who in the face of all this can say 'In
spite of all!' has the calling for politics.
—Max Weber
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Latest Research In a new PBS documentary on the national parks, the filmmaker Ken
Burns argues
that “[o]nly a democracy could have thought that land could have been set aside, not
for the rich and nobility, but for everybody for all time.”
My own research on the origins of public parks tells a more
complicated tale, one that separates rhetoric from reality. In a recent piece in the Journal of Policy
History titled "Make of Them Grand Parks, Owned in Common," I look at
newspaper editorials and the shamelessly contradictory way in which they used the language
of democracy to advance the creation of the Adirondack Park between 1864 and 1894. |
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I have also co-authored two new pieces with Christopher J. Bosso. The first,
"'High Hopes and Bitter Disappointment:' Public Discourse and the Limits of the
Environmental Movement in Climate Change Politics" will appear next year in Norman J.
Vig and Michael E. Kraft's popular text, Environmental Policy: New Directions for the
Twenty-First Century, 8th edition (CQ Press). The second, on "Issue Framing,
Agenda Setting, and Environmental Discourse," is forthcoming in The Oxford
Handbook on U.S. Environmental Policy (Oxford University Press). |
What's next? I am currently finishing a
project titled
"A Cooling Climate for Change? Party Polarization and the Politics of
Global Warming."
That manuscript has been accepted at American Behavioral Scientist
and will appear in print in 2012.
To view my full curriculum vitae, click here. |
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| How to
Reach Me Deborah L. Guber
Associate Professor
Department of Political Science
The University of Vermont
Old Mill, Room 532
94 University Place
Burlington, VT 05405-0114
Office: 519 Old Mill
E-mail: Deborah.Guber@uvm.edu
Phone: 802-656-4062
Fax: 802-656-0758
Office hours: Tu Th, 10:15-11:15 AM, 1:00-2:00 PM,
and by appointment. |
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