History as Spectacle

This entirely new volume comprises an important study. It forms the fifth of Peter Burke's essays published by EER. It turns on historical issues raised by the career of the emperor Charles V (1500-58).

Professor Burke writes that "It is often said, and correctly, that as our present changes, we look at the past from new perspectives. Today, the different media play an important role in our lives, including our vision of politics. Some politicians have become stars, and in a few countries, from the USA to India, some film stars have become politicians. ‘The State as Spectacle’ (L’État-Spectacle) is the title of a book ‘about and against the star system in politics’, published in 1977 – and brought up to date in 2009 – by the political scientist Roger-Gérard Schwartzenberg. He is also a member of the Radical Party of the Left and a deputy in the French National Assembly. In similar fashion, the role of advertising in everyday life inspired an earlier book, The Selling of the President(1969), an account of the successful campaign of Richard Nixon by the journalist – and novelist – Joe McGinniss. The concern with the role of the media in politics and the role of politics in the media has inspired historians, and in particular historians of the early modern period, to investigate the representation of political leaders, especially monarchs, in the past.

"The danger of anachronism is an obvious one. What is not anachronistic, however, is the idea of politics as spectacle, as theatre. It was Queen Elizabeth I who remarked, in the age of Shakespeare, that ‘we princes are set on stages’."