Oh the irony of being asked to review a book about flattery for Perspectives on Politics!

In this wonderful new book, Dan Kapust explores a topic that is uncomfortably familiar to most of us: insincere praise, especially when used to manipulate someone into thinking or doing what he or she otherwise would not do. As Kapust shows, flattery has been a recurrent theme in the history of political thought—and for good reason, as it constitutes a form of power. For the most part, political theorists have looked down on flattery as a form of bad behavior, because it is untruthful or exploitative or both. But, as the author demonstrates, this “moralistic” view of flattery is not the only or even most interesting one available to us.

Flattery can also be viewed sympathetically, Kapust argues, “as a response to conditions of subordination” (p. 4) wherein the disempowered protect themselves from harm and advance their interests by sweet-talking their bosses. Labeling this variety of flattery “strategic” (p. 4) and relating it usefully to James Scott’s analysis of public transcripts and peasant resistance, Kapust uses this second view of flattery to show that political theorists cannot hope to offer a singular judgment of the practice, but only a more finely textured appreciation of its potential forms and implications. Indeed, under conditions of power asymmetry, Kapust argues that strategic flattery can be used, in Scott’s terms, as a “weapon of the weak” to get the powerful to do what they otherwise would not. Flattery and the History of Political Thought was written to catalyze our recognition of this possibility.

The book is comprised of five chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion. Each of the main chapters sketches a debate about flattery between two or more roughly (sometimes very roughly) contemporaneous political thinkers. While the chapters are organized chronologically, Kapust avoids trying to fabricate a singular narrative about the “development” of flattery in the history of political thought. Nor does he pretend to offer an exhaustive account of all that has been said about it. Rather, he stakes out a few of the major positions that political theorists have taken on the subject and locates each of them within some relatively local debate, with a view to inaugurating a more fulsome discussion of flattery in relation to contemporary political events, as well as recent theorizing about republicanism, rhetoric, and representation (p. 18). The broad sweep of the book—from ancient Greece to the American founding—together with its regular attention to current work across political science, means that it has something of interest to virtually everyone.

Chapter 1 surveys a number of the more familiar objections to flattery, traceable to Greek sources like Plato and Aristotle, in order to show how Roman writers like Cicero and Pliny intensified their attention to the social and political dynamics responsible for flattering speech. More than Plato or even Aristotle, Romans appreciated that flattery is often a function of inequality—indeed, inequalities of the sort that epitomized the late Republic and early Empire, making it an issue of special concern to them. Moving briskly through Cicero’s writings on the subject, Kapust argues that even as Cicero acknowledges that inequality can generate flattery (something to be avoided at all costs, given its devastating effect on supremely important goods like friendship and liberty), he refuses to accept that it inevitably does. Rather, Cicero sees inequality as being compatible with frank speech when the powerful are also virtuous. In making this argument, Kapust holds, Cicero lays the groundwork for Pliny’s praise for Trajan in his Panegyric, in which Pliny maintains that “Trajan’s virtues make it possible to love him, to befriend him, and—crucially—to sever the close relationship between the princeps and his flatters that characterized rulers such as Domitian” (p. 61).

In Chapter 2, Kapust turns to the relationship between flattery and political counsel in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier and Machiavelli’s Prince. At issue for these authors, according to Kapust, is whether or not flattery (in the form of rhetorical ornamentation) is advantageous to those who wish to advise princes, with Castiglione of the view that flattery is useful because of how it grabs the prince’s attention, and Machiavelli holding that a plainer style does more to convince a prince to actually listen. Moreover, according to Machiavelli, keeping a prince’s attention has less to do with style than with substance—that is, the quality of the advice being given. As Kapust puts it, “Castiglione captivates to instruct, while Machiavelli instructs to captivate” (p. 65).

Continuing with the link between monarchy and flattery developed in the previous two chapters, Chapter 3 takes up Hobbes’s defense of monarchy in Of the Life and History of Thucydides, Elements, De Cive, and Leviathan. Against a wide-ranging literature in which monarchy was portrayed as being especially vulnerable to flattery, Hobbes claimed the opposite: that monarchies were especially insulated against this particular danger, and indeed more resistant to flattery than nonmonarchies. As Kapust notes, “Hobbes . . . does not hesitate to admit that monarchy is imperfect and that monarchs certainly can be flattered” (p. 116). But the perfect coincidence of the artificial person (i.e., sovereign) and the natural person in monarchy—what Kapust calls its “contingent unity” (p. 98)—allows Hobbes to argue that monarchs escape the forces typically responsible for flattery. These forces are multiple, ranging from the competitiveness that Hobbes regards as being the inevitable product of rhetorical competition to the “sheer practice of persuasion” (p. 118), which he equates with the amplification and orchestration of the passions.

Kapust shifts gears somewhat in Chapter 4, now using Mandeville’s discussion of flattery in the Fable of the Bees and Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue to apply some much-needed pressure to the assumption that flattery is necessarily a bad thing. As Mandeville points out, flattery can serve as “a mechanism of socialization and moral education” (p. 133). As any parent (or teacher) knows, flattery is a great way of motivating people to do good things—especially when those people do not find goodness to be intrinsically motivating, as Mandeville assumes of us all. According to Kapust, Mandeville’s openness to the potential benefits of flattery is traceable to his theory of language, which “is a manifestation of our naturally selfish urges at its origins” and something “we deploy . . . in an opaque fashion to get what we want” (p. 161). This perspective contrasts markedly with Adam Smith’s, who found it possible to maintain a distinction between flattery and praise, given his different view of language—as something that “shap[es] its speakers as they shape it, with the speakers themselves aiming at transparency” (p. 161).

Finally, Chapter 5 looks at charges of flattery launched by Federalists and anti-Federalists alike during the ratification debates over the U.S. Constitution. The crux of Kapust’s argument here is that “[w]hereas the Federalists depict the Anti-Federalists as flattering local prejudices . . . the anti-Federalists not only look back to and invoke anti-monarchical language familiar from seventeenth-century England; they also depict the Federalists’ desired outcome—the prospect of a strong regime capable of projecting power and achieving wealth and status—as a flattering prize” (p. 171). Ultimately, Kapust speculates that the Federalist argument won out because it managed to combine a seductive vision of America’s potential future self with a steady commitment to long-held beliefs about its distinctive character.

Engaging, insightful, and ambitious, Flattery and the History of Political Thought is a great book. But, as with any book, there are things about it that could be different. For one thing, it would have benefited from some critical evaluation of the recounted arguments. I found myself wholly unpersuaded by the Cicero/Pliny position, for example: the idea that relationships can be inured against the effects of structural inequality by character and earnestness has always been a favorite conceit of the privileged, and one that is particularly cherished today. Relatedly, I was also surprised that a book so attentive to the link between domination and flattery had no sustained discussion of race or gender. While it is not my view that every book needs to address these subjects, I do believe that a book about flattery probably should. I would wager that Mary Wollstonecraft and Ralph Ellison have more penetrating things to say about flattery than Hobbes does.

Still, this is a request for something more as opposed to something different. And more is what I expect we can look forward to now that Kapust has cut a much-needed path through this important subject.