Character Assassination throughout the Ages (PDF)

Martijn Icks is a researcher and teacher at the University of Düsseldorf, Germany, as well as a former Marie Curie Fellow. He specializes in Roman imperial history and the history of character assassination. His study on the Roman emperor Elagabalus has appeared in three languages.

Eric Shiraev is author, co-author, and co-editor of fourteen books and numerous publications in the fields of political psychology, international relations, and cross-cultural studies. He emphasizes the role of identity and culture in politics and international relations. In addition to his teaching and research work, he writes policy briefs and opinion essays for the media and government and nongovernment organizations.

"The can be few pleasures more delicious than witnessing the savaging of the reputations of the great and the good. This volume treats us to a rich smorgasbord of notable defamations, from the Romans down to our own day. They are served up by experts who seek to inform and entertain us and who succeed at both." - Anthony Barrett, University of British Columbia, Canada

'This tightly knit volume is a major contribution to our understanding of the ugly side of modern politics. It historicises what appears to be a universal human trait across all political societies the tendency of politics to descend towards mudslinging and character assassination. It asks why character assassination is an attractive political strategy, when it is most effective, and how it can be resisted. It establishes the different strategies of attack and defence that have been used in conjunction with changing media and that apply in closed dictatorial and open democratic societies, and it also establishes why it is a particularly ubiquitous strategy in electoral politics. Perhaps not surprisingly, the volume demonstrates that victims also have more possible strategies of defence under democracies, but it also shows how under an unpopular regime such as the Czechoslovakian regime after 1968 denigration of dissidents such as Václav Havel and Charter 77 could backfire spectacularly.' - Simon Burrows, University of Western Sydney, Australia