Joseph Tussman’s The Burden of Office is a book about the nature of political authority. Consider the symptoms of our present dilemma: leadership reduced to media “sound bites,” legitimate public power sold off to the marketplace in the name of “privatization,” citizens transformed into dubiously literate consumers in a Global Village. Can we make sense of any of this?

To do so, Tussman turns to some of the oldest and greatest stories in our tradition. He re-reads and re-tells the tales of Moses, Oedipus, Orestes, Antigone and King Lear. The re-tellings, as it quickly becomes apparent, are really new tellings that explore the deepest meanings of our social institutions. Tussman traces the tension between passion and puritanism in an effort to make sense of public office and public authority in a way that leads to neither blind obedience nor fashionable cynicism.

Lucid, original and ultimately wise, The Burden of Office is as much a work of literature as it is of philosophy.

Joseph Tussman (1914–2005) was an American educator. He was chair of the philosophy department at University of California, Berkeley, a prominent educational reformer, and a key figure in the campus controversy over the 1950s loyalty oath.Tussman was born in Chicago and grew up in Milwaukee. He studied under Alexander Meiklejohn at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Following his graduation from Wisconsin, he followed his mentor west to do graduate work at Berkeley. He served in an army-intelligence unit in southwest China during World War II. After his discharge, he returned to Berkeley. Starting in the 1950s, California began to require university employees to sign a loyalty oath, and Tussman was a key organizer of protests. Twenty percent of the Berkeley faculty refused to sign, and thirty-one professors were dismissed. Being untenured, however, Tussman eventually signed the oath for economic reasons. He said it was the saddest day in his life.Tussman moved to the philosophy department in 1952, leaving in 1955 when denied tenure for insufficient scholarly publication. Over the next few years he taught at Syracuse and Wesleyan and completed his first book, Obligation and the Body Politic. He returned to Berkeley in 1963 and became chair of philosophy the following year. He was a key figure in the Free Speech Movement of 1964.In 1965, Tussman founded the Tussman Experimental College Program (modelled on a program that Meiklejohn had created at Madison), which was offered to 150 students through their freshman and sophomore years and focused on great works written during times of great upheaval. The experiment lasted four years. He then continued to teach in the philosophy department until his retirement in 1983.

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