The Power of Language and the Language of Power from Churchill to Obama

During the first decade of the 21st century, the world did not experience a major pandemic nor a war at the borders of Europe. Many events, more or less tragic, however, occurred in those years, from Brexit to the triumph of leftist liberalism in the USA. This book is a comprehensive study of the political rhetoric of major politicians in those years, all belonging to the British and American world, from Obama to Farage, from Johnson to Romney, with occasional incursions from the not-so-distant past of British and American politics, from Churchill to Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher. This book, methodologically, uses the analytical tools provided by Critical Discourses Analysis (CDA), a linguistic sub-discipline that evolved from the pioneering works of scholars such as Norman Fairclough, Teun A. van Dijk, and Ruth Wodak. It offers a comprehensive and sophisticated analysis of the rhetorical devices used by men and women of power, demonstrating how much rhetoric, now as it has been from time immemorial, from the classical worlds of Athens, Rome and Jerusalem, and even before, shaped not only the language of the politicians, for good or evil, but the destiny of the world.