The  rhetoric  revival  in  political  theory  

         Bryan  Garsten  Professor  of  Political  Science  Yale  University  bryan.garsten@yale.edu                

N.B.:  For  the  conference  presentation  at  EHESS,  June  2011,  I  will  focus  on  the  argument  in  the  final  two  sections  of  the  paper.    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Introduction     Intellectual  Context     Rhetoric  and  Deliberation     Autonomy,  Motivation  and  Judgment     Rhetoric  as  a  Form  of  Reasoning     Rhetoric  in  Modern  Liberal  Democracies  

 

 

Introduction  

In  recent  years  political  theorists  have  turned  to  the  topic  of  rhetoric  with  new  

interest,  as  a  quick  search  of  the  relevant  journals  will  show.  In  Political  Theory,  for  

example,  there  have  been  at  least  ten  important  articles  treating  the  topic  directly  

just  in  the  years  since  2001,  while  the  previous  twenty-­‐seven  years  of  that  journal  

had  included  only  four  articles  with  “rhetoric”  in  the  title,  none  of  which  explored  

the  topic  in  great  depth  (Abizadeh  2001,  Fields  1983,  Frisch  1978,  Hawkesworth  

1988,  Martel  2004,  Nieuwenberg  2004,  Panagia  2003,  Panagia  2004,  Roth  1988,  

Scherer  2007,  Shanks  2010,  Smith  2008,  Urbinati  2010,  Yack  2006).  Of  course  

political  theorists  writing  before  this  revival  had  not  forgotten  about  rhetoric.  Many  

courses  in  the  history  of  political  thought  begin  at  the  moment  when  Socrates  

criticized  the  travelling  teachers  of  rhetoric  known  as  the  sophists,  and  there  is  a  

sense  in  which  the  whole  field  of  political  philosophy  is  defined  by  its  stance  

towards  rhetoric.  For  much  of  the  twentieth  century,  however,  this  point  did  not  

much  concern  political  theorists  unless  they  were  writing  about  the  history  of  

political  thought.  Only  recently  have  writers  concerned  with  contemporary  

democratic  theory  been  persuaded  to  recognize  the  importance  of  rhetoric.  

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This  essay  will  try  to  put  the  renewed  interest  in  rhetoric  in  philosophical  

and  historical  perspective,  focusing  especially  on  the  relation  between  rhetoric  and  

deliberative  democracy.  I  will  not  be  able  to  present  all  the  ways  in  which  theorists  

have  discussed  rhetoric.  The  word  is  so  vague,  and  used  in  so  many  different  senses,  

that  any  effort  to  discuss  all  of  them  would  soon  dissolve  into  little  more  than  a  

muddle.  There  is  a  whole  world  of  rhetorical  studies  in  communications  

departments  and  journals  that  deserves  a  treatment  of  its  own.  There  have  also  

been  valuable  new  translations  and  commentaries  on  texts  that  are  central  to  the  

rhetorical  tradition,  such  as  Plato’s  Gorgias  and  Cicero’s  De  oratore,  as  well  as  

provocative  reassessments  of  the  role  of  rhetoric  at  particular  moments  of  history  of  

political  thought  (Cicero  2001,  Plato  1998,  Skinner  1996,  Stauffer  2006,  Viroli  

1998).  In  this  review  essay  I  will  focus  on  just  a  few  fundamental  issues.  I  will  first  

try  to  explain  where  the  new  wave  of  interest  in  rhetoric  among  political  theorists  

came  from  and  what  its  precursors  were.  Section  two  will  be  devoted  to  tracing  the  

relation  between  deliberative  democrats  and  rhetoricians.  I  will  focus  on  some  of  

the  efforts  to  integrate  rhetoric  into  theories  of  deliberation  and  draw  out  a  few  of  

the  fundamental  questions  that  such  efforts  raise  but  do  not  adequately  address.  

This  will  lead  into  the  next  section  on  the  insufficiencies  of  the  view  that  rhetoric  is  

valuable  primarily  for  its  capacity  to  motivate  us,  a  view  that  does  not  adequately  

consider  or  respond  to  concerns  about  the  threats  that  rhetoric  poses  to  our  

autonomous  judgment.  The  fourth  section  shows  theorists  moving  towards  a  more  

ambitious  defense  of  rhetoric,  often  but  not  always  drawn  from  Aristotle,  in  which  it  

is  conceived  of  not  as  a  supplement  to  reason  but  as  a  form  of  reasoning  itself.  The  

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final  section  will  explore  links  between  the  structure  of  political  systems  and  the  

sorts  of  discourse  that  they  encourage,  exploring  some  of  the  challenges  that  

modern  liberal  democracies  face.  Here  I  will  touch  upon  the  special  challenges  that  

rhetoric  faces  under  distinctly  modern  conditions,  principally  the  centrality  of  

markets  and  the  media,  which  together  give  rise  to  the  practice  of  advertising.  

Advertising  is  the  most  visible  and  successful  sort  of  rhetoric  in  modern  liberal  

democracies,  and  it  is  a  very  different  kind  of  practice  from  the  deliberative  rhetoric  

that  so  many  recent  political  theorists  defend.  I  will  suggest  that  the  basic  structure  

of  liberal  democracy  is  an  important  factor  in  explaining  why  so  much  political  

rhetoric  today  looks  more  like  advertising  than  like  deliberative  argument.  More  

generally,  the  principal  theses  of  this  review  essay  are  a)  that  recent  efforts  to  

integrate  rhetoric  into  theories  of  deliberative  democracy  depend  for  their  

coherence  on  finding  a  clearer  conception  than  we  currently  have  of  how  rhetoric  

can  influence  judgments  without  compromising  their  freedom,  and  b)  that  the  extra  

attention  Aristotelian  rhetoric  has  received  is  not  necessarily  a  distraction  from  

considering  the  unique  challenges  posed  by  modern  conditions.  

 

Intellectual  context    

 

Several  layers  of  explanation  for  the  recent  interest  in  rhetoric  can  be  identified.  The  

simplest  story  to  tell  is  one  of  dissatisfaction  with  the  theories  of  deliberative  

democracy  that  became  influential  in  the  1990s.  This  is  a  story  of  protest  against  the  

limits  that  Habermas,  Rawls,  Cohen,  Gutmann  and  Thompson  and  others  writing  

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about  normative  conceptions  of  democratic  deliberation  seemed  to  place  on  what  

sort  of  arguments  were  admissible  in  democratic  discussions  (Cohen  1997,  

Gutmann  &  Thompson  1996,  Habermas  1996,  Rawls  1993).  At  the  same  time,  more  

historically  minded  theorists  began  to  point  out  that  the  long  intellectual  tradition  of  

writing  about  rhetoric  offered  an  alternative  way  of  thinking  about  public  argument  

and  deliberation.  Articles  that  once  would  have  presented  themselves  simply  as  

investigations  of  intellectual  history  were  now  framed  as  contributions  to,  or  

corrections  of,  the  ongoing  debate  about  deliberative  democracy.  Fontana,  

Nederman  and  Remer  put  together  a  wide-­‐ranging  volume  of  such  historical  essays  

that  aimed  to  bring  rhetoric  back  into  the  contemporary  debate,  making  the  link  to  

deliberative  democracy  explicit  in  their  introduction  (Fontana  et  al  2004).  At  around  

the  same  time  a  number  of  scholars  turned  to  Aristotle’s  Rhetoric  to  explore  aspects  

of  democratic  citizenship  that  theories  of  deliberative  democracy  had  not  

emphasized  (Abizadeh  2002,  Allen  2004,  Garsten  2006,  O'Neill  2002,  Yack  2006).  

  One  way  to  think  about  this  reaction  to  deliberation  theories  is  to  recall  that  

in  the  history  of  political  thought,  moments  of  excessive  rationalism  often  provoke  

romantic  responses.  Cartesianism  gave  rise  to  Giambattista  Vico,  Voltaire  and  the  

Enlightenment  to  Herder,  and  so  on.  Classicism  emphasizes  universal  reasons  and  

principles  and  aims  to  speak  for  humanity,  while  the  romantic  response  begs  that  

we  grant  due  consideration  to  particularities  of  history,  to  individual  lives  and  

communities.  Classicism  prioritizes  reason  while  romanticism  pleads  for  the  

emotions.  Classicism  prizes  analysis  while  romanticism  lauds  creativity  and  the  

poetic  aspect  of  language.  Classicism  aims  to  explain  nature  while  romanticism  

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explores  what  is  humanly  constructed.  In  many  respects,  the  revival  of  rhetoric  

seems  to  fit  into  this  pattern  and  so  could  be  viewed  as  a  romantic  response  to  a  

classically  rationalist  moment,  or  as  a  humanistic  response  to  a  scholastic  moment.  

  But  the  turn  to  rhetoric  cannot  be  understood  wholly  as  a  reaction  to  the  

rationalist  theories  of  deliberative  democracy.  Those  theories  were  the  immediate  

provocation,  but  there  were  also  deeper  and  more  long-­‐standing  reasons  for  

reconsidering  rhetoric.  Theorists  who  wanted  to  remind  deliberative  democrats  

about  the  rhetorical  tradition  were  standing  on  the  shoulders  of  earlier  writers  who  

had  returned  to  rhetoric  well  before  deliberation  became  the  topic  du  jour  in  

political  theory.  This  was  happening  on  both  sides  of  the  political  spectrum.  On  the  

left,  postmodern  anti-­‐foundationalist  thinkers  offered  rhetorical  analysis  as  a  way  of  

piercing  the  pretensions  of  objectivity  found  in  pseudo-­‐scientific  ethics,  law  and  

political  science  (Fish  1990,  Foucault  1972,  Rorty  1979,  Rorty  1989).  They  followed  

Nietzsche  and  Heidegger,  but  also  sometimes  claimed  affinity  with  “the  linguistic  

turn”  in  analytic  philosophy  –  Wittgenstein’s  notion  that  language  constitutes  reality  

rather  than  merely  describing  it.  Marshalling  the  insights  of  these  twentieth-­‐century  

philosophies,  scholars  were  able  to  show  that  even  the  pronouncements  of  the  most  

successful  of  the  social  sciences  –  economics  –  were  rhetorical  statements  whose  

apparent  objectivity  consisted  in  their  conforming  to  the  peculiar  demands  of  a  

particular  linguistic  community  (McCloskey  1985).  In  political  philosophy,  the  

implication  was  that  conflicts  of  moral  principle  were  only  clashes  of  what  Rorty  

called  “final  vocabularies”;  they  would  never  succumb  to  rational  resolution.  Rorty  

concluded  that  peaceful  coexistence  and  mutual  respect  therefore  depended  not  on  

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a  philosophical  working  out  of  reasonable  principles  but  instead  on  securing  

widespread  recognition  of  the  limits  of  our  ability  to  justify  our  own  principles,  a  

recognition  that  (as  Rorty  put  it)  “anything  can  be  made  to  look  good  or  bad  by  

being  redescribed”  (Rorty  1989).  The  language  of  “redescription”  suggests  the  link  

between  Rorty’s  “ironism”  and  rhetoric.  When  Skinner  turned  to  the  study  of  

rhetoric’s  importance  in  seventeenth  century  English  thought,  he  put  redescription  

at  the  center  of  his  analysis  (Skinner  1994,  Skinner  1996).  Skinner  offered  only  

passing  statements  about  the  implications  of  his  analysis  for  political  thought  more  

generally,  but  Kari  Palonen  has  expanded  these  hints  into  a  more  general  argument  

for  an  anti-­‐foundational  mode  of  political  thinking  that  he  associates  with  rhetoric  

(Palonen  1997,  Palonen  2003).  

  Quite  apart  from  these  developments  on  the  left,  conservative  thinkers  had  

also  become  interested  in  rhetoric  well  before  the  recent  deliberative  turn.  Early  

shoots  of  the  rhetoric  revival  had  been  growing  in  Michael  Oakeshott’s  influential  

essays  on  the  importance  of  language  and  the  limits  of  rationalism  in  politics  

(Oakeshott  1962).  Oakeshott  cited  Michael  Polanyi’s  work  on  “tacit  knowledge”  in  

reminding  readers  that  not  all  knowledge  was  technical,  that  not  all  insight  could  be  

captured  by  a  set  of  rules,  procedures  or  principles,  and  the  importance  that  he  

granted  to  prudence  was  linked  to  his  interest  in  rhetorical  argument  (Polanyi  

1958).  Even  earlier  in  the  century,  Leo  Strauss  had  drawn  attention  to  the  

importance  of  rhetoric  when  he  showed  that  the  account  of  the  passions  in  Hobbes’s  

Leviathan  owed  much  to  Aristotle’s  Rhetoric,  which  Hobbes  had  translated.  The  

implication,  according  to  Strauss,  was  that  Hobbes  –  and  the  entire  modern  program  

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of  political  science  that  he  had  launched  –  could  not  be  fully  understood  without  

noticing  the  humanistic  (rhetorical)  tradition  to  which  it  had  been  responding  

(Strauss  1936).  Hans-­‐Georg  Gadamer  also  sought  to  draw  attention  to  Renaissance  

humanism  in  his  effort  to  explain  a  hermeneutic  approach  to  knowledge  in  Truth  

and  Method,  pointing  to  several  features  of  humanism  that  deserved  notice  and  that  

together  characterized  a  culture  in  which  rhetoric  played  an  important  role:  the  

notion  that  a  community’s  values  were  manifested  in  our  characters,  the  centrality  

of  a  shared  common  sense  (sensus  communis),  the  virtue  of  prudence,  and  an  

aesthetic  sensibility  manifesting  itself  in  politics  as  well  as  the  arts  (Aune  2008,  

Gadamer  1997,  Gadamer  1986).  Oakeshott,  Strauss  and  Gadamer,  in  turn,  were  all  

responding  in  part  to  the  importance  that  Heidegger  had  placed  on  the  ancient  

sophists  and  on  the  challenge  that  they  had  posed  to  Socratic  political  philosophy  

(Heidegger  2003).  The  dark  mysteries  of  mid-­‐century  continental  thought  may  seem  

far  removed  from  the  recent  debates  about  deliberative  democracy,  but  they  

inspired  much  of  the  work  on  rhetoric  that  made  the  topic  available  to  the  most  

recent  crop  of  theorists,  and  they  also  help  to  place  that  more  recent  debate  in  

philosophical  perspective.  

In  detailing  the  background  conditions  that  prepared  the  way  for  the  recent  

revival  of  interest  in  rhetoric,  it  is  also  important  to  notice  developments  in  politics  

–  especially,  the  arrival  of  true  mass  democracy  and  of  a  media  world  

commensurate  to  it.  John  Dewey  noticed  that  these  developments  would  require  

new  attention  to  rhetoric  as  early  as  1927,  when  he  wrote  in  The  Public  and  Its  

Problems,  “The  essential  need  [in  mass  democracies]…is  the  improvement  of  the  

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methods  and  conditions  of  debate,  discussion,  and  persuasion.  That  is  the  problem  

of  the  public”  (Aune  2008,  Dewey  1927).  As  the  century  proceeded,  political  trends  

in  the  U.S.  only  intensified  the  need  that  Dewey  had  seen:  the  media  grew  more  

important,  political  parties  lost  influence,  the  presidential  selection  process  became  

more  personalized  and  charismatic,  advertising  grew  more  effective  and  permeated  

previously  immune  areas  of  consciousness  and  culture,  and  technologies  of  

propaganda  and  persuasion  developed  in  sophistication  and  intensity.  The  new  

focus  on  forms  of  deliberation  and  persuasion  was  linked  to  a  general  unease  about  

the  place  of  reason  and  reasoning  in  these  emerging  modes  of  mass  politics.  

 

Rhetoric  and  deliberation  

 

The  prominence  of  deliberative  democracy  in  the  political  theory  of  the  past  twenty-­‐

five  years  means  that  many  contemporary  discussions  of  rhetoric  orient  themselves  

in  relation  to  deliberation.  Some  scholars  view  the  rhetorical  tradition  primarily  as  

an  alternative  or  competitor  to  the  recent  theories  of  deliberative  democracy.  Thus  

the  editors  of  Talking  Democracy  introduced  the  work  by  arguing  that  “theories  of  

deliberative  democracy  are  seriously  imperiled  by  their  unwillingness  or  inability  to  

take  into  account  the  rhetorical  dimension  of  expression”  (Fontana  et  al  2004).  They  

found  in  deliberative  democratic  theory  a  hostility  to  rhetoric  which  they  traced  

back  to  the  rationalism  of  Kant  and  ultimately  of  Plato,  and  they  pointed  out  that  the  

deliberative  emphasis  on  reaching  mutual  understanding  did  not  address  the  

political  necessity  of  making  decisions.  At  around  the  same  time  a  number  of  other  

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theorists  were  also  noticing  the  contrast  between  rhetorical  theories  and  

deliberative  democratic  ones  (Abizadeh  2007,  Allen  2004,  Garsten  2006,  O'Neill  

2002,  Yack  2006,  Young  1996).  

Deliberative  democrats,  however,  rightly  point  out  that  many  of  them  have  

allowed  rhetoric  to  play  a  role  in  their  theories.  They  have  acknowledged  the  way  

that  rhetoric  can  open  people  to  deliberation,  draw  them  together  into  a  functioning  

deliberative  community,  and  help  transform  their  opinion  into  policy  (Chambers  

2009,  Dryzek  2002,  Dryzek  2010,  Gutmann  &  Thompson  1996).  As  of  the  moment  

when  this  review  article  is  being  completed,  the  two  most  recent  major  articles  on  

rhetoric  in  Political  Theory  are  ones  written  by  scholars  whose  books  helped  to  

define  the  field  of  deliberative  democracy  in  the  1990s  (Chambers  1996,  Chambers  

2009,  Dryzek  1990,  Dryzek  2010).  Both  scholars  concede  rhetoric’s  importance,  

deny  that  deliberative  theories  need  to  (or  ever  did)  rule  it  out  altogether,  and  try  to  

offer  ways  of  distinguishing  between  rhetoric  that  can  strengthen  deliberation  and  

rhetoric  that  interferes  with  it.  

  Still,  although  many  deliberative  democrats  carve  out  space  for  rhetoric  in  

their  theories,  a  close  look  at  their  treatment  of  rhetoric  reveals  a  much  more  

limited  appreciation  for  its  role  than  what  many  rhetoricians  would  hope  for.  When  

Gutmann  and  Thompson  noticed  that  “nondeliberative  means  may  be  necessary  to  

meet  deliberative  ends,”  their  language  indicated  that  rhetoric  was  not  itself  part  of  

deliberation.  They  appreciated  Senator  Carol  Moseley  Braun’s  dramatic  oratory  on  

the  Senate  floor  in  1993,  which  drew  attention  to  an  amendment  that  would  have  

renewed  a  patent  on  the  insignia  of  the  Confederate  flag  (Gutmann  &  Thompson  

  11  

1996).  Their  explanation  for  why  Braun’s  “nondeliberative”  rhetoric  was  acceptable  

was  that  it  “provoked”  deliberation  among  senators  who  otherwise  would  not  have  

focused  on  the  issue.  They  also  acknowledged  that  arguments  were  present  in  her  

speech,  and  that  these  arguments  were  relevant  parts  of  the  deliberation.  But  the  

vehemence  with  which  they  were  voiced  was  not.  On  their  view,  rousing  emotions  

could  help  make  deliberation  possible  but  was  not  a  constitutive  part  of  the  activity  

of  deliberation  itself.  

  Dryzek  also  granted  a  role  to  rhetoric  in  his  account  of  deliberative  

democracy.  He  noticed  that  Martin  Luther  King,  Jr.’s  rhetorical  appeals  were  helpful  

to  deliberation  because  “they  moved  a  white  audience  initially  unsympathetic  to  the  

civil  rights  movement  through  frequent  invocation  of  the  language  of  the  

Declaration  of  Independence  and  the  United  States  Constitution.”  He  pointed  to  the  

place  of  those  documents  in  the  hearts  of  the  listeners  and  attributed  the  

importance  of  rhetoric  to  its  emotional  appeal,  without  which  the  rational  

argumentation  would  have  “fallen  on  deaf  ears”  (Dryzek  2002).  He  also  made  a  

larger  point  that  rhetoric  could  affect  which  of  several  competing  discourses  in  the  

public  sphere  gained  traction,  and  that  it  could  function  as  a  “transmission  

mechanism”  between  the  public  sphere  and  the  state.  Thus  rhetoric  helped  his  

argument  that  elections  were  not  the  only  means  of  transforming  public  opinion  

into  policy,  and  therefore  that  social  choice  theorists  had  not  adequately  modeled  

democracy.  The  function  he  gave  to  rhetoric  –  calling  attention  to  arguments  and  

transmitting  them  –  are  ones  that  preserve  the  basic  distinction  between  rhetoric  

and  reasoning.  

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More  recently  Dryzek  has  articulated  an  additional  way  in  which  rhetoric  can  

be  beneficial:  Since  mass  publics  are  comprised  of  different  discourses  and  groups,  

he  suggests,  rhetoric  can  help  by  “bridging”  the  concerns  of  different  groups,  thus  

drawing  them  closer  together  and  joining  them.  In  general,  he  argues,  rhetoric  is  

harmful  when  it  instead  performs  the  function  of  “bonding”  within  existing  groups  

and  thus  further  fragmenting  the  public.  Bridging  rhetoric  is  usually  superior  to  

bonding  rhetoric,  he  argues,  but  not  always.  His  main  concern  is  to  argue  that  we  

should  judge  the  appropriateness  of  rhetoric  not  by  any  categorical  criterion  such  as  

its  emotionality  or  lack  thereof,  but  instead  by  the  effects  of  any  particular  instance  

of  rhetoric  on  the  whole  “deliberative  system”  (Dryzek  2010).  Here  again  rhetoric  

plays  a  potentially  important  but  fundamentally  supplementary  role,  either  

promoting  or  interfering  with  the  activity  of  deliberation  from  outside  that  activity.  

Dryzek  does  now  mention  what  he  refers  to  as  a  “poststructuralist”  view  that  

questions  the  distinction  between  reasoning  and  rhetoric,  but  the  only  implication  

that  he  draws  is  that  Rawlsian  public  reason  is  too  restrictive.  Rawls  and  Habermas,  

he  remarks,  allow  rhetoric  only  insofar  as  it  stimulates  reasoned  reflection.  He  goes  

further  than  they  do;  he  allows  that  the  non-­‐rational  aspects  of  rhetoric  can  

sometimes  “substitute  for  reason”  in  a  “fruitful”  way  –  meaning  a  way  that  will  

benefit  the  goals  of  the  deliberative  system.  

The  language  of  “substitution,”  indicates,  however,  that  even  Dryzek,  a  

deliberative  theorist  sympathetic  to  rhetoric,  regards  reason  and  rhetoric  as  two  

alternatives  that  one  must  choose  between.  As  we  will  see  later,  this  is  an  

assumption  that  scholars  closer  to  the  rhetorical  tradition  often  call  into  question.  

  13  

Interestingly,  this  assumption  had  been  noticeably  absent  from  a  much  earlier  

moment  in  the  deliberative  turn.  Before  the  Habermasian  point  of  view  had  

influenced  the  direction  of  deliberative  democratic  theory  so  deeply,  rhetoric  and  

deliberation  had  been  treated  as  closely  related  activities  rather  than  as  competing  

alternatives.  Some  of  the  theorists  who  first  drew  attention  to  the  importance  of  

deliberation  had  found  in  the  rhetorical  tradition  resources  to  help  them  explain  

what  they  thought  had  been  left  out  of  non-­‐deliberative  theories.  Beiner,  for  

example,  had  devoted  a  chapter  of  his  ground-­‐breaking  book  Political  Judgment  to  

rhetoric  in  the  early  1980s,  making  the  point  that  rhetoric  had  to  be  taken  seriously  

by  anyone  interested  in  practical  judgment.  Beiner  had  drawn  attention  to  practical  

judgment  as  a  way  of  insisting  that  the  formalistic  rule-­‐based  ethics  of  Kantian  and  

utilitarian  philosophy  would  leave  ordinary  citizens  under  the  tutelage  of  experts  

and  technocrats.  Following  Hannah  Arendt,  Beiner  had  sought  to  vindicate  the  

possibility  of  meaningful  political  debate  among  ordinary  citizens.  His  inquiry  into  

judgment  and  rhetoric  was  presented  as  an  effort  to  defend  the  possibility  of  

deliberation:    

The  purpose  of  inquiring  into  the  nature  of  judgment  is  to  disclose  a  mental  

faculty  by  which  we  situate  ourselves  in  the  political  world  without  relying  

upon  explicit  rules  and  methods,  and  thus  to  open  up  a  space  of  deliberation  

that  is  being  closed  ever  more  tightly  in  technocratic  societies.  In  respect  of  

this  faculty,  the  dignity  of  the  common  citizen  suffers  no  derogation.  Here  the  

expert  can  claim  no  special  privileges  (Beiner  1983)  (emphasis  added).    

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In  a  similar  vein,  when  Bernard  Manin  had  offered  an  important  article  showing  

how  a  focus  on  deliberation  could  inform  social  contract  theories  of  legitimacy,  he  

too  had  thought  of  rhetoric  when  describing  what  he  meant  by  deliberation:  

But  deliberation  is  not  only  a  process  of  discovery:  the  parties  are  not  

satisfied  with  presenting  various  and  conflicting  theses;  they  also  try  to  

persuade  each  other.  They  argue.  Argumentation  is  a  sequence  of  

propositions  aiming  to  produce  or  reinforce  agreement  in  the  listener.  In  this  

sense,  it  is  a  discursive  and  rational  process.  Yet,  in  contrast  to  logical  proof,  

argumentation  does  not  result  in  a  necessary  conclusion  that  the  listener  

cannot  reject.  A  conclusion  developed  from  argumentation  is  not  a  necessary  

proposition.  The  listener  remains  free  to  give  his  agreement  or  to  withhold  it.  

The  listener  is  free  because  argumentation  does  not  start  from  evident  

premises  or  from  conventional  ones.  Rather,  one  starts  by  taking  

propositions  one  assumes  are  generally  accepted  by  the  audience  being  

addressed.  In  politics,  one  would  argue  by  assuming  certain  common  values  

as  held  by  the  public  at  a  given  moment.  Argumentation  is,  therefore,  always  

relative  to  its  audience  (Manin  1987).  

As  the  footnote  to  this  passage  shows,  Manin  was  here  drawing  from  Chaim  

Perelman  and  L.  Olbrechts-­‐Tyteca’s  The  New  Rhetoric,  a  1958  work  that  revived  and  

revised  the  classical  rhetorical  tradition  for  use  as  a  modern  theory  of  

argumentation  (Perelman  &  Olbrechts-­‐Tyteca  1969).  In  both  Beiner  and  Manin,  

rhetoric  and  deliberation  had  been  seen  as  two  ways  of  talking  about  one  civic  

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activity  that  needed  to  be  defended  against  the  utilitarian  view  of  politics  implicit  in  

social  choice  theory  and  in  a  certain  reading  of  social  contract  theory.  

It  was  only  when  a  Habermasian  view  came  to  dominate  theorists’  

understanding  of  deliberation  that  rhetoric  came  to  seem  fundamentally  at  odds  

with  it.  When  theorists  of  rhetoric  later  treated  deliberative  democratic  theory  as  a  

target,  they  were  responding  to  the  influence  that  Habermas  had  had.  On  

Habermas’s  view,  the  purpose  of  a  deliberative  system  was  to  institutionalize  a  

process  of  practical  reasoning  whose  outcome  would  carry  a  special  presumption  of  

legitimacy,  and  his  view  of  what  brought  that  legitimacy  left  no  room  for  rhetoric.  

Habermas’s  approach  to  political  legitimacy  was  influenced  by  his  “discourse  

ethics,”  a  theory  that  sought  to  vindicate  the  possibility  of  reasonable  normative  

criticism  by  showing  how  standards  of  universal  validity  could  be  grounded  in  the  

pragmatic  presuppositions  of  communication  (Habermas  1981,  Habermas  1992).  

When  he  turned  to  political  legitimacy  he  argued  that  the  institutions  and  

procedures  of  democracy  should  be  understood  as  efforts  to  create  the  conditions  

under  which  citizens’  dialogue  with  one  another  would  tend  to  produce  results  that  

would  be  reasonable.  He  claimed  that  “democratic  procedures  are  meant  to  

institutionalize  the  forms  of  communication  necessary  for  a  rational  will-­‐formation”  

(Habermas  1996).  We  could  still  understand  democratic  legitimacy  as  a  function  of  

popular  sovereignty,  he  remarked,  but  we  should  adjust  our  understanding  of  what  

such  sovereignty  was.  Instead  of  an  embodied  expression  of  a  pre-­‐existing  popular  

will  through  a  representative  parliament  or  an  election,  it  should  be  understood  in  

this  way:  

  16  

…sovereignty  is  found  in  those  subjectless  forms  of  communication  that  

regulate  the  flow  of  the  discursive  opinion-­‐  and  will-­‐formation  in  such  a  way  

that  their  fallible  outcomes  have  the  presumption  of  practical  reason  on  their  

side.  Subjectless  and  anonymous,  an  intersubjectively  dissolved  popular  

sovereignty  withdraws  into  democratic  procedures  and  the  demanding  

communicative  presuppositions  of  their  implementation  (Habermas  1996).  

The  influence  of  Habermas’s  writings  on  political  theory  was  tremendous.  

Benhabib,  for  example,  adopted  Habermas’s  discourse  ethics  and  argued  that  “the  

institutions  of  liberal  democracies  embody  the  idealized  content  of  a  form  of  

practical  reason”  and  that  this  form  of  practical  reason  had  “a  culture-­‐transcending  

validity  claim”  (Benhabib  1996).  Cohen  followed  a  similar  line  of  thinking,  arguing  

that  citizens  in  democracies  should  “regard  their  basic  institutions  as  legitimate  

insofar  as  they  establish  the  framework  for  free  public  deliberation.”  He  outlined  an  

“ideal  deliberative  procedure”  that  described  what  sort  of  conversation  would  

amount  to  an  activity  of  justification  and  argument  among  equal  citizens,  and  

suggested  that  this  procedure  “serves  in  turn  as  a  model  for  deliberative  

institutions”  (Cohen  1997).  The  reason  for  putting  deliberation  at  the  center  of  

political  theory  for  these  theorists  was  that  (a  particular)  deliberative  process  could  

model  and  indeed  embody  the  process  whereby  a  group  of  individuals  in  modern  

conditions  could  find  laws  that  had  a  plausible  claim  to  inter-­‐subjective  validity.  

Cohen  ended  his  article  by  pointing  out  that  there  was  much  work  still  to  be  

done  to  outline  the  constraints  that  would  have  to  be  placed  on  deliberations  to  

insure  that  they  met  the  conditions  necessary  to  produce  legitimacy.  He  pointed  out  

  17  

that  the  more  substantive  these  constraints  were  –  and  he  thought  they  might  have  

to  be  quite  substantive  –  the  fewer  issues  might  be  left  to  actually  deliberate  about.  

He  was  right,  and  this  feature  of  deliberative  theories  soon  inspired  a  series  of  

objections.  In  defining  what  counted  as  “deliberation,”  the  objection  went,  these  

theories  resolved  many  substantive  debates  under  the  guise  of  establishing  the  

preconditions  of  legitimate  dialogue.  Sometimes  resolving  an  issue  ahead  of  time  

seemed  to  be  a  virtue  of  Habermasian  theories,  as  in  the  case  of  human  rights.  

Habermas  remarked  that  “human  rights  do  not  compete  with  popular  sovereignty;  

they  are  identical  with  the  constitutive  conditions  of  a  self-­‐limiting  practice  of  

publicly  discursive  will-­‐formation”  (Habermas  1996).  In  his  hands,  and  Benhabib’s,  

this  was  comforting  because  it  suggested  that  deliberative  theories  did  not  put  

rights  in  danger,  as  liberals  had  charged  (Benhabib  1996).  But  the  very  feature  of  

these  theories  that  assured  the  security  of  rights  –  that  their  procedures  came  with  

elaborate  and  substantive  preconditions  –  also  meant  that  many  positions  and  types  

of  communication  were  ruled  out  of  order  before  actual  deliberation  began.  

Benhabib  suggested  that  such  exclusions  were  themselves  open  to  debate,  but  this  

move  towards  reflexivity  did  not  satisfy  some  of  the  critics,  perhaps  because  it  came  

along  with  the  impressively  uncompromising  statement  that  “some  Enlightenment  

ideals  are  part  of  any  conception  of  democratic  legitimacy  and  the  public  sphere”  

(Benhabib  1996).  

This  turned  out  to  be  a  central  node  of  contention  between  a  number  of  

theories  of  deliberative  democracy  and  their  critics.  The  limitations  on  the  topics  of  

argument  and  the  modes  of  presenting  arguments  that  Habermasians  thought  were  

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necessary  to  produce  truly  deliberative  will-­‐formation  were  objectionable  to  others.  

The  objections  arose  even  against  theories  of  deliberative  democracy  that  took  a  

less  purely  Habermasian  line.  Gutmann  and  Thompson’s  Democracy  and  

Disagreement  attracted  a  set  of  objections  against  the  principles  they  had  identified  

as  constitutive  of  legitimate  dialogue  about  moral  disagreements.  Stanley  Fish  

pointed  out  the  exclusions  that  would  result  from  the  principle  of  “mutual  respect”  

(Fish  1999);  Jane  Mansbridge  made  the  case  for  allowing  “everyday  talk”  into  the  

dialogue  (Mansbridge  1999);  and  Iris  Marion  Young  described  valuable  types  of  

discourse  that  would  be  ruled  out  by  their  theory,  such  as  greeting,  storytelling,  and  

rhetoric.  Young  endorsed  a  discussion-­‐based  understanding  of  democracy  but  

wanted  to  broaden  the  notion  of  discussion  involved  away  from  “deliberation”  and  

towards  the  more  general  term  “communication.”  She  feared  that  otherwise  the  

emphasis  on  critical  argument  would  tend  to  exclude  certain  people  or  groups  and  

their  ways  of  communicating.  Cultural  and  other  differences  should  be  regarded  as  a  

“resource,”  she  argued,  and  they  should  be  brought  into  democratic  discussions  

rather  than  ruled  out.  In  addition,  communication  could  include  forms  of  speech  

such  as  “greeting,”  in  which  we  acknowledge  our  counterparts  in  all  of  their  

particularity,  “storytelling,”  in  which  we  offer  narratives  as  a  way  of  explaining  

ourselves  to  people  who  are  different,  and  “rhetoric,”  through  which  we  “reflexively  

attend  to  the  audience  in  speech”  (Young  1996).  

As  Young’s  article  made  clear,  rhetoric  had  now  moved  from  its  former  status  

–  as  a  way  for  deliberative  theorists  to  think  about  what  they  meant  by  deliberation  

–  to  a  new  status  –  as  an  example  of  what  theories  of  deliberation  unfairly  excluded.  

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But  the  exclusivity  of  “deliberation”  really  meant  the  exclusivity  of  Habermasian  

deliberation  –  that  is,  of  deliberation  that  functioned  as  a  procedure  to  produce  

democratically  legitimate  outcomes  according  to  Habermasian  criteria  of  legitimacy.  

Benhabib  articulates  clearly  some  of  the  reasons  for  this  exclusion:  

Young’s  attempt  to  transform  the  language  of  the  rule  of  law  into  a  more  

partial,  affective,  and  situated  mode  of  communication  would  have  the  

consequence  of  inducing  arbitrariness,  for  who  can  tell  how  far  the  power  of  

a  greeting  can  reach?  It  would  further  create  capriciousness  –  what  about  

those  who  simply  cannot  understand  my  story?  It  would  limit  rather  than  

enhance  social  justice  because  rhetoric  moves  people  and  achieves  results  

without  having  to  render  an  account  of  the  bases  upon  which  it  induces  

people  to  engage  in  certain  courses  of  action  rather  than  others.  In  short,  

some  moral  ideal  of  impartiality  is  a  regulative  principle…  (Benhabib  1996)  

(emphasis  added).  

The  questions  of  arbitrariness,  motivation,  partiality  and  heteronomy  that  Benhabib  

raises  point  to  some  of  the  deeper  philosophical  issues  at  stake  in  the  debate  

between  Habermasian  deliberation  and  rhetoric.  These  issues  are  ignored  when  one  

makes  the  case  on  behalf  of  rhetoric  rest  merely  on  the  virtue  of  inclusiveness.  

Habermasian  deliberation  excluded  certain  forms  of  discourse  not  arbitrarily,  but  

because  those  forms  of  speech  were  thought  to  threaten  the  listeners’  autonomy  and  

therefore  call  into  question  the  legitimacy  of  the  deliberative  process.  It  seems  to  me  

that  Benhabib  was  right  to  suggest  that  the  real  philosophical  issue  lying  beneath  

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the  debate  between  the  rhetoricians  and  the  Habermasians  is  how  we  understand  

the  relationship  between  speech,  reasoning  and  freedom.  

 

Autonomy,  motivation  and  judgment  

 

At  the  heart  of  Habermasian  deliberation  is  the  Kantian  view  that  reason  is  the  only  

way  of  influencing  people  while  respecting  their  autonomy.  In  fact,  it  seems  almost  

possible  to  say  that  Kantian  reason  simply  is  defined  as  autonomy-­‐respecting  

argument.  “Reason  has  no  dictatorial  authority,”  wrote  Kant.  “Its  verdict  is  always  

simply  the  agreement  of  free  citizens…”  (Kant  1965).  When  Habermas  writes  that  

people  deliberating  in  an  ideally-­‐specified  situation  are  influenced  by  no  force  

except  that  of  the  better  argument,  he  actually  means  that  they  experience  no  force  

at  all;  reason  is  meant  to  be  the  opposite  of  force  (Abizadeh  2001,  Habermas  1975).  

Reason  itself  is  conceived  of  as  spontaneous  and  uncaused.  If  we  reason  with  

someone  else  we  do  not  thereby  infringe  upon  their  freedom;  instead  we  invite  

them  to  participate  with  us  in  the  realm  of  freedom.  

  The  Kantian  view  contrasts  reason  with  perceptions  and  passions,  which  

reside  in  the  world  of  appearances,  where  each  change  seems  to  be  caused  by  

something.  Since  rhetoric  usually  plays  upon  perceptions  and  passions,  it  seems  to  

be  deeply  tied  up  with  the  un-­‐free  world  of  appearances;  it  seems  to  move  people  by  

accessing  them  through  their  entanglement  with  that  world.  As  Kant  wrote  in  the  

Critique  of  Judgment,  rhetoric  “borrows  from  poetry  only  as  much  as  the  speaker  

needs  in  order  to  win  over  people’s  minds  for  his  own  advantage  before  they  can  

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judge  for  themselves,  and  so  makes  their  judgment  unfree”  (Kant  1951).  When  

supposed  friends  of  rhetoric  make  the  argument  that  rhetoric  is  necessary  because  

it  is  capable  of  motivating  us  in  ways  that  reason  cannot,  they  play  right  into  the  

Kantians’  fears.  The  worry  is  precisely  that  rhetoric  can  move  us  instead  of  

convincing  us  to  move  ourselves.  

  Abizadeh  offers  a  difficult  but  important  article  demonstrating  how  deeply  

entrenched  this  Kantian  point  of  view  is  in  Habermas’s  thought  (Abizadeh  2007).  He  

explores  Habermas’s  efforts  to  find  a  way  of  endorsing  some  kind  of  affective  

attachment,  or  patriotism,  without  giving  up  on  the  communicative  understanding  

of  rationality.  The  problem  that  Habermas  faces,  Abizadeh  shows,  is  that  he  has  

defined  reason  in  part  by  its  exclusion  of  affective  content.  Habermas  follows  Kant  in  

trying  to  show  that  we  can  be  free  even  when  subject  to  political  authority  by  

showing  that  the  authority  can  be  rationally  justified  to  us.  If  reason  is  to  serve  this  

purpose,  then  it  must  be  a  faculty  that  involves  no  coercion.  But  affective  

attachments  are  coercive  in  the  sense  that  they  are  deeply  tied  to  the  physical  facts  

of  physiology.  Reason,  if  it  is  to  be  free,  must  not  be  tied  to  or  composed  of  such  

attachments.  In  Habermas’s  language,  emotions  and  patriotic  feelings  are  elements  

of  “facticity.”  It  should  be  no  surprise,  then,  that  “reason”  as  Habermas  describes  it  

seems  to  be  “motivationally  impotent.”  Reason  is  by  definition  something  free,  and  

freedom  requires  being  separate  from  the  emotions  that  motivate.  Furthermore,  any  

effort  to  solve  the  motivation  problem  will  necessarily,  according  to  Habermas’s  own  

assumptions,  threaten  the  freedom  that  reason  is  supposed  to  secure.  Abizadeh  

follows  Habermas’s  logic  through  to  its  inescapable  conclusion:  “Rhetorical  

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persuasion  can  solve  the  motivation  problem  only  insofar  as  it  emulates  

coercion”(Abizadeh  2007).  Because  the  motivation  deficit  is  a  constitutive  part  of  

Habermas’s  notion  of  reason,  he  argues,  any  effort  to  solve  the  motivation  problem  

is  bound  to  fail  within  the  terms  of  Habermas’s  own  project.  The  effort  to  find  a  

“constitutional”  form  of  patriotism  consistent  with  communicative  rationality  

cannot  succeed.  

  Abizadeh  suggests  that  rather  than  trying  to  find  a  way  of  relating  two  

separate  realms  of  reason  (“validity”)  and  rhetoric  (“facticity”),  as  Habermas  was  

doing,  it  would  be  better  simply  to  avoid  separating  them  in  the  first  place:  

The  incoherence  of  Habermas’  category  of  discourse  stems  from  a  failure  to  

consider  a  fourth  possibility:  facticity  may  be  a  constitutive  feature  of  the  

validity  dimension  itself  in  a  way  that  ultimately  (though  mediately)  

subordinates  facticity’s  operation  in  the  validity  dimension  to  the  ends  of  

validity  (or,  to  put  it  in  terms  of  discourse,  to  the  telos  of  reaching  

understanding).  Validity  here  is  constructed  not  by  an  expulsion  of  (nor  by  a  

fusion  with)  facticity,  but  by  organizing  the  operation  of  facticity  ultimately  

to  serve  the  ends  of  validity  (Abizadeh  2007).  

Though  this  prose  concedes  too  much  to  Habermas’s  ugly  terminology,  it  conveys  an  

important  criticism  of  Habermas’s  basic  categories.  Abizadeh  seems  to  suggest  that  

it  is  a  mistake  to  think  that  reasoning’s  legitimacy  and  freedom  depend  on  being  

separable  from  the  desiring  and  feeling  parts  of  experience.  Reasoning  is  something  

that  humans  actually  do;  it  occurs  in  the  phenomenal  world,  not  in  a  posited  

noumenal  one,  and  to  understand  it  we  would  have  to  see  how  creatures  who  are  

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fully  a  part  of  that  world  and  are  subject  to  it  can  nevertheless  reason  –  we  would  

have  to  see  how  the  activity  of  reasoning  emerges  out  of  and  through  the  organized  

“facticity”  of  the  real  human  mind.    

Hannah  Arendt’s  special  interest  in  the  faculty  of  judgment  can  be  

understood  as  an  effort  to  find  a  way  of  reconciling  reason  to  the  world  of  

appearances.  Kant  himself  had  seen  in  judgment  some  sort  of  link  between  the  

noumenal  and  phenomenal,  and  Arendt  sought  to  follow  his  hints  towards  an  

independent  faculty  that  would  help  to  vindicate  the  world  of  appearances.  Taking  

up  this  theme  from  Arendt  was  one  of  the  deepest  and  most  significant  moves  

towards  the  recent  revival  of  rhetoric  among  political  theorists.  Beiner’s  publication  

of  and  commentary  on  Arendt’s  lectures  on  judgment,  along  with  his  path-­‐breaking  

book  Political  Judgment,  were  key  early  moments  in  this  strain  of  thinking  (Beiner  

1982,  Beiner  1983).  Though  Beiner  cited  Arendt’s  lectures  as  inspiration,  he  made  

the  case  for  paying  attention  to  rhetoric  more  forcefully  than  Arendt  had  herself,  

and  brought  to  light  some  of  the  issues  about  autonomy  and  appearances  that  have  

already  been  mentioned.  In  particular  he  emphasized  that  rhetoric  and  judgment  

both  offer  a  way  of  thinking  about  the  importance  of  particulars,  in  contrast  to  rule-­‐

governed  forms  of  reasoning.  General  laws  or  rules  always  reside  at  some  distance  

from  the  actual  world,  because  the  actual  world  is  composed  of  particulars.  Rules  

trace  patterns  or  articulate  principles,  but  patterns  and  principles  are  always  

abstractions  from  the  particular  cases  that  make  them  up.  Patterns  and  principles  

are  not  themselves  what  appear  to  us;  they  are  the  order  that  we  attempt  to  find  in  

or  impose  upon  those  appearances.  Therefore  a  theory  of  morals  or  politics  that  

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grants  more  importance  to  patterns  and  principles  than  to  appearances  is  one  that  

has  the  potential  to  pull  us  away  from  the  world,  to  open  not  only  a  motivation  gap  

but  also  an  experiential  one,  to  leave  us  feeling  alienated  from,  or  unrooted  in,  the  

world  outside  ourselves.  

To  overcome  or  avoid  the  estrangement  of  reason  from  appearances  or  

action,  or  (in  Habermas’s  terms)  the  divide  between  “validity”  and  “facticity,”  it  

would  be  necessary  either  to  insist  that  freedom  can  exist  in  the  world  of  

appearances  or  to  concede  that  reasoning  is  not  wholly  free  and  cannot  make  us  

wholly  free.  Abizadeh  suggests,  against  Habermas,  that  “facticity  may  be  a  

constitutive  feature  of  the  validity  dimension  itself.”  Instead  of  aligning  rhetoric  

with  “facticity”  and  contrasting  it  with  validity-­‐creating  reason,  the  rhetorical  

perspective  would  suggest  that  it  is  possible  to  escape  the  dichotomy  and  instead  

naturalize  reason,  or  show  how  reason  emerges  from  and  exists  within  the  partially-­‐

un-­‐free  world  of  human  appearances.  This  is  what  Arendt’s  and  Beiner’s  

considerations  of  judgment  have  tried  in  one  way  or  another  to  do,  and  it  is  a  project  

that  many  political  theorists  have  been  drawn  to  since  Arendt  pointed  the  way.  

Some  of  the  deepest  recent  students  of  rhetoric  have  explained  that  the  rhetorical  

point  of  view  is  one  that  leaves  behind  the  “post-­‐Cartesian  disdain  for  the  world  of  

appearances”  (Garver  1994,  Kochin  2009).  

As  we  have  seen,  many  of  the  recent  efforts  to  incorporate  rhetoric  into  

theories  of  deliberative  democracy  do  not  delve  into  such  philosophical  issues.  

Arguably  they  do  not  have  to,  since  they  do  not  adopt  the  Habermasian  program  in  

its  entirety  in  the  first  place.  If  deliberation  is  understood  to  refer  simply  to  a  

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process  of  exchanging  reasons  in  a  way  that  produces  more  considered  policy,  a  

more  involved  or  more  unified  citizenry,  or  a  more  articulate  link  between  citizens  

and  their  rulers,  then  it  is  not  difficult  to  find  ways  of  integrating  various  sorts  of  

rhetorical  persuasion  into  it.  But  if  part  of  the  appeal  of  using  deliberation,  rather  

than  other  means,  to  do  these  things  comes  from  our  intuition  that  reasoning  with  

people  is  a  way  of  respecting  their  capacity  for  free  judgment,  it  may  be  harder  to  

avoid  the  issues  raised  by  the  Habermasians  than  is  often  admitted.  In  particular,  

the  familiar  defense  of  rhetoric  that  gives  it  the  role  of  motivating  us  to  attend  to  the  

results  of  reasoning  grants  too  much  to  the  view  that  reasoning  itself  is  inherently  

non-­‐motivational  and  un-­‐rhetorical.  Reconciling  rhetoric  with  the  wish  to  respect  

people’s  capacity  for  free  judgment  requires  an  account  in  which  the  perceptions,  

images,  and  feelings  that  rhetoric  works  with  are  not  threats  to  the  activities  of  

judging  and  reasoning,  but  partly  constitutive  of  them.  

 

Rhetoric  as  a  form  of  reasoning  

 

One  way  of  questioning  the  distinction  between  rhetoric  and  reasoning  is  to  insist  

that  reasons  are  merely  rationalizations.  This  position  is  linked  to  a  style  of  analysis  

that  portrays  all  statements,  even  apparently  objective  or  scientific  ones,  as  

“rhetorical”  in  the  sense  of  being  aimed  at  a  specific  audience,  in  accordance  with  

certain  communicative  norms,  and  often  with  the  intent  to  achieve  certain  goals,  as  

when  McCloskey  analyzes  the  discourse  of  economists  (McCloskey  1985).  As  O’Neill  

points  out,  this  position  has  surprising  similarities  with  the  view  that  social  choice  

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theorists  take  of  public  argument,  insofar  as  they  too  dismiss  it  as  nothing  more  

than  a  form  of  strategic  action.  This  “deflationary  rhetorical  perspective”  holds  that  

“all  discourse  is  an  exercise  in  power.  All  the  analyst  should  do  is  to  unmask  it  for  

what  it  is”  (O'Neill  2002).  Unmasking  great  works  of  political  philosophy  themselves  

as  rhetorical  in  this  sense  was  one  of  Skinner’s  goals  in  applying  speech-­‐act  theory  

to  the  history  of  political  thought  (Skinner  1969).  Palonen  links  the  view  of  rhetoric  

implicit  in  Skinner’s  approach  to  the  one  endorsed  by  the  ancient  sophists  (Palonen  

2003).  

Many  other  theorists,  however,  have  questioned  the  reason-­‐rhetoric  divide  

by  turning  not  to  the  sophistic  or  “deflationary”  rhetorical  perspective  but  instead  to  

a  point  of  view  advanced  by  a  critic  of  the  sophists  –  Aristotle.  In  Aristotle’s  Rhetoric  

they  have  found  a  rhetorical  account  of  reasoning  and  judgment  that  is  not  designed  

to  unmask  the  pretensions  of  reason  but  instead  to  analyze  how  reasoning  works  in  

public  (Abizadeh  2002,  Allen  2004,  Beiner  1983,  Farrell  1995,  Fontana  et  al  2004,  

Garsten  2006,  Garver  1994,  Nichols  1987,  Nieuwenberg  2004,  O'Neill  2002,  Rorty  

1996,  Yack  2006).  Recent  theorists  have  found  the  following  points  in  Aristotle’s  

analysis  especially  worth  emphasizing:  Rhetorical  persuasion  does  not  presuppose  a  

particular  conception  of  “public  reason”  or  a  strong  notion  of  civic  solidarity,  but  

instead  describes  discourse  among  citizens  tied  by  relations  of  mutual  advantage  

(Yack  2006).  It  begins  by  studying  the  opinions  of  the  audience,  noting  how  those  

opinions  are  structured  and  what  deliberative  pathways  exist  between  them  

(Garsten  2006).  It  pays  attention  to  the  way  that  the  particular  features  of  the  polity  

influence  those  common  opinions  (Garver  1994,  Nichols  1987).  It  is  an  art  based  

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largely  on  the  question  of  how  to  persuade  an  audience  to  trust  a  speaker;  rhetoric  

is  portrayed  as  an  art  of  trust-­‐production  (Allen  2004,  O'Neill  2002).  Rhetorical  

deliberation  understood  in  this  way  has  structural  parallels  with  an  individual’s  

practical  deliberations,  especially  in  the  way  that  perception  and  emotions  play  an  

integral  role  in  specifying  the  outcomes  of  both  (Abizadeh  2002).  Particular  political  

emotions,  such  as  anger  and  shame,  play  a  special  and  legitimate  role  in  public  

deliberations  (Garsten  2006,  Garver  1994,  Nichols  1987,  Nieuwenberg  2004,  

Tarnopolsky  2007,  Tarnopolsky  2010).  And  rhetoric  understood  in  this  way  aims  to  

engage  a  faculty  of  practical  judgment  in  the  audience  (Abizadeh  2002,  Allen  2004,  

Beiner  1983,  Garsten  2006).  Lying  beneath  all  of  these  points  is  the  fundamental  

point  that  Aristotle  described  two  ways  of  producing  belief  in  addition  to  logical  

argument  (logos):  leading  the  audience  members  to  trust  the  speaker’s  character  

(ethos)  and  influencing  their  emotions  (pathos).  To  describe  rhetoric  as  a  form  of  

reasoning  is  to  show  that  trust  and  emotion  are  integral  parts  of  public  reasoning  

rather  than  corruptions  of  it  or  supplements  to  it.  

The  theorists  who  find  Aristotelian  ways  of  thinking  about  rhetoric  relevant  

to  contemporary  politics  have  to  explain,  of  course,  how  an  ancient  theory  could  

relate  to  modern  conditions.  A  number  of  considerations  have  been  advanced  to  

make  this  move  seem  plausible:  Yack  suggests  that  Aristotle’s  account  of  public  

(rhetorical)  deliberation  is  more  realistic  than  Kantian  theories  are,  meaning  that  it  

takes  greater  notice  of  the  actual  social  relationships  and  expectations  that  must  be  

preserved  when  a  group  of  people  deliberate  together  about  political  issues  (Yack  

2006).  Allen  describes  the  critical  absence  of  trust  in  contemporary  urban  

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communities  and  identifies  the  rhetorical  techniques  of  trust-­‐production  as  ones  

that  could  be  harnessed  there  (Allen  2004).  Beiner  and  others  identify  Aristotle’s  

understanding  of  practical  judgment  (phronesis)  as  a  way  to  think  about  an  aspect  of  

citizenship  threatened  by  modern  bureaucratic  and  legal  modes  of  organization  

(Beiner  1983,  Farrell  1995,  Garsten  2006).  Garver  suggests  that  seeing  the  close  

ways  in  which  rhetorical  deliberation  is  tied  to  the  polis  in  Aristotle’s  thought  might  

help  us  to  better  understand  the  relative  awkwardness  with  which  that  activity  fits  

into  modern  political  life  (Garver  1994).    

One  objection  to  applying  lessons  from  classical  rhetoric  to  modern  

democratic  society  is  that  the  classical  works  are  usually  about  one  speaker  

addressing  an  audience  rather  than  a  mutual  exchange  of  arguments  among  equals.  

For  many  theorists  of  deliberation,  the  fact  that  rhetorical  argumentation  proceeds  

in  only  one  direction  seems  problematic;  they  would  prefer  a  more  dialogic  speech  

situation  that  better  corresponds  to  democratic  ideas  about  equality  (Chambers  

2009).  But  other  theorists  have  argued  that  the  monological  quality  of  oratory  is  still  

relevant  to  our  politics.  Remer  calls  attention  to  Cicero’s  distinction  between  

oratory,  which  was  appropriate  for  public  political  deliberations,  and  conversation,  

which  was  a  more  dialogic  and  rational  form  of  discourse  that  took  place  in  small  

groups  of  people  in  private  settings  and  that  gave  each  individual  a  chance  to  

participate  and  be  treated  equally  (Remer  1999,  Remer  2000).  He  points  out  that  

contemporary  politics  remains  a  sphere  in  which  speakers  must  motivate  action,  

not  just  come  to  mutual  understanding  with  one  another.  He  suggests  that  Cicero’s  

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distinction  remains  pertinent  and  that  it  is  a  mistake  for  deliberative  democrats  to  

conceive  of  political  deliberation  as  a  kind  of  conversation  among  equals.  

Chambers  observes  that  the  asymmetrical  speech  situation,  in  which  a  small  

number  of  speakers  address  an  enormous  public,  is  characteristic  of  mass  

democracies  today  (Chambers  2009).  If  we  are  to  keep  open  the  possibility  of  

imagining  how  this  sort  of  democracy  might  become  more  deliberative,  she  argues,  

we  will  have  to  find  a  way  of  encouraging  and  protecting  whatever  deliberative  

aspects  exist  in  this  asymmetric,  non-­‐dialogical,  relation  between  speakers  and  mass  

audiences.  The  many  deliberative  democrats  who  have  turned  their  attention  to  

creating  small  group  settings  in  which  dialogic  conversation  can  occur  have,  she  

says,  have  turned  their  back  on  the  earlier  project  of  finding  ways  to  make  mass  

democracy  itself  more  deliberative  (Brown  2006,  Fishkin  1997,  Fung  2003,  Goodin  

&  Dryzek  2006).  

In  a  related  vein,  O’Neill  points  out  that  in  large,  socially  differentiated  

modern  polities,  many  public  concerns  involve  matters  of  expertise.  Therefore,  he  

suggests,  Kant’s  call  for  us  each  to  judge  for  ourselves  rather  than  trusting  others  is  

not  especially  apt;  we  lack  the  time  and  relevant  knowledge  to  judge  sensibly  about  

many  issues.  In  the  conditions  of  modern  mass  democracy,  asymmetry  is  

unavoidable.  He  argues  that  it  is  therefore  reasonable  that  many  of  our  judgments  as  

part  of  a  public  focus  on  the  question  of  which  experts  to  trust.  He  concludes  that  

Aristotle’s  idea  that  speakers  persuade  largely  through  being  trusted  (ethos)  is  in  

this  respect  more  relevant  to  modern  society  than  the  Kantian  ideal  of  always  

judging  substantive  matters  for  ourselves  (O'Neill  2002).  

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If  we  juxtapose  Chambers’s  and  O’Neill’s  thoughts,  we  come  to  this  question:  

Does  the  inevitability  of  being  asked  to  follow  leaders  out  of  trust  (O’Neill)  

undermine  the  project  of  showing  that  asymmetrical,  non-­‐dialogic,  rhetoric  can  be  

deliberative  and  substantive  (Chambers)?  This  question  about  the  relation  between  

trust  and  deliberative  reasoning  and  judgment  arises  when  Dryzek  makes  an  effort  

to  accommodate  O’Neill’s  point.  It  is  true,  Dryzek  remarks,  that  we  often  have  to  

make  judgments  on  the  basis  of  our  assessments  of  an  expert’s  character  rather  

than  the  substantive  merits  of  an  issue,  but  he  insists  that  “competent  deliberators  

can  make  rational  judgments”  and  that  “in  the  course  of  deliberation  character  

judgments  must  in  the  end  be  answerable  to  reason”  (Dryzek  2002).  In  asserting  the  

priority  of  “reason”  one  could  mean  several  different  things.  One  might  mean  that  a  

speaker’s  trustworthiness  should  be  understood  to  play  the  secondary  role  of  

signaling  to  us  how  carefully  we  should  attend  to  the  substantive  arguments  that  he  

or  she  puts  forward,  and  that  those  substantive  arguments  remain  the  heart  of  the  

argument  that  needs  evaluating.  But  Dryzek  introduces  examples  that  actually  point  

to  a  different  implication,  one  that  is  more  consistent  with  what  recent  

commentators  have  found  to  be  the  Aristotelian  view  of  the  relation  between  

character  and  argument.  Dryzek  raises  for  consideration  deliberators  who  are  

considering  an  issue  related  to  smoking  and  points  out  that  “they  should  know  that  

if  a  researcher  receives  funds  from  the  tobacco  industry,  they  should  not  believe  his  

or  her  claims  about  the  minimal  dangers  associated  with  passive  smoking,  without  

substantial  independent  corroboration.”  In  his  more  recent  appreciation  of  rhetoric  

he  gives  an  example  with  the  same  structure:  “We  may  for  example  choose  not  to  

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believe  the  claims  of  scientists  about  the  efficacy  of  a  drug  if  their  research  is  

financed  by  a  pharmaceutical  company  that  stands  to  benefit  if  the  drug  is  widely  

prescribed”  (Dryzek  2010).  What  is  striking  about  these  examples  is  that  when  we  

learn  of  a  conflict  of  interest,  nothing  about  the  evidence  or  the  syllogisms  that  the  

speaker  has  advanced  has  changed;  the  rational  relation  between  the  propositions  

he  or  she  has  voiced  does  not  change,  and  the  conclusion  of  that  logical  argument  

remains  as  logically  powerful  or  as  weak  as  it  was  before  we  became  aware  of  the  

conflict  of  interest.  What  has  changed  is  only  the  balance  of  evidence  that  we  have  

for  the  speaker’s  trustworthiness.  And  yet  it  seems  reasonable,  as  Dryzek  suggests,  

for  an  audience  to  judge  differently  on  the  question.  The  examples  therefore  seem  to  

suggest  that  the  primary  question  being  judged  by  an  audience  is  not  one  about  the  

cogency  of  the  actual  argument  or  evidence  that  the  speaker  is  advancing.  As  Garver  

argues  in  a  chapter  on  the  question  of  “why  reason  persuades,”  the  primary  

judgment  is  actually  the  one  about  the  speaker’s  credibility  and  character  (Garver  

1994).  Logical  syllogisms  and  the  marshalling  of  evidence  actually  play  a  secondary  

role;  they  function  as  indirect  evidence  of  the  speaker’s  competence,  goodwill  and  

credibility.  What  finally  persuades  are  those  qualities  of  character  and  the  

trustworthiness  they  inspire.  This  is  why  receiving  external  evidence  about  that  

trustworthiness  can  rightly  change  our  judgment  even  if  the  logical  argument  itself  

does  not  change  a  whit.  Rhetorical  deliberation  is  a  matter  of  opinion  and  belief,  not  

knowledge.  The  insight  offered  by  scholars  of  rhetoric  reflecting  on  Aristotle  and  

other  classical  sources  is  that  it  is  a  mistake  to  think  that  a  speaker’s  character  is  

important  only  because  it  motivates  us  to  attend  to  the  validity  of  his  or  her  

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substantive  reasoning;  often,  the  validity  of  the  substantive  reasoning  is  most  

important  because  it  offers  evidence  of  a  speaker’s  trustworthiness  (Garver  1994,  

Kochin  2009).  As  Allen  argues,  rhetoric  can  be  understood  as  a  set  of  techniques  to  

generate  trust  (Allen  2004).  

Of  course  the  competence  of  public  speakers  in  arguing  is  not  the  only  

evidence  that  we  use  to  judge  whether  or  not  we  trust  them  enough  to  believe  what  

they  say.  Many  other  forms  of  evidence  come  into  play.  In  Dryzek’s  conflict  of  

interest  examples  the  additional  evidence  consists  of  facts  about  the  speaker,  but  we  

can  easily  imagine  other  examples  where  the  evidence  we  have  about  a  speaker’s  

character  comes  not  from  true  reporting  about  their  private  interests,  but  instead  

from  libelous  negative  advertisements  or  from  a  deceptive  advertising  campaign  

showing  the  speaker’s  image  next  to  photos  of  famous  dictators.  Furthermore,  the  

evidence  provided  by  a  speaker’s  seemingly  competent  reasoning  is  often  

overwhelmed  by  these  other  influences.  It  may  even  be,  as  Kochin  suggests,  that  

competent  and  subtle  reasoning  is  often  taken  by  audiences  as  evidence  against  a  

speaker’s  trustworthiness  (Kochin  2009).  After  all,  someone  who  is  truly  trusted  by  

his  audience  and  who  deserves  that  trust  will  have  to  do  no  more  than  assert  his  or  

her  judgments  to  be  believed.  Only  someone  whose  advice  cannot  be  accepted  

entirely  on  trust  will  have  to  justify  his  or  her  assertions  with  a  logical  argument.  

Nietzsche,  a  sharp  student  of  classical  rhetoric,  made  the  point  in  Twilight  of  the  

Idols:  

Honest  things,  like  honest  men,  do  not  carry  their  reasons  in  their  hands  like  

that.  It  is  indecent  to  show  all  five  fingers.  What  must  first  be  proved  is  worth  

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little…One  chooses  dialectic  only  when  one  has  no  other  means.  One  knows  

that  one  arouses  mistrust  with  it,  that  it  is  not  very  persuasive.  Nothing  is  

easier  to  erase  than  a  dialectical  effect:  the  experience  of  every  meeting  at  

which  there  are  speeches  proves  this.  It  can  only  be  self-­‐defense  for  those  

who  no  longer  have  other  weapons  (Garver  1994).  

The  language  of  explicit  argumentation  is  often  a  language  indicating  a  deficit  of  

trust  and  a  failure  of  persuasion.  

  If  the  rhetoricians  are  right  that  persuasion  occurs  primarily  through  trust  in  

the  speaker,  and  if  our  trust  can  be  affected  by  evidence  outside  of  what  a  speaker’s  

own  words  offers,  then  anyone  concerned  with  Chambers’s  question  of  how  to  make  

the  asymmetrical  rhetorical  situation  of  modern  mass  democracies  more  

deliberative  is  likely  to  worry,  as  Chambers  rightly  does,  about  the  confusion  of  

“character  and  image”  (Chambers  2009).  In  contemporary  democratic  life,  it  is  

difficult  to  see  past  the  unreliable  images  provided  to  us,  images  created  not  

primarily  by  the  speakers’  own  efforts  at  argumentation  but  instead  by  conscious  

manipulation.  We  are  all  familiar  with  negative  advertisements  that  successfully  

undermine  the  credibility  of  a  candidate  simply  by  a  clever  juxtaposition  of  musical  

rhythm,  shadowy  images  and  suggestive  phrases.  These  advertisements  are  just  one  

example  of  what  Chambers  calls  “plebiscitary”  rhetoric,  defined  as  “speech  that  is  

concerned  first  and  foremost  with  gaining  support  for  a  proposition  and  only  

secondarily  with  the  merits  of  the  arguments  or  persuasion  for  that  matter”  

(Chambers  2009).  The  motto  for  this  sort  of  plebiscitary  rhetoric  is  “say  anything,  if  

it  will  get  you  elected.”  Practitioners  of  plebiscitary  rhetoric  use  polls  and  surveys  to  

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discover  which  buttons  to  push  in  their  audience;  they  push  those  buttons,  using  

trigger  phrases  or  key  words  or  freighted  images  to  produce  automatic  results  

rather  than  appealing  to  the  voters  with  substantive  arguments  and  thereby  

respecting  their  autonomous  capacity  for  judgment.  As  Kochin  writes  of  this  sort  of  

public  relations  strategy,  “In  following  this  prescription  one  does  not  communicate  

with  survey  respondents  but  rather  deals  with  their  moods  in  the  way  that  a  farmer  

would  adjust  his  feed  mix  to  minimize  the  complaints  of  a  sick  cow”  (Kochin  2009).  

Plebiscitary  rhetoric  aims  simply  to  produce  a  belief  or  action  in  the  audience.  Its  

ideal  form  would  be  a  magical  spell  that  could  influence  an  audience  wholly  

subliminally  and  wholly  effectively.  

The  ancient  sophist  Gorgias  famously  compared  his  power  of  persuasion  to  a  

magical  spell  in  his  Praise  of  Helen;  plebiscitary  rhetoric  is  the  sophists’  view  of  their  

own  art,  and  Chambers’s  concern  about  it  is  a  contemporary  version  of  the  ancient  

worry  about  sophistry.  According  to  a  number  of  recent  theorists,  Aristotle’s  

Rhetoric  was  partly  an  effort  to  respond  to  this  worry,  and  the  response  it  offered  is  

still  philosophically  relevant  even  if  it  offers  no  blueprint  for  immediate  political  

reform  (Abizadeh  2002,  Garsten  2006,  Garver  1994,  Nichols  1987).  Aristotle’s  goal  

was  to  describe  a  kind  of  rhetoric  centered  around  argument  rather  than  spells  or  

their  equivalent,  what  Plato  had  dismissed  as  the  sophists’  “knack”  for  changing  

minds;  he  tried  to  show  that  making  arguments  was  a  plausible  way  of  proceeding  if  

one’s  goal  was  to  change  minds.  He  did  not  deny  that  an  audience’s  judgments  were  

influenced  by  emotions  and,  as  we  have  seen,  by  their  feelings  about  whether  the  

speaker  should  be  trusted.  But  he  showed  that  making  arguments  could  be  a  good  

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way  of  influencing  the  audience’s  emotions  and  their  view  of  the  speaker’s  

trustworthiness.  

The  Aristotelian  argument  about  emotions  has  been  especially  interesting  to  

theorists  because  it  disrupts  the  familiar  modern  dichotomy  between  reason  and  

passion  (Abizadeh  2002,  Garsten  2006,  Garver  1994,  Marcus  2002,  Nichols  1987,  

Nussbaum  2001,  O'Neill  2002).  On  Aristotle’s  analysis,  emotions  play  a  constitutive  

part  in  the  process  of  reasoning  and  deliberation  itself.  This  is  because  emotions  are  

not  themselves  entirely  non-­‐rational;  they  are  composed  in  part  of  beliefs.  The  

emotion  of  anger,  for  example,  consists  partly  of  a  belief  that  one  has  been  insulted  

or  treated  unfairly  in  some  way.  If  an  angry  person  learns  that  what  he  took  as  a  

slight  was  in  fact  not  one,  the  anger  will  dissolve.  The  emotion  of  fear  consists  partly  

in  a  belief  about  our  vulnerability.  If  this  belief  is  changed,  the  emotion  will  dissolve.  

Recent  developments  in  cognitive  psychology  have  produced  similar  insights  about  

the  mutual  implication  of  reason  and  passion,  and  there  is  now  a  productive  

convergence  between  philosophers,  political  scientists  and  psychologists  working  

on  the  way  that  emotion,  perception  and  reasoning  are  intertwined  (Damasio  1994,  

Krause  2008,  Marcus  2002).  Each  emotion,  however,  has  a  different  structure,  

which  is  why  classical  rhetorical  works  spent  less  time  speaking  about  “the  

emotions”  in  general  and  more  time  analyzing  each  one  individually.  Kochin  even  

suggests  that  “emotion  is  a  junk  category”  because  “there  is  nothing  distinctive  and  

positive  that  passions  as  varied  as  lust,  sorrow,  and  anger  share”  (Kochin  2009).  

Even  we  do  not  want  to  go  quite  as  far  as  that,  it  seems  true  that  theorists  interested  

in  rhetoric  recently  have  not  done  enough  to  explore  particular  emotions  in  depth.  

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Tarnopolsky’s  work  on  shame  and  anger  is  an  exception  and  a  model  for  what  could  

be  done  (Tarnopolsky  2010).  The  common  thread  in  all  of  this  work  on  the  

emotions,  however,  is  the  insight  that  emotions  have  cognitive  content  and  

therefore  can  be  integral  to  argumentation.  

Of  course  none  of  this  proves  that  argument  is  the  only  way  to  influence  an  

audience’s  feelings  or  judgments  about  a  speaker’s  character.  It  is  not.  Therefore,  a  

rhetoric  that  proceeds  through  argument  is  using  only  a  subset  of  the  techniques  

available  to  influence  an  audience.  Chambers’s  worry  about  how  to  encourage  

“deliberative”  rather  than  “plebiscitary”  rhetoric  can  be  understood  as  a  concern  for  

how  to  encourage  speakers  and  audiences  to  prefer  that  subset  of  techniques.  

Garver,  in  his  treatment  of  Aristotelian  rhetoric,  introduces  the  useful  terminology  

of  “internal”  and  “external”  ends  to  help  explain  one  way  of  thinking  about  this  

issue:  The  production  of  a  certain  belief  or  choice  in  the  audience  is  the  “external  

end”  of  rhetoric.  It  is  “external”  because  it  lies  outside  the  actual  activity  of  

persuading  through  argument,  and  it  could  conceivably  be  achieved  in  some  other  

way,  as  it  would  be  through  a  magic  spell  or  a  subliminal  message.  Aristotle  thought  

that  rhetoric  could  be  made  into  an  art  (a  teachable  technical  skill)  if  it  also  had  an  

“internal”  end.  The  internal  end  would  be  to  find  all  the  means  of  persuasion  that  

were  available  in  any  situation  (Aristotle,  Rhetoric  1355b26-­‐28).  Of  course,  the  

assumption  that  a  search  for  the  available  means  of  persuasion  will  lead  to  

arguments  depends  on  the  analysis  of  how  people  form  judgments  about  

trustworthiness  and  about  the  cognitive  content  of  their  emotions,  as  we  have  seen.  

Still,  positing  that  search  itself  as  one  goal  of  rhetoric  allows  us  to  frame  the  worry  

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about  plebiscitary  rhetoric  in  a  new  way:  It  is  a  worry  that  speakers  will  aim  only  at  

the  external  end.  Deliberative  rhetoric  of  the  kind  that  Chambers  is  searching  for  

would  be  the  sort  that  aimed  to  achieve  the  external  end  (producing  a  certain  choice  

or  action)  by  achieving  the  internal  end  (finding  persuasive  arguments).  The  

possibility  of  deliberative  rhetoric  therefore  seems  to  depend  on  the  existence  of  

conditions  that  might  allow  or  even  foster  the  practice  of  rhetoric  as  an  activity  with  

an  internal  end  of  its  own  (Garver  1994).  

 

Rhetoric  in  modern  liberal  democracies  

 

Suppose  one  finds  the  Aristotelian  perspective  helpful  in  imagining  a  practice  of  

rhetoric  in  which  arguments,  emotions  and  trust-­‐generation  are  all  integral  parts.  

One  is  still  left  with  the  question  of  whether  that  imagined  kind  of  rhetoric  has  a  

place  in  the  contemporary  world  (Aune  2008).  The  opportunity  to  practice  it  arises  

only  when  it  is  plausible  to  regard  the  activity  of  finding  and  using  arguments  (the  

internal  end)  as  a  viable  means  of  producing  choices  or  actions  (the  external  end).  

Aristotle  seems  to  have  thought  that  the  ancient  city-­‐state  made  this  alignment  of  

internal  and  external  ends  plausible.  Any  effort  to  begin  from  Aristotle  in  thinking  

about  rhetoric  today  should  consider  his  explanation  for  why  the  internal  and  

external  ends  could  be  aligned  in  city-­‐states  and  then  ask  about  the  extent  to  which  

modern  liberal  democracies  make  the  alignment  possible  (Garver  1994).  

Aristotle’s  explanation  was  that  the  institutional  settings  in  which  public  

discourse  occurred  had  particular  functions,  and  that  those  functions  implicitly  

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encouraged  argumentative  modes  of  persuasion.  The  courts  (dikasteria)  and  the  

assembly  (boule)  were  the  two  main  locations  of  rhetorical  activity  in  Athens.  

Aristotle  assumed  that  by  virtue  of  their  different  functions,  each  institution  aimed  

to  produce  judgments  of  a  different  kind.  Courts  aimed  to  render  verdicts  on  the  

past  and  so  implicitly  encouraged  a  discourse  in  which  justice  was  the  ultimate  

criterion.  Legislative  bodies,  in  contrast,  aimed  to  decide  on  policy  for  the  future  and  

so  implicitly  encouraged  a  discourse  in  which  advantage  was  the  ultimate  criterion.  

The  distinct  functions  of  these  institutions  made  plausible  the  classification  of  

rhetoric  into  three  types:  forensic,  deliberative,  and  epideictic.  Showing  that  the  

audience  in  each  institutional  setting  was,  by  participating,  concerning  itself  with  a  

particular  goal  (justice  or  advantage)  made  it  plausible  to  assert  that  their  beliefs  in  

that  setting  could  be  influenced  by  arguments  related  to  that  goal;  it  made  it  

plausible  to  assert  a  link  between  the  internal  and  external  ends  of  rhetoric  (Garsten  

2006,  Garver  1994,  Nichols  1987).  

If  we  turn  to  contemporary  liberal  democracies  with  this  structure  of  thought  

in  mind,  we  find  courts  and  legislative  assemblies,  but  we  also  find  that  legal  and  

legislative  discourse  are  not  the  most  visible  or  powerful  sorts  of  rhetoric  in  the  

polity.  Instead,  the  exemplary  mode  of  rhetoric  is  campaign  rhetoric  that  aims  to  

amass  support  for  certain  politicians  or,  less  often,  for  certain  policies  or  parties.  

Campaigns  differ  from  both  courts  and  assemblies  because  they  their  function  does  

not  seem  to  suggest  any  particular  pre-­‐defined  master-­‐criterion.  Politicians  running  

for  office  sometimes  seem  to  be  talking  about  rendering  a  just  verdict  on  actions  

done  in  the  past,  but  they  simultaneously  talk  about  choosing  policies  for  the  future.  

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The  discussion  of  prospective  and  retrospective  voting  in  political  science  points  to  

the  Janus-­‐faced  nature  of  campaign  rhetoric.  Such  rhetoric  cannot  easily  be  

classified  according  to  Aristotle’s  scheme;  it  is  both  judicial  and  deliberative  at  once,  

and  often  epideictic  too.  More  important  than  the  fact  that  campaign  rhetoric  does  

not  easily  fit  into  Aristotle’s  categories  is  that  it  cannot  readily  be  classified  in  any  

way  that  would  provide  an  implicit  master-­‐criterion  which  naturally  generates  

argumentation.  Thus  campaign  rhetoric  does  not  seem  susceptible  to  a  strategy  

analogous  to  the  one  that  Aristotle  deployed  when  he  showed  how  arguing  could  be  

made  central  to  Athenian  rhetoric.  

There  is  one  master-­‐criterion  that  sometimes  seems  to  be  present  in  

campaign  rhetoric:  representativeness.  Our  political  rhetoric  is  filled  to  the  brim  

with  claims  about  who  most  accurately  represents  the  people,  and  debates  about  

substantive  matters  are  often  channeled  through  the  language  of  representation.  

Representativeness,  in  turn,  is  largely  about  trustworthiness,  so  campaign  rhetoric  

is  often  about  whom  to  trust.  Now,  we  have  already  seen  that  there  is  a  sense  in  

which  all  argument  is  about  that  question.  But  there  is  nevertheless  a  difference  of  

emphasis  in  campaign  rhetoric.  Where  deliberative  rhetoric  in  a  legislative  assembly  

(as  idealized  by  Aristotle)  encourages  argument  about  what  the  best  policy  would  

be  and  allows  judgments  about  speakers’  characters  to  arise  from  those  arguments,  

campaign  rhetoric  does  not  culminate,  strictly  speaking,  in  a  decision  about  policy.  It  

culminates  instead  in  a  choice  of  a  person.  (The  case  of  more  deeply  party-­‐based  

electoral  systems  would  have  to  be  treated  separately.)  Campaign  rhetoric  aimed  at  

electing  individuals  therefore  does  not  channel  rhetoric  into  a  particular  

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argumentative  path  as  strongly  as  deliberative  or  judicial  institutions  can.  

Deliberative  assemblies  ideally  offer  a  kind  of  gladiatorial  ring  in  which  politicians  

perform  and  display  their  virtues  in  the  course  of  pursuing  certain  goals,  goals  that  

cannot  be  achieved  without  at  least  some  substantive  argument.  In  this  way  they  

make  arguing  a  plausible  path  towards  winning  approval.  Campaigns,  in  contrast,  

can  aim  more  directly  at  the  goal  of  being  trusted  and  elected.  There  is  no  particular  

argumentative  contest  that  must  be  waged  and  judged  as  a  means  to  winning  that  

approval  (except  in  occasional  and  badly-­‐designed  “debates”).  As  we  saw  earlier,  

judgments  about  whom  to  trust  can  be  made  on  the  basis  of  arguments;  there  is  

room  in  campaign  rhetoric  for  argument.  But  while  Aristotle  stipulates  in  the  

Rhetoric  that  he  means  by  ethos  only  the  impression  of  character  that  we  get  from  

speech  itself,  we  cannot  make  such  a  stipulation  in  talking  about  the  role  of  

character  in  modern  campaign  rhetoric.  There  are  many  sources  of  evidence  about  

politicians’  characters  outside  of  their  own  words.  Therefore  the  importance  of  

representativeness,  trust  and  character  does  not  in  itself  offer  a  strong  incentive  to  

make  arguments  or  substantive  policy  debates  a  central  part  of  campaigns;  in  fact  

representativeness  seems  to  offer  a  way  of  avoiding  such  debates.  Conditions  often  

seem  to  be  such  that  there  is  little  reason  to  think  that  aiming  at  the  internal  end  of  

finding  plausible  arguments  will  be  a  promising  way  to  pursue  the  external  end  of  

getting  elected.  

What  makes  helped  encourage  the  alignment  of  internal  and  external  ends  in  

Aristotle’s  idealized  version  of  Athens  was  the  fact  that  the  audience  for  each  sort  of  

rhetoric  was  participating  in  a  particular  part  of  the  activity  of  ruling.  In  modern  

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representative  democracies,  citizens  who  are  merely  voting  are  not  participating  in  

ruling;  they  are  judging  the  rulers.  Their  thinking  is  therefore  not  as  thoroughly  

structured  by  the  criteria  implicit  in  any  one  of  those  ruling  activities.  They  judge  

from  the  perspective  of  their  place  in  civil  society,  and  their  criteria  are  often  taken  

directly  from  their  interests  and  tastes  as  private  individuals.  In  appealing  to  people  

who  are  using  these  standards,  campaign  rhetoric  resembles  advertising.  

Advertising  aims  to  create  a  sale,  just  as  campaigns  aim  to  create  a  vote.  The  

external  end  dominates  in  both  cases.  The  devaluing  of  internal  ends  of  activities  is  a  

feature  of  markets;  they  register  only  the  achievement  of  external  ends  (Walzer  

1983).  Insofar  as  political  campaigns  resemble  market  competitions  for  votes,  as  

political  scientists  often  suggest  they  do,  they  will  be  indifferent  to  the  distinctive  

internal  ends  of  argumentative  rhetoric  and  therefore,  in  practice,  they  will  tend  to  

encourage  the  easier  and  apparently  more  efficient  plebiscitary  sort  of  rhetoric.    

This  line  of  thought  can  help  to  put  more  familiar  observations  about  modern  

conditions  of  rhetoric  in  political-­‐theoretic  perspective.  Certainly  it  is  true  that  the  

growth  of  markets  and  the  subsequent  privatization  of  formerly  public  arenas  have  

posed  a  challenge  for  the  traditional  sort  of  rhetoric  that  occupied  public  oratorical  

spaces.  And  it  is  also  true  that  changes  in  the  media  have  emphasized  visual  

communication  and  short-­‐format  speech  less  conducive  to  sophisticated  

argumentation.  Changing  practices  and  technologies  of  public  opinion  research  and  

speech  making  have  had  noticeable  effects  on  the  intellectual  content  of  public  

speech  and  on  the  political  strategies  adopted  (Jacobs  &  Shapiro  2000,  Lim  2008).  

The  organization,  funding  and  technology  of  the  modern  media  help  to  shape  

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campaign  rhetoric  (Jamieson  &  Waldeman  2003,  Posner  1995,  Starr  2004).  And  the  

conjunction  of  markets  and  media  has  given  rise  to  the  phenomenal  rise  of  

advertising  as  a  mode  of  influence.  Citizens,  as  has  often  been  remarked,  become  

consumers  (Schudson  1998).  Thus  the  growth  of  commercial  society  and  the  

sociological  effects  of  that  growth  –  the  fragmentation  of  traditional  communities,  

individualism,  the  pressure  for  commensurability  among  different  spheres  of  life  

mediated  by  economic  modes  of  valuation  –  all  of  these  and  related  phenomena  

must  be  taken  into  account  to  give  a  full  explanation  of  rhetoric’s  current  state  

(Aune  1994).  Looking  forward,  political  theorists  interested  in  rhetoric  confront  the  

large  but  exciting  task  of  trying  to  integrate  into  their  accounts  of  democratic  

deliberation  all  of  the  many  insights  of  communications  and  media  studies,  

historical  sociologists,  and  even  cognitive  psychologists.  

But  these  developments  are  all  made  possible  by  the  structural  political  

situation  that  the  very  form  of  representative  government,  as  it  now  exists  in  the  

United  States,  creates.  The  audience  for  the  new  media  and  the  consumers  for  the  

new  markets  live  in  a  realm  of  civil  society  that  exists  not  by  nature,  but  as  a  result  

of  political  systems  that  limit  themselves  from  colonizing  it;  limited  government  

creates  civil  society  and  civil  society  makes  possible  modern  media,  markets  and  

advertising.  The  defining  feature  of  the  private  sphere  is  that  its  discourse  is  not  

wholly  structured  around  the  imperatives  of  ruling;  this  freedom  is  precisely  what  

makes  non-­‐deliberative  rhetoric  more  likely.  When  Tulis  noticed  that  presidential  

rhetoric  has  changed  since  the  early  days  of  the  American  republic,  no  longer  shying  

away  from  addressing  citizens  directly,  he  was  noticing  that  the  audience  for  

  43  

presidential  rhetoric  had  shifted  from  individuals  situated  within  political  

institutions  with  delineated  functions  (legislators)  to  individuals  situated  simply  in  

civil  society  (Aune  &  Medhurst  2008,  Ceaser  1979,  Dahl  1988,  Dahl  1990,  Tulis  

1987).  The  change  does  not  necessitate  plebiscitary  rhetoric,  but  it  removes  some  of  

the  institutional  encouragements  to  pursue  deliberative  rhetoric.  

What  I  have  tried  to  suggest  is  that  it  is  a  mistake  to  think  that  the  interest  in  

Aristotelian  rhetoric  is  a  distraction  from,  or  irrelevant  to,  reflections  on  the  

contemporary  conditions  of  discourse.  What  the  Aristotelian  perspective  adds  is  a  

focus  on  the  importance  of  the  structural  form  of  the  polity.  The  Aristotle-­‐inspired  

line  of  thinking  described  above  puts  great  weight  on  how  a  polity’s  institutional  

structure  influences  the  type  of  political  activity  that  goes  on  inside.  It  suggests  that  

the  distinctive  problem  that  modern  liberal  democracies  pose  for  deliberative  

rhetoric  is  not  the  mere  existence  of  a  “mass  public”  or  the  mediated  way  in  which  

such  a  public  relates  to  one  another  and  to  their  leaders.  Nor  is  it  simply  the  

asymmetrical  relationship  between  speakers  and  audience.  Related  to  those  issues  

but  more  fundamental  than  them  is  the  fact  that  the  structure  of  the  regime  puts  

citizens  in  a  position  to  judge  political  rhetoric  from  a  position  outside  of  any  

defined  role  in  the  actual  activities  of  ruling.  Those  activities  –  deciding  what  to  do,  

judging  the  justice  of  what  has  happened  –  are  ones  that  suggest  particular  criteria  

and  therefore  implicitly  call  forth  at  least  some  substantive  debate.  The  difficulty  of  

encouraging  deliberative  rhetoric  may  be  linked  to  the  distinctive  structure  of  

modern  representative  government  itself,  to  the  fact  that  it  puts  ordinary  citizens  in  

the  role  of  an  audience  tasked  with  watching  and  judging  political  rule  from  the  

  44  

outside  rather  than  doing  it  for  themselves  (Green  2010,  Manin  1997,  Uhr  2004).  If  

there  is  any  truth  in  this  diagnosis,  then  the  usual  calls  for  media  responsibility  and  

civic  education  will  only  go  so  far  in  making  our  rhetoric  more  deliberative.  

 

 

 

 

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