The rhetoric revival in political theory
Bryan Garsten Professor of Political Science Yale University [email protected]
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
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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.
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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:
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…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
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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
23
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
24
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
25
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
26
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
27
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
28
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
29
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).
30
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
31
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
32
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
33
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
34
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
35
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.
36
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
37
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
38
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.
39
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
40
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
41
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
42
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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