The Rhetoric of Rhetoric — Political Rhetoric as Function and Dysfunction

Abstract

‘Rhetoric’ has the contradictory distinctions of being both an ancient and highly regarded component of an elite education, and a vernacular term of reproof, as when we dismiss something as ‘rhetorical’ (significantly, both Marx and Freud studied rhetoric at school; Patterson, 1990). And today there is a renewal of interest in rhetoric and its study, as with the scholarship of Chaïm Perelman (1982) and Brian Vickers (1988), amongst others. Rhetoric in history is not a trivial instrument or a decorative motif, but a primordial force. Yet rhetoric has always carried with it connotations of manipulation and even deceit, and the concept comes with the most urgent warnings from the ancient world. Plato was its first and greatest critic, rebuking orators for advocating belief rather than knowledge. In ancient Greece rhetoricians were admired but also feared; speech which ‘delights and persuades a large crowd because it is written with skill but not spoken with truth’ (Emlyn-Jones, 1987). Rhetoric was power. Thus in the Gorgias the spell of rhetoric is seen to affect Helen as much as a potent narcotic. Rhetoric was pseudo-reason, presenting a façade of rationality. Hence the disdain: advocacy had come to exist in its own right detached from any notion of objectivity, making no distinction between truth and falsehood. For Aristotle, rhetoric synthesised both rationality and emotion: its realm was not knowledge (episteme) but opinion (doxa).