Deseuse the nature and revival of political theory
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According to David Held, political theory is a 'network of concepts and. generalizations about political life involving ideas, assumptions and statements about the nature, purpose and key features of government, state and society, and about the political capabilities of. human beings'1.
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INTRODUCTION
In recent years, as a quick search of the relevant journals will show, political theorists have turned to the topic of rhetoric with new interest. In Political Theory, for example, there have been at least ten important articles treating the topic directly just in the years since 2001, whereas the previous 27 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, 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 traveling 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 toward 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 political theory been persuaded to recognize the importance of rhetoric.
This review tries to put the renewed interest in rhetoric in philosophical and historical perspective, focusing especially on the relation between rhetoric and deliberative democracy. It cannot 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 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 in the history of political thought (Cicero 2001, Plato 1998, Skinner 1996, Stauffer 2006, Viroli 1998). In this review, I focus on just a few fundamental issues. I first try to explain where the new wave of interest in rhetoric among political theorists came from and what its precursors were. The second section is devoted to tracing the relation between deliberative democrats and rhetoricians. I 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. The next section argues that one common defense of rhetoric—that it can motivate us in ways that reason cannot—is inadequate. The fourth section shows how some theorists have moved toward a more ambitious defense of rhetoric in which it is conceived of not as a motivational supplement to reason but as a form of reasoning itself. The final section is the most current and topical. It explores links between the structure of political systems and the sorts of discourse that they encourage, outlining some of the challenges that modern liberal democracies face. Here I touch on the special challenges that rhetoric confronts 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 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.