Abstract

Persuasion is a central activity of democratic politics, yet in both theory and practice today the conventional wisdom is that studied persuasion, or rhetoric, tends to corrupt serious political deliberations. This dissertation explores the roots of the modern suspicion of rhetoric, challenges its philosophical basis and points the way towards a conception of deliberation that is friendlier to rhetoric. ;Part One of the thesis argues that the roots of the modern case against rhetoric can be found in the form of social contract theory first put forth by Hobbes. In asking citizens to alienate their judgments to a sovereign, Hobbes aimed to undermine the practice of rhetoric that appealed to those judgments. While he certainly made use of rhetorical techniques gleaned from his humanist education, I argue that he turned those techniques against the heart of the tradition from which they came. That tradition offered techniques for facilitating controversy; Hobbes's rhetoric aimed to surmount or avoid controversy. I go on to claim that in spite of their more democratic sensibilities, both Rousseau and Kant inherited and even radicalized Hobbes's opposition to the sort of deliberative controversy imagined in the rhetorical tradition. ;Part Two of the thesis studies the accounts of rhetoric found in Aristotle and Cicero, paying special attention to the dangers they saw in persuasion and to the remedies they proposed. From Aristotle I derive concepts of deliberative partiality and situated judgment, suggesting that the dangers of rhetoric can be curbed not by principles of impartiality but by certain sorts of appeals to citizens' existing passions and prejudices. From Cicero I draw the concepts of shallow skepticism and reflective distance, suggesting that a rhetorical politics requires citizens open to revising their opinions but not skeptical about the grounds on which they do so. The final chapter of the dissertation shows how these concepts bear on recent approaches to deliberative democracy and points the way towards a different understanding of deliberation that incorporates persuasion and domesticates it within a system of constitutional government.