The SAGE Handbook of Persuasion

by James Price Dillard

  Like Cicero, Quintilian was concerned about the paucity of great orators in the Roman republic. At a time when politics and public morals in Rome had declined to a “savage low” (Murphy, 1965, p. xiii), he aspired to nothing short of a cultural revolution through rhetorical education. Quintilian’s monumental four-volume work, Institutio Oratoria (Butler, 1969), was the “most ambitious single treatise on education” produced by the ancient world (Murphy, 1965, p. xi), and it set out a program for educating the citizen-orator from cradle to grave. More than just a handbook of rhetoric, Quintilian’s Institutio placed at least as much emphasis on developing moral character as oratorical skills. For Quintilian, it was not enough that young men grew up to be effective orators; they also needed to be broadly educated and morally principled, capable of “analysis, reflection, and then powerful action in public affairs” (Murphy, 1965, p. xx). In the “dissolute society of his time,” Quintilian’s emphasis on “moral principle as a factor in education” made a most “profound impression” (Murphy, 1965, p. viii), and his portrait of the ideal citizen has been passed down through the ages in a phrase familiar to every student of classical rhetoric: the “good man speaking well.”

  Much of the modern scholarship on the classical/humanist tradition has emphasized the differences among these various “schools” of rhetoric in the ancient world. Yet a common thread ran through all of classical rhetoric: the need to educate for citizenship. Concerned with the practical and ethical requirements of civic life, the ancient rhetoricians aspired to equip young people with the skills and knowledge they would need to be citizens in a free society. All recognized the need for rules of civic persuasion, and they all imagined some ideal orator—a speaker who embodied civic virtue and a commitment to the “common good.” As Garsten (2006) has concluded, the ancient rhetorical tradition constituted a “politics of persuasion” where both leaders and ordinary citizens possessed “a certain moral compass” that served as a check on demagoguery and allowed for “responsible judgment” in civic affairs (p. 146). It was a tradition that, as we shall see later, had great appeal to America’s founders.

  The Modern Era

  Over the centuries, there have been a number of challenges to the classical tradition, including alternatives to its emphasis on persuasion in civic life. In this section, I provide a brief overview of the philosophical critique of the classical rhetorical tradition that emerged in the early modern era. I then take a closer look at the alternative paradigm that emerged across the 18th and 19th centuries—a period that Golden and Corbett (1968) have called one of the “most prolific eras in rhetorical history” (p. 7). During this time, British and American rhetoricians shifted the emphasis in rhetorical theory from persuasion to the aesthetic, literary, and performative dimensions of discourse, and they dramatically broadened the scope of rhetoric to include written and literary forms.

  The beginnings of what Garsten (2006) has characterized as the early modern “attack on rhetoric” (p. 10) can be traced to the rise of political and religious fanaticism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Fearing the effects of demagoguery on public opinion, philosophers such as Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant searched for some unitary and authoritative source of public judgment to replace the everyday opinions of ordinary citizens, in effect “asking citizens to distance themselves from their private judgments and to judge from a sovereign, unitary, public standpoint instead” (p. 11). Hobbes alternative was expressed in a “rhetoric of representation”; for Rousseau and Kant the alternatives were a “rhetoric of prophetic nationalism” (seeking to “instill in citizens a prerational, quasi-religious sense of sympathetic identification with their fellow citizens”) and a “rhetoric of public reason” (calling on ordinary citizens to defer to philosophers who had achieved a higher level of “enlightenment”). According to Garsten, all of these “rhetorics against rhetoric” undermined “the classical humanist tradition” by downplaying the role of persuasion and individual judgment in politics. They also contributed to an “aestheticization” of rhetoric that transformed it into “a literary enterprise rather than a political one” (pp. 11–12).

  This “aestheticization of rhetoric” was most obvious in the belletristic movement of the late 18th century. Led by Hugh Blair and George Campbell, this movement combined the study of rhetoric and “polite arts” (including poetry, drama, and even biography and history) into a common discipline, with an emphasis on taste, style, culture, and critical analysis. In his enormously influential Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1965), for example, Blair devoted only 10 of his 47 lectures to eloquence and public speaking, while he committed four lectures to “taste,” four to “language,” fifteen to “style,” and thirteen to the “critical examination of the most distinguished species of composition, both in prose and verse” (Vol. 1, p. xi). For Blair and other belletristic writers, there was no real distinction between oral and written rhetoric, nor did they draw firm distinctions between expository, literary, and persuasive genres of discourse. Moreover, they believed that the same principles might guide both rhetorical practitioners and critics of public discourse.

  The belletristic rhetorics represented the first real alternative to the classical tradition, as they radically expanded the scope of the discipline and elevated the importance of concepts that had been neglected by the classical rhetoricians, such as taste, style, sympathy, and sublimity. The belletristic movement also reflected some larger intellectual trends at the time, including “a pervasive enthusiasm for the newly developing empirical method, a commitment to rationalism, a curiosity to understand human nature and man’s relationship to God, a preoccupation with the origin and use of language, and an appreciation of the potentialities of persuasion as a force in a democracy and in a Christian society” (Golden & Corbett, 1968, p. 7). In contrast to the classical tradition, the belletristic rhetoricians paid little attention to the canon of invention (Blair’s Lectures, for example, had no separate chapters on argumentation, reasoning, or evidence). They also emphasized emotion over reason, distinguishing between “conviction” and “persuasion” and associating the latter with the human passions. In all of these senses, then, there was clearly something “new” about these so-called “new rhetorics.” Not only were they more “scientific,” but also much broader in scope, embracing expository and literary forms of discourse as well as civic persuasion.

  Not all modern rhetoricians shared the belletristic rhetoricians’ interest in “style” and “taste”—their “aestheticization” of rhetoric. Some, like John Ward (1759), remained slavishly devoted to the classical tradition, writing monumental yet wholly unoriginal restatements of classical doctrines (Golden & Corbett, 1968, p. 7). Others responded to complaints about the decline of oratory by writing detailed handbooks on vocal and nonverbal delivery, including elaborate taxonomies of facial expressions and gestures. These modern elaborations on the canon of delivery became so popular as to constitute yet another major trend in the history of rhetoric: the “Elocutionary Movement” (Cohen, 1994, pp. 1–12). Yet by conceding concern with the substantive content of discourse to other disciplines, the Elocutionary Movement only contributed further to the marginalization of rhetoric.

  In sum, the classical tradition was never supplanted entirely by the modern or “new rhetorics” of the 18th and 19th centuries. The ancients still had their champions, and the elocutionists at least preserved the study of speech as a distinctive discipline—albeit one focused narrowly on the performative dimensions of rhetoric. Most of the “modern” rhetoricians continued to acknowledge their debt to the ancients, and most still embraced the ancient view of the purposes of rhetorical education. Reflecting the spirit of Quintilian, for example, Hugh Blair argued that the goal of rhetorical pedagogy should be to prepare well-rounded, liberally educated, and morally virtuous citizens. Nevertheless, neither Blair nor any of the other modern rhetoricians treated civic discourse as the primary focus of rhetoric. Even those who did focus on argumentation a
nd persuasion, like Richard Whately, seemed “strangely aloof” from the world of politics, making “few references to contemporary economic and political problems” (Whately, 1963, p. xii).

  Not surprisingly, many of these trends became even more pronounced in the 20th century, including the blurring of the distinction between written and oral discourse, the broadening of the scope of rhetoric, and the treatment of persuasion as but one of many purposes or “ends” of rhetoric. In addition, the study of rhetoric would continue to become more interdisciplinary, as rhetorical theorists explored the connections between rhetoric and literature, religion, history, philosophy, and psychology. In the next section, I describe just a few of the most influential paradigms of contemporary rhetorical theory that accelerated these trends: Burke’s “dramatism,” Perlman’s “new rhetoric,” and the social movement and postmodern perspectives on rhetorical theory and criticism.

  Persuasion in Contemporary Rhetorical Theory

  Few would deny Kenneth Burke’s status as the most influential rhetorical theorist of the twentieth century. Long recognized as a literary scholar, the significance of Burke’s contributions to rhetoric were first illuminated by Nichols (1952), who distinguished between the “old rhetoric,” with its emphasis on “deliberative design” (p. 136), and Burke’s “new rhetoric” with its broader perspective on symbolic inducement. According to Nichols, the key difference between the old and the new rhetorics could be summed up by contrasting two words: whereas the key term in the old rhetoric was persuasion, Burke’s new rhetoric emphasized identification, which could refer to a “deliberative device,” a “means” of persuasion, an “end” of rhetoric, or even “unconscious” processes of the human mind (p. 136). For Burke, as Day (1960) later observed, identification was a “strategy,” but one that encompassed “the whole area of language usage for the purpose of inducement to action or attitude” (p. 271). In other words, as Zappen (2009) argues, Burke’s “concept of rhetoric as identification” broadened “the traditional view of rhetoric as persuasion” to include virtually any means of “inducing cooperation and building communities” (p. 279).

  Burke’s “new rhetoric” appeared at a time of growing dissatisfaction with the constraints of the classical paradigm, and it inspired a variety of new theoretical and critical alternatives over the next half century: the narrative paradigm, fantasy theme analysis, genre studies, social movement studies, and even psychological and visual “turns” in rhetorical theory and criticism. Burke’s theorizing changed the way rhetoricians thought about standards of judgment and the concept of “rhetorical effect,” and it encouraged new ways of thinking about “audience”—not just as the objects of persuasion, but as active participants in the construction or constitution of meaning and identity (Charland, 1987). This constitutive approach represented a fundamentally different way of thinking about the purposes and functions of all sorts of symbolic action, from traditional platform speeches, to visual and nonverbal cues, to music, art, and architecture, to the rhetorics of religion and science. In the Burkean spirit, all human activity was, at some level, “rhetorical,” for human beings were the “symbol-using animal[s]” (Burke, 1966, p. 3). Rhetoric, for Burke, encompassed not just persuasion but the broad range of symbolic actions that constituted the drama of human life.

  The liberating effect of Burke’s “dramatism” was perhaps most evident in the rhetorical study of social movements. Traditionally, rhetorical scholars were inclined to condemn radical speech as unreasonable or ineffective. “Since the time of Aristotle,” as Scott and Smith (1969) observed, academic rhetorics had functioned as “instruments of established society, presupposing the ‘goods’ of order, civility, reason, decorum, and civil or theocratic law” (p. 7). In the 1960s and 1970s, however, rhetorical scholars sought alternatives that might make better sense out of the rhetoric of social movements. Burkean theory provided one such alternative. Focusing on the identity-building functions of movement rhetoric, Burkean theory suggested how rhetorical strategies that might seem counterproductive, irrational, or even coercive by traditional standards might serve to foster group cohesion or dramatize shared grievances. Burke, in other words, opened critics’ eyes to the constitutive or “ego-functions” of protest rhetoric (Gregg, 1971, 71–91).

  The study of social movement rhetoric thus redefined the “rules” of public discourse, introducing new standards that acknowledged and even celebrated the role of radical speech in a democracy. In 1968, for example, McEdwards proclaimed the “jolting, combative, and passionate” (p. 37) rhetoric of the agitator “a necessary drivewheel of a dynamic democracy” (p. 36) and celebrated both Wendell Phillips and Malcolm X as agents of positive social change. Similarly, Burgess (1968) justified the confrontational, even threatening rhetoric of Black Power activists as their “only strategic choice” and explained that “behind all the sound and fury” was an effort to “force upon the culture a moral decision” (p. 123). A few years later, Windt (1972) even proclaimed the obscene diatribes of the Yippies an expression of their sincere “moral commitments” and a necessary response to circumstances—at least as they perceived them (p. 3). In their efforts to better understand or even justify the “rhetoric of confrontation” (Scott & Smith, 1969), rhetorical scholars argued that civility and decorum too often served as “masks for the preservation of injustice,” and they turned to Burkean theories of identity and dramatism to help fashion a rhetorical theory more “suitable to our age” (p. 8).

  Feminist rhetorical scholars likewise have developed alternatives to the traditional paradigm. In her pioneering work on the rhetoric of women’s liberation, for example, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell (1973) explained that “feminist advocacy” wavered “between … the persuasive and the non-persuasive” and called for theoretical perspectives that focused not on “public issues” but on “personal exigences and private, concrete experience” (p. 85). Other feminist theorists have renounced persuasion altogether, insisting that the conscious intent to change others is anathema to feminist thought. “Embedded in efforts to change others,” Foss and Griffin (1995) declared, “is a desire for control and domination, for the act of changing another establishes the power of the change agent over that other” (p. 3). Foss and Griffin’s alternative, the “invitational” approach, instead invites listeners “to enter the rhetor’s world and to see it as the rhetor does” (p. 5). Contrasting the invitational with the persuasive, Bone, Griffin, and Scholz (2008) explain that while “the ontological orientation” of persuasive rhetoric is “the desire to move another rhetor toward accepting a particular position,” invitational rhetoric aims instead to “understand the perspectives” of others and to foster “dialogue” that not only allows for “mutual understanding but also self-determination” (p. 446).

  The postmodern turn in rhetorical theory might be seen as the ultimate rejection of persuasion-centered theories. Skeptical about the very possibility for human communication and understanding in the “postmodern age,” these scholars generally reject traditional notions of human agency and shared meaning. They argue that “the subject of the rhetorical act cannot be regarded as the unified, coherent, autonomous, transcendent subject of liberal humanism,” but rather must be viewed as “multiple and conflicted, composed of numerous subject formations or positions” (Berlin, 1992, p. 20). In addition, postmodernists view language not as a “transparent medium” or a “simple signaling device,” but rather as a “pluralistic and complex system of signifying practices” that construct rather than reflect or simply communicate about external realities (Berlin, 1992, pp. 18–19). For postmodernists, it simply makes no sense to talk about a speaker using language to persuade a group of listeners, as rhetoric traditionally has emphasized. Indeed, some postmodernists reject the idea of a rhetorical tradition itself, insisting that all histories and traditions are “necessarily partial” and work “on behalf of some interests to the disadvantage of other interests” (Walzer & Beard, 2009, p. 16).

  Of course,
not all 20th-century rhetorical theorists have rejected the classical tradition’s emphasis on persuasion, civic discourse, and the ethics of speech. Most notably, Chaim Perleman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, in their influential New Rhetoric (1969), drew heavily on the classical tradition to develop a theory of practical or “non-formal reasoning” designed to “inform value choices and action” in law, politics, and everyday life (Frank & Bolduc, 2010, p. 145). Although Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca went well beyond the ancients’ emphasis on persuasive speaking, their concept of a “universal audience” reflected the same concern for the moral or ethical foundations of rhetoric (Ray, 1978), and they ultimately sought to answer the same basic questions as the Greek and Roman rhetoricians: How do we distinguish “good” from “bad” arguments? What separates “reasonable” attempts to persuade from propaganda or demagoguery? What sorts of standards or “rules” of speech and debate should prevail in a free society? And how might we best educate citizens to be responsible, effective participants in the civic dialogue?

  As we continue to grapple with these questions, it is useful to follow the example of Perlman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, who looked beyond the writings of rhetorical theorists and philosophers to consider how the ethical and pragmatic standards of public discourse are actually manifested in practice. In the second half of this chapter, I do just that by surveying the history and traditions of American public address in an effort to show how the “rules” governing civic persuasion have been tested and revised over the course of our nation’s history.

  The American Tradition of Rhetoric and Public Address

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