Introduction: “Just Words”

Summary

Drawing on the classical rhetorical tradition, I argue that we can normatively evaluate political communication by attending to the structure of rhetorical relationships. They are necessarily asymmetrical, but they can become more equitable when they involve both speaker and audience in vulnerability to risk: the audience assumes the risk of having its convictions transformed, while the speaker assumes the risk of public rejection or humiliation. This burden-sharing turns speech from a potential activity of domination into action in a common civic space. Today, this burden-sharing is threatened by routinized and data-driven practices that aim to shield elites from rhetorical risk, and by the demagogic rhetoric of “unfiltered” spontaneity that represents a backlash to these practices. I discuss these rhetorical pathologies in a survey of contemporary US rhetoric. We can recover an alternative in the rhetorical thought of antiquity: eloquence as “spontaneous decorum.” This notion of eloquence welcomes uncertainty as part of public deliberation. But it also has qualities associated with decorum, because it is avowedly artificial; it is conceived as inherently stylized and as set apart from ordinary speech. Eloquence, I argue, is an emergent property of sound rhetorical relationships – the audible sign, as it were, of the relationship’s health.