Rhetoric and Politics

Abstract

The degeneration of rhetoric and contempi of which it was victim followed triumph of bourgeois thinking in philosophy and romantic period in literature. This obliges me to state precisely, in order to avoid ail misunderstanding, that I understand by rhetoric theory and practice of persuasive communication. In conception of ancients, especially Piato, rhetoric was considered to be similar to psychagogy and for this reason great rival of philosophy. The new rhetoric, as I've presented it for last thirty years, covers entire field of informai reasoning: by that very fact, it includes ail forms of argumentation, ail reasoning which Aristotle called dialectic, in opposition to analytical reasonings, which formai logic studies. If rhetoric, so formulated, has as its object the study of discursive techniques functioning to provoke or increase support of minds to theses which one presents for approvai,1 rhetoric's role is central in politics. AU those who in Greek and Roman antiquity preferred an active life to contemplative life didn't hesitate to attribute to it at least as much importance as philosophy. Furthermore rhetoric remained, until end of antiquity, at center of education of young. What is source of contempi, even oblivion, into which rhetoric feil in nineteenth and first half of twentieth