Rhetoric, Plurality, and Political Production

Abstract

This dissertation proposes an audience-centered political theory of rhetoric: speakers identify and appeal to the characteristics of their audiences in order to build unity behind achieving some collective project. When crafting rhetorical appeals, speakers must account for those processes that define audience members’ concerns, commitments, and conceptions of self-interest. I call these processes “political production”: a central, but underexamined element in how audiences respond to rhetorical appeals. Under some circumstances, as in the small and narrowly-defined political communities discussed by ancient Greek theorists of rhetoric, political production is consistent across the politically relevant audience. In plural societies, however, difference, subordination, and exclusion often cut across the politically relevant audience, rather than defining its boundaries. As a result, rhetoric can build new solidarities which, reinforced through organizing and material infrastructure, create transformative political projects. This project utilizes a wide variety of theoretical and historical methods. In the first three substantive chapters, I rely on a combination of close readings of Attic Greek texts, conceptual analysis, and intellectual history to identify a conception of regime (politeia) as productive of the “available means of persuasion” in the thought of Aristotle and Plato, and to uncover Hobbes’ attempt, in his translation of Thucydides, to protect political order against his original and polemical conception of subversive “rhetoric”. In the next two chapters, I draw on social theoretic analysis, contemporary social science, and the history of American political thought to examine the role of rhetoric in political contexts defined by plurality and hegemony. In the dissertation’s final substantive chapter, I use archive research, interviews, and my own participant observations to apply the dissertation’s treatment of rhetoric to contemporary labor organizing and movement building. Understanding rhetoric in terms of political production contributes both to the history of political thought and to theoretically-engaged political interventions. By placing worries about rhetoric’s manipulative potential in their proper early modern context, I open space for re-reading the history of political thought for other approaches to rhetoric, such as the ones that I find in ancient Athenian philosophy. Normatively-engaged accounts of rhetoric, particularly those that examine appeals to racial resentment and similar reactionary attitudes, may also benefit from a broader focus on the institutions, movements, and material conditions that enable such appeals. These aspects of political production contribute far more to the success and consequent harm of such appeals than any specific candidate or official. Finally, the project contributes to the theory and practice of contemporary politics, especially as understood through radical democratic and broadly leftist perspectives. I develop a distinction between populist strategies and other possibilities for counter-hegemonic projects, and identify ways to fit an organization’s rhetorical approach to its strategy for achieving change.