Aristotle's Rhetoric as a Defense of Democratic Discourse

• In Event: Rhetoric, Emotions, and the Politics of Shame in the Ancient World

Abstract

Aristotle's Rhetoric is the least studied of his political works, yet it may be even more fundamental to his political thought than his Ethics or Politics. In the Ethics, he warns the reader to expect the precision of a rhetorician only, and in the Politics, he defines man as the political animal because he possesses speeches about the good and bad, just and unjust. He famously defends democratic practices with reference to the wisdom and judgment of crowds. But only the Rhetoric grounds these claims in an account of how public speeches do (not) track the truth. It is also the most scientific of his political works, in which he most often claims to establish what happens by necessity. Aristotle's science of rhetorical psychology is the closest we have to his theory of human nature, and it helps to explain why, in his view, the vulgar can be more prudent than the wise.

Author

• Daniel Hutter Fram, Middlebury College