Talking Democracy: Historical Perspectives on Rhetoric and Democracy

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talking democracy

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edited by

Benedetto Fontana

Cary J. Nederman

Gary Remer

Talking Democracy HISTORICAL

PERSPECTIVES

ON

RHETORIC

AND

The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania

DEMOCRACY

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Talking democracy : historical perspectives on rhetoric and democracy / edited by Benedetto Fontana, Cary J. Nederman, Gary Remer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-271-02456-9 (alk. paper) 1. Democracy—History. 2. Rhetoric—Political aspects. I. Fontana, Benedetto. II. Nederman, Cary J. III. Remer, Gary, 1957– . JC421.T36 2004 321.8—dc22 2004005509

Copyright © 2004 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802-1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

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contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Deliberative Democracy and the Rhetorical Turn Benedetto Fontana, Cary J. Nederman, and Gary Remer 1 1 Rhetoric and the Roots of Democratic Politics Benedetto Fontana 27 2 Democratic Deliberation and the Historian’s Trade: The Case of Thucydides Arlene W. Saxonhouse 57 3 Deliberation versus Decision: Platonism in Contemporary Democratic Theory Gary Shiffman 87 4 Rhetorical Democracy Russell Bentley 115 5 Cicero and the Ethics of Deliberative Rhetoric Gary Remer 135 6 Disarming, Simple, and Sweet: Augustine’s Republican Rhetoric John von Heyking 163 7 The Road to Heaven Is Paved with Pious Deceptions: Medieval Speech Ethics and Deliberative Democracy Cary J. Nederman and Tsae Lan Lee Dow 187 8 Deliberative Democracy and the Public Sphere: Answer or Anachronism? Thomas Murphy 213 9 Auditory Democracy: Separation of Powers and the Locations of Listening John Uhr 239 10 Reading J. S. Mill’s The Subjection of Women as a Text of Deliberative Rhetoric Nadia Urbinati 271 11 Criteria of Rationality for Evaluating Democratic Public Rhetoric Douglas Walton 295 Contributors Index 333

331

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acknowledgments

The editors wish to thank Sandy Thatcher of Penn State Press for his support of and interest in this project. They also would like to thank the various anonymous Press readers for their careful evaluation of the manuscript at several stages and for their invaluable help in the creation of a vastly improved book. A few colleagues who did not ultimately contribute to the contents of the volume were nevertheless supportive at various stages in the process of compilation, including Chris Laursen, Brent Lerseth, and Michael Leff. Preparation of the final text and the index was aided immeasurably by the editorial assistance of Jesse Chupp, Phillip Gray, Sara Jordan, Jeff Lee, Hassan Bashir, and Roberto Loureiro, doctoral students at Texas A&M University, whose time was made available courtesy of the Graduate Program in Political Science and the Head of Department, Patricia Hurley. Professor Fontana wishes to thank Doris L. Suarez, who assisted in the proofreading. He also thanks Eugene M. Lang and the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, whose assistance provided time and resources to complete the project. Professor Nederman acknowledges the assistance of Professor Donnalee Dox and of his colleagues in political theory, Ed Portis and Lisa Ellis, at Texas A&M University.

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introduction: deliberative democracy and the rhetorical turn Benedetto Fontana, Cary J. Nederman, and Gary Remer

i The literature on deliberative democracy forms a large and ever-growing body of work. Deliberative democrats, as well as their critics, have sought to uncover the principles justifying a stronger and more robust conception of democracy than is on display today in democratic societies. In particular, the theory of deliberative democracy, as often conceptualized, has placed a premium on the role of political expression—public speech, discourse, reasoned debate—as the key to democratic politics. Current debate between liberal democrats and deliberative democrats has, consequently, focused on the relation between politics as a mode of linguistic activity (symbolic and rational communication) and politics as a technical activity (policy formation and competent decision making). Deliberative democrats have also looked back to the history of Western political thought and practice to seek validation for the plausibility of their framework. Jürgen Habermas’s invocation of the public sphere of eighteenth-century bourgeois society and Hannah Arendt’s valorization of the Greek (especially Athenian) polis are perhaps the two best-known examples of the contemporary appropriation of historical antecedents.1 In the 1. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into

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quest to establish that deliberative procedures are more than merely theoretical, and have instead a practical application, historical inquiry takes a central place in the conceptualization of democratic relations. Given the emphasis on the discursive and historical dimensions of democracy, it is surprising that commentators have almost universally failed to consider the potential contributions of the history of rhetorical theory and practice to the understanding of democratic processes. Conceived in classical terms, rhetoric is the study of the art of persuasive expression; it addresses public and private speech, both written and oral.2 Since ancient times, mastery of rhetorical techniques has been considered an essential element of basic education, and especially crucial for individuals seeking careers in public affairs. Yet rhetoric was also a highly controversial field: throughout Western history, the association of rhetorical learning with popular rule, and even demagoguery, led to its criticism and condemnation by some authors.3 Historically, rhetoric was often viewed as particularly amenable to democratic values and beliefs. In sum, the long-standing tradition of rhetorical studies seems especially relevant to the study of deliberative democracy. The purpose of this book, therefore, is twofold. First, it focuses on the conceptual and theoretical relation between speech and democracy by looking at how deliberation and rhetoric inform each other and, in turn, together influence democratic politics. Second, it examines the relevance of the history of rhetoric for understanding the strengths and limitations of recent deliberative democratic theory. It shows that theories of delibera Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1989), and Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). See also Jon Elster, “Deliberation and Constitution Making,” in Deliberative Democracy, ed. Elster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 97–122. 2. For a good discussion of rhetoric and its history, see Roland Barthes, “The Old Rhetoric: An Aide-Mémoire,” in The Semiotic Challenge, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 11–94. See also Thomas M. Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), and George Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980 ). A useful reference source is Thomas O. Sloane, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 3. See Bruce A. Kimball, Orators and Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1986); Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); and the essays in Robert J. Connors, Lisa S. Ede, and Andrea A. Lunsford, eds., Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984).

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ative democracy are seriously imperiled by their unwillingness or inability to take into account the rhetorical dimension of expression, a point which has often been recognized and analyzed by earlier thinkers in the history of classical and European political philosophy.

ii Before we discuss the scope and range of the chapters in this book, it might be useful to review briefly previous notions of legitimate government and earlier versions of democratic theory. Since the advent of the modern world, with the transition from a feudal to a bourgeois social order, and with the concomitant transformation of politics and government, questions concerning the nature and bases of political power, the boundaries and limits that may legitimately circumscribe it, and the uses to which it may legitimately be put have been addressed and contested by numerous writers and thinkers. Thus, one reading of the classical modern thinkers contrasts the liberalism of Hobbes and Locke with the civic republicanism of Machiavelli, Harrington, and Rousseau. Debates over the interpretation of the American Revolution and the drafting of the U.S. Constitution revolve around their relatively liberal or republican characters. The problem of state power and its legitimation is intimately connected to the emergence of the “people” (or the “masses”) as an active agent in history and politics. The modern world, beginning with the English, American, and French Revolutions, is characterized by the emergence of the people as a force in history and in politics. Political theory, since Machiavelli, has been compelled to address the role of the people in the power equation, and thus to formulate ways to organize, channel, and deploy this new political force. With respect to liberal and democratic theories of popular government, the last hundred years, up to at least the middle of the twentieth century, have seen three basic frameworks or theories of democracy: the elite, the economic, and the pluralist.4 The first is based on the sociological theories of Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, and Robert Michels, who all viewed with intense suspicion the active participation of the people in politics and in public arenas. Theorists such as J. A. Schumpeter, Harold 4. For a good discussion of the pluralist and elite models, see David Ricci, Community Power and Democratic Theory: The Logic of Political Analysis (New York: Random House, 1971).

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Lasswell, and Abraham Kaplan viewed the people as a passive mass, controlled and manipulated by leadership elites. The economic theory of democracy, propounded by Anthony Downs, weds empirical and sociological observations about people’s socioeconomic preferences with an economic model of rational behavior. It reduces citizens to consumers and political action to economic utility. The third, Robert A. Dahl’s pluralist theory of democracy (“polyarchy”), is based on Madison’s notion of multiple factions, and thus conceives democratic politics as competition among groups and interests.5 Dahl tries to minimize the elitist and antipopular aspects of Mosca and Schumpeter, but retains their emphasis on democracy as a method and an “institutional arrangement.”6 Although Dahl has tried to move toward a more egalitarian and participatory perspective, democracy conceived as “polyarchy” retains Hamilton and Madison’s antimajoritarian suspicion of the people. All three theories, though different in method and in purpose, nevertheless share certain basic features. First and foremost, they deny the possibility of arriving at any notion of the common or public good. Indeed, politics is not about the coming together of public citizens in order to arrive at a shared understanding of the common good; it is rather the competitive struggle for advantage among private interests and economic utilities. In effect, what underlies these three theories of modern democracy are notions of voting, interest aggregation, and interest competition. As such, notions of the public good, and of the public arena in which such a good may be engendered, are seen as illusory, though instrumental to the struggle for interest and advantage.

iii Beginning in the 1960s critiques of liberal democracy and alternative frameworks for a democratic politics began to appear. Criticisms centered on the elitist, inegalitarian, and antiparticipatory character of liberal and pluralist theories of democracy. Critics questioned the fundamental propositions of liberal democratic theory: interest aggregation, economic utility, rational choice and game theory, methodological individualism, and

5. See Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). 6. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1942), 269.

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most important, the reduction of political activity to economic behavior, which they condemned as constricting the public and open space crucial to political activity. Two major schools of thought have emerged from the criticism of liberal and elite democratic theory. One is civic republicanism, the other is deliberative democracy.7 Both share the classical commitment to a politics that looks to the common or civic pursuit of the public good. Both see political activity as an important element in developing a well-rounded and educated citizen. Civic values, traditions, and ends are seen as important to the constitution and maintenance of a public space or forum in which the business common to all citizens may be conducted. And both recall the ideals of political virtue and political participation first enunciated by Plato and Aristotle, and later elaborated by Machiavelli and Rousseau.8 Civic republicanism and deliberative democracy—in highlighting such values as the common good, virtue, common action, and political education, and in inquiring into the conditions (theoretical and political) necessary for the emergence and expansion of a public/political space—reflect a profound dissatisfaction with pluralist and (neo)liberal theories of democracy.9 While the latter present a theory of democratic politics based on market and rational-choice models, the former want to recover the original and more profound sense of political activity, as something that transcends the immediately private and economic. An important element in both civic republicanism and deliberative democracy is the focus on liberty and equality. Civic republicanism devotes much thought and space to elaborating the connection between these two values and popular self-government. Fundamentally, as Arendt,10 Quentin Skinner,11 7. See Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), and Anita Allen and Milton C. Regan Jr., eds., Debating Democracy’s Discontent: Essays on American Politics, Law, and Public Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). See also the essays in the Journal of Political Philosophy 10, no. 2 (2002), a special issue on deliberative democracy. 8. While civic republicans are conscious of this connection, deliberative democrats do not seem to be aware of it, or at least are reluctant to acknowledge it. 9. For an interesting attempt to formulate a theory of “republican liberalism,” see Richard Dagger, Civic Virtues: Rights, Citizenship, and Republican Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 10. Hannah Arendt, “On Violence,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), and On Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972). 11. See Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli, eds., Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). See also Skinner’s Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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and Philip Pettit12 (among others) have shown, civic republicanism sees liberty and equality in terms of nondomination and in terms of the distinction (originally Aristotelian) between private space and public.13 On the other hand, it remains unclear in deliberative democracy whether its presuppositions about liberty and equality are republican (in terms of nondomination) or whether they are liberal (that is, based on a notion of rights). This is an important distinction between civic republicanism and deliberative democracy. Theorists of the former—such as J.G.A. Pocock,14 Skinner, Maurizio Viroli,15 Pettit, and Cary J. Nederman16—locate the origins of republicanism (in theory and in practice) in ancient Rome (positively, in the Roman republic, negatively, in the fall of the republic and the advent of the imperial monarchy); discover significant elements of it in the writings of Marsilius of Padua, Nicholas of Cusa, and others; see its rebirth in the humanist writers of Venice and Florence; and its culmination with the English and American republicans (Harrington, Sidney, Locke, Jefferson). In addition, Roman republicanism may be usefully contrasted to Athenian democracy: whether in practice or in theory, ancient political institutions and ideas are useful sources for modern theorists of popular self-government. As stated above, fundamentally the ideology of civic republicanism, with its stress on self-control, self-government, and selfdetermination, reconceptualizes and modernizes the Aristotelian distinction between the liberty and equality that exist within the polis and the slavery and domination that prevail within the despoteia. In the same way it reformulates the Roman political and legal distinction between the dominatio exercised within the domus and the dominium, and the libertas and the imperium exercised within the political/public space of the civitas.17 In democratic Athens and in republican Rome this public space is itself the realm 12. Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 13. See the essays in The Monist: An International Journal of General Philosophical Inquiry 84, no. 1 (2001), a special issue titled “Civic Republicanism and Political Philosophy.” 14. J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Political Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). 15. Maurizio Viroli, For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism (New York: Clarendon Press, 1995), and his Machiavelli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), see especially chapter 3, “The Power of Words.” 16. Cary J. Nederman, “Rhetoric, Reason, and Republic: Republicanism—Ancient, Medieval, and Modern,” in Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections, ed. James Hankins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 17. See Benedetto Fontana, “Tacitus on Empire and Republic,” History of Political Thought 14, no. 1 (1993): 27–40.

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of liberty and equality.18 And the polis or the civitas is nothing but the association of free and equal citizens as they deliberate and act together. Deliberation and action, moreover, take place openly within a political space constituted by the people organized legally and formally into popular assemblies. Arendt is surely right in pointing out the central role that speech and language, discussion and discourse—what Gorgias, Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle call the logos—assume in the political life of the ancients (especially in Athens).19 She, however, fails to distinguish properly between the various forms of political expression. In a sense, the differences among Plato, Gorgias, and Aristotle over the nature of the logos form the background to a major theme of this book: namely, the question of the nature and status of deliberation and rational discussion.20 That is, is the logos the vehicle of philosophic reason, as Plato would want it, or is it merely a technical rhetorical instrument used to sway the masses? Is public discussion as viewed by deliberative democrats the only (or alternatively, the most important) substantive method by which equal and free citizens may arrive rationally at a public good? Or is the formulation too narrow to encompass other politically (and democratically) important forms of public talk? In any case, in both it is significant that in republican Rome and in 18. Of course, the Athenian polis and the Roman republic are quite different from each other along a wide range of important sociopolitical and sociocultural elements (political, legal, institutional, military, and religious). However, in both systems power is generated through, and legitimated by, the mobilization and organization of the people. Generally, Western political and historical thought has been ambivalent over the relative merits of democratic Athens and republican Rome. James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, for example, defended the U.S. Constitution of 1787 precisely on the grounds that its mechanisms were designed to channel and to control the passions and interests of democratic majorities. And recently several historians and political theorists have begun to appreciate, and to reevaluate, the republican and democratic features of ancient Rome. In addition to Skinner and Nederman, see Fergus Millar, The Crowd in Rome in the Late Republic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), and Millar’s The Roman Republic in Political Thought (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 2002), 12–54, 135–82; and Andrew Lintott, The Constitution of the Roman Republic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). See also Mary Beard, “An Open Forum?” Times Literary Supplement, May 28, 1999. See, however, the discussion in Alain Boyer, “On the Modern Relevance of Old Republicanism,” Monist 84, no. 1 (2001): 22–44. 19. See Arendt, On Revolution, 26, 50, 81, 115, 127. 20. See T. A. Sinclair, A History of Greek Political Thought (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1968), and W.K.C. Guthrie, The Sophists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). See also Josiah Ober, “The Orators,” in Greek and Roman Political Thought, ed. Christopher Rowe and Malcolm Schofield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 130–41, and in the same collection, Malcolm Schofield, “Approaching the Republic,” 190–99.

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democratic Athens forms of public interaction other than discussion and speech—processions, rituals, religious festivals, games, theatrical performances, and recitals—were equally important. In effect, the public space was constituted by both speech and language (in the sense of public deliberation in the assemblies and in other political institutions) as well as by public performances and displays linked to the social, economic, cultural, and religious life of the community. Deliberative democracy recognizes the ancients’ contribution to public democratic deliberation. But it differentiates itself from civic republicanism in two crucial ways. First, the logos it recognizes is that of speech and language informed by reason and argument; it relegates all other forms of talk (such as rhetoric) to the extrarational or nonrational sphere. Moreover, deliberative democrats consider not only rhetoric but also other forms of public action such as displays and performances ill-suited to public deliberation and exclude them as well from the sphere of rational activity.21 Second, it reproduces the old distinction between the ancients and the moderns, and thus dismisses the contemporary use of Roman and Athenian forms of popular self-government as ahistorical and anachronistic (though still recognizing their value as historical but not political sources). These two points—that public deliberation is the only meaningful and rational vehicle toward civic virtue and the common good, and that public deliberation is conceptually and historically different from the ancient understanding of logos—underline the major rupture between civic republicans and deliberative democrats. They also suggest that although deliberative democracy emerged as a critique of pluralist and liberal democracy, it is still indebted to the language of rights and the moral/ethical presuppositions of liberalism and the Enlightenment. Of course, public deliberation and public discussion require a public space or public arena (or “square”) within which they can take place. And beginning with Habermas,22 up to contemporary writers such as Seyla 21. This antipathy is especially evident in Habermas and Benhabib. On the other hand, Iris Marion Young recognizes the importance of rhetorical technique and public display. See her “Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy,” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 128–32. 22. See Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996), and his “Popular Sovereignty as Procedure,” in Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, ed. James Bohman and William Rehg (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1997), 35–65.

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Benhabib, Jon Elster, Jean Cohen, and others,23 the public space is associated with what has come to be known as “civil society,” a complex of associations, institutions, and practices deliberative democrats understand to have emerged at the dawn of the modern era, that is, during the transformation of feudal and medieval society into bourgeois society. They understand civil society as consisting of associations—cultural, social, political, educational, and perhaps religious 24—not directly embedded either within the administrative/bureaucratic apparatus of the state, or within the corporate and business organizations of the economy. Thus, to these thinkers prebourgeois, premodern communities lacked a civil society and, consequently, lacked a public space, which thus precluded public deliberation about public ends. What this means is that the communes of the Italian city-states, as well as the democratic polis of Athens and the republican civitas of Rome, did not, and could not, possess a public space for public discussion because, obviously, civil society as understood by Habermas, Cohen, and others had not yet emerged. Chapters in this book will show, however, that premodern polities did indeed engage in public discussion within a public space. Though the term “civil society” emerged with the social contract theorists, and was later elaborated in various ways on the liberal side by Kant, Hegel, and J. S. Mill and on the socialist side by various Marxists (famously by Gramsci), there existed within the polities of the ancient and medieval Italian city-states associations, institutions, and practices that together might be analogous or equivalent to those which prevail within today’s civil society. For obviously what is important is not so much the term, but the practice and the concept to which it refers. 23. See Seyla Benhabib, “Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy,” in Benhabib, Democracy and Difference, 67–94; see the essays in Elster, Deliberative Democracy, and his “The Market and the Forum: Three Varieties of Political Theory,” in Bohman and Rehg, Deliberative Democracy, 3–33; and Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992). 24. Church, sect, and religion might present a problem to some theorists of deliberative democracy: what is the relationship between religion and religious commitment, and public reason and public speech? Or is religious faith a matter for private reason and private speech, and thus excluded from the public deliberation of the public sphere? The question points to the divorce between reason and passion (in this case, “ faith”), and to the sovereign, perhaps even quasi-absolutist, conception of reason entertained by some theorists of deliberative democracy. See, for example, Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement: Why Moral Conflict Cannot Be Avoided in Politics, and What Should Be Done About It (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996).

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Deliberative democrats return to the pre-Hegelian and pre-Marxian understanding of civil society. Whereas Hegel and Marx see civil society as the realm of economic struggle and market competition, where particularistic interests and unfettered appetite reign, deliberative democrats view it as precisely the sphere where appetite is overcome by reason, where speech tainted by interest may be transformed into “pure speech” (to use Habermas’s formulation) and into a kind of “deliberative universalism” (in Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson’s phrase). As with Plato and Kant, so too with theorists of deliberative democracy: reason, once it comes into close contact with interest or appetite, degenerates into mere rhetoric.25 It is in and through the ensemble of independent, secondary associations of civil society that a rational consensus on the common good may be attained. It is in this sphere, too, where Rawls’s public reason is located. In addition, where in Locke and other social contract theorists (Grotius, Pufendorf ) politics and the political are legitimated (indeed, come into being) as a result of individual calculations of self-interest and of per25. Gutmann’s notion of universality and Habermas’s notion of “pure speech” are informed by the rationalism and moralism of Immanuel Kant. Consider, for example, this extract from Kant’s Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951), 171: “Rhetoric, in so far as this means the art of persuasion, i.e., of deceiving by a beautiful show (ars oratoria), and not mere elegance of speech (eloquence and style), is a dialectic which borrows from poetry only so much as is needful to win minds to the side of the orator before they have formed a judgment and to deprive them of their freedom; it cannot therefore be recommended either for the law courts or for the pulpit. For if we are dealing with civil law, with the rights of individual persons, or with lasting instruction and determination of people’s minds to an accurate knowledge and a conscientious observance of their duty, it is unworthy of so important a business to allow a trace of any luxuriance of wit and imagination to appear, still less any trace of talking people over and of captivating them for the advantage of any chance person. For although this art may sometimes be directed to legitimate and praiseworthy designs, it becomes objectionable when in this way maxims and dispositions are spoiled in a subjective point of view, though the action may objectively be lawful. It is not enough to do what is right; we should practice it solely on the ground that it is right.” Plato, of course, could not have said it better—except that for Kant even Plato is not pure and rigorous enough, for he would use myth, allegory, and other rhetorical devices as means of mass persuasion and mass education. In this sense, the problem is not that deliberative theorists misconstrue mere rhetoric, but that they interpret other, more cognitively robust forms of discourse as no more than that. The Kantian binary not only deprives a large area of reasonable discourse of reason, but in doing so it also eliminates any middle ground between reason and the worst forms of rhetoric. And democracy can only develop on this middle ground. See Gutmann and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement. See also Robert Hariman, “Status, Marginality, and Rhetorical Theory,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 72 (1986): 38–54, in which he argues that Plato and Kant criticize rhetoric in order to establish the hegemony of philosophy.

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sonal/material security, in deliberative democracy consent is (or, at least, should be) the product of rational discussion. Habermas26 famously analyzed the consequences to public deliberation and to the public sphere when, as a result of social, economic, and cultural forces, the system originally established by the liberal and bourgeois revolutions expanded its social base, and the liberal foundation of government and politics was compelled to democratize because of pressure from below. The transformation of liberal politics into mass politics—the rise of mass parties and mass elections, mass communication, and mass media—not only destroyed the exclusive class basis of the public sphere, but made it more difficult to devise mechanisms to prevent the distortion or manipulation of public deliberation.27 Thus the concern with the integrity of the public sphere, and with the integrity of the means (procedural and substantive) by which public deliberation is conducted, is a reflection of the fear that mass politics and mass democracy may destabilize the liberal constitutional order and lead to authoritarian or despotic regimes.

iv In recent years works on democracy and deliberation have sought to establish a close and necessary relationship between democratic politics and discussion, between democratic legitimacy or authority and conversation, discussion, and reason.28 These works, though quite varied in emphases and in style, share a fundamental proposition: the exercise of legitimate democratic power is based upon, and must issue from, a process of rational and reasonable deliberation that is itself based upon a reciprocal and mutual discussion or conversation open and equally accessible to all. Such a process embodies both procedural and epistemic elements.29 It is procedural because the discussion necessary to democratic deliberation 26. See, especially, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. 27. For a critique of Habermas from the perspective of rhetorical studies, see John Durham Peters, “Distrust of Representation: Habermas on the Public Sphere,” Media, Culture and Society 15 (1993): 541–71. 28. See James Bohman, “Survey Article: The Coming of Age of Deliberative Democracy,” Journal of Political Philosophy 6, no. 4 (1998): 400–425. For a somewhat different view, see John S. Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 29. See Joshua Cohen, “Procedure and Substance in Democratic Theory,” in Benhabib,

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presupposes fair structures in which all participate, and fair rules that apply equally to all. It is epistemic because the process of deliberation is inherently transparent and reflexive, such that discussion, argument, and counterargument lead to a decision or to a consensus rationally and substantively (or morally) superior to one arrived at by a different or alternative method. Thus, democratic deliberation is more than just a neutral method for the making of political decisions; it is also a cognitive process for the making of moral and rational decisions. By adhering to the method of democratic deliberation, decisions and outcomes issue from rational argument rather than from brute force or from mere interest, or even from mere number. Deliberative democracy, therefore, is a method by which political decisions issue out of the force or the power of the (rationally and morally) superior argument. The only force recognized as legitimate is the force of reason. Therefore, when properly structured and institutionalized (when all the formal/procedural and constitutive/normative preconditions have been satisfied and are operative), democratic deliberation filters out of the political decision-making process elements and considerations extraneous to rational discussion, factors such as brute force, material (socioeconomic) interest, personal bias, and whim.30 Passion, desire, appetite, emotion, and sentiment, factors normally present in decision making and otherwise intractable and difficult to isolate, are factored out of the process by means of its reflexive reciprocity and its unmediated transparency.31 The necessity to give reasons compels all participants to argue reasonably and to promote reasonable talk, such that only outcomes issuing out of such talk are accepted as legitimate (both morally and epistemically). Indeed, the decision or outcome is authoritative precisely because it is understood as, and perceived to be, the product of mutually interactive discussion. In a word, deliberative democracy, emphasizing the rational force of the better argument, tries to uncover, or to formulate, conceptual and empirical conditions by which the force of utility (power and interest) is reduced while at the same time the weight of reason and knowledge is increased. Plato’s ideal, the identification of an epistemic/political method by which reason may assume its autonomous and ruling position, seems Democracy and Difference, 93–119, and his “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” in Bohman and Rehg, Deliberative Democracy, 67–91. See also Robert E. Goodin, Reflective Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 30. See Jane Mansbridge, “Using Power/Fighting Power: The Polity,” in Benhabib, Democracy and Difference, 46–66. 31. Young, “Communication and the Other,” 120–35.

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to be approximated in the political/deliberative method of free and open discussion. All of which brings us back to the question posed above: the status of speech and its connection with power and politics, namely, the relation between reason and politics (as the subtitle of a volume of edited essays on deliberative democracy puts it).32 This relation, of course, is the preeminent subject of the ancients and of those who believe that they still have something of value to say. Is reason (or public reason) autonomous and sovereign? If not, what political, social, and cultural conditions presuppose it? The power of speech and language is recognized by theorists from Gorgias to Habermas. But what kinds of public speech lead to legitimate or illegitimate power? Are some forms of speech inherently manipulative and dominating, while others mutually reflexive, and thus transformative and liberating? The distinction between rhetoric and dialectic (or philosophy) in Plato, for example, is replicated in the dichotomy deliberative democrats make between deliberation and rhetoric, or between what is rational and what is not. Yet these theorists—unlike Plato, Aristotle, or Cicero—establish an antithetical opposition between the two, such that one mutually excludes the other. Sheldon Wolin, in Politics and Vision, noted that the political was constituted by two different, but intimately related, elements.33 First, it is concerned with the foundation of a common ground within which common ends, purposes, and values may emerge and develop. Second, it is concerned with competition, struggle, and conflict. One looks toward community and the common good, the other is informed by power, interest, and advantage. Politics, certainly democratic politics, centers around the interplay of these two complementary but opposing elements. A similar and analogous distinction (between community and conflict, virtue and utility) may be seen when looking into the relation between speech and democratic politics. Deliberative democrats, while recognizing the problems attendant upon conflict and competition arising from a multiplicity of social and cultural groups prevalent within a free society, nevertheless overemphasize the elements of consensus, community, and virtue (or the cultural, educative, and transformative value) deliberative discussion is capable of generating. In this regard their understanding of the power of 32. Bohman and Rehg, Deliberative Democracy. 33. Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960).

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rational discussion (“the force of the better argument”) harks back to Plato’s bifurcation of the logos, that is, the speech of dialectic (philosophy) and the speech of rhetoric (politics). Dialectical reason leads to the transformation of the soul, and rhetorical technique leads to competitive advantage in the power struggle. Cicero’s distinction between conversation (sermo) and rhetoric (contentio) is similar to Plato’s dichotomy between rhetoric and dialectic, power and philosophy.34 However, as Harvey Yunis35 and Josiah Ober36 have shown, Plato retreated from his absolute antitheses and came to accept the necessity of rhetoric as an instrument for the moral and political education of the masses. Although the supremacy of dialectic over rhetoric remains untouched, he nevertheless concluded that the knowledge and virtue acquired by means of philosophical reason could not be realized in the polis without the techniques provided by rhetoric. Aristotle and Cicero went further; they placed rhetoric on an equal footing with philosophy and recognized the value of each form of argument within its own sphere.37 Even Hobbes, as Skinner has shown, followed an intellectual trajectory regarding the relation between science and rhetoric somewhat similar to that of Plato, first rejecting rhetoric as specious, later realizing that his new science of politics could not be introduced without using rhetorical techniques.38 In any case, Aristotle and Cicero understood the relation between rhetoric and philosophy, not only in terms of their intellectual and theoretical distinctions, but also in terms of their social, political, and cultural contexts. Though many have stressed the extrarational or nonrational elements of rhetoric, it should be recalled that both Aristotle and Cicero attempted to save rhetorical discourse from Plato’s critical attacks by showing the rational and logical structure of rhetorical persuasion. Thus, Aristotle argued that teachers of rhetoric stressed emotional appeals and neglected logical or rational argument, which is the most important of the three rhetorical techniques of persuasion he discusses.39 What distinguishes 34. Gary Remer, “Political Oratory and Conversation: Cicero Versus Deliberative Democracy,” Political Theory 27, no. 1 (1999): 39–64. 35. Harvey Yunis, Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Classical Athens (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). 36. Josiah Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 37. See Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans. and intro. George A. Kennedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 38. Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 39. Aristotle Rhetoric 1354a–1359a.

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rhetorical argument from dialectic is the sociopolitical context, which, in turn, determines the purpose, structure, and method of the argument. This purpose is both competitive and utilitarian. On the one hand, it is to persuade an audience of the truth of a particular proposition or position. On the other, persuasion is a means of overcoming and defeating an opponent who is similarly engaged. On the one hand, rational argument is used to arrive at what the audience will perceive to be reasonable. On the other, reason and reasonableness are not the ends, but the means (of course among others) to move the audience toward a decision, that is, to make them act. It is the need to make a decision that preeminently characterizes rhetoric as the political art in any polity where the people (or some part of them) is a political force in the power equation. What is crucial here is that argument before the people is used as a means of persuasion to arrive, not at a consensus on an issue or position, but at a decision to act. This decision is reached not by means of a consensus, but through a competitive struggle for power and advantage among the various groups, factions, and leaders that together constitute the audience. Thucydides’ rendition of the Athenian and Syracusan leaders’ speeches before their respective assemblies shows the dynamic operation of how conflict and consensus mutually presuppose, as well as mutually reinforce, each other. It shows how the interplay of factional conflict, strategic interest of states, uncertainty and unpredictability (that is, the contingency of political and military events), and public and open deliberation in the ekklesia combine to manufacture a particular conception of political truth, one highly unstable and indeterminate, because necessarily embedded within the power (political, economic, military) equation that characterized the relations of the Greek states. Opacity and transparency, conflict and consensus, deception and truth, characterized the proceedings of the public sphere. At the same time, the fact that a decision is taken itself indicates that a consensus, at some level within part of the audience, has been achieved. Competition, conflict, and factional division—which to Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero are the social and political sphere within which rhetoric thrives—can take place only if consensus exists or has been reached at some level. Similarly, action will only occur if conflict is transformed into agreement by means of persuasion. Thus the dichotomy between deliberation (consensus on a common good) and rhetoric (conflict over particular goods) is not as clear-cut as deliberative democracy would like to make it. The Ciceronian distinction between conversation and oratory, where the first is a theoretical and intellectual activity designed to uncover and

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explore philosophical questions, and the second a political and moral enterprise designed to persuade an audience or an assembly to act in a particular way, is a key to understanding the nature and scope of speech in a democratic and republican polity. Conversation can only lead to further conversation, discussion to more discussion. Certainly Plato’s dialogues show that dialectical speech and discussion, rather than resolving a question or settling an issue, open up avenues for further inquiry and further investigation. Rather than achieving consensus, conversation and discussion in Plato reveal how exclusive reliance on reason and dialectic often leads to disagreement, aporia, epistemic uncertainty, and even silence and speechlessness.40 On the other hand, rhetoric as the art of persuasion culminates in a conclusive decision. The decision, far from being imposed by force or by extradiscursive means, issues out of the rhetorical and competitive struggle for advantage located within the public space of the assembly/audience. The decision itself is the outcome of the close relationship between the orator and his audience: the orator cannot persuade without intimate knowledge of the people he is addressing, and the people cannot respond without understanding (both rationally and emotionally, that is, in terms of logos and of pathos) the language of the orator. In other words, both orator and people speak a common language, use a common syntax, and possess a common vocabulary. Moreover, since the orator and his audience are embedded within a specific tradition and a specific political culture, the orator has access to a deep reservoir of symbols, metaphors, and representations (verbal, visual, and aural), all of which resonate with the people/audience, in order to carry his argument or his position.41 In addition, the relation between orator and people is twofold. The orator must respond to, and account for, not only his own relation with the people, but also with that of his opponents. In a way, the common symbols and traditions are the ground upon which conflict and competition occur, in the same way that opposition is possible only within a shared language and through common symbols. 40. In the Gorgias the logic of Socrates’ position regarding philosophy (rational conversation) and rhetoric (politics) forces him to abandon the public sphere and retire into private life, and he is thus reduced to public silence. In the Republic and in the Laws the logic of Socrates’ position compels the people (the ruled) to public silence. In fact, as Aristotle pointed out, in Plato the polis is transformed into the household, and public reason becomes basically the private reason of the ruler(s). 41. Ann Vasaly analyzes the relation obtaining, on the one hand, between physical space, visual and narrative representation, cultural symbols, and metaphors and, on the other hand, between political speech and rhetoric, in her Representations: Images of the World in Ciceronian Oratory (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).

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This brings us back to politics, and especially to democratic politics. In a polity whose institutions (especially legal and political) embody the Madisonian ideas of ambition counteracting ambition, and power counteracting power, “truth” and “objectivity ” are always problematical. The boundary between reality and appearance, substance and pretense, truth and deception, though it exists, is difficult to demarcate, and is always changing. “As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed,” Madison says.42 Thus, in a republic, the interaction among reason (which is fallible), liberty, and opinion means that there is no independent or objective perspective. All positions, and all perspectives, are subjective—they are all based on the sociopolitical, or cultural, or economic positions of the actors engaged in the system. And this is the epistemological problem: is it possible, objectively and rationally, to arrive at a consensus or a policy or program that is not imbued with the power interests of the actors? If reason “continues fallible,” then no actor within the system should be able to claim objectivity, moral superiority, or philosophical “truth.” But, of course, this is precisely what all actors do claim: they represent themselves as the embodiments of the public, or universal, good. It is here that reason, liberty (or “free speech”), and power meet: each actor pursues power, which is determined by his relative and subjective position or perspective. Yet the fact that these relative perspectives are subjective suggests that the pursuit of power can never be a raw and naked contest, for the very subjectivity of the actors means that they are compelled to see and to portray the world through cultural, ideological, and moral filters. In a republic where violence and brute force are deemed illegitimate, they are thus properly excluded from its public/political space and from its decision-making and consensus-building processes. At the same time, the wedding of fallible reason with liberty implies that rhetoric is not merely the means by which conflicts are resolved and consensus is produced, but also the way in which political and social reality is presented and represented. The advocates of deliberative democracy pose, but cannot resolve, the political problem regarding the relation between power and reason (or interest and right) and the epistemological problem concerning the status and limits of reason and discourse. In a way, they reverse the position espoused by Callicles, Thrasymachus, Gorgias, and their postmodern 42. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York: Mentor Books, 1999), Federalist No. 10.

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epigones. The latter see law and rights (and the mechanisms that produce them, namely, government and politics) as mere screens that mystify their real bases (power and force), and the former assume that the use of reason as expressed in conversation and debate is sufficient to produce an outcome that will be acceptable to all rational actors. The first sees reason in law and politics as tainted with power, the other excludes all power considerations from political decision making. It views decisions as products of a conversation or debate among equal and rational actors, immune to emotional, symbolic, or other “extrarational” appeals. Deliberative democracy, of course, attempts to formulate an ideal rational/ political structure, one which is both normative and prescriptive: it says that rational debate among equal actors ought to constitute the process of democratic decision making. As such, it may be seen as a moral critique of the empirical reality.43 As such, in the manner of Plato’s Republic, it may offer interesting speculation on what an ideal system ought to be. Indeed, deliberative democracy’s argument is remarkably reminiscent of Plato’s in his dialogues. Reason in debate and conversation is sufficient to lead to an objective result, or “truth.” While deliberative democrats posit equality in the ability of all actors to reason, and Plato posits inequality, the method is quite similar. Plato’s ideal republic is an exercise in constructing what a state would look like were reason to become autonomous, that is, stripped of all social, economic, and other particularistic impedimenta. In this sense, deliberative democracy’s stance is paradoxically and unintentionally less inclusive than it appears: debate and conversation occur in quite narrow and restricted circles, to which the overwhelming number of citizens will not have access. What this means is that, because of an assumption of homogeneity neither possible nor desirable today, key constituents of human action will be lost. Deliberative democracy looks to an ideal so far removed from possible actualization that it no longer should be assigned critical or regulative status. The stress on rationality and reason, and the simultaneous disparaging of emotion and passion, produce a desiccated, abstract model of democracy, one which cannot do justice to the multifarious nature of human and social life.44 As in Plato, so too with the theorists of deliberative democracy: the privileging of reason reduces politics to rational conversation, and 43. However, both Benhabib and Bohman also see deliberative democracy as a description of empirical reality. See Benhabib, “Toward a Deliberative Model,” 84–87, and Bohman, “Survey Article,” 400–401, 422–23. 44. See William Brennan, “Reason, Passion, and ‘The Progress of the Law,’” Cardozo Law Review 10 (1988): 3–23. Brennan notes that “the framers operated within a political

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thus distorts the concept of democratic politics as conflict, as opposition, and by inference, as the method by which policies are formulated and decisions are made. Thus, in a republic that tries to guarantee liberty (free speech), and where reason is recognized as not only fallible but inherently and inextricably immersed in the brute reality of sociopolitical and economic interests, the age-old distinction between rhetoric (manipulation, deception, appearance, what Machiavelli calls “simulation and dissimulation”),45 on the one hand, and philosophy (knowledge, truth, reason, science, reality) cannot hold. Justice (rights) is not an entity or value existing independently of the perception of the observer. Rather, it is something that comes into being through the conflict of competing multiple perspectives and multiple interests.46 Such a situation, however, does not mean that democrats are left with a simple either/or: either remain mired in the stark and ruthless struggle for power and advantage, in which free and equal deliberation within an open and public space is a mere fiction, a convenient and strategic instrument of various power/interest groups, or continue the seemingly endless search for an ideal (moral and rational) speech situation where power, utility, and passion are excluded, because deemed inherently extrarational. At the same time, rhetoric is the form of expression that occupies the political and theoretical space between the two alternatives. It is the form of open and public speech that allows for rational and deliberative decision making within a sociopolitical reality defined by power, conflict, and interest. Political discourse, therefore, requires rhetoric if what is wanted is a public sphere or space open to all citizen/participants, in which decisions are the outcomes of a competitive and rational struggle for the favor of the people. Rhetoric is the form of public discourse able to link reason and power, knowledge and interest, leaders and people. As such, it is also a means to generate consent, mobilize support, and thus render law and government legitimate.47 and moral universe that had experienced arbitrary passion as the greatest affront to the dignity of the citizen. . . . In our own time, attention to experience may signal that the greatest threat is formal reason severed from the insights of passion” (17). 45. Niccolò Machiavelli, Il Principe, in Opere, vol. 1, ed. Sergio Bertelli (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1960), chap. 18. 46. On the relationship obtaining among rights, power, and speech, see Thomas Halper, Positive Rights in a Republic of Talk: A Survey and a Critique (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2004). 47. Although rhetoric can be understood as the major agency of civic republican politics, it is important to note that the relationship between rhetoric and political philosophy

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v The essays in Talking Democracy: Historical Perspectives on Rhetoric and Democracy, as the title suggests, are committed to a historical analysis of their subject matter. Reflecting this historical approach, the volume’s eleven chapters are organized, roughly, in chronological order. (“Roughly” because individual chapters usually focus on, but are not always limited to, a specific historical period or thinker.) Instead of presenting this book’s main themes—rhetoric, democracy, political discourse, and deliberative democracy—as abstract, timeless concepts, these themes are considered here rhetorically, that is, as ideas that were developed according to the conditions of time and place. The early chapters explore the ancient world’s contribution to rhetoric, democracy, and deliberation, with succeeding chapters examining these themes in the thought of theorists writing during, and as they relate to the politics practiced in, republican Roman, early Christendom, the Middle Ages, the early modern world, and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the first chapter, Benedetto Fontana discusses the relation between speech and politics, particularly in classical political thought. Fontana maintains that the ancients’ ideas about the relationship between political speech and political power were manifested in their debates about rhetoric. To Greek and Roman thinkers like Gorgias, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Tacitus, rhetoric was a form of political activity and a method of political discourse that raised questions about reason and desire, principle and power, and rulers and ruled. Through his analysis of these thinkers and of rhetorical practice itself, Fontana finds that “rhetoric is preeminently a republican and democratic form of speaking and communicating.” Implicit in Fontana’s essay is the argument that rhetoric was not only closely linked to the theory and practice of popular government in democratic Athens and republican Rome, but that rhetoric has a role to play in contemporary politics. Specifically, the robust understanding of political discourse found in classical rhetoric may supplement the overly constricted conception of

is not exhausted by such a politics. A proponent of the rhetorical tradition, for example, need not necessarily subscribe to a civic republican politics. Nor does it necessarily follow that the discursive tradition issues from and depends on the political position (which historically would be false). On the other hand, rhetoric is crucial, and a necessary ingredient, to the formation of a fully developed theory of civic republicanism. See Robert Hariman, Political Style: The Artistry of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

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political discussion found in the writings of many proponents of deliberative democracy today. In Chapter 2, Arlene Saxonhouse analyzes Thucydides’ rendition of the Athenian and Syracusan leaders’ speeches before their respective assemblies. She suggests in this chapter that to write his history Thucydides modeled the intellectual stages that must occur in democratic assemblies, where to deliberate about the policies to be adopted, the members of the assembly must evaluate and test, just as Thucydides does, the biased stories spoken before them. Political speech in Thucydides is prejudiced and self-interested. “Thucydides and those sitting in the ekklesia must take account of prejudices that govern human nature, prejudices about which the historian is prepared to teach his democratic readers. They both, the historian and the ecclesiast, must labor under the uncertainty of the logoi that come from prejudiced and self-interested individuals whether they present themselves as experts or not.” Saxonhouse contrasts Thucydides’ less-than-ideal view of democratic debate with the recent account of deliberative democrats, building on the work of Jürgen Habermas, who “envision a democratic process of deliberation in which the deliberators must be good faith actors with mutual respect in search of public reason or moral justification for policies.” For Saxonhouse, Thucydides’ account of democratic politics is more realistic than the deliberative democrats’. But Saxonhouse disagrees with those who conclude that Thucydides’ more pessimistic vision is tantamount to denying the people’s capacity to make reasonable judgments. The people in a democracy cannot escape the uncertainty of knowledge in their decision making. Nevertheless, Saxonhouse concludes that the “democratic advantage is the possibility of testing, of changing and revising decisions, or of deliberation that ends in nonaction; the challenge is to acknowledge that advantage.” In the third chapter, Gary Shiffman points up the connection between Plato and the deliberative democrats Joshua Cohen and J. Peter Euben. Like Plato, these deliberative democrats demand that discussion be sincere, reflective, and aimed at achieving rational consensus. As Shiffman demonstrates, Euben also adopts the Socratic view of dialogue as therapeutic. But Shiffman contends that these Platonic assumptions adopted by Cohen and Euben are antidemocratic. Plato was explicit about the antidemocratic character of his idealized philosophical dialogue; he saw politics and philosophy as incompatible activities. Cohen’s and Euben’s attempts, however, to merge Platonic philosophy with democratic politics lead to incoherence. Their error, according to Shiffman, is one of genre

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confusion; their norms for political speech are more appropriate to cognitive talk therapy than to political deliberation. Instead of looking to Socratic dialogue as the model for deliberation, Shiffman finds political rhetoric a more appropriate model. Rhetoric, for Shiffman, offers a less lofty, but more politically attainable, vision of political deliberation. Like Shiffman, Russell Bentley, in Chapter 4, also links his analysis of classical thought and rhetoric to an evaluation of deliberative democracy. Bentley, however, focuses his analysis on Aristotle and relates Aristotle’s rhetorical theory to Gutmann and Thompson’s conception of deliberative democracy. First, Bentley maintains that Aristotle offers insights into the problem (ignored by deliberative democrats) of accommodating power inequalities that arise from different degrees of rhetorical skill. Second, Bentley contends that Gutmann and Thompson’s principle of reciprocity rests on an “artificially thin moral psychology that neglects the interplay between emotion, perception, and reason as a factor in how we hear the arguments others make in a deliberative setting.” Once again, Bentley finds Aristotle’s rhetorical approach—his moral psychology based on rhetorical practice—better than Gutmann and Thompson’s. In Chapter 5, Gary Remer demonstrates how Cicero squares ethically questionable rhetorical methods with an ethical approach found in the Roman rhetorician’s De officiis. Critics of rhetoric from Plato to today’s advocates of deliberative democracy have condemned rhetoric as irrational, deceitful, and unconcerned with the public good. Remer chooses Cicero, the dominant figure in the development of the rhetorical tradition, to show that rhetoricians (in republican Roman as well as today) need not cede the moral ground to their critics. Cicero acknowledges that orators (and all politically engaged persons) must face ethically difficult situations in which choices are less than ideal. Nevertheless, for Cicero, the need to make morally difficult choices should not lead to the abdication of one’s moral duty. Like orators, who must accommodate their speech to a specific situation, persons practicing rhetorical ethics must determine their actions by context. For example, Cicero agrees, in the abstract, that deception is morally wrong. But for Cicero, certain higher ends, like the well-being of the republic, justify the use of some morally dubious means. There is, however, a major difference between this position and Plato’s doctrine of the noble lie. Plato’s use of deception is grounded in the certain knowledge of the philosopher/statesman, whereas Cicero’s is developed out of the dialectical tension of integrity and expediency, one negotiated in a constantly changing field of play, and thus requires continual reassessment.

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In Chapter 6, John von Heyking examines St. Augustine’s conception of rhetoric, more broadly, and his conception of political rhetoric, in particular. Von Heyking endeavors to show that Augustine’s discussion of rhetoric is relevant to contemporary notions of deliberation, including that of deliberative democracy. Augustine, as von Heyking interprets him, considers the relationship between rhetoric and politics to be a close one. In both rhetoric and politics, theory is derived from practice. Von Heyking uses St. Augustine’s insights into rhetoric and politics to demonstrate that, contrary to deliberative democracy, there are no preexisting “fair” norms and rules of procedure to govern deliberation. Instead, “those very rules are discovered over the course of deliberations.” And deliberative democrats who try to create a priori rules governing “public reason” subvert politics and propound a theory that does not reflect political experience. The contrast between deliberative democracy’s moral absolutism and rhetoric’s practical ethics, discussed in some earlier chapters, is addressed again in Chapter 7. In this chapter, Cary Nederman and Tsae Lan Lee Dow discuss the issue of linguistic deception. To the deliberative democrats’ position, which rejects all deception for political ends as antidemocratic, Nederman and Lee Dow contrapose the views of John of Salisbury, the twelfth-century churchman, and Christine de Pizan, an author of the early fifteenth century. Like Cicero, John and Christine adopt a rhetorically inspired speech ethics and maintain that under certain conditions some forms of deception are moral. According to John, deception used to protect against harm is neither sinful nor evil. Similarly, Christine views a lady’s use of dissimulation and falsification as sometimes necessary for her own good and for the greater good of the community. To both thinkers, the public good must be taken into account when making moral calculations. In Chapter 8, Thomas Murphy reexamines the “public sphere,” a concept crucial to many current theories of deliberative democracy. These theories of deliberative democracy accept Habermas’s assumption that the model of democratic deliberation is to be found in the public sphere’s “web of interpersonal exchanges” that arise in the intermediate associations that constitute civil society. Habermas (in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere) finds the historical origins of the public sphere in the rise of bourgeois society. Habermas describes this historic public sphere as characterized by face-to-face communication between peers, which made these discussions largely egalitarian and inclusive. Murphy contends, however, that a public sphere (characterized by a critical publicity) existed as far back as the Middle Ages, but communication in this premodern public sphere

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was not face-to-face, but mediated through writing. Murphy rejects the attempts by Habermas and other deliberative democrats to limit proper communication to oral, face-to-face conversations. For Murphy, mediated communication takes conceptual precedence over oral communication, and the conversational equality and inclusiveness sought by deliberative democrats is probably unattainable. Murphy concludes that further democratization is likely to emerge, not from face-to-face deliberation, but from the mediated forms of communication that formed the public sphere in the first place. In Chapter 9, “Auditory Democracy,” John Uhr emphasizes the significance of listening in democratic politics. While proponents of deliberative democracy conceive of deliberation as an egalitarian conversation between speakers, rhetoricians understand that political speech involves few speakers but many auditors. Uhr argues that listening should not be equated with passivity. Rather, citizens exercise their sovereignty in listening and responding to the political justifications from each branch of the government. Uhr traces the development of a democratic conception of listening in early modern political thought through the theories of Hobbes, Locke, and Montesquieu. Hobbes introduces the issue of political listening by establishing listening as a significant element of the subjects’ political obligation to the sovereign; for Hobbes, listening concerns the creation of a compliant citizenry. Locke replaces Hobbes’s monarchical sovereignty with popular sovereignty and voices the need for a system of separate institutions to manage political power. The existence of separate governmental institutions supports political listening in the sense that the sovereign people can listen to the public arguments of the legislative and the executive, holding them politically accountable. Finally, Montesquieu presents a more fully developed separation of powers theory than Locke, which distinguishes between legislative, executive, and judicial spheres. Uhr contends that Montesquieu’s more advanced conception of the separation of powers “introduces greater political listening by promoting closer attentiveness—within as well as over government.” In Chapter 10, Nadia Urbinati defends John Stuart Mill against the charge that he betrayed his radical principles in The Subjection of Women on the grounds that Mill, like Remer’s Cicero or Nederman and Lee Dow’s John of Salisbury and Christine de Pizan, adopted a rhetorical ethics. Because Mill’s policy proposals in The Subjection of Women do not depart fundamentally from the status quo, some radical feminists have criticized Mill for his “liberal feminism”; they find in Mill a gap between his more

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radical theoretical claims and his timidly reformist practical proposals. Urbinati argues, however, that The Subjection of Women must be read as a rhetorical text, in which principles can be ethically accommodated to context, when the audience is more likely to be persuaded. As Urbinati states, “Mill was not trying to build a general theory of justice, but to make a radical principle (‘perfect equality’ of men and women) palatable to an audience that was not radical at all.” Finally, in Chapter 11, Douglas Walton develops the argument that deliberative democracy and rhetoric are sometimes compatible. Walton uses Aristotle to show that rhetoric and reason can be mutually consistent. Walton even refers to deliberative democracy as “a model of rhetoric.” Walton distinguishes, however, between different types of discourse within rhetoric and concludes that “reason-based deliberation,” in which the goal of the dialogue is to decide the best available course of action, is a rational basis for political action. (Another type of dialogue, for example, is the “persuasion dialogue,” in which the proponent of the argument has already decided upon a viewpoint and thesis and now aims to persuade the respondent to accept that thesis. It is the persuasive character of rhetoric that most critics and some champions of rhetoric find problematic.) Walton turns to the work of pollster Daniel Yankelovich to further explicate the normative requirements for a rational process of deliberation among the people. Although Walton acknowledges the legitimacy of Alexis de Tocqueville’s fears about the tyranny of the majority in democratic politics, he believes that reason-based deliberation represents “the best kind of argumentation we can hope for in democratic deliberations on matters of public policy where the future is uncertain.”

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1 rhetoric and the roots of democratic politics Benedetto Fontana

This chapter discusses a problem originally posed by ancient political thought, especially by Gorgias, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Tacitus—one whose strands run through the fabric of Western political theory, namely, the relation between speech (or conversation or discourse) and politics.1 Controversy over the nature of this relation has produced numerous debates among various schools of interpretation, for example, between liberals and communitarians and between postmodern and deliberative democrats.2 The role and status of rhetoric, both as a form of political 1. See Cary J. Nederman, “Rhetoric, Reason, and Republic: Republicanism—Ancient, Medieval, and Modern,” in Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections, ed. James Hankins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Nederman argues, rightly I think, that the tension among various strands of republican thought can be traced to thinkers such as Cicero, from whose thinking emerged “two different and competing theoretical defenses of republicanism within the body of his work: one highlighting eloquent speech, the other focussing on the faculty of reason.” 2. The literature on the subject is legion. See, for example, Seyla Benhabib, “Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy,” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 67–94; James Bohman, Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity, and Democracy (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996); the essays in Journal of Political Philosophy 10, no. 2 ( June 2002); and Simone Chambers, Reasonable Democracy: Jürgen Habermas and the Politics of Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). For an excellent discussion, see Gary Remer, “Political Oratory and Conversation: Cicero Versus Deliberative Democracy,” Political Theory 27, no. 1 (1999): 39–64. See also Peter Berkowitz, “The Politic Moralist,” New Republic, September

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activity and as a method of political discourse, are contested questions because they underscore basic issues that revolve around political speech and political power: the relation between reason and desire/appetite, principle and power, and rulers and ruled. Rhetoric addresses what may be termed the relation between “public reason” and “public good,” on the one hand, and the politics of liberty and equality, on the other.3 In short, an inquiry into debates over the relation between speech and politics, rhetoric and philosophy, within ancient political theory and practice may prove useful to an understanding of democratic and republican politics.4 In any case, to classical authors rhetoric and politics are arts so closely interwoven that they presuppose each other. Moreover, rhetoric’s relationship to democratic politics is more intimate still. What follows is in part an attempt to question Platonic conceptions of rhetoric and arguments in political theory today and to show that their antagonism to democratic discourse rests on unfounded and tenuous beliefs regarding the relations obtaining among rhetoric, deliberation, and politics. In so doing, it also tries to discover the bases for a rhetorically informed understanding of deliberation. The term logos, usually translated as speech, language, reason, is central to ancient political thinking, and is used in various senses and for various purposes by different thinkers in different times. In general, however, it possesses a philosophical and a political meaning, and both senses of the term are embodied in the famous statement of Isocrates, logos hegemon panton. The sentence may be translated as “speech and language are the ruler and guide of all things,” but logos, of course, may also mean discourse and argument, whether written or spoken (but especially spoken in the classical context).5 Isocrates, unlike Protagoras, and somewhat similar to Plato 1, 1997, 36–40. In reviewing Ruth W. Grant’s Hypocrisy and Integrity: Machiavelli, Rousseau, and the Ethics of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), Berkowitz offers both a general guide and an informative discussion of the various schools’ positions. 3. See Berkowitz, “Politic Moralist,” 36–37. 4. Habermas argues that the “people’s public use of reason” was unique and “without historical precedent” before the European Enlightenment. See his Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1989), 27. See Alan Ryan, “The Power of Positive Thinking,” New York Review of Books, January 16, 2003, 43–46. 5. Isocrates Nicocles 5–9. Isocrates says, “We shall find that none of the things which are done with intelligence take place without the help of speech, but that in all our actions as well as in all our thoughts speech is our guide [ hegemona logon].” In Nicocles 9. The editions of works of ancient authors cited in this chapter are those of the Loeb Classical Library, unless otherwise noted. In the Encomium to Helen, Gorgias asserts that “Speech [ logos] is a

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in the Phaedrus, sees the logos as the expression of a particular kind of truth, and he locates it within a given cultural and social context, moving in space and time.6 As such, the relation between logos and culture describes a power relationship based on the generation and dissemination of consent. Such generation assumes a particular form of knowledge and practice—the art (ars) or techne of rhetoric, which presupposes a particular relation between the speaker and his audience, which, in turn, assumes a particular sociopolitical structure or order that makes both necessary and useful the relation between the speaker and the assembly/audience. It is only in a political community such as the polis that the logos as hegemon would be capable of generating consent by means of the persuasive and rhetorical devices of public speaking. Thus rhetoric is preeminently a republican and democratic form of speaking and communicating.7 It emerges, develops, and thrives under conditions of conflict, competition, and strife. On the other hand, while rhetoric cannot exist without competition, the continued existence of competition presupposes a social and political arrangement that is conducive powerful lord” (par. 8). In addition, he notes that “Helen, when still young, was carried off by speech just as if constrained by force. . . . Her mind was swept away by persuasion, and persuasion has the same power as necessity . . . ; for speech, by persuading the soul that it persuaded, constrained her both to obey what was said and to approve what was done” ( par. 12). In George A. Kennedy, Appendix IA, in Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans. Kennedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). For a discussion of the formulation logos hegemon panton, see T. A. Sinclair, A History of Greek Political Thought (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1968), 115–42, especially 133–34. See also Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, trans. Gilbert Highet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944), 3:88–91. Jaeger notes that “the logos, in its double sense of ‘speech’ and ‘reason,’ becomes for Isocrates the symbolon, the ‘token’ of culture . . . [ which] assured rhetoric of its place, and made the rhetorician the truest representative of culture” (3:79). It is this double sense of speech/reason that gives logos another, equally revealing, meaning —namely, that of giving an account for something, both in the sense of elaborating a discourse or narrative and in the sense of providing a “reason.” To give an account would therefore mean to provide an intelligible, or at least a plausibly reasonable, basis for one’s action or one’s position. 6. It should be noted that the meaning of logos is fluid, full of nuances, and multilayered. Given its rich range of meanings (and the fact that both Plato and Isocrates were not formulating a vocabulary of technical philosophy), no translation can be sure and definite. A fully developed definition would require a historical and contextual analysis beyond the scope of this chapter. However, my discussion is based on a particular tradition of use—that is, as the term was developed by some to capture an encultured, contingent, and contextual form of discursive truth and power—rather than a consensus about its meaning. 7. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Description of Ancient Rhetoric (1872–73),” in Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, ed. and trans. with a critical introduction by Sander L. Gilman, Carole Blair, and David J. Parent (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 3–5.

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to a minimum tolerance of difference, plurality, and multiple points of view. In this sense, the orator is a party leader, a leader of a faction. What Gorgias calls rhetorike techne is a skill or a craft devoid of substantive value or of any claim to objectivity or absolute truth.8 Corax (or Tisias) understands it as rhetorike esti peithous demiourgos: rhetoric is the maker or the craftsman of persuasion. The instruments or tools of this art are words, speech, and language. Lacking any natural or objective telos, its only end is to use words convincingly, to create a desired effect. Or rather, its end or purpose is defined by the sense of the term peithein.9 It teaches nothing but itself—to the extent that it does posit something—a value, a morality, a philosophy—the teaching is always provisional, relative to the context, and therefore subject to change and reformulation.10 At the same time, however, while Isocrates’ views seem to parallel those of Gorgias— rhetoric as peithous episteme—he makes clear that the utility and effectiveness of rhetoric are themselves a function of a particular moral-intellectual culture without which rhetoric would have no value or meaning.11 Aristotle sees rhetoric as an ability or a power “of discovering the possible means of persuasion,” and persuasion is achieved either through ethos (the character of the speaker), pathos (passion and emotion evoked from the audience or listeners), or through logos (argumentation, or showing the “truth” or the “apparent truth” of a given case).12 Despite their differences in emphasis and in outlook, Gorgias, Isocrates, and Aristotle generally associate rhetoric with forms of democratic politics. Thus Aristotle, in chapter 3 of his Rhetoric, seems to say 8. See Sinclair, History of Greek Political Thought, 62, 73–77, and Plato Gorgias 452–53, 456–57, 459–60. And see Robert Wardy, “Rhetoric,” in Greek Thought: A Guide to Classical Knowledge, ed. Jacques Brunschwig and Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 465–85. 9. Nietzsche, “Description of Ancient Rhetoric,” 5–6. 10. See W.K.C. Guthrie, The Sophists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 176–81. 11. For a good discussion of the nature and origins of rhetoric, see Edward Schiappa, The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), and Schiappa’s Protagoras and Logos: A Study in Greek Philosophy and Rhetoric (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991); Thomas Cole, The Origins of Rhetoric in Ancient Greece (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); and Robert Wardy, The Birth of Rhetoric: Gorgias, Plato and Their Successors (London: Routledge, 1996). On Isocrates, see Yun Lee Too, The Rhetoric of Identity in Isocrates: Text, Power, Pedagogy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 164–71, 200–232, and Takis Poulakos, Speaking for the Polis: Isocrates’ Rhetorical Education (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997). 12. Aristotle Rhetoric 1.2.1.

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that rhetoric emerges out of, or is intimately connected to, the civic space of public address: The kinds of Rhetoric are three in number, corresponding to the three kinds of hearers. For every speech is composed of three parts: the speaker, the subject of which he treats, and the person to whom it is addressed, I mean the hearer, to whom the end or object (telos) of the speech refers. Now the hearer must necessarily be either a spectator or a judge, and a judge of either of things past or of things to come. A member of the general assembly is a judge of things to come, a juror in a court, of things past, the mere spectator, of the ability of the speaker.13 All three understand rhetoric as an art particularly suited to attack and defense by means of words and speech. But the crux of rhetoric is deliberative speech, which is practiced especially and normally within an assembly, because to Aristotle deliberation is more noble and more “civic”—that is, more universal, less private and specialized—and thus preeminently political.14 In the democratic polis, rhetoric necessarily means liberty and power. Demokratia, rule of the people, is in Athens traditionally associated with liberty and equality. Thus Aristotle, in the Rhetoric (1.8.5), notes that liberty is the telos, or the essential and defining characteristic of democracy.15 Parrhesia—freedom of speech—or the “liberty to say everything” is a central element in the construction and elaboration of the art of speaking, the logon techne.16 The terms isegoria (equal rights to speak), isonomia (equal political rights), and isokratia (equal right to rule) denote various forms of political equality that together embody democratic rule, and all are directly related to rhetoric as a political craft. In the assembly the rights and liberties 13. Ibid., 1.3.1–3. The constituent elements of a speech, of course, are closely connected to the three kinds of speech: the deliberative, the forensic, and the epideictic. All writers on rhetoric subsequent to Aristotle base their discussion on this classification, see Cicero De inventione 1.5.7 and Quintilian Institutio oratoria 3–4.12–15. Of course, by the time rhetoric became the subject of theoretical, philosophical, and literary analysis its connection and relevance to social and political activity had been rendered, if not entirely superfluous, then certainly considerably more tenuous. 14. Aristotle Rhetoric 1.1.10. 15. Ibid., 1.8.5. 16. See Susan Sara Monoson, Plato’s Democratic Entanglements: Athenian Politics and the Practice of Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 51–63.

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of citizens are embodied and focused in the right to speak.17 Citizenship, which means membership in the ruling body, which, in turn, defines membership in the polis, is characterized precisely by this right to speak. Thus possession of isegoria is an important criterion in determining the power structure of the polis. Whether the right is broadly or narrowly based determines the democratic or oligarchic character of the polis. For the right to speak in the assembly is the right to persuade the assembly to act—that is, to harness the power of the state and use it for particular ends.18 At the same time, the right to speak in the assembly is a necessary condition for equal treatment under the law—that is, isegoria and isonomia imply each other. In addition, equal right to speak and equal treatment under the law, important in distinguishing the various types of regimes, are even more important in distinguishing the free citizen from the slave. To Aristotle speech and language are the underlying foundation of the polis, which would mean that to him the logos is inherently and necessarily political and social. Man is a political being because only within the political association (the polis) —which to him is the highest form of cultural and civil life—can he realize his full human potential. But the polis—and this is Gorgias and Isocrates—is an association characterized, and made possible, by speech and language (the logos).19 Polis and logos presuppose one another, such that each can only be understood in terms of the other. More specifically, in his Politics Aristotle distinguishes among different kinds of rule: in the household (despoteia), and in the polis.20 The first is rule over unequals—women, barbarians, slaves; the second is rule over equals. Equality in speech and in law, therefore, applies only to members of the association.21 Women, slaves, and metics, which together formed the 17. See Josiah Ober, “The Orators,” in Greek and Roman Political Thought, ed. Christopher Rowe and Malcolm Schofield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 130–41. 18. See Harvey Yunis, Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Classical Athens (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 2–15. 19. Schiappa makes the same argument for Protagoras, and links the latter’s understanding of logos to that of Aristotle. See his Protagoras and Logos, 189 and, especially, 185. 20. Aristotle Politics 1252a–1253b. 21. Nietzsche, writing on the relationship between rhetoric and Greek culture and politics, is instructive: “The nation which was educated by means of such a language, the most speakable of all languages, spoke insatiably and at an early age found pleasure and a distinct talent in speaking. There are, indeed, tribal differences, such as the brachologia [terseness] of the Dorians (especially the Spartans), but on the whole the Greeks feel that they are speakers, in contrast with the aglossai, the [languageless] non-Greeks (Sophocles); they are the ones who speak understandably and beautifully (the opposite is barbaroi, the “quackers,”

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majority of the population of the polis (certainly of Athens) could not speak in the political space that defined the polis. Possessing no public persona, they could only speak and act within the household (ruled, we should remember, by the citizen/master). Indeed, to Aristotle the political distinction between slave/barbarian/woman and master/Greek/man corresponds to the philosophical and metaphysical distinction between reason/logos and appetite/desire. The ability to speak openly in the assembly or in the agora is thus the signal mark of equal citizenship.22 In effect, it is only within the public and open space of the polis—which is an association of equals, who are at the same time masters (despotai) who rule a household of slaves—does it become possible to realize the Aristotelian ideal of “ruling and being ruled in turn.”23 And it becomes possible precisely because the constituent members of the association have equal rights to speak and to address the assembly.24 Thus ruling and being ruled in turn implies the reciprocal and mutual relation of persuading and being persuaded. In practical terms, however, a democratic polis that tries to establish the equal right to speak along with the liberty to say everything must accept party politics and factional strife. Orators within the assembly are leaders of various factions. And as Plato and Aristotle demonstrate, democratic politics revolves fundamentally around the struggle between the few and the many, the oligarchs or dynasts against the democrats and groups of lesser means. Even within the latter group, however, as Thucydides makes abundantly clear,25 the leaders of the democratic faction are themselves

cf. ba-trachoi [frogs]). But only with the political forms of democracy does the overestimation of oratory begin; it has become the greatest instrument of power inter pares.” “The History of Greek Eloquence,” in Gilman, Blair, and Parent, Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, 214. 22. See the Politics 1260a–1260b, where Aristotle discusses slaves and women, and approvingly quotes Sophocles’ line, “A modest silence is a woman’s crown.” 23. This should be contrasted to Euripides’ understanding of contemporary Athenian democracy as evinced in the exchange between Theseus and the messenger in The Suppliant Women, 400–440, where Theseus says, “There is no tyrant here. The city is not ruled by one man only, but is free. The people is the sovereign, and rulers succeed one another year by year in turn. No extra privilege is given to the rich man, and the poor is his equal” (403–8). 24. Politics 1274b32–1275b. 25. Thucydides The Peloponnesian War 1.139.4, 2.40.2, 2.64.1, 2.65.8–10, 3.11.7, 3.43.4–5, 4.22.2, 8.1.1. See also M. I. Finley, “Athenian Demagogues,” Past and Present 21 (1962): 3–24, and Josiah Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

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men of substance and education, skilled in administration (public and private) and in the ways and methods of addressing the assembly. The equal right to speak and the liberty to say everything thus mean political competition and civil conflict. The democratic city, in Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle, is in reality—that is, politically, socially, and economically—two cities. Political theory, in a sense, emerges out of the conflict between the classes as it attempts to deal with the social and political problems such conflict poses. These problems, as Machiavelli notes in chapter 9 of The Prince, and as Madison and Hamilton underline in The Federalist Papers,26 have been endemic to “every city”—that is, to a political body defined by factional strife between the few and the many. As Machiavelli says, “The people desire not to be dominated and oppressed by the rich; the rich desire to dominate and to oppress the people. As a result of these two opposed desires, one of three effects appears in the city: princely rule or liberty or license.” Machiavelli’s discussion may be regarded as a succinct and terse summation of Thucydides’ description of the internecine class war within the Greek city-states, as well as a restatement of Plato’s analysis of democratic and oligarchic politics in the Republic. Thucydides addresses the problem of democratic politics as he describes the internal power struggles within the Athenian assembly as it is manipulated and moved to action by various factional leaders. Through the use of set speeches he shows how the moderate and conservative democracy under Pericles is gradually transformed into a radical democracy under Cleon and Alcibiades. What is crucial is his analysis of the change in the relation between the orator/ statesman and the assembly he addresses. Although Thucydides castigates the demos (the many) for the disasters of the war, it is nevertheless interesting that his aristocratic, antipopular bias does not make him reject traditional Athenian democratic institutions. Indeed, he seems to argue that it was factional demagogues such as Cleon and Diodotus who led the assembly away from Periclean democracy. On the other hand, Plato regarded the intensification of factional strife and the triumph of radical democracy as the inevitable consequence of rule by a popular assembly and, concomitantly, of the right to speak openly and to say everything. In the very different context of republican Rome, where the right to speak at meetings or in the various assemblies of the people was limited to 26. See Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York: Penguin, Putnam, 1999), nos. 9, 10, 51, 63, and 70.

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magistrates, effective political power was concentrated within the senatorial oligarchy. Nevertheless, the right to speak to the people, to address them, and to put political and policy questions before the various comitia and before the concilia plebis, is what defines political activity in republican Rome. It was precisely the ability to move the Senate and the popular assemblies that enabled factions and their leaders to attain and maintain power.27 Roman authors—whether historians and politicians such as Sallust, Cicero, and Tacitus, or writers and poets such as Virgil, Horace, and Ovid—associate rhetoric and oratory with libertas and with certamen. Indeed, under the republic liberty 28 and conflict presupposed each other. Moreover, although writers, especially Cicero and Sallust, lamented the loss of virtuous concord and harmony, which supposedly characterized the ancient Roman order, and simultaneously castigated the political and social strife that characterized Roman politics of their period, such a critique underlines the value they placed on libertas, and they were quite conscious of the irony wherein the critique was itself a weapon in the ongoing struggle for power. Sallust, in describing the contest between the Sullans and Marians, and in recounting the events of the Catilinarian conspiracy, echoes both Thucydides and Plato in his analysis of rhetoric and party strife. It is the lubido dominandi that sparks speeches at public meetings, in the Senate, and in the various assemblies.29 The opposition between the few and the many, the rich and the poor, is described as a struggle between those who desire liberty (cura libertatis) and those who lust or desire to dominate (cura dominationis); yet at the same time, what to Sallust underlies these two seemingly antithetical desires is the struggle for glory, power, and wealth (certamina et cura gloriae et divitiarum).30 Sallust, following Thucydides,31 describes how the diverse factions used the language of liberty and rights 27. See Lily Ross Taylor, Party Politics in the Age of Caesar (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961), and Claude Nicolet, The World of the Citizen in Republican Rome, trans. from the French by P. S. Falla (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988). 28. On the concept of liberty in ancient Rome, see Chaim Wirszubski, Libertas as a Political Idea at Rome During the Late Republic and Early Principate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950). See also Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 29. See Benedetto Fontana, “Sallust and the Politics of Machiavelli,” History of Political Thought 24, no. 1 (2003): 86–108. 30. Sallust Bellum Iugurthinum 31.23, Bellum Catilinae 20.7–17, 23, and Epistula ad Caesarem. 31. Since Plato and Thucydides many have noted the rhetorical and political uses of

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as a means to attack and to defend, and as tactical and strategic instruments of the struggle for power. He laments the corruption and debasement of political discourse. Yet what emerges quite clearly from his account is that such a use of language and speech, far from evincing a moral decline in public speech and debate, is inherent to political conflict, and the various rhetorical forms it takes are determined by the nature of the conflict. Tacitus is very instructive. Writing long after the fall of the Republic, and trying to understand its transformation into a dominatio, Tacitus links conflict, competition, and strife with oratory and public speaking, and in turn, makes these central to republican liberty. The res publica libera is the public arena constituted by the competition among the Senate, the people, and the magistrates. Indeed, to Tacitus opposition and conflict define the civic life of the republic. He writes: In the disorder and license of the past more seemed to be within the reach of the speaker, . . . hence, speeches of magistrates who . . . passed nights on the Rostra; hence prosecutions of influential citizens brought to trial . . . ; hence, factions among the nobles, and incessant strife between senate and people. . . . [T]he more powerful a man was as a speaker, the more easily did he obtain office, the more decisively superior was he to his colleagues in office, the more influence did he acquire with the leaders of the state, the more weight in the senate, the more notoriety and fame with the people . . . it was thought a disgrace to seem mute and speechless.32 Thus the sequence: open and public speech led to factions among the nobles (that is, among the party leaders), which led to strife between the Senate and the people, which led to power and glory in the state. The passage evokes not only Cicero, but also Gorgias, Isocrates, and Aristotle. The power of the logos in the state (as in Gorgias and Callicles), as well as its role as a necessary ingredient to liberty and citizenship (as in Aristotle), is no more brilliantly described than in Tacitus’s epigram—“It was thought the idea of liberty, especially Sallust, Tacitus, Machiavelli, and Hobbes. A citation from Francesco Guicciardini is illustrative: “Non crediate a costoro che predicano sì efficacemente la libertà, perché quasi tutti, anzi non è forse nessuno che non abbia l’obietto agli interessi particulari.” Ricordo 66, in Francesco Guicciardini, Ricordi, ed. R. Spongano (Florence: Sansoni, 1951). 32. Tacitus Dialogus de oratoribus par. 36.

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a disgrace to seem mute and speechless.”33 Speechlessness is perceived as the token of powerlessness and dependence, indeed, of slavery and domination.34 Leadership and influence in the Senate are linked to the generation of support with the people, which together make possible leadership in the state. Here Tacitus makes two points. First, the struggle for power taking place within the Senate forced the leaders to address the Senate and to attack and defend by means of speech and language. Thus, he says: “It was little good for them to give a brief vote in the senate without supporting their opinion with ability and with eloquence.”35 Ability and eloquence— Cicero’s famous ratio et oratio—are necessary both to achieve power and to force a decision on matters of policy. And second, Tacitus underlines the fact that without popular support the leaders of the various factions, who together of course comprised the Senate, could not maintain their power relative to their opponents. As he notes, “Even against their own wish they had to show themselves before the people.”36 The notion of “showing oneself before the people” is rich in ironic nuance. At one level, it points to the republican and democratic aspects of rhetoric, basic to any kind of civic life, and as such is reminiscent of Aristotle, and of his distinction between acting as a member of the political association and acting as a member of the household. “Showing oneself before the people” implies the open and mutual recognition of citizens within the polis or the civitas.

33. See Cicero De oratore 3.35.141, where he relates a story concerning the rivalry between Isocrates and Aristotle, in the course of which he quotes Aristotle citing Euripides to the effect that it is a disgrace to be silent and suffer a barbarian to speak, except that Aristotle substitutes Isocrates for barbarian— ille enim turpe sibi ait esse tacere cum barbaros, hic autem cum Isocratem pateretur dicere. Quintilian, too, cites a similar line: turpe esse tacere et Isocratem pati dicere (3.1.4). In addition, Cicero uses almost the same expression as Tacitus in discussing the central importance of oratory to the founding (and maintaining) of political and civil life: “It does not seem possible that a wisdom either silent or lacking speech [ inops dicendi ] could have converted men suddenly from their [primitive and savage] habits and introduced them to different ways of life . . . unless men had been able by eloquence to persuade their fellows of the truth of what they had discovered by reason.” De inventione 1.2.2–3. Tacitus’s epigram thus highlights speech and rhetoric as an indispensable constituent of citizenship and membership within a political community. 34. On the relation in Tacitus between res publica and imperium, libertas and dominatio, see Benedetto Fontana, “Tacitus on Empire and Republic,” History of Political Thought 14, no. 1 (1993): 27–40. See also Arlene W. Saxonhouse, “Tacitus’ Dialogue on Oratory: Political Activity Under a Tyrant,” Political Theory 3, no. 1 (1975): 53–68. 35. Tacitus Dialogus par. 36. 36. Ibid.

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In addition, Tacitus seems to say that political activity—competition and opposition—takes place within sight of the people, who are not merely the spectators, but also the ground within which the conflict takes place, and as such, provide the purpose and meaning of the entire process. It is in the formal comitia and in the more informal contiones that the people as ground and background both form and inform the notions of civic discourse and public speech. At the same time, however, “showing oneself before the people” is a tacit, and ironic, assertion that republican politics is far from transparent—or as “moral” and as “just”—as its defenders might want to argue. For it points to multiple levels of “truth” telling, multiple layers of masks a leader (democratic or otherwise) is compelled to assume. It seems to say that the struggle for power, even (or especially?) when conducted openly before the people within a public space, cannot avoid duplicity and deception. What appears before the people, what is presented and revealed, is necessarily indeterminate, and whose “truth” and “authenticity” cannot be fixed and captured with certainty.37 As in the funerals38 of the Roman nobiles, where the public is treated to the spectacle of image busts of the family ancestors carried in procession, the party leaders and orator/politi37. On this point, see Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, edited and introduced by C. B. Macpherson (London: Penguin Books, 1985), pt. 1, chap. 16, p. 217, where he says, “The word Person is latine: insteed whereof the Greeks have prosopon, which signifies the Face, as Persona in latine signifies the disguise, or outward appearance of a man, counterfeited on the Stage; and sometimes more particularly that part of it, which disguiseth the face, as a Mask or Visard: And from the Stage, hath been translated to any Representer of speech and action, as well in Tribunalls, as Theaters. So that a Person, is the same that an Actor is, both on the Stage and in common Conversation; and to Personate, is to Act, or Represent himselfe, or an other; and he that acteth another, is said to beare his person, or act in his name; (in which sense Cicero useth it when he saies, Unus sustineo tres Personas; Mei, Adversarii, & Judicis.” On Cicero’s notion of persona as human character, see De officiis 1.30.107–1.32.121. For the public magistrate as the representative of the state (se gerere personam civitatis), see 1.34.124. For an excellent discussion of rhetoric and politics in Hobbes, see Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), where he analyzes Hobbes’s intellectual and philosophical development, from his early use of rhetoric, to his rejection of it and embrace of science, and finally to his attempts to reconcile science and rhetoric—a journey which intriguingly approximates Plato’s movement from original opposition to ultimate recognition of rhetoric as a useful and necessary tool of dialectic, and to his attempts to arrive at a synthesis between rhetoric and philosophy. 38. Funeral orations, neither of the deliberative nor forensic kind, perhaps may be classified as epideictic, and their political effectiveness is famously recorded in Thucydides’ rendering of Pericles’ speech. In the Roman case, the relation between the funeral speech itself and the context within which it is inserted (procession, imagines) offers a revealing example of the power and force of nondeliberative and nonforensic rhetoric, and its dramatic and strategic use by party and factional leaders testifies to its importance in Roman politics.

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cians appear before the people wearing masks appropriately designed for strategic effect.39 It is not that politics is a “stage,” and the political actors are represented through their political personae. The protagonists/orators and their political conflicts are quite “real”; yet this reality becomes perceptible and meaningful by means of rhetorical (aesthetic and emotional) devices and methods, that is, through “appearance.” And Tacitus continues: The great and famous eloquence of old is the nursling of the license which fools call liberty; it is the companion of sedition, the stimulant of an unruly people, a stranger to obedience and subjection, a defiant, reckless, presumptuous thing which does not show itself in a well-governed state . . . our own state, while it went astray and wore out its strength in factious strife and discord, with neither peace in the forum, unity in the senate, order in the courts, respect for merit . . . produced beyond all question a more vigorous eloquence.40 Tacitus, using the tools of rhetorical eloquence, is making an ironical argument, seeming to undermine what he actually supports, to advocate by criticizing, and to praise by blaming. Oratory is not simply linked to license/ liberty; it is the motive force by which liberty/license matures and expands. The passage celebrates free expression and plurality, antagonistic perspectives, and competing desires and appetites, all of which lead to power struggles channeled within multiple and “counteracting”41 institutions. 39. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, in The Chief Works and Others, trans. Allan Gilbert (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), 3:18: “Men in general judge more with their eyes than with their hands, since everybody can see but few can perceive. Everybody sees what you appear to be; few perceive what you are, and those few dare not contradict the belief of the many, who have the majesty of the government to support them. As to the actions of all men and especially those of princes, against whom charges cannot be brought in court, everybody looks at their result. So if a prince succeeds in conquering and holding his state, his means are always judged honorable and everywhere praised, because the mob is always fascinated by appearances and by the outcome of the affair; and in the world the mob is everything; the few find no room there when the many crowd together.” The distinction here made between the few who “touch with their hands” (who may perceive with reasonable certainty) and the many who can only see addresses the sociopsychological bases of knowledge, which apply to all, and does not refer to the political and economic distinction between the few and the many. 40. Tacitus Dialogus par. 40. 41. James Madison, Federalist No. 51.

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Public speech, indeed, precisely because it is a “stranger to obedience and subjection” produces a defiant, unruly people, eager to pursue their desires and appetites, and as such paradoxically willing to listen and to follow the orator/leaders best able to exercise their oratorical technique —that is, best able “to show themselves before the people.” 42 In effect, given a sociopolitical order constructed along the lines of a polis like pre-Hellenistic Athens, or of a city-state such as pre-Augustan, republican Rome, the knowledge of rhetoric—argumentation, the ways and means (logical, structural, physico-emotional, and dramatic) by which one addresses a body of people—is not a mere literary affectation, or a lifeless academic exercise. Rather, it is directly connected to social and political practice. Rhetoric is crucial to a citizen’s life, both in the assembly and in the law courts. To possess this knowledge is therefore to possess the means to assert one’s will over others. The use of a specific language, within a given historical context, shows the relative power equation of diverse groups. Thus the rise and decline of the vernacular may be seen as a barometer that tracks the rise and decline of the relative influence of the lower classes within a given society—that is, of the relative value assumed by the “many” within the power equation. In this context, therefore, rhetoric describes a form of knowledge that depends upon a close relationship between the speaker/leader and the people, in the same way that rhetoric as a form of knowledge depends upon the existence of a popular assembly whose persuasion and direction is the object of the speaker. But it should be noted that the orator, in the very process of addressing the people, is on the one hand assuming a position of moral-intellectual leadership with respect to them, and on the other, still immersed—or minimally, “showing himself before”—within them. He is of the people, because the effectiveness of the speech depends on his establishing a link—and because he must be present in the assembly to address the people. And if he appears “superior” to them, because he possesses a knowledge that enables him to generate arguments and reasons that will persuade the audience and elicit

42. See Commentarolium petitionis, reputedly a work of Cicero’s brother Quintus addressed to Marcus, on methods of electioneering, in which are stressed techniques such as deception, simulation, theatrical displays before the people, flattery, and ingratiation (16–17, 39–42, 44, 47, 52–55). In 1, he says, “Though nature is strong . . . an assumed personality can overcome the natural self for an affair of a few months.” And in 42, “What you lack by nature should be so well simulated that it seems a natural act,” and finally, in 55, “Be supreme in oratory [dicendo]; this is what holds and attracts men in Rome, and keeps them off from hampering or harming you.”

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their support, it is only as a leader or rhetor in the assembly, subject to the scrutiny and accountability of the citizens.43 Demosthenes makes this point in one of his speeches, where he notes that the audience or the assembly, if it does not determine, certainly plays a significant role in the formulation and delivery of the actual speech.44 Addressing the Athenian assembly, he says: “Your orators never make you either bad men or good, but you make them whichever you choose; for it is not you that aim at what they wish for, but they who aim at whatever they think you desire. You therefore must start with a noble ambition and all will be well, for then no orator will give you base counsel, or else he will gain nothing by it, having no one to take him at his word.”45 Demosthenes is trying to warn the Athenians to be wary of demagogues (which, of course, from the perspective of his opponents will be seen as a political and rhetorical maneuver). Stripped of moral pretension, however, his observation remains cogent. In a democratic polis such as Athens, where demos and polis are coterminous, orator and statesman are one and the same: the politikos is the leader who looks after the interests of the body of citizens (as opposed to those of the few).46 And in republican Rome, where politics was fundamentally a struggle for preeminence and control over the direction and power-resources of the state, the popular assemblies, Senate, magisterial institutions, and law courts together formed the public space and ground that gave meaning and direction to civic and social strife. In both kinds of states knowledge of rhetoric cannot be separated from knowledge of the audience —which means knowledge of the means necessary to persuade, influence, and thus lead it. For in order to influence the audience/assembly, one should be able to adapt oneself to its peculiarities and idiosyncrasies, and this requires a knowledge of psychology, economics, and sociology—not, of course, in any social “scientific” sense, but in a fundamentally political sense (as understood by Aristotle and Cicero). It is no accident, as Quentin Skinner and others have noted, that Aristotle’s Rhetoric, precisely because it deals with the art of speaking and persuasion, is simultaneously a trea43. On the relation between speaker/politician and audience/assembly, see Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 107. 44. On Demosthenes and his use of rhetoric, see Jeff Miller, “Warning the Dêmos: Political Communication with a Democratic Audience in Demosthenes,” History of Political Thought 23, no. 3 (2002): 401–17. 45. Demosthenes “On Organization” par. 36. 46. Indeed, Athenian politicians, especially in the fourth century, were called rhetores. See M. H. Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes: Structure, Principle, and Ideology, trans. J. A. Crook (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 270.

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tise on character, and on the “passions” and “virtues” of human nature. As Vico puts it, “The end sought by eloquence always depends on the speaker’s audience, and he must govern his speech in accordance with their opinions,” 47 which is analogous to what Aristotle says in the Rhetoric on the speaker adapting himself to the character of his audience.48 Demosthenes’ exhortation to the people, along with Vico’s observation, highlights the problem regarding the nature and role of rhetorical knowledge originally posed by Plato (and taken up by Aristotle). The problem is addressed throughout his writings, openly and explicitly in some, tacitly and implicitly in others, and it has become a topos of most major political thinkers since the Greeks—namely, the relation between philosophy and rhetoric, knowledge and politics, reason and power.49 On the purely philosophical and epistemological level, the issue is the status of reason itself, and its relation to “truth” and “opinion.” Plato’s position on rhetoric is not as clear-cut as it appears at first sight. On the one hand, he appears to move from relentless opposition and scathing critique in the Gorgias to recognition and acceptance in the Phaedrus and the Statesman. The Gorgias establishes a fundamental distinction between knowledge and opinion, between reason and appetite, and between philosophy and power.50 These dichotomies are used to criticize Gorgias’s understanding of rhetoric as a technique by which the orator may dominate the people/audience. Speech is used either to instruct, and thus to improve the listener, or to persuade, to flatter, to satisfy the pleasures of the listener. Thus rhetoric is a form of speech, which is likened to the art of cooking, used to cater to, and to indulge, the undisciplined and restless appetites of the people. It appeals to the senses by creating the appearance of grace and pleasure in the conscious embellishments of speaking and performing. Teaching and instructing aim at knowledge (episteme), which is always true, while rhetoric aims at persuasion in order to evoke opinion (doxa) and belief 47. Giambattista Vico, De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, ed. Giovanni Gentile and Fausto Nicolini, vol. 1 of Opere (Bari: Laterza, 1914–41). Also see Vico, On the Study Methods of Our Time, trans. from the Latin and with introduction and notes by Elio Gianturco (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965). 48. Rhetoric 1.8.6 and 2.12–17. 49. See Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric, “Territorial Disputes: Philosophy Versus Rhetoric.” See also Robert Hariman, “Status, Marginality, and Rhetorical Theory,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 72 (1986): 38–54. 50. On Gorgias’s rhetoric and its relation to Plato’s Gorgias, see Wardy, Birth of Rhetoric. See also Wardy, “Rhetoric,” in Greek Thought, 465–85, and Charles Segal, “Gorgias and the Psychology of the Logos,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 66 (1962): 99–155.

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(pistis), whose truth is always contingent. What Plato wants is to show that the superior knowledge of the philosopher (or the expert/intellectual) is aimed at “what is best” for the audience/listener. In the same way that reason acts as the guide and the ruler of the soul by disciplining the appetites and controlling the passions, so too the philosopher/intellectual by means of speech and discourse (education and instruction), acts to lead the people to what is best. Thus, rather than exercising rational rule and control over appetite and desire, sophistic rhetoric gives them free rein. Plato brings the art to its logical conclusion, and makes Callicles construct a theory of Machtpolitik, whose concept of the democratic politician is the embryonic figure of the tyrant outlined in the Republic.51 Sophistic rhetoric, and the notion of politics based on it, is both product and cause of a restless desire for power, wealth, and glory, which culminates in imperial expansion and ultimate collapse. In this sense, Callicles symbolizes the unbridled desire for power that both Thucydides and Plato see in postPericlean Athenian democracy. It is interesting to note that Plato’s discussion of rhetoric prefigures Machiavelli’s formulation of the model prince. The metaphor of the fox and the lion, fraud and force, neatly captures the uses of rhetoric: “The one who knows best how to play the fox comes out best, but he must understand well how to disguise the animal’s nature and must be a great simulator and dissimulator.”52 Simulation and dissimulation—elements of what both Plato and Machiavelli call appearance, which is crucial in the construction of a given reality—are ironically dependent upon an accurate and perceptive analysis of the subject or audience (social psychology, sociocultural values, emotive symbols, language, social-political status, and so on). At the same time, the analysis must be combined with a fine psychological understanding of the relation between the nature of the audience and the emotive and dramatic symbols evoked by historical 51. See Malcolm Schofield, “Approaching the Republic,” in Rowe and Schofield, Greek and Roman Political Thought, 191–232, especially 192–98. 52. Machiavelli, The Prince, 18. Compare Machiavelli’s understanding of prudence and political virtue with Vico’s: “Our youth are seriously compromised: they are unable to engage in the life of the community with sufficient prudence, nor do they know how to infuse their speech with a knowledge of human psychology or to permeate their utterances with passion. When it comes to prudence in civil life, it is well for us to keep in mind that human events are dominated by opportunity and choice, which are extremely subject to change [quae incertissimae sunt] and which are strongly influenced by simulation and dissimulation—both preeminently deceptive things [res fallacissimae]. As a consequence, those whose only concern is truth [ qui unum verum curant ] have great difficulty in finding means to a goal and even greater in attaining their ends.” De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, in Opere, 1.91.

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memory and the geography of place and of landscape.53 The construction of cultural and ideological structures of power is the modern equivalent of rhetorical practice, and to this extent the use of fraud and deception is crucial. In the modern world, certainly, mass media and mass communication networks are sophisticated and elaborate instruments of image formation and value dissemination, an increasingly technical and technological underpinning to an activity whose theoretical foundations and practical elaboration were originally outlined and explored by the Sophists. The issue here is the status of logos itself.54 Is reason, and its expression in speech, language, and discourse, inherently and fundamentally deceptive? Gorgias seems ambiguous on the matter. As he says in the Helen, “On most subjects most people take belief as advisor to the soul,” and, “How many speakers on how many subjects have persuaded others and continue to persuade by molding false speech?”55 Yet the “molding of false speech” assumes the existence of—or at least the possibility of devising—an objective method by which false and true speech may be determined.56 Constructing such a method enables Plato to argue that the forums in which rhetoric is effective, and the ends to which Gorgias says rhetoric is directed, are not suitable to philosophic discourse and the teaching of knowledge.57 Plato hints at the possibility of reforming sophistic rhetoric in the Gorgias. Socrates asks Callicles about orators who “make the Athenians better,” and suggests a type of rhetoric informed by philosophy and knowledge—what he calls “true rhetoric”—directed to the ways and means justice may be promoted, injustice removed, and moderation instilled, and indiscipline corrected.58 He develops this idea in the Phaedrus, where the orator, by means of dialectic and philosophic discourse, acquires the necessary knowledge to see and understand reality (as opposed to appearances). Since the orator is now also philosopher, and knows the distinction

53. For an excellent discussion of this relation, that is, the interaction among rhetoric, socio-physical space, architecture and aesthetic representation, and audience/public, see Ann Vasaly, Representations: Images of the World in Ciceronian Oratory (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). 54. See, for example, Nietzsche’s discussion in “Description of Ancient Rhetoric,” 21–25, where he says that “language is rhetoric, because it desires to convey only a doxa [opinion], not an episteme [knowledge].” See also his “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense,” in Gilman, Blair, and Parent, Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, 246–57. 55. Encomium to Helen, 11, in Kennedy, Appendix IA. 56. See Guthrie, The Sophists, 180–81, 192–99. 57. Ibid., 269–74. 58. Gorgias 503C and 517A.

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between knowledge and belief, truth and opinion, reason and appetite, he is able to use deception and dissimulation for purposes of education and instruction. The point is to use rhetoric and the arts of deception to teach philosophic truth.59 What this means is that the philosopher, in addressing his audience, should be able to generate passion in them while at the same time controlling his own passion. Such an ability to generate passion coolly and with calculation demands knowledge of the constituent elements of the soul. Thus the philosopher, in order to teach and lead the people to what is best, must become an orator. Plato does not simply reject the idea that the speaker must adapt and shape his discourse to the nature and character of the audience he is addressing. The speech of the philosopher/orator is shaped in accordance with the nature of the people’s psychology in order to transform it toward the virtuous and the best. At the same time, however, Plato wants to maintain the distinction between philosophy (which teaches by means of dialectic) and rhetoric (which persuades by means of illusion and deception). Thus, in the Statesman he writes that rhetoric does not educate by means of rational discourse, but rather persuades the many (plethou) or the mob (ochlou) through myth (ochlou dia mythologiai).60 Of course, in the dialogues Socrates is presented now teaching by means of dialectic, now persuading by means of myths and legends. The first arrives at truth by means of knowledge, the second arrives at the same truth by means of illusions and fictions. In effect, we see Plato, in his analysis of rhetoric and its relation to the masses, in the process of constructing a methodology by which the telling and speaking of the philosophic truth is achieved through its antithesis—deception and dissimulation. The dual nature of the logos as the hegemon “of all things” is clearly revealed in the Republic. There Plato contrasts the logos as reason, the ruler of spirit and appetite, both guide and arbiter of truth and virtue, to the logos as rhetoric, seducer, and flatterer of the appetites and the passions. Knowledge, and those who possess knowledge, are independent of social and historical structures, such that the subject of knowledge is a reality that only reason is able to penetrate. Plato establishes the philosophic logos as the determinant of all reality and makes it master and ruler over politike praxis. Because philosophy possesses knowledge of the truth, and thus of the difference between reality and appearance, myths, legends, and liter59. Phaedrus 239E. 60. Statesman 304D.

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ary and artistic fictions are both useful and necessary to the philosopherrulers. Myths and other similar fictions, therefore, are valid when they are used to lead the people to believe right opinions. Poets, dramatists, and other artists are criticized, not because they construct illusory fictions that deceive the masses, but because Plato believes they do not know how to deceive well enough (that is, according to the philosophic logos).61 Thus: “If anyone, then, is to practise deception, either on the country’s enemies or on its citizens, it must be the Rulers of the commonwealth, acting for its benefit; no one else may meddle with this privilege.”62 In effect, to Plato rhetoric and politics are subordinate to dialectic and to philosophic reason. The foundation of true rhetoric is the science (episteme) of mind, such that rhetoric is the “art which wins men’s minds by means of words [techne psychagogia dia logon].”63 By means of words, or by means of reason, (dialogon) one will arrive at the truth, objective and independent of human perceptions, appetites, and interests. The distinction that Plato establishes between the two kinds of speech is central both to despotic and to democratic politics. “True rhetoric,” which is subject to philosophy and to dialectic, leads the mind or the soul to truth (psychagogia), and sophistic rhetoric, which is subject to appetites and passion, leads the people (that is, the many) toward ends or policies 61. See M. F. Burnyeat, “Art and Mimesis in Plato’s Republic,” London Review of Books, May 21, 1998, pp. 3–9. Both Plato and Aristotle compare politics and aesthetics, but in opposite directions and with different conclusions. To Aristotle, as also in Athenian democracy, in the same way that the ekklesia was sovereign in the polis, so too the audience or spectators, whether in drama or in the arts generally (such as architecture or sculpture), determined the winners of prizes in dramatic or artistic contests. Of course, as Burnyeat notes, such a practice is anathema to Plato. See Plato Laws 700E–701A and Republic 492B–C. As he says in the Laws, in a discussion of music, “Consequently they gave the ordinary man not only a taste for breaking the laws of music but the arrogance to set himself up as a capable judge. The audiences, once silent, began to use their tongues; they claimed to know what was good and bad in music, and instead of a rule of the best in music, a sort of vicious ‘rule of the audience’ [theatrokratia] arose. But if this democracy had been limited to gentlemen and had applied only to music, no great harm would have been done; . . . however, music proved to be the beginning of everyone’s conviction that he was an authority on everything, and of a general disregard for the law. Complete liberty was not far behind.” See Paul Cartledge, “ ‘Deep Plays’: Theatre as Process in Greek Civic Life,” in The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, ed. P. E. Easterling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 3–35. 62. Republic 388, and see 389–91. 63. Phaedrus 261B, 271D. Aristotle’s Rhetoric is based on the Phaedrus: an orator should study the various parts of the soul, and consequently the different kinds of men, in order to know what kinds of speech, and what kinds of persuasion, to use when addressing them. See Wardy, “Rhetoric,” 482–85.

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given by the ongoing power struggle (demagogia). The former is an activity that may be conducted privately or not (indeed, anywhere, because independent of political, social, and historical conditions), whereas the latter is a preeminently public activity, and cannot be conducted except in the assembly or the law courts.64 In the same way, the former leads one to episteme, whereas the latter leads one to mere opinion and, worse, to error.65 The rhetoric of Gorgias and Callicles is the breeding ground of the “spirit of liberty and equality.”66 In the democratic constitution, Plato notes, “liberty and free speech are rife everywhere; anyone is allowed to do what he likes. . . . The result will be a greater variety of individuals than under any other constitution . . . with its variegated pattern of all sorts of characters.”67 The right to say everything, and the right to pursue desires, appetites, and interests unmediated by the philosophic logos produce, avant la lettre, a Hobbesian war of all against all. The fight between the rich and the poor, between oligarchy and democracy, culminates, as we know, in the tyranny of the irrational appetite for power embodied in Plato’s famous characterization of the tyrant as a “beast” and a “wolf.”68 Plato describes the process by which class conflict and strife, conducted under conditions of isegoria and liberty, lead to tyranny and the consequent abolition of public and civic speech.69 The right to say everything ironically leads either 64. Plato makes a similar point in the Sophist (222C–D), where speech is divided between that which is practiced in the assembly and in the courts, and that which takes place in the private sphere. 65. See Republic 562B–563C. In the Statesman Socrates, comparing the statesman (guided by philosophic discourse) to party and faction leaders, calls the latter cheats, liars, and Sophists (303C). 66. Republic 563. 67. Ibid., 557. For a different and provocative discussion of parrhesia and democracy in Plato, see Monoson, Plato’s Democratic Entanglements, 3–18, 154–80. 68. Republic 566 on the tyrant as a wolf, and 493A–C on the masses as the “great beast.” It should be recalled that in book 1, when Thrasymachus joins the discussion on the nature of justice, Socrates looks “at him in terror,” calls his intervention an “onslaught,” and refers to him as a “wolf” (336). Thrasymachus, of course, espouses a theory of politics as Machtpolitik, in which right and justice are mere fictions and deceptions used to attain and maintain power. To Thrasymachus, Gorgias, and Callicles, justice has no independent, objective status: what exists is not justice, but a rhetoric of justice, not right, but a rhetoric of right. It is not an accident that Machiavelli, in his famous chapter 18 of The Prince, employs the rhetorical figures and metaphors of the beast (the fox, the lion, and the centaur) when discussing the “ways of fighting”—that is, politics understood as conflict and competition. 69. Plato, like a philosopher/ruler who develops myths and narratives in order to teach a higher truth and a higher morality, develops stages of political change purely for pedagogic purposes. As such, his theory of revolutionary change should be seen in light of his rhetorical theory. The historical reality in the ancient Greek polis is that democracy emerged

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to speechlessness or to subservient flattery. By flattering the people through rhetoric and public speech the orator becomes a tyrant, and rhetoric/flattery is now redirected toward the tyrant. However, Plato attacks tyranny, not because it silences public speech, but because it represents the rule of the lowest appetites. The opposite of tyranny is not democracy, but the rule of philosophy. Indeed, while democracy, which is described by a multiplicity of appetites and a variety of interests, produces tyranny, which is characterized by the appetite for domination, tyranny, once properly instructed and educated by philosophy, may lead to the just state where reason rules. In either case, public speech, once replaced by public reason, is superfluous. As Tacitus notes, writing about the status of oratory in Rome under imperial rule: “The orator gets an inferior and less splendid renown where a sound morality and willing obedience to authority prevail. What need there of long speeches in the Senate, when the best men are soon of one mind, or endless harangues to the people, when political questions are decided not by an ignorant multitude, but by one man of preeminent wisdom [ sapientissimus et unus ]?”70 Nevertheless, “true” rhetoric in Plato performs a necessary political and social function: it is the means by which the philosopher leads the masses to accept a sociopolitical and sociocultural reality manufactured and constructed by philosophical reason. The philosopher devises myths and fables (simulation and dissimulation, in Machiavelli’s and Vico’s terms), and uses rhetoric to disseminate them. As such, rhetoric in Plato is the means by which the reason and knowledge of the philosopher are transformed into faith and religion in order to generate within the people support and consent for the state. In the Republic politics and rhetoric (as free speech) are abolished.71 And where philosophy and reason rule, speech is only a means to instruct the masses. from tyranny, not the reverse as Plato would have it. Because of social and economic changes tyrants arose who destroyed the power base of the traditional landed aristocracy, established hoplite armies of citizen-soldiers, and established their power on the emerging classes of commoners (such as peasants of means, traders, merchants, artisans, etc.). A transitional form of government, tyranny generally created the conditions for the emergence of oligarchies or democracies. On this, see A. Andrewes, The Greek Tyrants (London: Hutchinson, 1956). For our purposes, however, it is important to note that in traditional aristocracies— where blood lineage and an ethics of honor are crucial—the idea of logos as the giving of an account for one’s actions is meaningless: an aristocrat does not explain his actions (certainly not to an inferior). From an aristocratic and traditional point of view, giving a rational account is an ethic of the base and the vulgar, and therefore eminently democratic. 70. Tacitus Dialogus par. 41. 71. More precisely, in the Republic Plato, as Aristotle saw, tried to create the private sphere of the family or household writ large, such that the speech which would instruct and

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At the same time, what is most interesting is that Plato links liberty, equality, and free speech with expansion and empire. The release of appetitive energy, unrestrained by moral reason, yet consciously directed by an instrumental and calculating intelligence, leads to conflict and competition within the state, and to the consequent refocusing of these energies toward foreign adventures and conquests. Pericles and Cleon recognize that democratic Athens is despotic and tyrannical. Indeed, there is a direct connection between the radical democratic character of the state and its imperialistic policy. Empire provided the economic and material base necessary to support the radical democracy. In addition, as both Plato and Thucydides understood, there is a connection between economic and social conflict at home (the struggle between “those who hold and those who are without property”)72 and imperial expansion abroad. They directly relate expansion, or acquisition of property, to internal dissension and internal strife, which they deem pernicious to the state, whereas the Sophists see strife and factionalism as salutary to the life and growth of the state. Thus, internal acquisition (the conflict within the democratic state over the ownership and accumulation of property) is translated into external acquisition (empire). Philosophic thought in the ancient world after Plato, whatever its differentiation into various and bitterly antagonistic schools, retains the supremacy of philosophic reason over all other forms of activity. Politically and socially, the victory of philosophy over rhetoric signals the decline and fall of the polis and its ekklesia, and the consequent rise of the Hellenistic monarchies. Thus various forms of Stoicism turned their attention to the education and cultivation of a wise and philosophic ruler, the only kind of political speculation relevant—and possible—within a despotic order.73 In effect, logos hegemon is constituted by two different forms, or ways, of thought and discourse, each revolving around the other in a reciprocal and competitive, if not contradictory, tension. Logos as speech and language presents a form of knowledge that depends upon the subject that knows

shape people’s souls by means of words would become possible and be realized within the polis as a whole. By transforming the polis into a household ruled by the philosopher, Plato was able to transform the rhetoric of Gorgias into the “true rhetoric” of dialectic. 72. James Madison, Federalist No. 10. 73. See Bruce A. Kimball, Orators and Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1986), chap. 1, and Sinclair, History of Greek Political Thought, 239–61, 287–301. See also Saxonhouse, “Tacitus’ Dialogue on Oratory,” 53–55, 65–67.

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or bears this knowledge, as well as on the object to which the knowledge is addressed. As such, it is fluid and in constant movement, and dependent upon context and perspective of both subject and object. Indeed, it is the product of this interaction between the two terms. This is the sophistic knowledge against which Plato wrote, and in response to which he constructed his own version of the logos as philosophic reason. Speech and language inevitably lead the discussion, not only to a consideration of the nature and role of ethnicity, nation, and people, but also to a critical analysis of social, economic, and psychological factors. From its structural characteristics, such as syntax, grammar, and idiom, to its elaboration in various literary genres, from the beginnings of critical thinking on rhetorical discourse in Magna Graecia attempts were made to derive and specify concrete expressions and manifestations that together would constitute the life and culture of a given people. Isocrates, who looked at speech and rhetoric as a form of knowledge, understood Hellas as a cultural unit precisely on this basis. A way of life resting on a shared culture and on common language and literature provided for Isocrates the basis on which the jealous and fiercely competitive Greek city-states could come together.74 Speech and language, therefore, take root and develop within a particular and concrete sociospatial context, such as Athens or Syracuse, and are expressed in a specific and individual language, such as Ionian or Doric. The particularities that rhetorical discourse identifies generate a relativistic and skeptical outlook on life and the world.75 Thus sophistic thought is not only inherently democratic, but also demagogic in character—where demagogic is here understood in its original meaning, as leadership of the people.76 All of which points to the centrality of rhetoric as a theory and as a practice. On the other hand, logos as philosophic reason as we find in Plato aspires to the ideal of an ahistorical, universal form of knowledge whose “truth” or validity is independent of the context within which it may have arisen or within which it is inserted. It tends toward a universality that, in its architechtonic desire to locate politics and society within an ordered cos74. See Too, The Rhetoric of Identity in Isocrates, 179–81, 183–84, and Jaeger, Paideia, 3:79. 75. See Schiappa, Protagoras and Logos, 117–33, and Guthrie, The Sophists, 181–88. Guthrie, referring to Protagoras’s famous epigram metron anthropon, says that it encapsulates the notion that “there was no reality behind and independent of appearances, no difference between appearing and being, and we are each the judge of our own impressions.” The Sophists, 186. Such a subjectivism and individualism necessarily negate an “all-embracing” good for all, and emphasize the importance of the particular and the concrete. 76. Hansen, Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes, 268.

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mos, would level, or negate, the multiform particularities issuing from the speech and languages of diverse social groups. These particularities, with their multiple variety and antagonistic differences, are relegated to the realm of appearance and deceptive fictions, and they are given value only to the extent that philosophy may use them to establish a higher unity and a greater totality. Thus, logos as reason and logos as speech and language: in the one, reason is autonomous, and master of desire and appetite, and in the other, reason is a calculating and instrumental faculty, and the servant of appetites and desires. The first expresses the absolute integrity of reason, and thus of thought, in confrontation with the world; the other, their mutual penetration and permeability. Such a simultaneous antagonism and interdependence of the two are neatly captured in Cicero’s formula, ratio et oratio: reason and speech together are the foundation of politics and the state.77 Cicero is certainly conscious of the moral and intellectual controversies of the various Greek schools concerning the relation between philosophy and rhetoric. He translates the philosophy and culture of a highly sophisticated and intellectual world into the much more primitive, less articulate, and certainly less intellectual environment of the Roman political and ruling class.78 Yet in the debate between philosophy and rhetoric, philosophy and politics, Cicero seems to return to Isocrates’ understanding of rhetoric.79 It is a technique and method by which power may be acquired, but also, precisely because it is a means to power, it assumes a determinate political, moral, and social order within which it acquires meaning and value.80 The struggle within the ruling class between the populares and the optimates, which began with 77. Cicero De officiis 1.50. 78. See George Kennedy, The Art of Rhetoric in the Roman World, 300 B.C.–A.D. 300 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 4–10, 23–24, 29–38, 53–55, 61–71; see also his discussion of Cicero as both orator and theorist of oratory. And see M. L. Clarke, Rhetoric at Rome: A Historical Survey (London: Routledge, 1996). 79. On Cicero and Isocrates, see S. E. Smethurst, “Cicero and Isocrates,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 84 (1953): 262–320. 80. In De oratore 3.16.60–61, Cicero criticizes the Platonic distinction, and has Crassus say: “Whereas the persons engaged in handling and pursuing and teaching the subjects that we are now investigating were designated by a single title (the whole study and practice of the liberal sciences being called philosophy), Socrates robbed them of this general designation, and in his discussions separated the science of wise thinking from that of elegant speaking, though in reality they are closely linked together. . . . This is the source from which has sprung the undoubtedly absurd and unprofitable and reprehensible severance between the tongue and the brain, leading to our having one set of professors to teach us to think and another to teach us to speak.”

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the Gracchi brothers’ attempt to reform Roman politics and society (around 133 b.c.e.), and which eventually culminated in the fall of the republic and the rise of military dynasts, shows the uses to which oratory could be put in organizing, deploying, and leading the Roman citizenry, both for and against various factions. Cicero’s distinction81 between oratory and discourse or conversation— what he calls contentio and sermo—embodies the antinomies between rhetoric and philosophy, and also encapsulates the contradictions inherent in the notions of speech and discourse. Sermo to Cicero is a form of speech conducted within an elite or narrow context for the purpose of ascertaining what is true, whereas contentio is a form of speech used to bring a mass audience to action or to a decision.82 As discussed earlier, rhetoric or oratory presupposes a public that the politician/speaker is seeking to convince and to persuade. As such, it is alert to the passion, mood, temper, and language of the people. In so doing, the orator, rather than “commanding obedience”83 from his audience in order to lead them to a virtuous state only the speaker can see, is compelled to adapt and to conform to the needs and individual character of his hearers. The public, like the audience in a Greek tragedy, is the judge of the orator’s argument and of his performance. At the same time, however, as both Gorgias and Tacitus show, the orator, precisely because of his skill in rhetoric, and of his knowledge of the psychology and character of his audience, is able to shape and to mold the opinions—that is, as Gorgias says in the Helen, the orator, “by persuading the soul that . . . [ he] persuaded, constrained her both to obey what was said and to approve what was done.” Cicero, like Plato, makes reason the arbiter of the natural law that maintains the social order, and thus establishes a dichotomy between those who reason and those who do not (or simply reason less). In this case only those

81. Cicero De officiis 1.37.132: “The power of speech . . . is great, and its function is twofold: the first is oratory [ contentionis]; the second, conversation [sermonis]. Oratory is the kind of discourse to be employed in pleadings in court and speeches in popular assemblies [contionum ] and in the senate; conversation should find its natural place in social gatherings, in philosophical discussions, and among friends, and at dinner parties [convivia].” And in De finibus 2.6.17, he talks about the “rhetoric of the philosophers” and the rhetoric of the courts. Cicero’s lament, that no one teaches the art of conversation, is reminiscent of Plato’s: the rhetoricians teach the young aristocrats how to use speech to make a career and gain power, but no one teaches them how to reason to virtue and to acquire humanitas. As he notes in De officiis 1.37.134, the Socratics offer the best models for speech as conversation. 82. See Remer, “Political Oratory and Conversation,” for an extended discussion. 83. Nederman, “Rhetoric, Reason, and Republic.”

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who are rational are able to rule, and the people must be guided and led by rulers who know what is just and virtuous. Cicero’s argument for natural law and natural reason leads to the distinction between the wise, who are the natural rulers, and the ignorant or foolish, who are necessarily the followers. Since the wise not only know the good, but use reason to discipline their appetites and desires, the ruler “considers the welfare of the people rather than their wishes.” 84 Here the statesman is not only an orator, but also a philosopher: he does not merely wish to gain the consent or assent of the people, but also wants to guide and lead them to the good life, one which, of course, only the wise ruler can ascertain. Cicero’s ideal state attempts to institutionalize the divorce between the few who are rational and the many who are not by making the Senate the center of power and leadership.85 In effect, rhetoric or speech presupposes an active citizenry, whereas reason or philosophy presupposes a passive one. In one case speech is used to lead the people to a particular action; in the second, reason is used by the wise to discover the moral good and impose it on the ignorant. The distinction between rhetoric and philosophy, contentio and sermo, appetite and reason, brings up two crucial points that underlie most arguments regarding democratic and republican politics. One is the position taken on the relative competence (or lack thereof) of the people. Rhetoric and open debate are possible only if one assumes, as, for example, Machiavelli does, that the people are rational and competent. Certainly Machiavelli is conscious of going directly against a long tradition of regarding the people as incompetent and inconstant.86 Underlying critiques of rhetoric as an 84. Cicero De re publica 1.6.8. 85. Cicero’s espousal of the concordia ordinum, and of the consensus universorum bonorum, under the leadership of the nobiles organized and institutionalized in the Senate, seems curious for an orator whose skill and power depends upon conflict and antagonistic debate. On the other hand, such an alliance of “honest men”—the senatorial oligarchy—is the only kind of republican alternative he could offer to oppose the rise of the imperatores such as Pompey and Caesar. Cicero’s position, both in relation to the factional leaders within Rome, and to Caesar the proconsul exercising the imperium militiae in Gaul, shows the weakness of oratory when not used to mobilize and to harness the plebs into a disciplined fighting force, either politically as a faction or militarily into an army. 86. The Prince, 9. See also, the Discourses, 1.58, in Machiavelli, Chief Works, vol. 1, where he tries to refute the opinion of Livy and “all other historians” that the multitude is “unreliable and inconstant . . . arrogant” and domineering. In Machiavelli, though the people are capable of being rational and competent, they may not always act so. It is significant that Machiavelli believes that the many, when misguided and in error, may be led back to reason and guided by the use of “words” and “arguments,” while a prince, once having become

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agonistic form of public speaking is an open or tacit belief that the many— the masses, the demos minus the oi agathoi of Plato, the boni and the honesti of Cicero, the uomini savi e di buone case of Guicciardini, to mention a few of many examples—as a collective entity are dominated by passion, and are undisciplined and ignorant. They do not reason; they feel. Subject to the exigent and irrepressible forces of diverse and sometimes conflicting appetites, they lack the rational self-control necessary to ruling. For rule implies self-mastery, the ability to command and obey oneself. The demagogue and the tyrant, whether Plato’s or Machiavelli’s, whether issuing from the many or the few, exhibit political and psychological traits similar to those of the masses. They may have mastered the techniques of persuasion and flattery, but their cupido dominandi has mastered their minds and souls. Thus, Plato in the Gorgias attacks rhetoric as simply catering to the people, flattering them and manipulating their appetites, while in the Phaedrus he tries to devise a form of rhetoric that will combine the rationality and wisdom of the philosopher with the rhetorical art. Yet his basic understanding of the many does not change: whether it is used by the orator/ politician to manipulate the desires of the people in order to gain power, or whether the philosopher resorts to rhetoric in order to teach and to control the people, the basic antinomy between the competent few and the ignorant, irrational many remains. In the Protagoras, Protagoras says that politics, because it issues from speech and language, is an art that may be shared by all—in the same way that in Aristotle speech and polis determine each other. But this is not good enough for Plato. What he wants is not life or power, but the good life as given by the philosophic logos, and to him this leads to a hierarchy of value distinctions that is incompatible with Protagoras’s refusal or inability to make such distinctions. Socrates may agree with Protagoras’s founding myth, yet the agreement is more apparent than real, for later Socrates forces Protagoras to agree that all virtue, since it is knowledge, is one. Thus Socrates implies that teaching only one kind of excellence is impossible. On the other hand, there is no question that Plato uses and appropriates Protagoras’s teaching about politics and rhetoric. Protagoras begins by looking at the polis as an association or institution necessary for the preservation of life, and concludes by seeing it as an association of people united by mind and established for the good life. tyrannical, requires steel—a remedy which, though mute and speechless, is nevertheless quite meaningful and effective.

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This leads to the second point, which is somewhat epistemological, and deals with the status of philosophy, and its basis, reason. Either reason is an autonomous faculty capable of discovering a preexisting or a given good, such that only the select rational few are able to rule; or reason is contingent, inextricably interwoven with socioeconomic interests, and thus dependent upon the social and political activity of the people. In the first case reason and appetite are opposed, with reason superior to appetite. In the second, each informs the other, and is shaped by the other; the good and public reason are now the products of the competitive activity of the antagonistic factions that constitute the people. While Plato and Aristotle, despite their differences, are quite clear on the matter, Cicero seems to be ambivalent, or rather, somewhat contradictory. He certainly prefers the narrow circle of the senatorial aristocracy, within which he may pursue the gentlemanly activities of politics, philosophy, and literature. Yet he knows, as a consummate orator, that the power and position of the ruling notables depend upon the support and manipulation of the Roman populus—those very masses to whom he directs such contempt and disgust.87 Cicero’s contrast between contentio and sermo highlights these distinctions. What he also shows is that there is a relation between political and 87. On the one hand, Cicero insists on the importance and primacy of politics, of the statesman, and of the man of action. Politics and action are crucial to the public good of the patria, which to Cicero is the supreme end. The good of the statesman is closely related to the good of his country. Thus Cicero says, statesmen “must strive . . . by whatever means they can, whether in war or at home, to increase the republic in power [that is, expansion and empire], in land, and in revenues. Such service calls for great men.” De officiis 2.24.85. On the other hand, to achieve the good, one must also know what is good, and thus the statesman needs the philosopher’s knowledge, or in Plato’s words, the statesman must become philosopher, or the philosopher statesman. Not only must the statesman concern himself with necessity and with life—that is, with the useful and the instrumental—but also with the good life, that is to say, with the generation and dissemination of the moral virtues. Cicero wants to show that the morally good is instrumentally useful, in the same way that the useful is also moral. Machiavelli regards this argument as counterproductive and forced. Either philosophy trumps politics, or politics is “autonomous,” that is, it is an activity independent of other spheres of human endeavor, and thus a sphere possessing a knowledge and a technique independent of other forms of knowledge. The question regarding the autonomy of politics is related to Cicero’s conflation of rationality and sociability, or reason and speech, ratio et oratio. To Cicero community is based on speech and reason. Indeed, each would seem to presuppose the other. Cicero’s depiction of the origin of community and civilized life as emerging from the ratio et oratio of an original orator-founder underlines Cicero’s belief in the complementary character of reason and speech, philosophy and rhetoric. In any case, Machiavelli explodes such a conflation. Ratio et oratio to Machiavelli assumes a political and social condition which must be established, because it is not given in

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institutional structures and kinds of speech and discourse. Conversation presupposes a closed—even elite or aristocratic—space, for it is here that reason finds its domain; whereas rhetoric requires a wider, open, and more popular forum. In addition, the distinction between the two forms of speech recalls the dual nature or meaning of the Greek logos: speech as reason, and speech as language or rhetoric. It also recalls Plato’s dichotomy between rhetoric used to address and merely to persuade (demagogia) the masses, and rhetoric used to lead the wise to truth and knowledge ( psychagogia). Yet contentio takes into account the entire complex of human nature, whereas sermo addresses the purely rational (as well as, perhaps, the aesthetic). Thus, the orator addressing a mass audience must use not merely logos (reason or argument) but also ethos and pathos in order to move his audience to action.

nature, as Cicero assumes. Thus, while Cicero sees the orator as the exemplar of the founder, Machiavelli uses two images as exempla of the founder: the armed prophet and the centaur. Law (that is, deliberation and thus speech) and force are together necessary both for the founding and for the maintaining of a state (not to mention its expansion). Machiavelli, in his reference to Sallust and to the conspiracy of Catilina, is alert to the paradox of Cicero’s use of extraconstitutional (extra ordine) means in order to save the constitution (ordine).

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2 democratic deliberation and the historian’s trade: the case of thucydides Arlene W. Saxonhouse

Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. —Oliver Wendell Holmes1

On what basis do we take political action? Hobbes, describing the mental processes preceding action, writes: “When in the mind of man, appetites and aversions, hopes and fears concerning one and the same thing arise alternately; and diverse good and evil consequences of the doing, or omitting the thing propounded . . . [this] is what we call deliberation. . . . Every deliberation is then said to end, when that whereof they deliberate, is either done, or thought impossible.”2 Hobbes here is describing the mental life of the individual, but his story also captures the process of deliberation in democratic assemblies. Going back one step: on what basis do we assess the “diverse good and evil consequences of the doing, or omitting the thing propounded.” What is the basis of the knowledge that underlies our deliberation—as individuals or as communities? Much discussion lately has centered around the nature of democratic deliberation.3 A return to the practice of the democratic assembly of the ancient Greek world through the lens of Thucydides’ historical craft points to the analogous dependence of democratic deliberation and the historian’s trade on “imperfect

1. Epigraph. Holmes Dissent, Abrams v. United States 1919 (250 U.S. 630). 2. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (1651; Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), with selected variants from the Latin edition of 1668, chap. 6. 3. The recent literature is vast; I refer to only a fraction of it in the following discussion.

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knowledge.” Justifications for democratic deliberation may wittingly or unwittingly lie in that analogy.4 Near the beginning of his History, Thucydides explains his historical method. He complains that men take what they hear (tas akoas) and do not test (abananistôs) it. As examples of the lack of care in evaluating what one hears, he cites the popular version of the story of the tyrannicides Harmodius and Aristogeiton and the belief that the Lacedaemonian kings have two rather than one vote—so careless (atalaipôros), he says, is the search for the truth among hoi polloi.5 He, Thucydides, in contrast, depends on spoken evidence (ek eirêmenôn tôn tekmêriôn, 1.21.1), accepting which “one does not make a mistake [ hamartanoi ].” He relies, he tells us, on the most manifest signs (ek tôn epiphanestatôn sêmeiôn, 1.21.1). These principles he applies to the study of this greatest of movements, the war between Athens and Lacedaemonia. Behind his History, then, is the evaluation of evidence he has acquired largely through speech; this means, in particular, the evaluation of the stories that he has heard from others, for he must rely on what others report in order to cover the vast details of the war. Earlier in book 1, Thucydides reflects that if Lacedaemonia were to be deserted with only the temples and the foundations of the structures left standing, men would be unbelieving (apistian, 1.10.1) of her power or that her fame matched her power, though she controlled, at the time that Thucydides writes, two fifths of the Peloponnese. On the other hand, Thucydides remarks, if Athens were to suffer the same fate, it is likely that the appearance of the city would make her seem twice as large a power as she is at Thucydides’ time. So much for the reliability of sight as the basis for accurate knowledge about the power of cities. Thucydides, while dismissing the mere stories Homer and Herodotus tell, reveals his own dependence on the stories of others as he moves in his methodological paragraph to clarify the status of the speeches that he records. Though some speeches he claims to have heard himself, others (most?) were told to him from other places (tois allothen pothen emoi apaggel4. Though Thucydides is familiar to many a political scientist as the originator of the realist approach to the study of international relations, Thucydides as a student of relations within cities has not been a frequent denizen of the political science / political theory literature. Exceptions are Steven Forde, “Varieties of Realism: Thucydides and Machiavelli,” Journal of Politics 54 (1992): 372–93, and Arlene W. Saxonhouse, “Nature and Convention in Thucydides,” Polity 10 (1978): 461–87. This chapter is in part an effort to redress that imbalance. 5. Thucydides The Peloponnesian War 1.20.3. Hereafter references to Thucydides will be by book, chapter, and sentence.

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lousin, 1.22.1). Precise reporting being impossible, Thucydides writes the speeches pretty much as what is needed (ta deonta malista, 1.22.1), deducing what was necessary given the circumstances. With this language he gives the reader the aura of a concern with precision, but he also reveals the dependence he must have had on his own imagination to discover “that which is necessary.” For the narrative, he repeats, he relied on what he saw, but also on what others saw and later reported to him. But, and this is the passage I want to stress, it took a great effort (epiponôs, 1.22.3) to sort out what he was told, given the prejudices and faulty memories of those who retold their stories to him. Always, Thucydides recognizes, the stories told to him are shaded by prejudice (eunoia) and the uncertainties of human memory (1.22.2–3). I suggest that to write his history Thucydides performs the same intellectual exercises that must go on in democratic assemblies, where, in order to deliberate about the actions a city is to take, the ecclesiasts must evaluate and test, just as Thucydides does, the biased stories spoken before them. Socrates in Plato’s Protagoras describes the experts whose advice the ecclesiasts must assess. “When we are collected for the Assembly, and the city has to deal with an affair of building, we send for builders to advise us on what is proposed to be built; and when it is a case of laying down a ship, we send for shipwrights.” 6 Aristotle in book 3, chapter 11, of the Politics remarks on the benefits of the wisdom of the many—like a potluck dinner, each brings some advantage to the deliberations in the assembly. But neither explores the problem that Thucydides poses: how do we know whether the people are saying what is true, how do we know that the participants in the assembly examining the expert ask whether the expert is giving advice to help or harm the city, or whether the multitude who participate express their views openly without subterfuge? It is Thucydides who is so aware of the self-interested passions that drive humans and cities, it is Thucydides faced with the sorting through of self-interest, the biased reporting of views and expertise, who recognizes the need, not just to listen to what the experts say or what people claim to have seen or heard, but to understand those claims as tinged by bias. Successful deliberation requires more than expert advice and the blending together of various opinions. It requires an awareness of human nature that a historian like Thucydides employs in his reading of his sources. Those at the assembly, Thucydides’ book indicates, faced the same challenges and had to resolve 6. Plato Protagoras (Lamb translation) 319b.

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the problems in the same way that he had to in developing his historical method. It is the understanding of the historian’s craft and the presentation of the challenges that confront historical knowledge that make his readers aware of the challenges that confront democratic assemblies as well. The historian’s craft becomes a model for democratic deliberation. Thucydides’ reporting of his history offers democrats a harsh reminder of the difficulties that confront efforts at deliberation. Like the practice of history, it requires hard work and a sensitivity to faults of human nature. Recent democratic theorists, building on the work of Jürgen Habermas, envision a democratic process of deliberation in which the deliberators must be good faith actors with mutual respect in search of public reason or moral justifications for policies.7 Habermas has indeed placed deliberation at the front of contemporary theorists’ stage;8 the appeal of his requirements for reasoned conversations rests in part on carrying democratic principles of engagement beyond the goal of mere liberty from oppression to claims for a moral foundation for the engagement of citizens and their actions. It is a noble vision in which the institutions allow for the reasoned “conversations” leading to actions that can be justified on the basis of moral claims.9 The portrait of democratic deliberation in the first democratic regime that emerges from Thucydides’ history is very different.10 Those speaking to the assemblies of Thucydides’ history and to Thucydides himself are prejudiced and motivated by self-interest. Neither the assembly nor Thucydides has the luxury of listening to or engaging in discourse among

7. For example, Joshua Cohen, “Democracy and Liberty,” in Deliberative Democracy, ed. Jon Elster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Seyla Benhabib, “Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy,” in Benhabib, Democracy and Difference, 67–94; Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement: Why Moral Conflict Cannot Be Avoided in Politics, and What Should be Done About It (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996). 8. Stephen Salkever, “The Deliberative Model of Democracy and Aristotle’s Ethics of Natural Questions” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, 1998), refers to “deliberative democracy” as “a recent neo-Kantian way of thinking about what makes a good democracy that has gained wide academic support and may now be the most influential alternative to the model of constitutional or liberal democracy.” His first footnote summarizes well some of the recent literature. 9. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996). 10. The Greek word bouleuô is commonly translated as “to take counsel” or “to deliberate.” The Athenian assembly, the ekklesia, would meet “to take counsel.” The administrative body called the Boulê set the agenda for the assembly’s deliberations.

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those motivated by communal welfare and marked by mutual respect for one another. No Habermasian ideal speech situation flourishes in the world of Thucydides. Rather, Thucydides and those sitting in the ekklesia must take account of prejudices that govern human nature, prejudices about which the historian is prepared to teach his democratic readers. They both, the historian and the ecclesiast, must labor under the uncertainty of the logoi that come from prejudiced and self-interested individuals whether they present themselves as experts or not.11 The Thucydidean contrast between the historian and the ecclesiast lies in the opposition between word and action: the ecclesiasts’ efforts must end in action, Thucydides’ in mental clarity, “seeing clearly” (to saphes skopein) (1.22.4). Thucydides’ text is open to the constant revision that famously has frustrated scholars caught up in the challenges of the Thukydidesfrage, the question of the stages of composition of a work that was written over three decades with ample time for reevaluation of earlier assertions.12 Deliberators can revise (as we see in the cases of Mytilene and Sicily); but the plane of political action is not forever open as is a literary text of the sort Thucydides composes. Both, though, must prophesy, in Holmes’s phrase, on the basis of uncertain knowledge. Dreams of an ideal speech situation are far from the practice of politics in the first democracy 11. Contemporary theorists of deliberative democracy are sometimes aware of the difficulties that plague deliberators even in the best of discourse settings: see Benhabib, “Toward a Deliberative Model,” on relativism, and Gary Remer, “Political Oratory and Conversation: Cicero Versus Deliberative Democracy,” Political Theory 27, no. 1 (1999): 39–64, on Cicero; also Simone Chambers, Reasonable Democracy: Jürgen Habermas and the Politics of Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 158: “A discursive approach to the dilemmas, conflicts, and tensions of modern society stands somewhere between the view that all problems are amenable to rational solution (it is only a matter of time) and an approach that accentuates the intractability of the dilemmas. . . . Discourse ethics offers no theoretical guarantee that discourse will be successful or somehow always could be successful if only we were all of good will.” See also Bernard Manin, “On Legitimacy and Political Deliberation,” Political Theory 15, no. 3 (1987): 338–68. Jon Elster introduces Deliberative Democracy with a quotation from Pericles’ funeral oration in which Pericles, praising the Athenians, remarks on their refusal to see words (tous logous) as a hindrance (blaben) to deeds, but rather as a necessary predecessor to action. Elster properly notes that despite this noble vision, “Athenian democracy was also the birthplace of the tendency to debunk discussion as sophistry or demagoguery,” and concludes by comparing the debates before the Athenian assemblies to forensic speeches before juries rather than to the goal imagined by the advocates of deliberative democracy. As such Athenian democracy loses for him the focus on the moral life that deliberative democracy’s advocates have tried to reintroduce to our democratic theories. 12. See Clifford Orwin, The Humanity of Thucydides (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 5–7, for a discussion of this debate.

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and from the historian’s craft. The question Thucydides’ text raises is whether this is a problem that we can address through exhortation or whether it is simply the nature of political life and historical research. Rather than diminish the democratic regime of the ancients because they do not achieve this model, Thucydides’ text alerts us to democracy’s potential where the uncertainty at the basis of all actions and reports opens up for the community the opportunity for reassessment and revision of decisions. The democratic assembly acknowledges the biases and uncertainties of speech. When Thucydides reports the speeches given in the assemblies, he offers the readers the information that the assemblymen used to evaluate what actions they were to take. The reader with access to Thucydides’ narrative knows that the information presented is neither adequate nor complete. In contrast, Thucydides himself does not take us through his own testing activities to illustrate how he sifted through the biased speeches that he heard, those tainted with eunoia, to present his own version of the war. We never learn whom he himself chose to believe or why. In this context Adam Parry’s distinction between Thucydides and Herodotus is especially relevant. Parry writes that Thucydides’ very reluctance to speak of himself, his way of stating all as an ultimate truth, is . . . one of his most subjective aspects. When you say, “so-and-so gave me this account of what happened, and it seems a likely version,” you are objective about your relation to history. But when, without discussing sources, you present everything as auta ta erga [the deeds themselves] . . . , the way it really happened, you are forcing the reader to look through your eyes, imposing your own assumptions and interpretations of events.13 By including the speeches of the assemblies Thucydides enables us to see the Herodotean background that underlies his own hidden efforts to produce a history. The subjective presentation of facts that occurs in the assembly enables us to see the challenge that faces both the historian and the city, the difficulty of evaluating the stories told, of accounting for the biases and self-interest that motivates all speakers of tales—whether before an assembly or the critical ear of a Thucydides. 13. Adam Parry, “Thucydides’ Historical Perspective,” Yale Classical Studies 22 (1972): 48.

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Thucydides’ history is a complex mix of narrative and speeches; some of the speeches are exhortations by generals to their soldiers urging courage in battle, some are the pleas by ambassadors from a city that feels threatened in one fashion or another seeking support from Athens or Sparta. Three are stand-alone speeches by Pericles. There are as well four sets of speeches that record a city’s deliberations: the debate at Sparta about how to respond to the speeches of the Corinthians and the Athenians that precipitate the war; the Mytilenian Debate of book 3; and the debates at Athens and at Syracuse that introduce book 6.14 These are not legislative debates about the creation of self-binding laws, but deliberations about the immediate actions that a city is to take with regard to its relations with other cities (e.g., whether to launch a major military campaign against a distant island), about actions that will engage and commit the lives of all. A recent book by Harvey Yunis15 captures the usual reading of Thucydides on democratic deliberation when he prefaces the section of his book on ancient democratic rhetoric by describing Thucydides as an “Athenian political thinker [who] responded in depth and at length to the problem [my italics] of rhetoric in Athenian politics” and when he uses the subheading “Scenes of Demagoguery” to describe the debates about Pylos and Sicily.16 Yunis’s view recalls many other readings that hark back to the famous Hobbesian phrase about Thucydides liking democratic government least.17 In what follows I try to cast a more positive light on what Thucydides is saying about democracy by studying what happens during the debate about Sicily. I discuss the two assemblies in book 6 to suggest analogies between the epistemology of the historian and that of the democratic assembly rather than their opposition. This gives quite a different picture of the task of democratic deliberation than the one inaugurated by contemporary proponents of deliberative democracy. Modern theorists 14. There are also a number of occasions when Thucydides uses indirect discourse to describe such debates, but these occasions do not capture the complexity of the issues surrounding deliberation that he brings to his reports of speeches that he says were given. William C. West III, “The Speeches in Thucydides: A Description and Listing,” in The Speeches in Thucydides: A Collection of Original Studies with a Bibliography, ed. Philip A. Stadter (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), provides a valuable list of all the direct and indirect speeches in Thucydides’ History. 15. Harvey Yunis, Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Classical Athens (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). 16. Ibid., 58, 101. 17. See Thomas Hobbes, Thucydides, ed. Richard Schlatter (1628; New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1975), 13.

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focus on the moral dimension of deliberation. Thucydides’ assemblies deliberate about what is in the city’s self-interest.18 My argument is in part a response to a series of stimulating studies of Thucydides by Josiah Ober, who raises similar questions about the status of historical knowledge and the nature of the debates described by Thucydides. Ober, interested in the “literary resistance to Athenian civic ideology,” has written widely and with great insight on Thucydides as an elite critic of Athenian democracy. In one of several pieces on Thucydides he discusses the debate between Nicias and Alcibiades in book 6.19 Ober’s understanding of Thucydides the critic rests in this article and elsewhere20 on the distinction he draws between historical knowledge and democratic knowledge; historical knowledge is lacking among the people, who therefore make decisions that harmed their cities. This, in Ober’s argument, is the basis for Thucydides’ attack against the lower classes who rule in democracies. Ober ends his 1994 article with the reassurance that “we certainly need not accept Thucydides’ pessimistic conclusions about public speech and collective action.”21 Ober, however, prefaces this remark by noting the “vulnerability to falsification on the empirical basis of observable ‘realities’” of any political theory (including, presumably, Thucydides’ History) that claims accurate knowledge about the recent past.22 In his later book, Ober continues to point to some of the ambiguities that touch Thucydides’ claims concerning what Ober has called historical knowledge—but even more so: “In contrast to the many he [Thucydides] claims to have checked out (epexelthôn) the truth of reports exhaustively. What exactly does this process entail? How are narratives of past events put to the test? What is the touchstone by which the historian tests the gold content of other’s accounts? Yet the master craftsman will not reveal his secrets, and the anticipated revelation never comes.”23 Ober, who earlier had been 18. Diodotus, who may indeed be speaking from the perspective of justice, must frame his argument in the language of the self-interest of Athens in order to be persuasive; see Orwin, “The Just and the Advantageous in Thucydides: The Case of the Mytilenian Debate,” American Political Science Review 78 (1984): 485–94. 19. Josiah Ober, “Civic Ideology and Counterhegemonic Discourse: Thucydides on the Sicilian Debate,” in Athenian Identity and Civic Ideology, ed. Alan L. Boegehold and Adele C. Scafuro (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), chap. 2. 20. For example, Josiah Ober, “Thucydides’ Criticism of Democratic Knowledge,” in Nomodeiktes: Greek Studies in Honor of Martin Ostwald, ed. Ralph M. Rosen and Joseph Farrell (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), and Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 21. Ober, “Civic Ideology and Counterhegemonic Discourse,” 118. 22. Ibid. 23. Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens, 60.

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committed to a distinction between democratic and historical knowledge here begins to admit the tentativeness of historical knowledge as well and to elide the difference between the two. I want to affirm their similarity and its importance, not grudgingly admit that it exists. Thucydides himself points to the difficulty of acquiring accurate knowledge on which to make decisions when he describes how burdensome (epiponôs) the weighing of speeches is (1.22.3). Yet Ober, in order to emphasize Thucydides’ hostility to democracy writes in his discussion of the debate between Nicias and Alcibiades: “Democratic decision-making [is] typically based on misinformation because of the agonistic nature of Assembly debate”; and he sees books 6 and 7 as “Thucydides’ strongest case for . . . for the instability of democracy when it is re-envisioned as government by competing speeches.”24 I wonder whether Thucydides may be more self-reflective than Ober’s final observation here suggests; at least by the time Thucydides records the deliberations about the Sicilian campaign and especially Hermocrates’ speech, he may indeed recognize the significance of the analogous reliance of the historian and the assembly on the logoi of others, and thus the uncertainty at the foundation of both political deliberation and historical narratives. In both cases again, it is an uncertainty because of our biased speeches whether to an assembly or to a historian who is trying to get information from us about events past. Acknowledging this uncertainty and imprecision in turn justifies a regime that allows for the open re-consideration of views, namely, democratic regimes with deliberative assemblies. Both the Mytilenian and Sicilian debates are re-considerations of decisions. Both assemblies acknowledge the uncertainty of decisions based on deliberation. The justification for deliberative democracy does not depend on strict conditions of neutrality and good will. There is no demand for the luxury of searching for a truth by consensus as envisioned by the contemporary theorists of deliberative democracy; rather, both political and historical truth may be found by the hard work of testing speeches against one another where prejudices are acknowledged, biases recognized, and the limitations of knowledge admitted. The historian dependent on the same sort of sources as the assembly holds up his labor-intensive testing of speeches as the 24. The argument is similar in Ober, “Thucydides’ Criticism of Democratic Knowledge,” 116, 117: “The citizen masses are unable to determine truth accurately or to determine congruity of interest by listening to speeches because they have no way of testing for either quality. Thucydides’ position seems to be that democratic knowledge does not provide adequate grounding for assessing speeches of this kind. Thus, badly instructed by speech, the Athenian Assembly was likely to fall eventually into error and make bad policy.”

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model that deliberators are to follow. And by presenting his work as Thucydides does—for all to read—he becomes through his written text a participant in those deliberations, alerting the citizens of a democratic community to those truths which may repeat themselves and those which remain always subject to further investigation. It is in the assembly of the democratic regime that we can engage in the testing needed for political knowledge, but it is a testing that in Thucydides’ vision benefits from the reading of his history and an appreciation for the effort that must be put into acquiring the most accurate (but always uncertain) knowledge on which decisions are to be made. For Ober, the debate between Nicias and Alcibiades in book 6 and the response of the people to it exemplify that in assemblies “the final choice was [not] completely rational, because the assemblymen had no independent means of judging or testing the accuracy of each speaker’s factual statements.”25 This is true, but not just for democracies; it is true for historians as well. The challenge may be not to envision ideal speech situations, but to create the institutions that acknowledge the limits of deliberation and the enormous work (epinonôs) involved in testing biased and self-interested speeches. What goes on behind the scenes in the craft of Thucydides the historian is carried on openly in the assembly. The historian presents his knowledge not as an alternative as in Ober’s initial view, but as a work that shows what is necessary for successful deliberation in a world where unrestrained biases reign. Book 6 of the History provides the text for this study.26

sicily The Context

Book 6 begins the story of the Sicilian invasion: “During that winter the Athenians resolved to sail against Sicily” (6.1.1). The expedition starts during the Peace of Nicias agreed to some six years earlier. As prelude to the 25. Ober, “Civic Ideology and Counterhegemonic Discourse,” 116. 26. The Mytilenian Debate could be the text for this analysis. See, however, Arlene Saxonhouse, Athenian Democracy: Modern Mythmakers and Ancient Theorists (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1996). Paula Debnar, Speaking the Same Language: Speech and Audience in Thucydides’ Spartan Debates (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), considers the debate among the Spartans in the beginning of book 1, but her focus is more on the character of the reception of the speeches by the Spartan audience than the epistemological basis of the claims that are made.

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campaign, Thucydides describes in detail two assemblies—one in Athens, one in Syracuse. The assembly at Athens that Thucydides actually records occurs several days after an earlier assembly had voted to respond favorably to a request by the Egestaeans for aid in their conflict with the Selinuntines. Thucydides’ narrative highlights the analogies to book 1 when the Corcyreans had come to ask the Athenians for assistance against Corinth, a request that precipitated the war with Sparta.27 The Athenians recognized that aid for the Egestaeans would provoke resistance from other cities, but they also anticipated the opportunities it would present to expand their empire, considerations not absent from their deliberations concerning Corcyra’s request reported in book 1. In each case, concern for the empire prevailed over a concern for justice. Deliberation centered on what was in the city’s apparent interest. The Athenian assembly Thucydides records in detail was originally called to assess the preparations necessary to embark on their naval expedition. Under the influence of Nicias, it becomes instead a reconsideration of the earlier decision. Nicias, though unwilling (6.8.4), had been chosen to serve as general on the expedition; he questions the wisdom of the expedition and forces the city to deliberate on the question again. Alcibiades defends the earlier decision and attacks Nicias’s motives. The assembly, supporting Alcibiades, reconfirms with more enthusiasm than before the decision to set sail. Nicias, who could not persuade the Athenians to forgo the expedition directly, next tries to dissuade the Athenians by enumerating the large numbers of ships, men, and money required for such an adventure. Nicias’s plan backfires, and the Athenians are only more encouraged by his speech and vote to put all the resources Nicias asked for into the expedition, making the eventual defeat even more costly. After describing the departure of the Athenian fleet for Sicily, repeating in more detail the story told in book 1 of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, and reporting on the desecration of the hermae and the implications of that for Alcibiades, Thucydides turns to the situation in Sicily and in particular the assembly in Syracuse. The Syracusans deliberate whether their city is to respond to the stories about the impending Athenian expedition— or whether the reports and the attention to them are part of an oligarchic plot to take over power in the city. Hermocrates urges preparations; Athenagoras, whom Thucydides calls “foremost” (prostatês) of the people (6.35.2), argues that the Athenians would never be so foolish as to invade 27. Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens, 106.

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Syracuse and leave behind a hostile and still powerful Lacedaemonia. It must, he claims, be the oligarchs eager for power who are circulating these rumors. The Athenian Assembly At that moment the awesomeness (the danger, dreadfulness, ta deina) came upon them more than when they voted to sail. —6.31.1

Thucydides describes in as vivid detail as he gives anywhere in his History the departure of the Athenian fleet for Sicily. The whole throng of people, whoever was in the city, both citydwellers (astôn) and foreigners went down together (zumkatebên), with their loved ones to watch the spectacle of the departing forces (6.30.2). The wonder of the sight of all the combined strength of ships and men overcomes that brief moment of dread. For readers who must be aware of the sad conclusion to this expedition, ta deina resonates with foreboding, a foreboding that was not there when the assembly voted to set sail. Why not? Does the foreboding come from a fear of their own arrogance implied in the size of the expedition and the expectations of success? Such pride, as Herodotus had shown frequently in his Histories, such crossing over boundaries, brings destruction for the transgressor; similar stories of arrogance confronted and frightened the Athenians when they attended the theater and watched the sufferings of an Oedipus or a Creon. The debates that take place in the assemblies, unlike the debates that take place between states such as the Melians and the Athenians or the Plataeans and the Thebans of book 3, though, do not draw on religious themes of hubris and punishment. They draw on calculations and rationality, on evidence and probability. The moment of dread arises outside the deliberations when the local inhabitants accompany their companions, relatives, sons, to the ships about to set sail for a distant place and uncertain return, not when they calculate the benefits they hope to gain. No Melian appeal to divine laws that limit the actions of the stronger tempers the Athenians’ deliberations; the calculations here are whether it is in the interest of their city to proceed, not whether it is just. Though we do not learn from Thucydides the content of the initial debate about the expedition, he does introduce some editorial comments. Within the very first sentence of book 6 Thucydides tells us that hoi polloi

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were ignorant (apeiroi) of the size of the island and the number of its inhabitants (6.1.1), making it seem as if the Athenians sailed to Sicily blindly. This contradicts, not only his claim in 2.65.11, where he writes that the failure of the expedition rested as much on the lack of support given to those whom the Athenians had sent forth as on error in judgment, but also the information he gives us about the Athenians sending envoys to scout Sicily (6.5.4–5). Thucydides proceeds in book 6 to show us the results of his own learning, his historia28 about the peoples of Sicily, but we learn later that the Athenians were not so derelict in their efforts to learn about the situation in Sicily as Thucydides at first would have us believe. As a result of the importuning of the Egestaeans whom the Athenians heard speaking frequently (pollakis legontôn) in their assemblies (note the plural) of the need for Athenian assistance against the Selinuntines, the Athenians vote still earlier to send envoys to Egesta. The envoys were to see (skepsomenos) how much money the Egestaeans held in common and in the temples, to assess the Egestaeans’ ability to support the expedition, and to determine whether they would be valuable allies in the future (6.6.3). The problem with getting information about Sicily lay not in the democracy’s failure to seek knowledge, but in the reliability of the reports they received. The report of the Athenian envoys who returned from Sicily, Thucydides tells us, was full of enticements (epagôga), but it was not true (ouk alethê) (6.8.2). The ambassadors had been bribed, but the Athenians did not have alternative accounts against which to test the “facts” they reported. While Thucydides in book 1 had acknowledged how reports are slanted by eunoia, favoritism, and therefore must always be tested against other reports, the Athenians in this case sent only one embassy and did not ask (except for Nicias, 6.13.2) the cui bono question when they received information from their delegates: in whose interest is it to bring these favorable reports from Egesta? While they did not ask the cui bono question of their own ambassadors, it is in fact this question that resounds through the deliberations about the expedition. The deliberative process as presented in these two assemblies is one of questioning the motives of the other speakers and thus the 28. It is a matter of scholarly debate whether Thucydides ever went to Sicily himself or whether he needed to rely on the reports of others. The probability is that he did not go; if that is the case, we must be attentive to how much his presentation of the “facts” about Sicily depend on reports, logoi. In 6.2 Thucydides says that he will leave information about ancient things to the poets. This was not the strategy he followed in book 1 when he revised the Homeric account of the Trojan expedition (1.9).

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reliability of the information they transmit and the recommendations for action they propose. Nicias does this in opposition to Alcibiades, Alcibiades in opposition to Nicias, and Athenagoras in opposition to Hermocrates. While we, with visions of a deliberative process imagined by Habermas29 or Gutmann and Thompson,30 may recoil at the expression of suspicions of other’s motives, such assaults remind us of the subjectivity of arguments, of the eunoia that must be acknowledged in the testing of the stories one receives from speakers. When the Athenians fail to question the motives of their own envoys, they are misled. Thucydides’ presentation of assemblies emphasizes that speeches are spoken by specific individuals with specific interests focused on their own conceptions of what is to their own advantage. The assemblies of ancient Greece do not make the moral demands on their citizens that contemporary deliberative democrats do; the challenge is to test the speeches of concrete individuals, with personalities and interests, against one another in the search for what the city must do in its own interest. This applies to the historian and the members of the assembly. In Ober’s analysis, prejudiced speech is a problem for democratic assemblies where the participants cannot distinguish between self-interested and communal speech. However, the openness with which each speaker questions the motives of his opponent means that the listeners are aware of precisely this point. An abstraction from particularity is not required. No one hearing Nicias or Alcibiades attack each other could think that either speaks without self-interest; with the self-interest openly addressed, those testing the information have no illusion of disinterested advice. The testing may be burdensome, but the need for it is obvious. Though in the end the Sicilian expedition indeed brings much suffering to the Athenians with the loss of its fleet and with many of its men dying in the salt mines of Sicily, scholars are not of one mind about whether the expedition was itself foolhardy—or simply badly handled. W. Robert Connor, for one, accepts what he sees as the general scholarly view that it was not a mistake for the city to take on the expedition, though he recognizes that “at the beginning of book 6 Thucydides emphasizes the folly of the decision itself.”31 The Athenians had the resources to make the 29. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms. 30. Gutmann and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement. 31. W. Robert Connor, Thucydides (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 158 n. 2; see also Tim Rood, Thucydides Narrative and Explanation (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

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island part of the empire. The mistakes came in the secretive machinations that led to the recall of Alcibiades, the activities outside the assembly, the events on darkened streets late at night, where the openness of the deliberative assembly gives way to claims of knowledge that cannot be tested by alternative views. Private jealousies, fears of tyranny—and a misreading of the history of Harmodius and Aristogeiton32—prevented the Athenians from following through on the decisions they had made and led to the error of judgment in recalling Alcibiades, not in the decision to sail. It is when subjective interests do not play out in the arena of the assembly, in a venue where the self-interest of the speakers can be directly confronted and tested against each other that policies may falter. Democratic deliberation taking place in the open air of the Pnyx allows for this testing not possible in other regimes—including a Periclean “democracy” led by a single man.33 The assembly with its debate takes us back, in Parry’s language, to the Herodotean model where we see the explicit subjectivity of the speakers, not the Thucydidean (and Periclean) pretense of objectivity. The realism of Thucydides’ understanding of democracy matches his understanding of the realism in the relations between states. It is the openness of democracy revealing the self-interested motives that allows for this awareness. Thucydides introduces Nicias’s speech by commenting that Nicias thought that the city “had not deliberated correctly [ouk orthôs bebouleusthai ],” but had based its decision on a slight excuse (prophasei), the request for aid from the Egestaeans (PW 6.8.4). Nicias’s speech proceeds as a complex of contradictions that undercut his own position. He claims to recognize that his words will be weak against the character of the Athenians (6.9.3), and yet he speaks to the Athenians as if he were a Spartan,34 urging that they remain quiet (hêsuchantôn) (6.10.2), talking of restraint and assuming that references to difficulties will serve as a deterrent rather than as a challenge. While the quiet that the Athenians currently enjoy comes from the peace treaty Nicias arranged, Nicias points to the limitations of the treaty he

1998); Orwin, The Humanity of Thucydides, 118–19, 122–23. Kenneth Dover, The Greeks and Their Legacy: Collected Papers, vol. 2 of Greek and the Greeks (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 81, and Yunis, Taming Democracy, 108, argue that the trip was a mistake. 32. Steven Forde, The Ambition to Rule: Alcibiades and the Politics of Imperialism in Thucydides (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). 33. It is interesting to note that Pericles’ two speeches before assemblies are single speeches—unanswered and therefore untested. 34. Connor, Thucydides, 166.

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himself engineered. If he is responsible for such a flawed document, why should the Athenians listen to him now? Though Thucydides has said that the Athenians did not know the size and peoples of the island, Nicias argues that the Sicilians are too numerous for the Athenians to be able to rule without difficulty. It is senseless (anoêton) to go against men we cannot hold (6.11.1), but from whom does he have his information about the peoples of Sicily that Thucydides tells us was missing from the deliberations of the Athenians? Nicias proceeds to make a series of arguments that themselves seem anoêton. An empire led by Syracuse would be less frightening (hêsson deinoi, 6.11.2) in part because it is unlikely (ouk eikos) for one archê to make war against another (6.11.3). It is unclear on what evidence he bases this proposition. If anything, history does not support this claim. He then adds that the Sicilians will fear the Athenians most if the Athenians never go there, suggesting that fear of the unknown is a restraint (6.11.4). But fear of the unknown is not a restraint for the Athenians, who, Thucydides would have us believe, are ignorant of Sicily but certainly ready to venture against it. Nicias then ineffectively makes a comparison with the situation against Sparta, where their success was para gnômên. If they were successful para gnômên once (which according to Pericles in his first speech was not the case), then why not again? While Nicias may have a point when he urges the Athenians to be sure that the Lacedaemonians are subdued before they head off to Sicily, in fact the subsequent failure of the expedition did not come from that arena. Finally, Nicias will not convince the Athenians to be moderate—sôphronomen—so little understanding the restlessness of his own city, of the “character” against which he had promised not to speak (6.9.3). Toward the end of his speech, he does raise the important point to be raised in deliberations: whom to trust? He notes that it is in the interest of the Egestaeans to tell falsehoods (6.13.2) and therefore asks why the Athenians should accept their stories, but it is particularly with reference to the self-interest of Alcibiades that he warns the assemblymen about the challenges they face as they consider whether to set sail for Sicily. Nicias, perhaps giving the only speech not driven by self-interest, may in fact be giving the wrong speech, the one that least conforms to the context, to the nature of the choices before the Athenians or the Athenian character. Thucydides sets up Alcibiades’ speech with more than the usual prefatory remarks. We hear of Alcibiades’ extravagance and his ambition, of his hostility to Nicias and of the resentment of the hoi polloi to his arrogance. Thus, the speech is framed entirely in the context of Alcibiades—on his

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explicit reading of the welfare of Athens within the context of his own ambitions. The speech lives up to the expectations Thucydides sets for it, as Alcibiades identifies Athens’s greatness with his own. While the initial effort of the speech is to boost his individual stature, he contradicts all that Nicias has said concerning the peoples of Sicily and describes them as a “mixed mob” (ochlos xummeiktois poluandrousin, 6.17.2) who easily change regimes. Further, the people of Sicily do not care about their own country, there are no feelings of patriotism, nor do they have arms or settled homes (6.17.3). There is, of course, no basis for the claims that Alcibiades makes about the peoples of Sicily, no more than there was for Nicias’s claims. Alcibiades does say that he has learned these things (egô akoêi aisthanomai, 6.17.6; note that Nicias uses the same phrase in his next speech at 6.20.1), but we must ask: From whom has he heard these logoi? From what he has heard (or at least tells his audience that he has heard), he decides that it is not likely (ouk eikos) that such a crowd (homilon) as lives in Sicily would have one mind or be able to join together in action. The assembly is left to weigh the reports of each speaker, just as Thucydides had to weigh the reports he heard as he wrote his history. The precision with which Thucydides presents his “facts” is based, as he has told us, on the hard work of testing the reports of others. Unlike Nicias, who had spoken to the Athenians against their character, Alcibiades encourages action, warns that quiescence (hêsuchia, 6.18.2, 3, and 6; also apragmosunê, 6.18.6 and 7) will lead to their destruction. Melding the Periclean warning that they cannot give up the empire that they have acquired with the un-Periclean advice that they not restrain themselves, he pleads from probabilities that are far more consistent with the lessons of Thucydides’ History than are Nicias’s assertions. Predicting the actions of the Syracusans, he argues: “One (tis) does not only defend against an attack, but so that the attacker may not come, one strikes first” (6.18.3). And he concludes by focusing on the active character of the Athenians, calling on a unity between the young and old who in their aggressive stance will rejuvenate the city. Though his knowledge of Sicily is based on reports that he has heard (or claims to have heard) that may be inaccurate, he has a knowledge of the character of the people to whom he is speaking, an understanding that may come not so much from a testing of facts, but from an individual sensitivity—and a similarity—to the citizens among whom he lives.35 It is an understanding of human nature 35. This raises the further question of the need to attend to one’s audience—whether

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paralleling Thucydides’ that might have served him well had he had the chance to serve as general in Sicily. Since he was recalled, we will never know. The contrast between Alcibiades’ ability to understand the people to whom he speaks and Nicias’s failure to do so is nowhere captured better than in Nicias’s subsequent speech, when Nicias, acknowledging that the assembly would not be moved by the “same logoi” (6.19.2) as he used before, details the enormous resources that he judges to be necessary for the expedition. Misunderstanding the Athenian character, he fails to recognize that this will incite rather than deter. Using the same words as Alcibiades, akoêi aisthonomai (6.20.2), he presents information opposed to that Alcibiades had offered in his speech.36 The cities of Sicily are great (megalas), not subject to one another, nor in need of change (6.20.2). The reports of the two speakers differ, and the assembly has no way to judge the differences. What makes the difference in this deliberation are not the “facts” of the case, but the character of a people. Especially given Thucydides’ suggestion that the decision to sail to Sicily was not evidently the “wrong” decision, the significance of democratic deliberation in this assembly is not so much its distance from historical knowledge (to which it may be closer than Ober, for example, gives it credit), but the dependence of deliberative decisions on knowledge of the character of a people to whom one speaks. Nicias’s failure to acknowledge the character of the Athenians makes him a poor speaker in the assembly. Nicias had said in his speech that the peoples of Sicily were too numerous and fearsome for the Athenians to conquer. Alcibiades had described them as a motley crew unable to come together. A deliberative body of Athenian citizens will not be able to figure out who is “right,” and indeed neither Nicias nor Alcibiades accurately reports the situation in Sicily. Given the possibility that the expedition was more mistaken in execution than in conception, this debate raises the question of whether the Athenians actually needed precise information on this point before they set off. More important than the facts was ultimately the character of the people. The deliberative process revealed the motives of the speakers. The assemblymen are offered the opportunity to weigh the subjective presentations against each other. The assembly testing the arguments may not have voted one is the speaker in the assembly or the historian writing the story of a war. The old vision of Thucydides the universal, a-personal, writer has been rightfully subject to considerable questioning of late; the issue of audience needs to be part of that recent reassessment. 36. In Political Dissent in Democratic Athens, Josiah Ober notes that “Nicias initiates a contest of facts: Alcibiades’ information about Sicily versus his own,” 113.

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foolishly, given their character (to which Alcibiades appealed) and given the uncertain status of the knowledge to which they and all assemblies (and historians) have access. The failure of the expedition to Sicily rests on the Athenians’ failure to follow through with the necessary support in the form of Alcibiades. It is the cabals, playing on the people’s fears aroused by the inaccurate stories about the tyrannicides, who derail the expedition.37 The story of the tyrannicides, told right after the description of the deliberative assembly, had attained the status of myth—untested claims—whereas debates in the assembly force the testing absent in the unquestioned acceptance of myths. Thucydides does not record for us the discussions surrounding the demands for the return of Alcibiades, and thus we do not know what part the myths played in that decision. The Assembly in Syracuse

The assembly in Syracuse is distinctive in Thucydides’ History; it is the only time that Thucydides describes deliberations in a democratic regime other than Athens. Previous sections have established Syracuse as the analogue to Athens, a rising power, possibly threatening the independence of the surrounding cities. Paralleling in several ways the debate at Athens, this debate is even more epistemologically explicit. Hermocrates asserts that, based on reports he has heard, the Athenians are coming; the Syracusans must prepare for the invasion. Athenagoras, speaking from the probabilities about human nature says that the Athenians are not coming. Reports, logoi, that which is heard, confront deductions from human nature. In this case the reports rather than deductions from human nature provide the more accurate picture, but they lose before the judgment of the assembly. Similarities between Athens and Syracuse certainly exist, but the power of Thucydides’ presentation is that the similarities are not simplistic. They point instead to the varied texture of political speech and knowledge. In this debate the moderate Hermocrates urges action, arguing against the fiery Athenagoras, who counsels quiescence. Each speaker claims access to knowledge. Book 6 had begun with the Athenians’ being inexperienced about Sicily and then deceived when their own ambassadors return from an expedition especially undertaken to acquire knowledge. In contrast, the Syracusans did not need to send out envoys. Reports had come from many places (êggelleto men pollachothen) about the impending Athenian expedi37. Forde, The Ambition to Rule.

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tion, but Thucydides tells us, for a long time they were not believed (ou mentoi episteueto, 6.32.3). Belief or trust (pistis) becomes the theme of the debate in the Syracusan assembly. Thucydides summarizes the assembly by noting that among the speakers some believed (pisteuontôn) the reports about the Athenian expedition and others did not. What reports does an assembly believe? This is the question the Syracusan assembly raises. Incomplete knowledge confronts all deliberators, and thus political action must always be based on trust. Thucydides introduces Hermocrates as one who “thought he knew clearly about these things” (saphôs oiomenos eidenai, 6.32.2). Thucydides had in his discourse on his historical method cited above from book 1 identified his goal as enabling men to see clearly, saphôs. Hermocrates, we know from Thucydides’ description of the Athenian preparations for the expedition, does see “clearly”; he trusts the reports that we know from Thucydides accurately reflect the actions of the Athenians. But why does he believe the reports? Because they are numerous? Because he admires the reporters? Because, as Athenagoras argues, Hermocrates is plotting an oligarchic takeover of Syracuse? There is no indication that Hermocrates believes the reports because he has himself seen the armaments. He must rely, like Thucydides, on the speech of others to reach his conclusions, but we are not privy to how he weighed the reports he received from others. Hermocrates’ speech may in fact be a blind for Thucydides’ own speech throughout the history. Hermocrates wishes to make men see clearly, as does Thucydides. Both test speeches, and Hermocrates correctly describes what he does not see. Thucydides claims the same for himself. Thucydides, however, writes a book and hides himself (like Plato) behind his narrative; Hermocrates works within the context of a democratic assembly arguing for specific actions. Thucydides can present his knowledge away from the political arena where motives are constantly questioned and subjectivity brought to the forefront, but he too must rely on the speech of others. The first word of Hermocrates’ speech is apista. He is concerned that he will not be believed by those who hear him, that he will seem unconvincing when he speaks the truth (alêtheias) about the impending Athenian expedition. He knows, he says, that those speaking that which is not believed (mê pista) are not only not convincing (ou peithousin), but considered to be fools (aphronês). Forms of pista appear three times in a few short lines. Whose reports and whose deductions become the basis for the knowledge that deliberative bodies will use for making decisions? Can we identify the grounds for such discrimination? And if not, what becomes the basis for decision making in deliberative bodies—or in histories?

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Hermocrates continues forcefully: he is persuaded (peithôn, again) that he knows the matter more clearly (saphesteron) than anyone else (6.33.1). The clarity of his understanding gives him the courage to say what he is convinced he knows. Like Thucydides, he speaks against prejudices among men who may not wish to believe what he says—and he speaks, he claims (though Athenagoras disputes this) for the sake of his city. He is committed to expressing what he knows to be the truth based on the reports that he has heard, not on the sights or erga that he has seen. Belief becomes an issue of character judgment. The challenge that Hermocrates faces is to convince the Syracusans that the Athenians are acting contrary to what seems “reasonable.” The expedition of the Athenians is unreasonable because who would think that with Sparta still hostile, with the limited ability to bring provisions with them or acquire them in Sicily (all points raised shortly by Athenagoras), who would believe that the Athenians so foolishly would set out for Sicily? Who would believe that the Athenian character of impetuosity would trump human rationality? Hermocrates relies on reports rather than on deductions based on a knowledge of human nature. Thucydides had noted the role of eros, a desire for adventure and for wealth (6.24.3), in the decision of the Athenians. Hermocrates, the rational one, with the emphasis on gnomê, accepts this point; Athenagoras, the fiery orator, does not. Hermocrates then turns to speak to those who believe him (ei de tôi kai pista, 6.33.4) and encourages them with the promise of the fame they will acquire upon their victory against the Athenian forces. Making sure that the audience (both in the assembly to which he speaks directly and the readership of the Thucydides’ History) recognize the analogies with Athens’s defense of Greece against the Medes, Hermocrates asserts that resisting the Athenian invasion is not at all to be “unhoped” for (anelpiston, 6.33.4), nor is it to be unhoped for (6.33.6) that the Syracusans will rise from the defeat of the Athenians just as the Athenians “beyond reason” (para logon) arose from the defeat of the Medes. The use of elpis, hope, should be a warning sign. The Melians—fools that they were—had relied on the elpis that the Lacedaemonians would come to their aid. The Plataeans had likewise hoped that the Lacedaemonians would show regard for their earlier courage against the Persians, but in each of these cases elpis was not founded on erga, or even on reports that would lead the hopeful citizens to justify their hopes with logoi.38 38. Here again I disagree with Yunis’s reading: “His speech is too concise and blunt. The speaker merely asserts that the Athenians are coming, and that there is none of the

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Though Hermocrates may be correct about the reports concerning the Athenian expedition, his hopes are based on projections and on expectations that depend on theories about human nature. These in turn are based on the principle that the same things happen over and over again—according to human nature more or less in the same fashion. While we the readers know that the fleet is on its way, for Hermocrates knowing what had happened in the Persian Wars leads to a projection of what will happen when a small city successfully defends itself against an overwhelming but overextended expedition. In this speech, Hermocrates has learned the lessons of Herodotus’s history and applies them within the context of Thucydides’ history. But knowledge that comes in this way is not always the prelude to action. The Syracusans, unlike the Athenians, are limited, Hermocrates warns, by a characteristic quietude (dia to zunêthes hêsuchon), which makes them slow to be persuaded (hekista an oxeôs peithoisthe, 6.34.4). Hermocrates’ speech fails to effect action in the way that Alcibiades’ appeals to the enthusiastic Athenians did. Democracies are not the same. The democratic Athenians are quick to action, the Syracusans are not. Democratic institutions do not lead to uniformity. While history repeats itself because of the similarities in human nature, repetitions are only “pretty much” (malista) alike because there is always variability in the character of a people and the uncertainty of the knowledge on which they base their actions. On the basis of his own speculations concerning human nature, Hermocrates proposes that the Syracusans send off a fleet to meet the advancing Athenians at Tarenteum. He expects that the Athenians, taken aback by the sudden show of force, would spend time deliberating about what to do and assessing the number of the Sicilians resisting; this would delay the trip across the open sea until the moment for such travel would have passed, causing the Athenians to return home. The proposed scenario is highly speculative, and A. W. Gomme and his coauthors are firm in their conviction that it would never have worked, that the outcome would have been “the annihilation of the Sikeliot fleets and the rapid imposition of Athenian rule on Sicily and South Italy.”39 We will never know if it would have worked, but Hermocrates by proposing it is the model deliberator

control and clear strategy masterfully displayed in Pericles’ funeral speech.” Yunis, Taming Democracy, 110. 39. A. W. Gomme, A. Andrewes, and K. J. Dover, A Historical Commentary on Thucydides, vol. 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 229.

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blending logoi with deductions about human nature as the basis for proposed actions. This status, though, does not ensure that he can convince. He speaks against the character of the quiet Syracusans, urging action on those who are quiet by nature, just as Nicias had tried to urge quiet on those who were by nature active. Neither succeeds. Thucydides as the author of Hermocrates’ speech reconfirms for the reader the accuracy of Hermocrates’ information. Hermocrates reports to the assembly that the general with the most experience (namely, Nicias, see 6.34.6) unwillingly became the general for the expedition and that he would grasp at any excuse to abandon it. He explains further: “We would be reported (aggelloimetha) with exaggeration” (6.34.7), and since “the minds of men steer to what they hear,” the Athenians, he claims, would be influenced more by the reports of the Syracusans’ strength than the actual numbers or facts behind those reports. Hermocrates relies on this belief in exaggerated reports for his Tarenteum plan to work, but we the readers (and presumably the Syracusan ecclesiasts) are left to wonder about his speech. If the Athenians will be influenced by exaggerated logoi, if the minds of men steer to what they hear even if what they hear is untrue, why does Hermocrates not worry that the logoi he has heard may likewise be exaggerations?40 The profound irony of this speech, as Hermocrates keeps making clear, is that we—speakers in assemblies, members of assemblies, historians like Herodotus and Thucydides, political scientists, whoever—rely on the speech of others for what we ourselves cannot see. To rely on speeches and reports, as Hobbes recognized and argued so well, limits us to the subjectivity and potential for deception from those who speak their stories to us. Speakers in assemblies and historians must turn to a consistency in human behavior in order to be persuasive, a consistency that must depend on an initial critical view, a testing of the speeches originally received. Hermocrates’ practical suggestion depends on the shock value of the logoi, reports that would not be in accord with the facts of the case, where the logoi have not been adequately tested. His plan depends on the uncertainty of knowledge, which in turn he must deny in order to be persuasive himself. Hermocrates argues that the Athenians are attacking because they think that the Syracusans

40. Cartwright claims Hermocrates relies on “real facts.” David Cartwright, A Historical Commentary on Thucydides: A Companion To Rex Warner’s Penguin Translation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 239. I am not sure what “real facts” means in this context.

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are unprepared. They based this judgment, he suggests, on their inference from the Syracusan failure to help the Lacedaemonians, which made them think that the Syracusans were weak. By a sudden show of force, Hermocrates claims, the Syracusans would be daring beyond expectation (para gnômên tolmêsantas), and the unexpected show of force would be more effective than the Syracusans’ true strength (têi apo tou alêthous dunamei, PW 6.34.8). Asking that the Syracusans believe him, he proposes a plan that shows the limits of all belief. Ending as he began, Hermocrates again calls on the Syracusans to be convinced (peithesthe, 6.34.9). He can do no more than appeal to their beliefs. Hermocrates knows well (eu oid’, 6.34.9) that the Athenians are coming, but his knowledge is based on logoi that in his own speech he says can be exaggerated.41 Reactions to Hermocrates’ speech among the demos at Syracuse vary from thinking that what he said about the impending Athenian invasion was not true to ridicule to the few he managed to persuade (to pisteuon, 6.35.1). Though Thucydides has given the reader reason to sympathize with Hermocrates’ efforts to persuade the demos, it remains unclear why the Syracusans should be moved by his claims to have heard accurate reports of an event that he himself has not seen or why the demos should be persuaded by him to act against their customary quiet. Our knowledge based on reading the earlier sections of book 6 is not available to the ecclesiasts sitting in the Syracusan assembly. Athenagoras gives the speech opposing Hermocrates. Thucydides uses terms similar to those he uses to describe the Athenian demagogue Cleon in book 3.42 Hermocrates pleaded to be trusted. Athenagoras begins his speech as the “most trusted” (pithanôtatos, 6.35.2) of the Syracusans by the people. Athenagoras, like Nicias and Alcibiades, spares no effort in making ad hominem attacks on his opponent. While he asserts that those warning about the Athenians must have their private motives and must be 41. Hunter comes to a similar conclusion. She writes, in Virginia J. Hunter, Thucydides: The Artful Reporter (Toronto: Hakkert, 1973): “The reader is witness to a genuine dilemma. How can the Syracusans . . . distinguish truth from error? Unless they are as convinced of the facts as Hermocrates, i.e., have some absolutely trustworthy source of information about Athens’ aims, what intrinsic superiority has one logos over the other. Any choice between the two must be subjective. . . . Thus are revealed the limitations of logoi,” 155. See also p. 160. where she comments: “Hermokrates . . . has learned from experience. But just as important, so have his listeners. Previously they had no means of determining which logos was intrinsically superior. Until news of the expedition was confirmed by eyewitnesses as saphe, the assumptions and predictions of both logoi were mere eikota.” 42. Gomme, Andrewes, and Dover, Historical Commentary on Thucydides, 4:301.

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hostile to the city, he speaks to the citizens of Syracuse of human nature and disregards the logoi, reports. He speaks of the Athenians as deinoi and experienced in many things (pollôn empeiroi, 6.36.3) What, he asks, would men of this sort do? It is not likely (ou gar . . . eikos, 6.36.4) that they, leaving behind the Peloponnese without fully ending the war, would begin willingly another war of equal size. Athenagoras works from a calculation of rationality, a deduction from what the sane man would propose and vote for when he knows that his city’s powerful enemy is eager for the opportunity to retaliate for an ignominious defeat and treaty. The passionate Athenagoras does not see potential actors acting irrationally, as the Athenians would were they to come to Sicily. Given that rationality governs human actions, Athenagoras argues, those warning that the Athenians are on their way can only be acting out of self-interest with a desire to take power in the city into their own hands and establish an oligarchy. Athenagoras predicts the future based on the primacy of a rational self-interest—whether he describes his enemies within the city or outside it. “If you deliberate well (eu bouleuêsthe), you will not look to the reports but will calculate from that which is likely (ta eikota)” (6.36.3). Unlike Hermocrates, unlike Thucydides, Athenagoras ignores logoi; they, as Hermocrates himself admitted, can be unreliable in comparison to the truths that come from a knowledge of human nature. Should the assembly rely on uncertain reports, or on deductions from human nature? The deliberative process, always based on uncertainty about both the future and the past, is caught, as Thucydides points to in this debate, between these two poles. Athenagoras does address the possibility of the Athenians coming, but identifies all that works against a successful invasion, factors that Nicias had also noted. Where Athenagoras plays the demagogue (that most commentators accuse him of being) instead of a speaker in a deliberative process is when he switches from talking about probabilities about human nature to claims of knowledge. Thus, chapter 38 begins with the assertion eu oid’ (I know well—a phrase that Hermocrates also uses) that the Athenians know their limitations and want to preserve their own welfare. Men like Hermocrates, Athenagoras suggests by implication, are storymakers (logopoiousin, 6.38.1) of what is not and what will not be. Here his speech turns truly nasty by accusing the “storymakers” not of reporting logoi that are always subject to interpretation and to falsification, but of using stories to create fears that will lead the people to turn the city over to the storymakers. Inverting Hermocrates’ criticism of Syracusan quietude, he notes that on account of these storymakers, the logopoientes, the city seldom is at

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rest (oligakis men hêsuchaze, 6.38.3). Movement—the absence of hesuchia— comes from internal conflict rather than a natural drive for external expansion as at Athens. While from the outside we recognize the accuracy of the reports Hermocrates cites, the debate at Syracuse leaves open whether to accept the reports or the probabilities based on deductions from human nature as the foundation for action. The Syracusans deliberating in book 6 in the end choose to rely on probabilities rather than on the logoi transmitted by Hermocrates. Athenagoras concludes by attacking the reports as a mechanism for enslaving. He assures the assembly that even if the reports were true, the Syracusan generals would be able to respond; if, however, the reports are not true and the people listen to the warnings of the potential tyrants, the city will have chosen for itself servitude. He warns those who threaten the city with these reports that the city looking to itself will judge the “words as deeds” and will protect its liberty and not lose it from listening to (ek ton akouein) the frightening speeches of Hermocrates (6.40.2). A third, unnamed Syracusan general speaks briefly after Athenagoras has finished, and this third party urges the Syracusans to leave off the accusations against one another. This general, who wants to end the calumnies, nevertheless explicitly accepts Hermocrates’ perspective and urges that each individual and the whole city attend to the messages that have come (esaggelloumena, 6.41.2) with a view to preparing the defense against those who are coming. His advice is the moderate middle ground, for he takes no stand on the logoi, whether they are true or the work of storymakers eager to gain power in the city. This general argues that even if there is no need, there can be no harm (oudenia blabê, 6.41.3) for the city to make common preparations for war. He even suggests that some of this has been done already, and Thucydides ends his description of the assembly by remarking that the Syracusans disbanded from the assembly without taking any actions. The debate appears almost irrelevant for the Syracusans, but it offers Thucydides’ readers a vivid portrayal of difficulties of engaging in deliberation, the epistemological and rhetorical challenges that confront those debating a city’s public policies.

conclusion All the characters in Thucydides’ History who deliberate about the actions they will take work under the uncertainty of knowledge that comes from sights, from speech, and even from deductions based on claims of a uni-

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versal human nature. Democratic assemblies become a locus for testing the claims individuals make and judging how those claims can justify actions. While commentators have too often seen Thucydides as dismissing the capacity of the people to make judgments, the assemblies at the beginning of book 6 with their vivid personalities engaged in debate demonstrate that the uncertainty that underlies deliberation marks the very activity of writing history as well. Ober states the problem effectively: The audience is presented with a mix of fact and falsehood. . . . How are the Assemblymen to separate truth from falsehood? . . . Thucydides’ answer seems to be “Left to their own devices, they can’t.” The citizen masses are unable to determine truth consistently and accurately or to determine congruity of interest. . . . Thucydides’ implicit lesson is that democratic knowledge does not provide an adequate grounding for assessing the truth-value of rhetorical discourse [which leads to mistakes]. . . . By contrasting his own critical-historical approach to gaining knowledge of past and future with the rhetoric of ideal-type public speakers, Thucydides has established for his reader the existence of a potentially fatal flaw in the edifice of democratic ways of knowing and doing. The identification of this flaw is key to his criticism of Athenian popular rule.43 I agree with Ober about the difficulties the democratic assembly faces, but I wonder whether this is a “flaw” only of democracy or of all knowledge— historical, political, democratic—a “flaw” that confronts all bodies that must turn deliberation into will and then into action, whether those bodies be democratic assemblies in ancient Athens or the political agencies of today. Thucydides the historian is confronted with the same challenge. The hard work (epiponos) and the testing that produces his history do not remove the uncertainty that underlies the final product. Thucydides himself revises his text regularly (much to the dismay of scholars looking for a coherent text). As the war proceeds, Thucydides uncovers new facts and gains new insights. These are incorporated into the story he himself tells, just as democratic assemblies are never finished works, but always remain venues for further deliberations and investigations. Thucydides does not set forth an objective scientific truth, a level of accuracy toward which democracies ought to aspire but can never achieve. 43. Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens, 78–79.

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Rather, knowledge emerges from the testing possible in the exchange of views of self-interested individuals occurring in the democratic assembly, not in the discussions of individuals abstracted from their particularity. By pointing to the epistemological ambiguity that must affect all deliberation, even that which goes into the activity of writing a history, Thucydides’ History, rather than serving as an attack on democratic assemblies, demonstrates the potential of democracy that arises from the openness of deliberation, the willing acknowledgment of individual biases and the capacity for reassessment. The failures of democracies occur when they do not openly deliberate but allow backstreet cabals and untested myths (such as the inaccurate recollection of the motives of the tyrannicides) to lead to decisions that harm the city as a whole. The epigraph at the beginning of this chapter comes from Holmes’s dissent in Abrams v. United States, a case concerning freedom of expression. During World War I, the defendants had published scurrilous pamphlets about the government of the United States and found themselves accused of sedition. Holmes in his dissent from a court that accepts the validity of that accusation draws on a Millian perspective that affirms the need for free speech because of the uncertainty of even the most firmly held beliefs. Since what we may consider knowledge (“fighting faiths,” in Holmes’s words) 44 is nevertheless uncertain, we must be open to debate. The democratic assembly of Thucydides’ time was a venue for debate. Yes, the words issuing forth from the assorted speakers was uncertain and biased, but the skills required of a democratic populace are the same as those of the historian: not to know the truth, but to have the capacity to test speeches spoken from personal perspectives and especially to be willing to revise conclusions as new stories are heard. Historians have the luxury of revisable texts—at least until death. Cities lack the flexibility of the historian. Their researches and deliberations lead to actions, and the tragedy of cities is often that they must act on the basis of the uncertain knowledge that always emerges from the processes of deliberation. Thucydides, though, is not replacing democratic knowledge with historical knowledge, but rather teaching ecclesiasts engaged in democratic deliberation to practice the historian’s craft. Nevertheless, Thucydides’ own story of the recall of Alcibiades, portrayed as the result of secret cabals and not of the open deliberations in the assemblies where stories can be questioned and speakers held account44. Holmes Dissent, Abrams v. United States 1919 (250 U.S. 630).

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able for their assertions, takes the reader beyond Thucydides’ own narrative style by pointing to the dangers for democracies of secrecy. The assembly exposes issues under deliberation to scrutiny where topics can be assessed from all sides and a multitude of voices can be heard. Yet what is open in the assembly remains hidden in Thucydides’ own text. It is Herodotus, as Adam Parry noted,45 who illustrates this openness in his own work and Thucydides who hides it. Though Thucydides, then, emphasizes the testing and assessment in which democratic assemblies must engage, we may need to return to Herodotus’s History for our model of the value of openness for the democratic grounding of deliberation, an understanding to which Thucydides may lead us, but does not show us himself.

45. See Parry, “Thucydides’ Historical Perspective,” 48.

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3 deliberation versus decision: platonism in contemporary democratic theory

Gary Shiffman

What is the connection between deliberation and democracy? And what kind of deliberation is democratic? Some recent defenses of deliberation have argued that conversations of a highly specified sort are a prerequisite to legitimate democracy, and that enabling such conversations is the first task of democratic reformers. I argue here that even the best of these accounts have two peculiar, inadvertent, but hardly accidental features: they make deliberation incompatible with democratic institutions, and they lapse, inevitably, into a defense of their stylized conception of deliberation on the grounds that it improves citizens, rather than on their preferred ground of democratic legitimacy. The core of the problem is genre confusion, specifically, describing the norms for political speech in terms more appropriate to cognitive talk therapy of the sort first described by Plato. By consulting Plato, who first documents the genre that contemporary theorists mis-specify as democratic, we can see exactly why it is that these theorists have run into such difficulties.1 My appreciation to Jill Frank, Alan Houston, Ted Miller, Cary Nederman, Gary Remer, Tracy Strong, Frank Sposito, and Bernard Yack for comments and conversations on earlier drafts of this chapter. 1. Remer calls attention to the confusion between political debate and private conversation in contemporary deliberation theories. He emphasizes the context of conversation— scale and intimacy—rather than the relationship of deliberation to decision making. See

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I begin with two contemporary theorists whose deliberative ideals hark back to Plato. I then reconstruct Plato’s account of Socratic dialogue as a style of conversation aimed at improving the psychological well-being of discussants. I show that Plato intends his account of Socratic dialogue to provide a standard by which to delegitimize democratic political institutions. I then explain how both Platonic and contemporary theories of deliberation systematically obscure from view the appropriate normative standards for judging genuinely political speech—that is, speech attendant upon making a political decision.

contemporary platonism The weak form of the defense of deliberation is that deliberation makes us better as citizens or people, or makes better policy, or both. The strong form is that only deliberative outcomes can be authoritative in politics— that deliberation, in other words, is the correct measure of legitimacy. Let us call these the improvement and legitimacy views of deliberation. The improvement view is weak in two senses.2 First, it simply enumerates some of the alleged benefits of deliberation to democracy rather than arguing that deliberation is democracy’s sine qua non. Second, it has the weakness, from the theorist’s point of view, of hanging on whether it is true or not, a matter that no theorist can decide from his or her office chair. Even if the evidence for the beneficial effects of deliberation were compelling (assuming that we agree that the effects described are beneficial),3 we would still have to make a comparative judgment about whether or not this particular way of improving democracy was worth the effort, as opposed to other measures we might employ. Gary Remer, “Political Oratory and Conversation: Cicero Versus Deliberative Democracy,” Political Theory 27, no. 1 (1999): 39–64. 2. Espoused by, among others, Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984); Thomas Christiano, “The Significance of Public Deliberation,” in Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, ed. John Bohman and William Rehg (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1997); James Fishkin, Democracy and Deliberation: New Directions for Democratic Reform (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); and Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement: Why Moral Conflict Cannot Be Avoided in Politics, and What Should be Done About It (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996). 3. See James Fishkin, “The Televised Deliberative Poll: An Experiment in Democracy,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 546 (1996): 132–40.

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Sensing this weakness, most contemporary advocates of deliberation prefer to explain its importance in terms of legitimacy. 4 Here the key distinction is between institutional mechanisms for aggregating preferences and deliberation that aims at rational consensus.5 The latter is said to fulfill the promise of consent theory in a way that the former never can. The best aggregation can do, it is alleged, is to allow winners and losers to take turns having their way with governmental power, and even this alternation is not guaranteed. Deliberation, on the other hand, allows each of us, in principle, to be ruled by laws and judgments we ourselves make. The legitimacy view usually is articulated as a formal argument that purports to hang not on empirical testing, but rather upon logical deduction from reasonable principles and noncontroversial assumptions about how the world is and works. Rawls and Habermas, the most famous defenders of this view, offer variations on the traditional theme of consent theory.6 The basic intuition here is that political institutions are legitimate when they represent or embody the will or consent of the governed. Likewise, humans are held to be politically free only when they can meaningfully be said to have chosen the basic form of the rules and institutions that govern them. And choice here is not meant to be an existential roll of the dice, but rather needs to be guided by reason and not subject to unjustifiable external constraints, manipulation, deception, coercion, and the like. In other words, we are free when we act according to reason, otherwise we are not.7 A legitimate government is said to be one that secures the rational consent of the governed, one that in some sense persuades rather than coerces. We can gloss “in some sense” here more or less strictly, with varying implications for practices like representation and partisan interest articulation (interest groups, parties, and so on). Liberals like Rawls consider political 4. John Rawls, Political Liberalism, 2d ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996); Joshua Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” in Bohman and Rehg, Deliberative Democracy; Bernard Manin, “On Legitimacy and Political Deliberation,” Political Theory 15, no. 3 (1987): 338–68. 5. Joshua Cohen, “An Epistemic Conception of Democracy,” Ethics 97 (1986): 26–38. 6. Rawls, Political Liberalism; Habermas, Between Facts and Norms. 7. Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” says that the commitment to deliberative decision making “carries with it a commitment to advance the common good and to respect individual autonomy” (75). It should be noted that, as a rhetorical matter, autonomy is still an ideal that, even at this late date, actual (as opposed to ideal) reasonable people can get excited about. Deliberation, even the very best kind imaginable, doesn’t seem to me to have anything like that normative gravity.

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legitimacy to be a strictly constitutional matter. A (that is, our) government is legitimate if it is just, as defined by a hypothetical deliberation. In other words, we can, as Locke thought, describe the principles that reasonable people would require their governments to embody without actually polling reasonable people. Unlike Locke, Rawls thinks that these principles are best understood as those which would emerge from a public discussion among diverse but reasonable and fair-minded individuals, rather than as simply the obvious products of natural reason. Actual public discussion of constitutional questions, according to Rawls, ought to be conducted by the standards of public reason, standards meant to appeal to the diverse individuals party to the “overlapping consensus” of liberal society.8 Joshua Cohen argues that Rawls’s view underplays the deliberative requirements of democratic legitimacy. According to Cohen, political institutions can only claim legitimacy (or we for them) if reasonable people actually decide in actual political institutions: “The ideal deliberative procedure provides a model for institutions, a model that they should mirror, so far as possible.”9 Cohen thinks that this entails two things about deliberation. First, the standards for discriminating real deliberation from coercive or trivial forms of speech cannot be circumscribed to constitutional issues. Second, the principles of justice by which a democratic society chooses to govern itself cannot be stipulated in advance. What legitimacy requires—the kind of government that free people can consent to in good conscience—is a set of sovereign political institutions defined precisely by their deliberative procedures, rather than by their correspondence to an independent conception of justice.10 Cohen has in my view taken the limiting position, arguing that deliberation is the sole source of legitimacy, that it should govern the ongoing, everyday functioning of all democratic political institutions, and that it should meet strict and clearly defined conditions for the disposition of the interlocutors. The extremity of his position—a direct mapping of Habermas’s discourse ethics onto politics—and the abstract way he formulates it make it relatively easy to compare to other views. His defense of deliberation also illustrates why deliberation as he conceives it cannot bear the weight he asks it to hold.

8. Rawls, Political Liberalism. 9. Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” 79. 10. Ibid., 74, 79.

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Cohen’s Deliberative Ideal

Cohen stipulates four conditions for democratic deliberation. The outcome of a deliberation that fails to satisfy these conditions, Cohen believes, cannot be legitimate. Cohen insists that democratic deliberations be sincere, reflective, strictly rational, and aim at consensus. By sincerity, Cohen means that discussants are to articulate their view of the common good in a way that they sincerely expect that others might rationally accept.11 Note here that sincerity entails both a personal commitment to the view at issue and a sincere belief that other parties to the proceedings might endorse it on a rational basis. The reflexivity requirement requires that participants actively recognize the unique legitimacy of the outcome of deliberation: “Because the members of a democratic association regard deliberative procedures as the source of legitimacy, it is important to them that the terms of their association not merely be the results of their deliberation, but also be manifest to them as such.”12 By “strictly rational” I refer to Cohen’s stipulation that arguments be intended and framed as appeals to reason rather than to passion or prejudice. Finally, the consensus requirement entails that all discussants aim at agreeing on a provisional definition of the common good. These, I submit, are protocols of discussion more at home in the Platonic conception of philosophy than in democratic politics. One way to see that this is so—to see, in other words, that Cohen has confused genres—is to take note of the difficulties Cohen encounters when he tries to explain exactly how decisions are supposed to follow on deliberation. According to Cohen, we cannot expect, in most cases, to arrive at a rational consensus about how to pursue the common good, even among sincere, committed, reasoning citizens. So how exactly do we decide once we have exhausted deliberation? Cohen says we must conclude our decision-making process with a vote governed by majority rule, and then affirm the results of that vote as authoritative, at least until we deliberate the issue again. That is, participants apparently need to “regard themselves as bound” not “only by the results of their deliberation” but by the results of their voting as well. How can majority-rule voting be a legitimate way to conclude the sort of deliberation Cohen describes? Cohen is reticent on this matter, but he 11. Ibid., 75. 12. Ibid., 73.

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does suggest that, since prior deliberation is likely to influence how people vote, somehow the vote shares in the legitimacy generated by deliberation. Here is the relevant passage: Even under ideal conditions there is no promise that consensual reasons will be forthcoming. If they are not, then deliberation concludes with voting, subject to some form of majority rule. The fact that it may so conclude does not, however, eliminate the distinction between deliberative forms of collective choice and forms that aggregate non-deliberative preferences. The institutional consequences are likely to be different in the two cases, and the results of voting among those who are committed to finding reasons that are persuasive to all are likely to differ from the results of an aggregation that proceeds in the absence of this commitment.13 On its face, this risks collapsing the legitimacy defense of deliberation into the weaker improvement defense, assuming that “different” in the passage above means “better.” In any case, there is no obvious reason to grant that majority rule is the proper way to conclude deliberation from the point of view of a sincere deliberator who anticipates losing votes frequently. If we have what we mutually take to be an ideal deliberation, and I end up losing in a vote, what am I to think? Obviously, I must believe that the majority is wrong, otherwise I would have agreed. As Socrates asserts in the Gorgias, the vote count surely cannot count as evidence against my judgment.14 If it does, then either my standing in the deliberation or the sovereign status of reason giving must be compromised. What Cohen seems to have overlooked here is the need any reasonable participant in discussion has to explain to himself the sources of disagreement. Indeed, in order to preserve sincerity and reflexivity, one might think that the sources of disagreement would be mandatory topics for conversation, as indeed they are in Socratic dialogue. But how would such a conversation go? If we assume sincerity all around and still suffer disagreement, then surely something was lacking either in our deliberation or in our interlocutors. If our deliberation went wrong, then we would be right to worry about the legitimacy not only of the discussion but of the vote that fol13. Ibid., 75. 14. Gorgias 474a. Citations in the text to the Platonic corpus refer to Stephanus pagination. Quotations are from Plato, Complete Works, ed. John Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), unless otherwise noted.

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lowed it. If the problem is cognitive limitation, we will presumably need an account of how this works. Are we biased, stupid, or obstinate? Is the majority less so than the minority? Is membership in the majority evidence of greater reasonableness? As a practical matter, the fact that I have been outvoted by a sincere group of people cannot prevent me from concluding that they suffer cognitive deficiencies.15 In fact, this seems to me the only conclusion compatible with preserving my self-respect and independence of judgment along with my belief that the deliberation is not hopelessly compromised by power, prestige, and the like. One could hope for a more benign interpretation of disagreement by deliberating citizens, but these run us into a different difficulty. If our disagreements reflect reasonable comprehensive differences, then, by the lights of Cohen’s own theory, we have no business deciding these matters in this forum at all—in other words, then there is no objective common good for us to ascertain. When our deliberation ends in anything less than unanimity, we all must agree that someone has got things wrong. To admit our fallibility as a general matter is unobjectionable. But neither generalized fallibility nor “reasonable pluralism” explains, in a way consistent with the demand for deliberative reflexivity, why in any particular case the better reasons were not transparent to everyone.16 The requirement that we agree to consider everyone sufficiently competent to engage in reason giving, an entailment of the sincerity stipulation, simply does not allow deliberators to draw honest, practical conclusions from the divided results of deliberation. There is no guarantee that a sincere minority will avoid coming to view majority rule as coercive, or for that matter, that the majority will avoid coming to view the minority as pigheaded and obtuse. (It seems to me an ironic but inevitable outcome that self-consciously high standards for deliberation are likely to lead to more emphatic judgments about the competence of the deliberators.)17 And we cannot hope to rescue majority rule 15. Gerald Gaus, “Reason, Justification, and Consensus: Why Democracy Can’t Have It All,” and Jack Knight and James Johnson, “What Sort of Equality Does Deliberative Democracy Require?” in Bohman and Regh, Deliberative Democracy, 208, 231–32; 284. 16. Joshua Cohen, “Moral Pluralism and Political Consensus,” in The Idea of Democracy, ed. David Copp, Jean Hampton, and John E. Roemer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), makes it clear that Rawls’s stipulation that we construe disagreement as a result of the “burdens of reason” is only tenable in an adequately just society, as defined by a relatively high standard (which our society patently fails to meet). 17. I pursue this thought in “Construing Disagreement: Consensus and Invective in Constitutional Debate,” Political Theory 27 (2002): 39–64.

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by adverting to legitimizing principles like reciprocity and rotation, since for Cohen these principles merely drag us back into the dank world of interest-bound politics. Cohen’s ideal deliberative procedures, then, only make sense under conditions of actual consensus. Once we admit the possibility of incorrigible disagreement and adopt a decision-making procedure governed by the principle of majority rule, it is hard to see how a commitment to sincere, reflective reason giving can be maintained, and hence how Cohen’s goal of democratic legitimacy can be achieved. Participants seem to have no way of making coherent public judgments about the sources of disagreement consistent with the demands of this conception of legitimacy. Ideal deliberation, as conceived by Cohen, also seems to require that we learn nothing from the process of voting. We must ignore the fact that our failure to arrive at a consensus last time indicates that we will probably have the same problem next time. However predictable our deliberations become, and however predictable our disagreements, we need to rehash them again and again, and sincerely, too. If not, we risk lapsing back into partisan politics-as-usual. But what if disagreements are systematic, as I think it is reasonable to anticipate, and reasonable for participants to notice? For example, say I know I am going to be outvoted on this issue; I see the handwriting on the wall. I know that my best reasons should carry the day—they do for me, after all—but that on account of bias, stubbornness, or stupidity you will resist, as you usually do. Cohen still requires me to aim not at winning the coming election but at arriving at a rational consensus about the common good. Moreover, for the entire procedure to retain its reflexive legitimacy, we all need to believe that no one involved is trying to win the vote by “rhetorical” or bargaining means, but simply submitting to the best argument, even if we have come to believe that cognitive limitations keep some of the deliberators permanently in the dark on some issues. (The character model here is Socrates in the Phaedo, patiently demonstrating for the umpteenth time to his weeping and allegedly philosophical friends that his death is no misfortune.) I find it untenable to expect that we lesser mortals will seek the best account of the common good rather than a majority of votes in the coming election. Cohen’s model of deliberation is meant to provide a standard for judging the legitimacy of democratic institutions. But in fact, it is hard to imagine any plausible set of political institutions—let alone democratic ones—that would be compatible with the view of deliberation he espouses.

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The problem is not merely, or even primarily, that Cohen’s deliberative standard makes strenuous demands on its participants, though it does that as well. The central problem is that we cannot simultaneously maintain sincerity, reflexivity, and the aspiration to rational consensus in our deliberations and arrive at an authoritative decision, at least not under conditions where actual disagreement is likely to obtain. The exigency of making an authoritative decision under precisely these conditions is what drives Cohen back to majority-rule voting, and what I would argue requires partisan organization—the institutionalization of disagreement on recurrent policy issues—as well. But neither of these institutional devices, familiar enough from typical modern democracies, is available to Cohen’s consensus model of deliberation. The tension between deliberation and decision making in Cohen’s theory is not accidental. The root of the problem is that Cohen’s account of democratic legitimacy borrows from a model of deliberation designed to delegitimate democratic institutions, namely Plato’s. Indeed, the protocols of deliberation espoused by Plato and echoed in Cohen’s model are best conceived as a procedure for deferring political decision making—democratic or otherwise—indefinitely. But before I turn to Plato’s own account of the incompatibility between ideal deliberation and democratic decision making, it will be illuminating to consider the views of a self-professed democratic Platonist who has, after a fashion, drawn this same conclusion for himself. Euben’s Socratic Irony

Like Cohen, J. Peter Euben believes that democratic deliberation requires discussants to be sincere and reflective, and to aim at achieving rational consensus.18 Unlike Cohen, Euben is explicit both about his identification of this ideal with Plato’s depiction of Socratic dialogue and about his concern with improvement rather than legitimacy. Euben’s reading of Plato is quite idiosyncratic in parts, straightforward in others. The straightforward elements—the defense of Socratic inquiry as conventionally understood— 18. J. Peter Euben, “Reading Democracy: ‘Socratic’ Dialogues and the Political Education of Democratic Citizens,” in Demokratia, ed. Josiah Ober and Charles Hedrick (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), appears to endorse the plausibility of belief in the existence of a unique common good. However, he also stipulates as a further condition of legitimate deliberation an agreement on an “antifoundational epistemology” (333). No explanation is offered.

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are quite similar to Cohen’s ideal deliberative procedures, and therefore have the virtue of providing corroboration for my claim that Cohen is a Platonist. The idiosyncratic part—Euben’s characterization of Socrates as a kind of postmodernist—serves to demonstrate the robustness of the genre error both Euben and Cohen have made. In other words, whether Plato’s Socrates believes that his characteristic form of discussion aims at truth or at endless irony, philosophical dialogue is still the wrong model for democratic deliberation. According to Euben, “philosophical conversation, construed as a common search for a shared good that enhances an individual’s and a dialogical community’s good, stands as an ideal of political deliberation.” The stipulated subordination of private interest to the outcome of deliberation is rendered thus: “Socrates’ insistence that ‘if my opponent has any substance in what he says I will be the first to acknowledge it’ (506b), provides a standard for a political debate over the best policy.” Euben glosses the sincerity requirement thus: “Citizens, like participants in the dialogue, should take responsibility for what they say, and in this respect they are educators of each other.” Finally, Euben advances a version of the improvement claim similar to the one Cohen grafts onto his legitimacy defense: “The process of talk in both philosophical discussion and political deliberation changes how one talks. In both instances there is a move from what is private, selfish, or merely taken as given to a situation where reasons in terms of common purposes must be offered and defended.”19 The core of Euben’s view of democratic deliberation is his insistence that reflexivity is not merely a procedural protocol but also a goal of deliberation. According to Euben, “‘real’ dialogue must be about its own preconditions,” and again, “perhaps uniquely among political regimes, democracy calls attention to the conventional authority of its own practices.”20 Construed as a statement of ideals rather than as a descriptive claim (in which case it is probably false), this claim is quite similar to Cohen’s insistence that ideal deliberation make manifest to participants that they recognize no authority other than that of the deliberative procedures them19. Ibid., 342. Euben appears to harbor some doubt about the plausibility of the equality and sincerity conditions. To compensate, he strengthens the reflexivity requirement: “[Deliberation must] acknowledge how the will to power frames the will to truth, and how inequalities of power shape the ‘positions’ of interlocutors in ways that turn proclaimed dialogues into covert monologues” ( 331). 20. Ibid., 331; see also J. Peter Euben, Corrupting Youth: Political Education, Democratic Culture, and Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 35.

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selves. But it admits openly what I take to be implicit in Cohen’s account of deliberation, namely, that its purpose is to come to an understanding rather than to a decision. Euben thus avoids the chief dilemma plaguing Cohen’s view of deliberation by eschewing the connection between democracy and decisionmaking institutions altogether. And so Euben claims that “majority rule is not distinctive to democracy” and that Socrates’ avoidance of formal institutions and self-professed incompetence in their procedures is a good model for democratic citizenship.21 Moreover, Euben simply equates the legitimacy and improvement functions of deliberation. Hence deliberation becomes less a procedure for arriving at a consensus about the best way to pursue our common ends and more a substantive, soul-improving end in itself. As he says, in Socratic deliberations, it is as important that “one be willing to open oneself up to a refutation of one’s life and character” as it is that one advance and consider rational arguments about what we ought to do.22 Indeed, Euben evinces some skepticism about whether rational deliberation can ever issue in anything like an authoritative judgment about an objective common good, a skepticism he apparently does not harbor about the intrinsic beneficial effects of Socratic deliberation on the characters of the participants. Even more than Cohen, then, Euben resorts to the improvement justification of deliberation, which as we saw has a more tenuous link to democracy than the legitimacy view. However, by construing deliberation as a substantive and even exalted end, Euben does successfully avoid the tension between deliberation and decision making that plagues Cohen. Instead, Euben creates another problem indicative of genre confusion, a nominal rather than institutional one: Euben describes the practices of a therapeutic community of philosophers and calls them democracy. Cohen and Euben both strive to define and invigorate democracy by comparing it to a Platonic standard for deliberation, one that stresses the virtues of sincere, self-aware reason giving. It is certainly not an objection to either theorist to observe that they articulate a deliberative ideal first and then proceed to evaluate democratic institutions in light of that ideal. But I believe I have sufficiently demonstrated that the particular ideal they have chosen fits poorly with democratic institutions as we typically understand them. On this score, Euben is more straightforward: his democracy 21. Euben, “Reading Democracy,” 333. 22. Ibid., 350.

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has no partisan organization and requires no majority-rule voting, and so his deliberative ideal creates no obvious obstacles to designing a democratic polity. Cohen, on the other hand, retains what I take to be our commonsense view that in a democracy, weighty issues will be decided by voting, that unanimity on such issues is rare, and that the voting majority should determine the outcome. This practical virtue is a theoretical vice: majority rule is not an upshot of the Platonic view of deliberation; it is, on the contrary, its polemical target. I turn now to Plato to gather some sense of not only why the ideal deliberative procedures of both Cohen and Euben are a poor model for democratic deliberation, but also why they are indeed designed to make such decision making appear incoherent and irrelevant.

plato on democratic deliberation Plato’s Socrates wants his interlocutors to engage in sincere, rational dialogue that aims at consensus, and to accept a conclusion as authoritative only insofar as it is the result of self-conscious participation in this procedure of philosophical interrogation.23 Unlike Cohen, but like Euben, Socrates is explicit about the therapeutic grounds for these criteria for deliberation. Moreover, Socrates argues strenuously for the incompatibility of this style of speech with democratic political institutions and indeed with political decision making in the ordinary sense. In Socrates’ view, the proper goals of philosophical dialogue are to disabuse participants of pretension to wisdom and to help them to purge themselves of inconsistent moral beliefs—in other words, to create harmony in their souls. Toward this end, Socrates encourages his interlocutors to abandon political pursuits in the conventional sense and to practice the “true politics” in which he himself engages: philosophic inquiry. It is, ironically, this Socratic mode of speech that contemporary democratic theorists have recapitulated in their own view of deliberation. 23. Gregory Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 46, 107–31, and Socratic Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1–37, and Terence Irwin, “Say What You Believe,” and Donald Davidson, “Plato’s Philosopher,” in Virtue, Love & Form, ed. Terence Irwin and Martha C. Nussbaum, Apeiron 24 (1993), all discuss the extent to which this is true of the Platonic corpus. I refer to Socrates in this section without advertising a judgment on whose historical views are represented in Plato’s dialogues, if anyone’s.

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Plato’s Gorgias presents his most detailed explanation of the procedures and purpose of Socrates’ distinctive style of conversation, the elenchus, a form of speech that serves as the prototype for Cohen and Euben’s ideal.24 Plato elaborates the norms and aims of the elenchus by means of a contrast with the procedures and purposes of political rhetoric as defended, practiced, and represented by Socrates’ interlocutors in the dialogue. Two of these interlocutors, Polus and Callicles, openly admit that political rhetoric or oratory is designed to pursue the competitive advantage of the orator, at the expense of his adversaries and auditors, by means of duplicitous, emotionally manipulative speeches (466c, 486a–d). While they construe political institutions as the proper forum within which to make use of such a skill, Plato’s dialogue depicts them as desiring to revert to this style of speaking even in their conversation with Socrates about the nature of rhetoric itself. Indeed, the dialogue begins with the famous Gorgias having just finished giving a public display of his skills in an effort, presumably, to recruit students. It is in this context, and by means of contrast, that Socrates sets out, not only to refute the claims made in behalf of rhetoric by its defenders, but also to defend the virtues of his own distinctive style of speech. Polus and Callicles both purport to believe that rhetoric is a skill that will allow them to make use of Athenian political institutions in order to dominate their enemies and the Athenian demos. Subjected to the effects of rhetoric, the Athenians will render decisions and judgments that they believe to be in their own interest, but which will in fact be in the interest of the expert speaker skilled in manipulating and deceiving them. Polus and Callicles are open about their belief that this kind of political domination is a choiceworthy end, and Gorgias implies that he holds such a belief (452e). The immediate aim of Socrates’ elenchus in the Gorgias, then, is to refute two claims: that rhetoric is a skill capable of securing political domination for the one who practices it well, and that political domination is an end worth pursuing. Because of the extremity of the views presented, and the fact that part of what is at issue in the dialogue is the proper use of speech itself, Socrates is called upon to defend his view of how the discussion should proceed. It is crucial to understand that the elenchus is both the method by which Socrates aims to refute the defenders of rhetoric, and the practice which he believes most appropriate for them to engage in given their ultimate aim: happiness. By means of the elenchus,

24. Vlastos, Socrates, 46; Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 1–37.

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they should come to see that a rational person will continue engaging in the elenchus, rather than pursue political power by any other means. Throughout his examination of the claims his interlocutors make in defense of rhetoric, Socrates insists that they say only what they really mean (Gorgias 495a, c, 500b). This sincerity stipulation is a standard feature of the elenchus, familiar from other dialogues besides the Gorgias.25 Socrates sometimes appears to forgo this sincerity requirement, in deference to unease in an interlocutor, but even on these occasions he inevitably returns to the insistence on staking claims in the argument.26 Among other things, this requirement distinguishes the elenchus from rhetoric, in which the presumption is of both conflicting interests between speaker and auditor and the need for the speaker to conceal this fact. Socrates’ sincerity requirement also distinguishes his elenchus from eristic, the sort of hypothetical, competitive logic-chopping depicted somewhat humorously in the Euthydemus. When we consider in more detail how Socratic methods relate to Socrates’ therapeutic aims, this distinction will be of some assistance. For now, note that the express commitment of Socrates’ interlocutors in the Gorgias to deceptive speech leads Socrates to insist on sincerity here more vehemently and frequently than usual. Socrates’ sincerity requirement, like Cohen’s, demands not only that a speaker say what he truly believes, but also that he address his interlocutor with a claim to which he sincerely believes that interlocutor could reasonably assent. Indeed, Socrates goes so far as to insist that they already do!27 In any case, Socrates’ commitment to giving arguments that his interlocutors will find reasonable is palpable. To this end, Socrates typically begins conversation by eliciting the views of his interlocutor, a procedure which clearly meets and exceeds the demand for due consideration of the views of others. It is worth noting, by the way, that Socrates also elaborates the sincerity standard in a more nuanced way than either Cohen or Euben. He insists, for example, on frankness (parrhesia) and good will (eunoia) as detailed aspects of sincerity and laments the deleterious effects 25. Protagoras 331c; Republic 349a, 350e; Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 7–11; Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith, Plato’s Socrates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 7, 13–14; Irwin, “Say What You Believe”; Davidson, “Plato’s Philosopher.” 26. In the Protagoras, Socrates tells the famous Sophist that his intention is to test the argument, exetadzo ton logon, but that by implication “it may happen both that the questioner, myself, and my respondent wind up being tested” (333c). See also Republic I for the same tactic with Thrasymachus. Irwin, “Say What You Believe,” offers a different view, which I believe mistakes the nature of Protagoras’ demurral. 27. Gorgias 474b; see Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 23.

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of their opposites, shame and hostility, on edifying discussion (Gorgias 487a; Laches 178b). Both frankness and goodwill entail consideration for how an argument will affect the other party, and in particular, how the argument will facilitate that party’s use of reason.28 Like Cohen, Socrates is explicit in his demand that parties to the elenchus give clear and logical reasons, rather than appealing simply to image or passion. The defenders of rhetoric, on the other hand, confess to practicing a style of speech that presumes the intellectual inferiority of the audience and makes flagrant appeal to passion and imagery. Indeed, they purport to possess a technique that allows them to overwhelm the logical presentations of experts (456b). Plato portrays Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles as partial to this approach even in their conversation with Socrates. They prefer the sort of long, image-filled speech made famous by the historical Gorgias to the brief, interactive style of the elenchus. Socrates continually insists that his interlocutors refrain from this declamatory style, which he suggests with some irony is appropriate to an assembly or court of law, in favor of short questions and answers (465e–466a). In general, Socrates seems to worry about the effect of Gorgian rhetorical devices on the capacity of their auditors to exercise rational judgment. Socrates frequently adverts to his own bewildered state in response to dubious methods (Protagoras 328de, 334d; see the ironic reference to this effect at Crito 54d). Both Socrates and his interlocutors agree that public addresses to a mass audience lend themselves to emotional manipulation. By contrast, Socrates emphasizes the benefits of the one-to-one exchange characteristic of his elenchus, a feature entailed in his view by the rationality requirement. Intimate discussion of this sort allows for constant questioning and clarification (457c–458b). Moreover, Socrates prefers short questions and answers because he believes that this style of discussion will make it more likely that the discussants will agree on terminology, be mutually comprehensible, and avoid shifting topics and terms in midstream. He pointedly warns his interlocutors about concept “drift”; he calls attention to contradictions in arguments; he frequently revises or offers to revise propositions in order that the argument remain both logically consistent and a sincere representation of the interlocutor’s view (448d, 454c, 457c–d, 462a). In general, Socrates insists not only that conversation proceed rationally but that it aim to arrive at a consensus among the interlocutors about 28. This is not to suggest that Socrates is concerned to avoid awkwardness or embarrassment in his interlocutor. If he points out a contradiction in your argument and you, as a result, blush, you are the one who has ceased to be “considerate” in the relevant sense.

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a practical topic in morality, a version of the question, How should a human being live?29 In the Gorgias, Socrates faces the task of convincing specialists in the practice of competitive speechmaking that they ought to strive to come to agreement with him about the merits of rhetoric and the goods it purports to provide. Plato’s dialogue depicts these characters as lovers of victory, people sensitive to honor and shame. They clearly think of themselves as engaged in a competition with Socrates, to whom they ascribe various competitive motives of his own (482c). But I think we can take Socrates at his word: he wishes his conversations to arrive at a rational consensus, a conclusion in which neither party wins, but by means of which both parties benefit. In the Gorgias, Socrates’ interlocutors frequently present him with the objection that his views would be contradicted by the great majority of his fellow Athenians. As he says to Callicles in response to this claim, he aims only to produce an agreement with his interlocutor. No agreement produced by any means other than the elenchus has authoritative standing for Socrates: “For my part, if I don’t produce you as a single witness to agree with what I’m saying then I suppose I’ve achieved nothing worth mentioning concerning the things we’ve been discussing” (472b).30 The implication here is obvious, and if it were not, Socrates spells it out over and over again: agreements generated in mass political settings are on their face unworthy of consideration. As Euben argues, Socrates rejects majority rule as incompatible with the demand that we hold only a sincere, rational consensus to be definitive and authoritative. One of the purposes of Socrates’ frequent reminders to his interlocutors of both the procedures of the elenchus and the stakes of the questions involved—no less, in his view, than knowing how to live— is to justify their commitment to the outcome of deliberation. He seeks, in other words, to show that they have reason to feel bound by the outcome of a discussion in which their views were fairly and voluntarily subjected to rational scrutiny (472b, 486d–488a). By implication, they are meant to see that beliefs untested by this method, or a consensus reached in any other way, do not merit adherence. I take this to be the Socratic correlate of Cohen’s reflexivity stipulation. Just as Cohen’s ideal deliberative procedures describe a standard for legitimacy by which any set of ordinary democratic practices is bound to be found defective, Socrates sets 29. E. R. Dodds, Plato: Gorgias (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 280. 30. See Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 14.

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standards for speech that serve to deny the legitimacy and coherence of the decisions of the Athenian Assembly and Lawcourts. While the elenchus is compared with oratory throughout the dialogue, this is not the only contrast Socrates offers. Indeed, early on in the discussion Socrates makes a fairly long speech—an anomaly he attempts to justify—comparing oratory not to the elenchus but to the craft of politics. In this passage, a response to Gorgias, Socrates defines oratory as “an image of a part of politics” (463d). He goes on to explain that he understands politics as a craft that aims at care for the soul. This craft has two parts, legislation and justice, each of which is imitated by a “knack” which purports to care for the soul, but which in fact simply flatters and degrades it. By means of analogy, Socrates explains: “What cosmetics is to gymnastics, sophistry is to legislation, and what pastry baking is to medicine, oratory is to justice” (465c). Socrates claims to believe that oratory is an image of justice. What does this mean? For Socrates it means that instead of caring for the souls of their auditors, orators make them worse. By resorting to constant flattery, the orators, according to Socrates, do senseless psychological damage to the demos by exercising their base passions, like a confectioner endlessly feeding sweets to a child. Socrates returns to this theme—that orators make the people of Athens worse—at the end of the dialogue. There he engages Callicles in a discussion about whether any of the famous Athenian politicians of the past made the people better. None, not even Pericles, meets Socrates’ standard for the true politics, the craft of caring for the soul. There is no evidence that they have improved the souls of Athenians; there is some that they have fattened their appetites (516a–e). The purpose of the contrast between oratory and true politics is in part to show how thoroughly public rhetoricians, those who make their livelihoods addressing the democratic Assembly and Lawcourts, fail to grasp the nature of the activity in which they purport to engage. But the contrast has a second purpose: to assert that Socrates is the true politician, because he, unlike the teachers and practitioners of rhetoric, knows how to make people better. Pericles may not improve the demos, but Socrates can (515b–517a, 521d). Of course, the definition of “true politics” as care for the soul is tendentious. We might, and generally do, attribute other purposes to the activity of politics, but since contemporary deliberationists like Cohen effectively borrow the protocols of Socratic conversation, I think it important to show that for Socrates, those protocols make sense only for a politics conceived as therapeutic.

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There are two ways to construe “therapeutic” here. One suggests that philosophical dialogue provides psychic benefits by producing true moral belief. The other suggests that engagement in the elenchus, independent of the substantive outcome, provides such benefits. Notice that the first account appears to leave the door open for contemporary deliberationists to insist that a properly disposed and committed group of citizens might conduct a meaningful political discussion along Socratic lines. If it were the case that the Socratic elenchus were truly a method for arriving at a rational consensus, then the obstacles to achieving such a consensus in the Athenian Assembly would simply be contingent ones. In other words, Cohen could argue that although the Athenian demos may indeed have insisted on pandering or responded to emotional appeals, a more enlightened one may not. Here it is important to observe that Socrates denies not only the compatibility of elenchus and democratic institutions, but that of elenchus and decision making in any form, in any setting. That is, he argues that philosophical conversation is good for the soul independent of whether or not it issues in a rational consensus about anything other than the usefulness of continuing the conversation. Not only does Socrates believe that the elenchus is an end in itself, but he gives every indication of believing that it is in fact unlikely that the elenchus will ever derive any other result. And so Socrates implicitly argues against the view that elenchic criteria for conversion could make sense as a decision-making procedure. Notice first that despite his uncompromising insistence that conversation aim at consensus, Socrates is quite forthcoming about the chronic failure of his elenchus to reach any definite conclusion. In the Apology, Socrates claims that he himself has secured no definite wisdom despite many years of philosophical discussion. Dialogues such as Euthyphro, Laches, and Charmides end in aporia, without even a contending answer to the question at issue still on the table. In other dialogues, Socrates’ interlocutors appear to concede a point out of exhaustion, humiliation, or out of friendship and admiration for Socrates himself. The most convincing agreement Socrates secures in the early dialogues is for the proposition that inquiry itself is useful and should be pursued again another day. This seems odd on its face. How can we explain why Socrates dedicates his life to aiming at a rational consensus that, in positive terms, he appears never to reach? The first clue to resolving the puzzle is Socrates’ own specification of circumstances under which Socrates expects the elenchus to generate a meaningful agreement. Notice the conditionality: if Socrates meets

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someone who is knowledgeable and sincere, he believes that a conversation with that person which achieves rational consensus will issue in genuine moral knowledge, knowledge which should then guide our actions authoritatively. There is good reason to believe that when Socrates attributes knowledge, frankness, and goodwill to Callicles, a self-professed tyrant lover hostile to philosophy, his expectations are in fact low that such conditions have been met in this case.31 Whatever the status of his sincerity, it is clear that Callicles does not have the knowledge Socrates seeks.32 At any rate, no consensus emerges from the discussion, just a begrudging concession that Socrates has won the day. Socrates stipulates the conditional—a counterfactual—by which his elenchus would indeed issue in truth, by definition: rational agreement with a knowledgeable person guarantees knowledge. But the fact that in a relatively long career of philosophizing he has failed to meet anyone (excepting Diotima and perhaps Aspasia) who has managed to substantiate a claim to wisdom has hardly reduced Socrates’ ardor for interrogation. Why? Because, I submit, he recognizes psychological benefits secured by the elenchus even when no certain moral knowledge, no authoritative, comprehensive answer to the how-should-we-live question emerges from discussion. Again, if the value of further inquiry could be justified only on condition that we have reasonable certainty that such inquiry might yield positive results in the future, Socrates’ deep commitment to the elenchus might rest on shaky grounds. But Socrates appears to believe that the elenchus has therapeutic value independent of its capacity to produce such knowledge. In the Apology, Socrates explains that the point of his interrogations is to disabuse the intellectually pretentious of their claims to wisdom. When Socrates encounters such a person—and there appear to have been sufficiently 31. There is no reason, however, to believe that Socrates himself is insincere. Socrates always takes his interlocutors at their word at the outset, and examines them on that basis. Socrates begins with Callicles in the same way: he gives initial, if formal credit to Callicles’ presentation of himself as knowledgeable about moral ends, unabashed, and interested in benefiting Socrates, namely by helping him to outgrow his juvenile philosophizing. See Dodds, Plato: Gorgias, 279–80. 32. Richard McKim, “Shame and Truth in Plato’s Gorgias,” in Platonic Readings, Platonic Writings, ed. Charles L. Griswold Jr. (New York: Routledge, 1988), believes that Socrates must doubt all three qualities he attributes to Callicles. Dodds, Plato: Gorgias, 279, only doubts the attribution of knowledge. I do not believe that such an attribution amounts to insincerity on Socrates’ part, largely because (a) in conventional terms, Callicles is well educated and would be assumed knowledgeable by conventional standards, and (b) Socrates means to test exactly this proposition, which would be impossible if he didn’t suspend his prior disbelief and credit it sufficiently to put it to the rational test.

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many to occupy him for many years—he aims to “show him that he is not wise” (Apology 23b).33 By means of his peculiar style of discussion, Socrates believes that he is able to drive self-professed sages into self-contradiction. Socrates further believes that sufficient testing in this way will drive his interlocutors to the conclusion he has reached for himself, namely, that the wisest position for a human to take is to confess his ignorance about exactly the questions he pursues so doggedly. There is sufficient benefit for the interlocutor, at least, in the straightforward experience of refutation by Socrates: the person refuted achieves greater self-knowledge through recognition of his inconsistencies in belief. Being disabused of the pretense of wisdom is apparently good for the soul. That this brings us no closer to a practical decision (other than the decision already made by Socrates, to continue philosophizing) is simply not a problem for Socrates.34 This leaves us with another puzzle. If it is true that Socrates has little expectation of achieving a rational consensus on anything other than the importance of the elenchus itself, then why insist on aiming at such a consensus in the first place? Why stipulate sincerity, rationality, aiming at consensus, and reflexity? The answer, I believe, is that beyond serving as a foil for the decadence of oratory, these procedural constraints govern what Socrates takes to be the preconditions for successful talk therapy. These procedural demands actually name a set of characteristics typical of a person motivated to engage in further inquiry, a person who finds the existence of inconsistent beliefs, internally or externally, simply intolerable. When Callicles in the Gorgias threatens to beg out of a discussion with Socrates, the latter responds, “This fellow won’t put up with being benefited and with his undergoing the very thing the discussion’s about, with being disciplined” (505c). The benefit at stake is the removal of self-contradiction, which for Socrates is tantamount to psychological health. The obstacles to Callicles’ being benefited by Socrates are no doubt complex, but they certainly involve both an unwillingness to take Socrates seriously and an abiding view of the conversation as a contest, such that conceding a contradiction causes him to lose face. What Socrates shows is that the psychic benefit of elenchus can only be secured if the discussion elicits our sincere commitments, and if we recognize the outcome of discussion as authoritative. The sincerity require33. Socrates goes on to call this his “occupation” (askholias). 34. The most famous Socratic dictum—“the unexamined life is not worth living” ( Ap. 38a)—expresses the view that undergoing elenchic examination is an obvious, intrinsic good.

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ment makes perfect sense if the goal of discussion is not merely to unearth contradictions, but to compel the person who harbors those contradictions to view reconciling them as a psychological urgency. Lack of sincerity allows one to skirt the therapeutic effects of refutation. Likewise reflexivity: Socrates wants the outcome of elenchus to be authoritative for his interlocutors, as it is for him, as indeed the outcome of deliberation is meant to be for the citizens committed to Cohen’s ideal procedures. Without awareness that one is searching systematically for an answer to the question How should I live? one might fail to take the lesson that one does not yet know, and therefore stand in need of more philosophizing. Socrates recognizes that his stipulations about attitudes toward discussion are actually quite hard to meet. The most powerful obstacle to sincerity appears to be shame, an ongoing theme in the Gorgias, where the point, protocols, and psychological ramifications of the elenchus are most deeply plumbed. Socrates also cites jesting, ill will, and (if Gorgias and Cephalos represent generic types) old age as further obstacles (487a). Again, interlocutors who fail to meet the sincerity requirement will simply refuse to take the discussion seriously. As a result, they will dismiss Socrates’ refutation as so much “philosophizing,” in the obvious pejorative sense. Likewise with reflexivity: most of his interlocutors have a hard time keeping track of their own contradictions, their own use of terms, and so forth. They also have a hard time submitting to the judgments reached, in finding them authoritative, no matter how compelling they may be in rational terms. What Socratic therapy seems to suggest is that its four conditions are not merely ideal procedures, but character goals. That is, sincerity, reflection, rationality, and a desire for consensus are not just methods but also goals of the elenchus—which means, of course, that the point of philosophizing is to encourage you to do more philosophy. Socrates says as much; I believe we should take him at his word. While it is not clear that Socrates has succeeded in this aim with Callicles, he can certainly give a coherent account of the connection between this aim and his practice of refutation. If Callicles were to submit to the protocols of elenchus, he would indeed be benefited by the disabuse of the pretense to wisdom, since he would have to face his own logical inconsistencies. This would entail a practical result: abandoning his current, unjustified pursuits in favor of further investigation—that is, more philosophizing. We would expect this outcome to be more plausible in the case of discussion with friendlier characters, and in historical terms, it appears that Socrates did manage to disabuse a sufficient number of such

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people of their mistaken and incoherent beliefs and ambitions. We know the name of at least one: Plato. Disabuse of the pretense to wisdom, then, seems to be not only prerequisite to the reception of reasonable propositions, important if elenchus indeed aims at truth, but more important still, the precursor to the recognition of the need for further inquiry. This does not in any way contradict the dictates of reason, or make the elenchus a sham. The search for contradiction is a logical operation, and Socrates appears to believe sincerely that such contradiction can only be remedied by rational means. Indeed, the only rational course of action for someone convinced of his own ignorance is to inquire, hence Socrates’ lifelong commitment to this endeavor. It is important to see that Socrates is engaged in a battle between reflection and decision. In general, Socrates aims to show, first, that his interlocutors lack sufficient knowledge in moral matters to make anything that could count as a “political” decision, and second, that to issue such decisions in such a state of ignorance would be ill advised. In other words, he wants to debunk the claims of experts in order to defer political decision making. Just as you would never set to raising horses until you were convinced you knew how, Socrates is convinced that you can make no important moral choices on a rational basis until you have determined with reasonable certainty that you have moral knowledge. For Socrates, it is not an objection to the elenchus to say that it appears to defer practical decision making indefinitely.35 That, for him, is largely the point. No wonder, then, that discussions in the Socratic mold make such an odd fit with decision-making institutions.36

reconceiving political rhetoric There are, then, two odd features of the deliberative turn in contemporary democratic theory. The first is that the ideal deliberative procedures 35. Consider the task given the philosopher in the Theatetus: “Consider what happens, my friend, when he in his turn draws someone to a higher level, and induces him to abandon questions of ‘My injustice towards you, or yours towards me’ for an examination of justice and injustice themselves—what they are, and how they differ from everything else and from each other” (175bc). That normal politics involves “my injustice towards you, or yours towards me” has not, I am sure, escaped Plato’s notice. 36. Again, the simple point here is that everyone from Socrates to Cohen acknowledges that rational consensus is a fanciful goal (take any random academic debate as an illustration). The disagreement is about what benefits we get from striving for the impossible.

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favored by most democratic theorists conflict with the decision-making institutions that make democracy tenable. It is hard, for reasons I hope are now clear, to imagine how Socratic-style deliberation could ever conclude in an authoritative way, other than to recommend further deliberation. In a political setting, we can talk ideally all we like, but will, in the end, need to stop talking and decide. If we arrive at an actual consensus, then things are fine, but we will not; that much proponents and critics can agree upon. In ordinary democracies, it is at this point that we take a vote and decide by majority rule. Unfortunately, the resort to this mechanism unravels the legitimation project contemporary deliberation theory was designed to address in the first place. Indeed, stipulating ideal deliberative conditions as the prerequisite for real democracy has the perverse effect of making majority-rule voting look that much more banal or absurd. The second odd feature of contemporary deliberation theory is that it is constantly lapsing from the articulation of a standard of democratic legitimacy into an exhortation to improve our character. And so, although we may still have to vote—and agree to disagree—we are ultimately meant to console ourselves with the thought that we will be better, and better off, for having hashed things out under ideal deliberative conditions. This may or may not be so, but it is certainly a peculiar way to rescue the deliberative project—a bit like a surgeon telling a patient that she’d failed to remove the tumor, but had after all managed to do some liposuction. Ideal deliberative procedures may make us better people (though to engage in them, we’d have to be pretty good to start with), and they may lead to better policies (though that too is something we are likely to dispute endlessly). But once legitimacy is not in the offing—once the very tenability of democracy is no longer wedded to deliberative procedures—we need to begin considering the relative merits of other sorts of improvements we might strive to make in our currently imperfect but more or less democratic way of life. Talking better is hardly the most obvious priority.37 Plato saw no conflict between the search for a democratic standard of legitimacy and a commitment to ideal deliberation. For Plato, the incompatibility of democratic institutions and Socratic conversation is sufficient to demonstrate that the former fail to serve any useful or defensible purpose at all. In fact, the insistent aim of the Gorgias is to show that Socratic 37. The magnitude of the likely social changes wrought by deliberation is, I think, dramatized by Fishkin’s deliberative poll: it is no doubt a well-intentioned effort, but hardly the crux of democratic legitimacy.

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conversation is wholly unsuited to a meeting of a democratic assembly, and vice versa; what it is suitable for is making those who engage in it more rational, more orderly, more virtuous people. Sincere, rational, reflexive, consensus-seeking discourse is formidable cognitive therapy, a reasonable method for improvement, good for your soul—but a strange way to get large groups of people with some common and some competing interests to agree to bind themselves to a particular course of action. The puzzle, then, is why contemporary democratic theorists would choose to embrace as a standard for democratic legitimacy a form of discourse designed to make both democracy and legitimacy standards look silly. As I said at the outset, the surface problem is that these theorists suffer genre confusion: they want therapeutic conversation to accomplish a task it was designed to thwart. What drives this confusion, however, is an underlying error, one that, like Socratic conversation, is also a Platonic legacy: generic monism. Like Plato, contemporary deliberationists tend to think that there is only one right way to conduct a reasonable discussion, only one acceptable way to talk. This is a contentious proposition, though reading the contemporary literature, one would hardly know it. For Plato, at any rate, generic monism was a polemical point. According to the Gorgias, the only alternative to sincerity in deliberation is deception; the only alternative to reflexivity, incoherence; to strict rationality, the rule of the appetites; and to the pursuit of consensus, bitter conflict leading to friendlessness and psychic disharmony. As Andrea Nightingale and Brian Vickers have argued, Plato’s attacks on oratory, poetry, eristic, and so forth were intended to clear the discursive field of the competition to philosophical dialogue.38 The picture here is of an anxious acolyte, someone who saw the newly discovered Socratic philosophy as a tenuous, soul-saving proposition, both noble and endangered. When Plato engages his Socrates with defenders or practitioners of oratory and poetry, he inevitably concludes that anything they can do, philosophy can do better. Not only that: Socrates alone talks the talk that makes life worth living. In the face of such a discovery, who needs poetry and speechmaking? What our contemporaries apparently fail to see is that this itself is a rhetorical tactic, indeed the defining rhetorical tactic of generic monism; 38. Andrea Nightingale, Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), and Brian Vickers, In Defense of Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).

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we know it colloquially as the straw man. Just as Plato’s picture of democratic oratory and decision making is tendentious, Cohen and Euben’s implicit caricature of homo economicus (the poor man’s Callicles) as the default democratic character—the typical voter in a modern democracy— is both false and implausible. The aggregation model of democracy, which suggests that individuals consult their private interest and then vote in order to maximize it, implies that political communication must be strategic. Either I’m trying to flag you down for a mutually beneficial coalition, or I’m trying to hoodwink you. If this were how things stood—if we had to choose between William Riker’s world and Cohen’s—then Socratic dialogue might look pretty appealing. Indeed, this seems to be exactly how Cohen and Euben and the rest do see things. But this is only how the world looks through the lens of a generic monist. In fact, political communication in ordinary, run-of-themill democracies is straightforwardly normative in a completely different, non-Platonic way. Imagine a silent election—no speeches, no news articles, no banners or posters, no TV advertisements. What’s wrong with this picture is not that it impedes our maximizing the bang for our vote. What’s wrong with it is that it is not a real election. An integral part of electioneering is struggling for the hearts and minds of the populace. No one who has participated in such a struggle would leap to the word “sincere” to describe it, but nonetheless, it matters in a way described adequately neither by the aggregation model nor the Platonic one. Likewise, proposing to offer a tax cut to 51 percent of the voters, listed by name, is simply not kosher. A tax cut for people who happen to fall into the highest tax bracket is, though Cohen and I are both free to wonder why so many people in the lowest tax bracket consistently find this sort of thing appealing, at least in the United States. But the point is that we already have a popular and well-entrenched publicity test for political arguments. You cannot say just anything and have it count as acceptable political speech.39 39. Ironically, some critics of philosophical models of deliberation—Walzer, Lefort, and Barber, for example—simply invert the false picture of democratic speechmaking found in the theories they criticize. Barber’s critique of Euben, for example, simply inverts the values in Plato’s philosophy/rhetoric dichotomy: if philosophical discourse is not the gold standard of democratic deliberation, then it must follow that anything goes. The odd result is that Barber’s vision of democracy ends up looking suspiciously like Plato’s jaundiced picture of it in book 8 of the Republic. Critics like Barber are as misled as those they criticize, I believe, by the monist’s view that generic constraints on speech must either be philosophical or nothing at all. See Michael Walzer, “A Critique of Philosophical Conversation,”

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Arguing in public about what we should do to make the country prosper, to address its problems, to sort out its conflicts, is a way of showing respect for voters, who may or may not be all that smart or public spirited, but who generally care that politicians act like public servants, not generalissimos. It is also a way of showing respect for the process, of willing submission to the law of the land. No doubt, it is also part of a process of information gathering, pandering, and hoodwinking. In any case, what matters is that there are deep and deeply democratic communicative norms already implicit in our current practices. If we are concerned about the shape of our democracy, we would do well to start by exploring exactly those practices, by investigating the norms we already live by. Once we abandon the Platonic presumption of generic monism, it is simple enough to see that stipulations about sincerity, reflexivity, and rational consensus are well suited to therapeutic ends and poorly suited to decision-making institutions, and that some other deliberative standard will help us to make reasonable judgments about democratic performance. It becomes clear, in other words, that there can be a variety of good ways to talk, some therapeutic, some political, and so on. Plato rejects this possibility for a variety of reasons. There is no reason for us to follow his lead. It is beyond my scope in this chapter to articulate an alternative model of public deliberation to that I have criticized so strenuously. What I have said instead is that we already have such a standard available—we use it all the time. At any rate, how much and how well we deliberate in politics is surely not the only criterion for democratic legitimacy. It is farfetched, so it seems to me, that communication alone can uniquely determine the quality or existence of as complex a phenomenon as democracy, which seems on its face to entail a cluster of appropriate social structures and norms, legal and political institutions, and so forth. With this caveat in mind, what is not beyond my scope is to suggest an alternative source to Plato for helping us to articulate a reasonable standard for political communication, one that pays due deference to the rest of our democratic intuitions and institutions. The right strategy for articulating such a standard—to start with practices and institutions, rather than trying to cram them in as an afterthought; to consider that there are many good ways to communicate, depending on where, when, why, and with Philosophical Forum 21 (1989–90): 182–96; Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988); and Benjamin Barber, “Misreading Democracy: Peter Euben and the Gorgias,” in Ober and Hedrick, Demokratia.

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whom you intend to communicate; finally, that legitimacy may not boil down to just one benchmark, but may rather consist in the achievement of a variety of aims simultaneously—this has an ancient proponent, too: it is the Aristotelian model. According to Aristotle, political oratory, no less than philosophical dialogue or academic lecturing, is a norm-governed activity, and even a techne. Political life, as Aristotle observed, generates its own distinctive norms and requires, therefore, a distinctive form of deliberation. Political rhetoric is the substantive form of communication adapted to exactly this practice of making group decisions. That is, it is normative speech adapted to democratic institutions. Political rhetoric should enable us to act in pursuit of our interests, to respond to claims of injustice, and occasionally, should provoke us to reflect on what kinds of people we are. Each of these can be done either well or badly, in both an ethical and a narrowly technical sense. The norms governing each are well worth elaborating, not in order to demonstrate yet again how sadly unlike a constitutional convention of Socratic geniuses our politics is, but in order to appreciate better the norms and ideals already present and beckoning in our current democratic practices.40

40. An elaboration of the enabling conditions of this genre would give some substance to the conclusion reached by John Elster, “The Market and The Forum,” in Bohman and Rehg, Deliberative Democracy.

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4 rhetorical democracy Russell Bentley

the problem Deliberative forums exist to address issues of public concern, however defined, and are thought to call upon individual members of that public to participate in decision making as equals. Public deliberation assumes that no one can determine beforehand what the right answer to the given political question is; and therefore, a prima facie duty exists to hear different viewpoints and give them, and those who present them, the sort of respect we would individually ask for ourselves. This gives rise to two related issues. First, how can a deliberative forum accommodate power inequalities that arise from differing levels of rhetorical skill? Second, what conditions are necessary to give force to the idea of equal respect? These are immense questions, and my purpose here is both to clear some ground and to use a specific example from deliberative democratic theory to illustrate why answers might be thought necessary. The ground clearing will take the form of examining Aristotle’s teaching on rhetoric (with some minor discussion of Plato) to show that the ancients had a lively awareness that rhetorical skill becomes a form of power in public institutions. To illustrate why these questions need answers, I will critically examine the principle

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of reciprocity that Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson use to underpin their conception of deliberative democracy.1 To preview my conclusions regarding the first question, I will claim that as theorists rush to defend deliberation itself, they risk ignoring the possibility of power inequalities arising in public forums. In this regard, the encounter with the ancients is especially profitable and a necessary component of research into democratic deliberation. In handling the second question, I want to claim that the principle of reciprocity, as Gutmann and Thompson express it, rests on an artificially thin moral psychology that neglects the interplay among emotion, perception, and reason as a factor in how we hear the arguments others make in a deliberative setting.2 I examine reciprocity with respect to four related topics: the framing of political issues, the context of those issues, experience, and memory. The two main questions I ask in this chapter can be seen as connected in that the power of rhetoric, as Aristotle saw, lies in its practitioners’ knowledge of particular auditors’ psychological and moral states, and of the specific means that are available to persuade them. In other words, Aristotle is acutely aware that the art of persuasive speaking arises from a deep knowledge of moral psychology that gives the rhetorician a special ability to influence an audience. Consequently, the moral state of the rhetorician is a crucial variable in the way deliberation takes place, since this will govern how that special ability is used.3 I conclude from this that a theory of civic discourse that does not attend closely to moral psychology might not only permit power inequality to arise, but could ultimately lack the means of recognizing the abuse of power if it occurs.4 I conclude 1. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement: Why Moral Conflict Cannot Be Avoided in Politics, and What Should Be Done About It (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996 ). Hereafter cited as DD in text and notes. 2. DD is not used here as the exemplar of deliberative democratic theory. Rather, it represents one approach and, as I will claim, an approach with particular problems. Thus, whatever else this chapter succeeds in doing, it aspires to something other than a debunking of deliberative democracy in all its theoretical formulations. 3. I refer to Aristotle in this chapter for two reasons. First, he provides a perspicuous account of the relationship between emotion and reason, which, while certainly not the final word on the subject, highlights the need to address that relationship when theorizing about deliberation. Second, Aristotle expressly distinguishes rhetorical reasoning from other modes of reasoning, and part of my claim here is that we would do well to keep that distinction in mind. As I will argue later, Gutmann and Thompson have improperly substituted a dialectical mode of reasoning for a properly political (that is, rhetorical) mode of reasoning. 4. While I criticize the principle of reciprocity, I will not defend either prudence or impartiality (which Gutmann and Thompson identify as rival alternatives to reciprocity) on

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this chapter with a description of the conditions that should inform or govern an account of deliberative democracy, calling on the reader to consider how much needs considering if deliberative democratic theory is to get off the ground. What I call rhetorical democracy is intended as a more helpful way of conceptualizing the task that democratic theorists confront when reflecting on the problem of deliberation itself, and the conditions relevant to a theory of deliberative democracy. Thus, if we wish to see deliberative democracy as a way forward, I am trying here to help us face the right direction. While this is intended to provoke, it does also gesture toward a serious programmatic area for democratic theory, namely civic education. Nevertheless, the point is to underline the fact that civic education is never reducible to a programmatic agenda; and therefore, the scope of our theoretical considerations must reflect the complexity of education for deliberation.5

rhetoric and power It may be no abuse of ordinary language to describe persuasiveness as a form of power, but Charles Beitz could be correct to say that it is perhaps impossible to formulate any systematic analysis of it.6 This, however, was not the view of the ancients, who, apparently untroubled by any such difficulty, set about writing numerous technical manuals on how to persuade people in deliberative forums.7 What was troubling, as we see in the writings of Plato and Aristotle, is not whether persuasiveness is power, but how that power is used. Our main sources for Plato’s views on rhetoric are the Gorgias and the Phaedrus, two dialogues separated as much by a difference in tone as they

the grounds that, as presented, these are broadly open to the same criticisms I intend to make. 5. Thus, my aim here is not to “dissolve” a particular problem in deliberative theory, but to propose a more muscular conception of the problem faced in theorizing about deliberation. As the chapter proceeds, it should become clear that my criticism of DD is that the authors have artificially dissolved a problem in deliberative theory through an overly restrictive account of deliberative rationality. 6. Charles Beitz, Political Equality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 13. 7. George Kennedy provides a useful background introduction to the subject of rhetoric in his translation of Aristotle’s treatise. See Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans. Kennedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). References to the treatise are taken from this translation.

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are by their location in the Platonic corpus.8 In the former, Socrates’ attitude toward rhetoric alternates between contempt and condemnation. In the latter, he seems to accommodate rhetoric, albeit a rhetoric that is subservient to philosophy. The contempt and condemnation we find in the Gorgias should not, however, lead us to think that the Phaedrus represents a radical change of heart. He condemns the way in which his interlocutors in that dialogue defend and practice rhetoric. They are committed to a pursuit of power without regard to any ethical motive.9 Plato shows them accepting rhetoric as a useful tool that helps them achieve aims antithetical to Socrates’ own. Despite this, though, Socrates’ condemnation may be belied by his own rhetorical flair throughout the work. This seems to acknowledge some role for an art of persuasive speech and the possibility of harnessing it to ethical ends. The Phaedrus goes some way toward describing what this would mean in practice. In that work, Socrates appears to distinguish between a technique for constructing speeches and a true rhetorical art.10 The latter is tied to a philosophical method of “collection and division,” which I take to mean an ability to make fine distinctions and detect hidden similarities. Moreover, the true art of rhetoric, Socrates tells us, requires a knowledge of the human psyche, specifically knowledge of the various human personality types. The reason is that a speaker does not simply persuade; speakers persuade particular audiences. A speech is persuasive to someone; and therefore, nothing is called persuasive in the absence of anyone who is actually persuaded. Thus, ensuring one succeeds in persuading requires some knowledge of the audience’s psychological and moral condition. This is a compressed gloss of Plato’s views, but it allows us to see that Aristotle’s apparently more analytical treatment works with the same themes and concerns. Aristotle begins the Rhetoric by putting the art in some context: he describes it specifically as the counterpart of dialectic.11 This is important beyond mere contextualization. It establishes at the outset that rhetoric is not the art of being eloquent, which would be no more 8. The Gorgias is considered to have been written significantly earlier than the Phaedrus. 9. By way of example, see Gorgias 452e. I have used the translation by Terence Irwin, Plato: Gorgias (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). 10. Socrates makes some minor remarks about the proper organization of speeches at 237c, which seem to be little more than advice about technique. His more expansive discussion of rhetoric in his second speech concerns the kind of knowledge an artful rhetorician requires about an audience. I have used the R. Hackforth translation, Plato’s Phaedrus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952). 11. Rhetoric 1354a1. “Counterpart” is the usual translation of antistrophos.

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than a mastery of style, but the art of a kind of reasoning, of which eloquence is but a component. It will be useful, therefore, briefly to describe dialectic in order that we can follow Aristotle’s distinction. Aristotle makes several references to dialectic in the Rhetoric, but his fullest statement can be found in the Topics.12 Dialectic, he says, is a form of reasoning that starts from opinions that are generally accepted and arrives at some conclusion through them (Topics 100a30). These opinions may be accepted by everyone, the majority, or the most illustrious of people (Aristotle cites the philosophers here) (100b21). However, what distinguishes dialectic from, say, demonstration is that the latter uses principles that are true and primary (100a27). We do not interrogate the first principles of the sciences, for example, on the grounds that we typically accept them as natural facts. Generally accepted opinions are specific human commitments, however. They are not themselves, therefore, beyond interrogation. Dialectic, then, begins with common opinion, but it may not leave it intact. Also, we learn that dialectic has more than an academic value. Aristotle says it is useful for intellectual training, for giving one the ability to argue with others in terms of their own convictions, and for helping one raise searching questions on both sides of a subject (100a34). He claims that the last will help us detect error and truth. Dialectic, then, is a process of criticism, which Aristotle says contains the path to the principles of all inquiries (101b3). The dialectician’s tools in this process are syllogism and induction. This is a compressed presentation of dialectic, but we can see the general thrust. Dialectic is a kind of philosophical disputation. It is close examination of another’s argument through precise questions and a defense of one’s own argument when faced with similar questioning. Its precision intentionally excludes expansive development of responses and, therefore, significantly limits the scope of allowable criticisms and defenses. The reason for this is that one uses dialectic to determine logical consistency both within a particular argument and between that argument and other beliefs one professes to have (or are seen as generally held). It would not be too far off to say that Aristotle’s dialectic closely resembles Socratic cross-examination. Dialectic, then, is basically a logician’s device that delivers some kind of certainty about things of which we can, in fact, be certain. It starts from what is simply opinion, but it does not necessarily end there. Indeed, 12. W. A. Pickard-Cambridge, trans., Topics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941). Hereafter cited in the text.

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if, like Aristotle, one believes the aim should be true opinions, dialectic should not end there. Rhetoric, on the other hand, while not concerned strictly with logical coherence, still uses tools that are comparable to those of dialectic. The rhetorical equivalent of syllogism is what Aristotle calls enthymeme. It is a device that functions largely as a syllogism does, but is, first, less formal in structure and, second, may leave the major premise unstated.13 The rhetorical equivalent of induction is paradigm (which I take to mean something like paradigmatic example), which, rather than arriving at the universal through the particular, illustrates the universal with a specific instance (Rhetoric 1356b1ff.). Now given that Aristotle says rhetoric is related to dialectic, we can reasonably assume that it too has something to do with truth.14 What distinguishes rhetoric from dialectic, therefore, is not so much the question of truth and error, but the circumstances in which each is used. Rhetoric is the method of reasoning employed when uncertainty defines the situation, which typically happens in law courts and legislative assemblies. Aristotle faults other writers on rhetoric for concentrating too much on the former and neglecting the latter, which he describes as more fine (Rhetoric 1354b23). Whereas judicial proceedings concern private disputes, assemblies address public issues and, therefore, fill the role of lawgiver. To put this in broader terms, the more noble use of rhetoric addresses the question, What is good for us? It is effectively about giving practical content to moral beliefs through public action. It does not address disputes over moral beliefs, as such, but about actualizing those beliefs in the context of specific public issues. Clearly, this creates for Aristotle, as it did for Plato, pressing ethical concerns related to the use of rhetoric, which appear through his analysis of persuasiveness itself. Persuasiveness, he says, depends on three factors: the character of the speaker, the auditors’ frame of mind, and the proof or apparent proof provided by speech.15 He ranks the character of the speaker as the most important of the three and notes that a person of good character is more 13. Aristotle uses enthymeme quite often in the Rhetoric himself. By way of example, we read at 1354a, “All men make use, more or less, of both [dialectic and rhetoric]; for to a certain extent all men attempt to discuss statements and to maintain them, to defend themselves and to attack others.” 14. At 1356a25 he says that rhetoric is an “offshoot” of dialectic and the study of ethics. A few lines later, rhetoric is said to be partly dialectic and to resemble it. 15. Ethos, pathos, and logos (Rhetoric 1356a1).

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persuasive than his opposite. This is especially true when opinions are so divided that resolution is difficult to achieve (Rhetoric 1356a5ff.). Aristotle’s meaning here is that, when divisions are so intense that grounds for agreement seem unavailable, the moral quality of a speaker becomes a significant factor in our evaluation of the views he defends. However, Aristotle does not mean that we judge the quality of speech by what we already know about the speaker, since this would seem to answer the question of whose opinion should be accepted before anyone has spoken. It would absolve us of any responsibility to listen. Instead, the idea is that a speaker evinces a personal character that lends credibility to the speech made. This is not to say that our prior knowledge of a speaker is irrelevant (especially since good character can be evinced through speech over time), simply that it cannot do all the work for us. Regardless of his character, however, the artful rhetorician cannot be successful without considering the auditors’ frame of mind, as well. Thus, book 2 of the Rhetoric is partly a commentary on moral psychology. In it Aristotle considers the nature of human emotions and the state of mind a person is in when experiencing each one. He also considers what sort of person characteristically experiences certain emotional states and the causes of each. What we discover in this part of the treatise is that feelings of anger, friendship, shame, pity, and so on are directly connected to our capacity to judge issues and choose courses of action. Moreover, factors such as age, family social standing, wealth, and power in the community are significant influences on the character a person has. Putting emotional state and character together, we get a picture of human agents as diversely motivated both across individuals and over time. More specifically, we can say that changing material influences on character, as well as the various emotional states, seriously affect how an individual frames and judges issues. We should be clear at this point that Aristotle is not assigning a decisive role to nonrational factors in decision making. His point is that emotions and reason are not separate components of the psyche; neither can operate without the influence of the other (or can even be made to do so entirely). The judgments we make, he might say, cannot be conceptualized as the outcome of a single motivational cause, but of a wide and changeable motivation-set. This seems to be born out in his ethical teaching, as well. One of his major aims in the Nicomachean Ethics is to describe the rational governance of emotion and appetite. Note, this is not the domination of emotion by reason, but the informing of emotional responses by a rational awareness of circumstances and events. The doctrine of the

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mean, which is the central tenet of Aristotle’s ethical thought, is not an arithmetic mean, under which we would feel only middling amounts of any emotion. Rather, it is learning to gauge one’s emotional response to a rational assessment of the situation at hand. Sometimes, extreme anger, for example, occupies the mean position because the present situation is something that should make one extremely angry. Our assessment of what situations require of us emotionally is learned through habituation and correction, both within the family and the wider community. All of this points to a conclusion we also find with Plato: persuasion does not occur unless some specific person is (or people are) persuaded (Rhetoric 1356b27). Nothing makes an argument, claim, or position persuasive in the abstract. It has to convince another person, who, as Aristotle tries to make clear, will have an individual character and will be subject to various nonrational (as well as rational) influences. Another conclusion from Plato also appears: the subject Aristotle describes is an art, something that is open to systematic study. In short, the art of rhetoric can be taught and learned, and it stands to reason that some might possess the art and others not. Possession of it constitutes a certain power one has over others. Just as surely as an expert practitioner of any other art will be more capable of achieving the aims of that art, the skilled rhetorician will succeed at persuading others with more regularity and predictability than those who do not study it. It represents a kind of political skill, and this is why it is immensely valuable to Socrates’ interlocutors. As Aristotle says, however, rhetoric, like dialectic, does not have its own peculiar subject area; it is about reasoning in public, not reasoning about specific topics (1355b7). Consequently, there is nothing inherent in the art of rhetoric that prevents its use for unethical ends. The power it provides has to be supported by a sound ethical grounding, which is perhaps why Aristotle treats rhetoric as an offshoot of ethics as much as of dialectic. In other words, he takes for granted that some will be artful rhetoricians and others not, but he wants to harness the power of rhetoric to the finest aims and pursuits. The problem that Socrates addresses in the Gorgias, therefore, remains. The way rhetoric is actually practiced will always depend on the moral character of the practitioner. Since moral character is something that is developed through education, rhetorical practice will only be as good as the broader education citizens receive. This is why he saw his teaching in rhetoric as a complement to his teaching in politics and ethics. In each of these he is concerned about moral character at the individual level and at the level of the individual in the community. Furthermore, if

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rhetoric is an art, those who practice it can reasonably be held responsible for the way they do so. Holding public speakers morally accountable would make any amoral study of rhetoric appear either misguided or dangerous. One must seek ethical learning along with the art of rhetoric.

conditions of reciprocity In this section I intend to examine Gutmann and Thompson’s description of reciprocity, a principle cornerstone of their defense of deliberative democracy, and draw out the conditions necessary for it to hold. The claim is that the moral psychology necessary to support the principle, as they develop it, is insufficiently robust to carry the weight of their deliberative democratic commitment. Thus, the following analysis draws on my earlier discussion of Plato and Aristotle by arguing that the principle of reciprocity cannot accommodate the complex nature of persuasiveness because its moral psychological foundations will not carry the burden. Additionally, the conditions necessary for reciprocity do not rule out the power inequalities that the ancients identified and, because of the shaky moral psychology, effectively permit the abuse of that power. Reciprocity is one of three principles upon which Gutmann and Thompson build their idea of deliberative democracy. Reciprocity, they say, governs the kinds of reasons that are given in a deliberative forum. The principle of publicity concerns where those reasons are given. The principle of accountability concerns the questions of by whom and to whom. While all three principles comprise the deliberative process within their theory, reciprocity occupies a crucial position. This principle effectively defines the terms of public discourse and appears to generate a moral obligation to interact discursively in a prescribed way. The obligation takes the form of mutual respect, which, they say, lies at the core of reciprocity and deliberation in a democracy. They describe it as making cooperation on fair terms possible. Moreover, mutual respect is more than a pattern of behavior—more than having a favorable attitude and constructively interacting with others. Rather, they describe it specifically as an “excellence of character” (DD, 79). Since this is the closest thing to an idea of moral psychology in Democracy and Disagreement, it is worth dwelling on Gutmann and Thompson’s remarks. They say this excellence consists of the following: (a) the possession of moral commitment; (b) a self-reflective stance toward one’s particular

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beliefs; (c) an ability to discern when a difference of opinion is tolerable and when it calls for the notion of mutual respect; and (d) an openness to the possibility of changing one’s commitments (79–80). Mutual respect holds out a possibility that has to be fulfilled in actual political life. While it refers to the manner of holding and expressing moral beliefs, it is fundamentally the manifestation of certain attitudes in public action, and not about style or rhetoric (80). We need to unpack the components of mutual respect more completely in order to understand better the excellence they represent. The first, possession of moral commitment, hardly needs elaboration. Citizens who are not themselves morally committed are difficult to conceive of as agents and, moreover, pose no problem to the democratic process, since they will not become involved in moral disagreements. The second, a self-reflective stance, requires that citizens not be dogmatists. It holds that one should develop moral commitments through inquiry and choice. Accepting unquestioningly what one has been taught or what passes for a common view is, therefore, ruled out. Self-reflection requires us to look at ourselves as part of the process of looking at others. It recovers the ancient command to know thyself and is premised on a notion of selfimprovement. Further self-reflection is premised on an implicit belief that self-improvement is possible. At least, it commits us to the view that who we think we are may not be who we really are or really desire to be. Whether one undertakes to improve oneself after making such a discovery would require a different act of will.16 In any event, self-reflection is connected to potential feelings of uneasiness with oneself. The third, discerning the tolerable from the respectable, appears to work in two ways. First, it is a statement about practice: some disagreements can be tolerated, but some are sufficiently deep to require deliberative interaction.17 Second, such discernment addresses the ability to make fine distinctions, to exercise finesse. It points toward a certain intellectual sophistication that finds its practical value in not exaggerating (or underemphasizing) the disagreements we confront in politics. It recognizes similarities and differences that are revealed only through examination and through an effort to take apart and reassemble what first appears unitary 16. If Socrates is correct, to recognize a deficiency of character as such would entail a willingness to rectify that deficiency. Aristotle’s account of akrasia largely responds to the Socratic view. See Ethics, book 7. 17. The authors’ prose is a bit unclear here; by “tolerable” they mean that a disagreement should be governed by a principle of toleration and by “respectable” they mean it should be governed by their own principle of mutual respect.

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and indivisible. It aims at conceptual clarity through nice distinctions, but shuns verbal hair-splitting. The fourth, an openness to changing one’s commitments, indicates a modified skepticism. It directs us to hold our beliefs provisionally, which is an offshoot of holding them self-reflectively. The inquiry and choice that leads to moral commitment is ongoing, a perpetually unfinished business. Given that the circumstances that call our commitments into play will be changing, those commitments are always being put to the test, both by events and by our interaction with others. Thus, openness to change becomes awareness that our moral beliefs are not pronouncements on all that has been and is yet to be. As with self-reflection, a Socratic ideal can be discerned here, specifically a desire to undermine prideful belief in our own infallibility. And like self-reflection, it may also be a weapon against intellectual complacency more generally. For example, it would preclude a kind of vulgar nihilism that abandons argument on the grounds that moral beliefs are too complex and contradictory to lend themselves to interrogation. If it protects against complacency, then it also protects against what Plato calls “misology”—contempt for argument18—since it requires us to engage willingly in argument to check and correct our beliefs. Thus, we can see that mutual respect is, indeed, an excellence of character. As with any such excellence, it is hard to dispute its desirability. Even if one wanted to question its attainability, its value as an ideal would remain intact. Nevertheless, one can usefully question how Gutmann and Thompson believe this excellence will come to be engendered in the citizens of a democratic polity. While they believe mutual respect is both a necessary and excellent thing, they have little to say about the kind of civic education that would promote its development, except for the following statement: “In opening the forums of political decision making to a wide range of legitimate moral disagreement, and defending practices that cultivate mutual respect among citizens within those forums, the principle of reciprocity supports a political process that promotes moral learning. Citizens put their moral beliefs to the test of public deliberation, and strengthen their convictions or change their minds in response to the arguments presented in a politics governed by reciprocity” (DD, 93). Thus, one can say that we become mutually respectful by acting in mutually respectful ways.19 Institutions that are open to diverse voices will help promote this behavior 18. Cf. Plato, Phaedo. 19. Habituation as the route to virtuous character is, of course, central to Aristotle’s ethical thought.

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more widely, as will public defense of mutual respect itself. But all of this is too general. The question of how to engender mutual respect must say something more specific about what is engendered. The constituents of mutual respect, as we saw earlier, are moral commitment, self-reflection, intellectual discernment, and open-mindedness. In expanding on these, Gutmann and Thompson describe a “family of moral dispositions” that support the principle of reciprocity and which appear to be foundational commitments for a democratic civic education. These dispositions are “civic integrity,” “civic magnanimity,” and “economy of moral disagreement in action” (DD, 81–91). The first, civic integrity, is a demand for consistency throughout one’s moral reasoning. It calls for consistency in speech and between speech and action. It also calls for the acceptance of the broader implications of one’s moral views. As an example, Gutmann and Thompson believe someone opposed to abortion should be in favor of policies that ensure children are well fed (81–82). Civic magnanimity means acknowledging the moral status of an opponent’s position; that is, treating an opponent’s position as a genuine moral belief and not something easily dismissed.20 The last, economy of moral disagreement, basically means not expanding the scope of a dispute more than is necessary to resolve it. To illustrate, they say, “Citizens ought to be able to agree, for example, that someone’s views on abortion should not affect how she is treated with respect to other public policies” (DD, 87). In a broader sense, this represents protection against victimization, so deliberators do not judge the worth of one’s views on an issue by the views one held about an unrelated issue. What should be striking about this typology of dispositions is the remarkable similarity it has to Aristotle’s idea of dialectic. We are first told that educating citizens into mutual respect entails their bringing moral positions to the forum and putting them to the test. This test, we later find, consists in standards of consistency, avoidance of any prejudice, and a neat separation between the relevant and irrelevant. In other words, reciprocity seems to commit us to seeking doctrinal harmony, something we work out in speech during public deliberations. The three moral dispositions that must be instilled through civic education promote both clarity of thought and sincere interaction with others as a way of determining the morally consistent thing to do. 20. “Magnanimity” may not be the most perspicuous way of expressing this thought. One often thinks of the magnanimous person as bestowing something, often respect, that is not strictly deserved. The authors use magnanimity to mean a bestowing of respect that is deserved until proved otherwise.

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Herein lies a difficulty that I want to describe under four headings: issue definition, issue context, experience, and memory. I see these as deepening the moral psychological issues that Aristotle raises. Each of these headings, I will argue, leads us away from reciprocity, understood as doctrinal coherence, and toward a more classical conception of civic discourse that is sensitive to the diversity of moral character in a polity. However, they also highlight the problem of power in deliberative forums and show that Gutmann and Thompson’s account of reciprocity has masked over this problem. Issue Definition

Reciprocity treats public issues as arising from no identifiable source; the essential character of each is taken as given. When an issue comes forward, it arouses various moral beliefs that citizens hold, and we then need some way of handling the resulting disagreement. Consequently, Gutmann and Thompson concentrate their effort on how to manage conflicts of this sort. This, however, is only part of what is at stake. Moral disagreements in politics are not only about what should be done and how our actions should be defended. They are also about how to describe the situations we confront, how to conceptualize and understand them. One of Gutmann and Thompson’s favorite examples is abortion, certainly an intractable problem in American politics. Nevertheless, the dispute over abortion is a dispute over the terms of characterization as much as it is a dispute over policy. It was only recently that the labels “pro-life” and “pro-choice” became widely replaced by “anti-abortion” and “pro-abortion” (which may or may not be better). The old labels seemed to imply that some people put the idea of choice ahead of life itself. More important, the labels are a contest over the nature of the political issue: is it about the murder of innocent, unborn children, or is it about the right of a woman to control what happens to her own body? The description of an issue is going to call forth different moral responses, so what the issue is cannot be taken for granted. We might reasonably expect deliberators to disagree over the nature of what they are talking about as much as what the right response to an issue is. This is not to say that an issue called “abortion” does not exist. However, it is problematic for the idea of deliberation that individuals attach different meanings to the issue stated in its most generic form.21 21. Moreover, that attachment of meaning can be, and often is, a calculated move in a deliberative setting. Unfavorable descriptions can put those with whom one disagrees on

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Issue Context

If the meaning to be attached to an issue is itself problematic, so is the constellation of issues that surround it. In one sense, we address political issues within the framework of other political events and decision-making activities. Thus, the decision we take in one area can have a bearing on what other issues arise and how we deal with them. In another sense, though, drawing on the points about issue definition, there is a moral context that we need to address, as well. The contexts in which we try to place political issues have moral tones and can be emotionally charged. There is no value-neutral characterization of an event, problem, or context. Take the example of abortion again. The moral context in question ranges across ideas of liberty to act in ways that do not harm others, Lockean property rights over one’s person, the state as a protector of life, and the boundary (and the existence of the boundary) between the public and private. These are not just various commitments that parties to the dispute might have, but moral notions thrown up by the liberal framework within which the issue occurs and which may not be compatible with respect to the given issue. Indeed, to be true to the problem of contextualization, we need to recognize that the liberal framework may not be the only one active. Questions of virtue or community ethics, for example, expand the constellation and, thereby, complicate how we understand the issue and can generate further incompatibilities.22 Experience

The ideas that I have addressed concern our problematic relation to political issues by concentrating on the idea of an “issue.” Experience and memory, on the other hand, address concerns about the citizens in deliberative forums. Experience has two aspects: experience of political events and issues, and experience in deliberation. Our experience of events and issues should be straightforward. The judgments we develop about what an issue means and what policies are both desirable and effective are influenced by our familiarity with political issues in general. This kind of experience is the defensive (e.g., the characterization of abortion as murder) by setting the terms of debate within certain parameters. 22. If we truly do live in multicultural societies, the context expands yet further. Indeed, we can imagine that under some descriptions there may be no issue at all.

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an aspect of civic maturity, and we might reasonably say that a usefully generalized understanding of a political issue will be partly subject to the range of experience we have had. By “usefully generalized” I simply mean that the issue, if we are to think of it as a moral disagreement, must be conceptualized at a sufficiently high level of abstraction. Moral claims we make contain generalizations about our own experience, thus, given differences in experience, both in terms of quantity and quality, agents are not simply disagreeing over the morality of policy decisions, but over their own moral sentiments. These will have been developed over time, in various ways, articulated in various styles, and held with varying levels of confidence. The diversity of moral conviction is as diverse as human experience. This contributes to the point about experience in deliberation. It is not in itself a major problem that some people have more practice than others in deliberative forums. After all, if deliberative ability can be learned through experience, we can foresee a general increase in ability over time. It is, however, a problem that variance in individual experience can contribute to perceptions of authoritativeness in a forum. Whether or not general levels of deliberative ability do rise, there will always be some who have more experience than others. We can reasonably see that members of the community with both more life experience and more deliberative ability also have a more robust sense of awareness that would be rhetorically useful. In practice, this contributes to forming generalizations about the issue at hand, making broad and richly informed comparisons, and constructing persuasive analogical arguments. Moreover, it contributes to how one assesses the character of fellow participants in deliberation, what patterns of argument one can discern and inform the choice of one’s own style and strategy of persuasion. Therefore, it is not very helpful to think of deliberation as taking place between people who are basically the same, but with different moral commitments. We need to consider the development both of moral commitment and modes of understanding. Since we are born with neither commitment nor understanding, we cannot take for granted how these have developed in any given individual. We can perhaps find out, but the possibility of discovery is not the same as knowing.23 If this is true, a defense of deliberation that does not take seriously what we have yet to learn about citizens cannot seriously address what changes would be necessary for deliberative institutions to function. 23. Nor is it the same as knowing how one might learn.

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Memory

Experience and memory are inseparable. However, not all memory is of personal experience. As a community, citizens will have stories about themselves in the form of histories and myths that purport to tell the who, what, how, and why about the community itself. We can take a broader perspective and characterize judicial findings and legal pronouncements the same way. Both state to some degree what we believe is in accordance with who we see ourselves to be; they say something about the citizenry to whom they apply as much as they say something about any particular issue. To illustrate, we can look again at the abortion debate in America. It may not be surprising that many opponents of abortion are also in favor of capital punishment, prayer in state schools, and limiting social welfare programs. The memory of America that may be in operation is one of devout Christians beginning a new life in a new world, where they had to learn self-reliance if they were to survive, and saw punishment as retribution, not moral education. Defenders of abortion may see an America devoted to negative liberty, the protection of rights against invasion by tyrannical leaders, and toleration of those different from oneself. Other histories conflict over other issues. We might consider affirmative action, for example, as violating traditions of self-help and of equal opportunity. Alternatively, we might think of it as small recompense for a history of appalling injustice or as patronizing charity that degrades whoever accepts it. The moral positions that citizens develop and defend, therefore, are tinged by historicomythical narratives, as well as by more personal memories of life in the community. These are not conflicts over moral positions, as Gutmann and Thompson treat them, but conflicts between narratives about who “we” are. Memory goes further than this when we consider deliberative forums themselves. The place where deliberation takes place is not an arena of strangers, but of people who have some knowledge of one another. Whether we are talking about citizen assemblies or representative bodies, those who participate bring their memories of each other into the deliberations. Deliberators remember how one argued in the past, what positions were held, and the way others present were treated. Deliberators remember who is tactful, who is assertive, who is cautious, who is excitable, who always raises the same point, who remains silent, and so on. Unlike collective memories that influence moral beliefs, memories of other people influence how we hear those people and how we acknowledge their participation. Certainly nothing prevents a commitment to listening

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intently no matter who speaks, but that is a decision to recognize and perhaps overcome prejudice built up through memories of previous encounters. Furthermore, memory may work indirectly by supplying us with recalled stereotypes that complicate the perceptions we form of speakers and of what they say. Accents, dialects, physical attributes, gender, tones of voice, and a range of other factors affect our listening. Of course, this has nothing to do with the intrinsic nature of such factors, but with the meanings they have come to possess for a given auditor. The points I have raised above—issue definition, context, experience, and memory—should lead us to question further how civic discourse is and should be conducted. It seems apparent that much more is in dispute than the moral commitments held by citizens in a deliberative forum. Also, we see how much more is available for deliberators to draw upon in order to persuade other citizens. The more they are aware of this availability and the more they are able to incorporate it into their efforts to persuade, the more persuasive they will become. We find ourselves, therefore, in the world of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. It is a world in which there is uncertainty, tentativeness, and ambiguous relations among persons, issues, and meanings. The first is perhaps most crucial here. Uncertainty surrounds the motives and the level of knowledge that a persuasive speaker possesses. Just because awareness of the available means of persuasion contributes to deliberative ability, we cannot say it generates moral transparency. We cannot see character; we have to watch it unfold through action. Unfortunately, from the perspective of the other deliberators, the action through which it unfolds is partly the action of deliberating. It would be useful to know the character of other deliberators before we credit their views, but we are trying to decide how to credit the views while we are trying to sense the character behind them. Similarly, how we sense character will be as complex as how our perceptions are formed more generally. Even if speakers try to evince a certain character, they meet halfway the character that auditors might assign to them. They may already be branded with some label in the eyes of their listeners. While the character that others sense need not be a fixed perception, it is a perception that starts to emerge before a deliberator has spoken. This is not to treat deliberation as a hopeless ideal. Aristotle’s comments in the Rhetoric partly save it: dialectic and rhetoric are more or less practiced by everyone (Rhetoric 1354a3). We are talking about modes of reasoning and that means speciousness, sophistry, insincerity, and prejudice are at least potentially subject to exposure. But for the principle of reciprocity,

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this is a problem of controlling the abuse of rhetorical power through citizen education. Specifically, it means educating people not to abuse power and educating people to recognize abuse when it occurs. With regard to the abuse of power, it clearly seems that education must be directed at least in part to the sorts of virtues that promote the ethical use of power. With regard to the recognition of abuse, it also clearly seems that education must be directed toward distinguishing the dispositions or states of character that tend to undermine the exercise of the relevant virtues. This may call for interventions in education that promote civic consciousness—interventions that must occur even in those areas that liberal polities consider private, since we learn about interpersonal discourse as we learn language. Moreover, the overwhelming effect of the family on the development of moral consciousness requires us to attend to how this development takes place. Ignoring this is to ignore that rhetorical skill is power in deliberative assemblies, and checking excesses of power is certainly a democratic ambition.24 These comments, it seems, describe the upshot of reciprocity. Its practical success appears to require its own violation. A pervasive ethos of deliberative reciprocity, as Gutmann and Thompson seek, cannot come about through deliberative reciprocity itself; that would require the endpoint to be reached before it is reached. Rather, it must be systematically taught as the core of civic education. One might not feel this is problematic: if we take reciprocity as a first principle, then we can work through it to certain conclusions. However, in so far as reciprocity becomes a moral view, it not only becomes (incoherently) subject to itself, but fails their own test of reciprocity. As they say, “Any claim fails to respect reciprocity if it imposes a requirement on other citizens to adopt one’s sectarian way of life as a condition of gaining access to the moral understanding that is essential to judging the validity of one’s moral claims” (DD, 57). This might well stand as an epitaph. Gutmann and Thompson want us to accept reciprocity because, they claim, it is superior to certain rival principles. In the final analysis, however, a possibly invasive form of civic education is necessary to make it operational. 24. These remarks can only hope to gesture toward issues that would need addressing in a full treatment of civic education. However, we can say that civic maturity occurs through a process of moral development that is not limited to formal and informal learning in the period prior to civic majority. Participation in the public forum contributes to the ongoing moral development of citizens and, therefore, secures and deepens all prior development.

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conclusions: rhetoric in the public sphere Disagreement in the public sphere almost inevitably takes on a moral dimension: questions predominate of how we should understand an issue and what ought to be done. Consequently, disagreements are more impassioned and less amenable to procedural rules of engagement. Fortunately, though, this neither requires us to choose a hegemonic mode of discourse, which must be imposed to silence the clamor, nor to surrender to the babble of competing voices. We can, instead, retrieve the classical stance that puts the study of rhetoric at the center of civic discourse, a position I would like to label “rhetorical democracy.” Rhetoric in the public sphere takes for granted the inherent particularity both of political action and of the moral agents who engage in decision making. It starts from the view that persuasion begins when we try to describe what an issue is and continues with an awareness that we wish to convince specific individuals. It conceptualizes citizens as complexly motivated agents who find their value commitments undergoing modification over time for a variety of reasons. They also experience these commitments with varying intensity as they encounter and consider different issues. Even if they are able to rank their moral commitments, rhetorical democracy, as a conceptual stance toward deliberation, maintains that the ranking need not remain consistent over time as perceptions of and feelings about an issue lead citizens to judge differently what values are being challenged. Rhetorical democracy suggests a mode of reasoning that embraces the uncertainty of political action and the diversity of political actors. It is not a matter of style with regard to how we speak; it is a matter of style with regard to reasoning. This style recognizes that there are indeed likely to be, as described earlier, different narratives that govern how individuals conceptualize and understand the objects of political debate. Therefore, it describes the kind of knowledge citizens should strive to attain, and how to apply it, in order to become effective deliberators. Its application, moreover, must start from the understanding that modes of argument different from one’s own are not, simply because of that difference, unreasonable. This stance, therefore, commits itself to suitable forms of civic education, which is coupled with a commitment to civic protection. The best defense against the abuse of power is the wide distribution of power. Since rhetoric is a form of power and since it can be taught, it follows that it should be taught. Nevertheless, rhetoric is a mode of reasoning that may

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be unevenly learned. Rhetorical democracy still offers something a democratic polity should desire: the aim of educating citizens to see the abuse of power, even if they are not personally capable of competing with it. Distinguishing the verbal flourish from rhetorical reasoning is the beginning of such education. When it becomes common to describe public speech as rhetorical, and mean that public speech has its own form of reasoning, it will also become easier to recognize when rhetoric is being used properly or improperly. It will help citizens see that public action in the face of moral disagreement is not about tidying up our thoughts. Tidiness commits us to a mode of reasoning unsuitable to public action itself, one that treats the problem of moral disagreement as an aspect of housekeeping. If it were, moral disagreement in politics would be a mere inconvenience. Of course, civic education is an aspect of individual development, which occurs via numerous formal and informal relationships the individual has from birth. Educational programs, therefore, can achieve only so much by themselves. To be comprehensively effective, the same educational aims would have to be pursued consistently through the public voices of popular culture. The roles of the media, those thought of as intellectuals, and the family are paramount in this regard. Thus, just as the relevant factors for democratic deliberation have expanded and become amplified, commensurate changes in our theoretical approach to civic education must also take place. None of the foregoing is intended as a solution to moral disagreement in democracy. As I said at the start, this is more a provocation than a proposal. Recently, deliberative democracy has been widely accepted as the theoretical way forward—as the way to overcome institutionalized apathy, as well as impotence in the face of moral crisis, that modern polities are said to confront. However, to be a way forward, it must start, as I indicate at the beginning of this chapter, by facing the right direction. This means an appreciation of the intimate relationship between perception, emotion, and judgment. It requires us to consider that a better politics, as sought by deliberative democratic theory, will have to accept at the outset the problematics of persuasiveness, human motivation, and power in deliberative forums.

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5 cicero and the ethics of deliberative rhetoric Gary Remer

Rhetoric has been attacked, at least since Plato (427–347 b.c.e.), as an amoral, if not immoral, practice. Rhetoricians from the ancient Greeks onward, however, have denied that their art was inherently unethical. Aristotle (384–322 b.c.e.) argues that rhetoric, when used justly, can do much good and, if used unjustly, is no worse than other beneficial things, “like strength, health, wealth, and military strategy,” which can be used for good or for ill.1 Cicero (106–43 b.c.e.) and Quintilian (c.40–95 b.c.e.) defend the morality of rhetoric even more vigorously. For Cicero, in De oratore, eloquence is “so kingly, so worthy of the free, so generous, as to bring help to the suppliant, to raise up those that are cast down, to bestow security, to set free from peril, to maintain men in their civil rights.” And Quintilian writes: “For I do not merely assert that the ideal orator should be a good man, but I affirm that no man can be an orator unless he is a good man.”2 Nevertheless, although these classical rhetoricians affirm 1. Aristotle Rhetoric 1355b. All citations from Aristotle’s Rhetoric, unless otherwise indicated, are from Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans. George Kennedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 35. 2. Cicero De oratore 1.8.32; Quintilian Institutio oratoria 12.1.3. All citations from Cicero and Quintilian, unless otherwise indicated, are from the Loeb Classical Library editions. See also Quintilian Institutio oratoria 1.pr.9–20. Quintilian derives his view of the good orator from Cato the Elder, who defines the orator as a “good man, skilled in speaking.” The earliest source for Cato’s definition is Seneca the Elder Controversiae 1.pr.9. Defending the

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rhetoric’s goodness, they do so in a general way, that is, they do not defend rhetoric against most of the particular charges leveled against it: distorting or concealing the truth, emotional manipulation, demagoguery, and so on. On the contrary, classical rhetoricians advise orators to make use of many of the practices that have been condemned as immoral. This conflict between the rhetoricians’ ethical commitments and their apparent use of morally questionable methods has been widely viewed as the inevitable gap between theory and practice, most evident in orators, like Cicero, whose morals were accommodated to political exigencies.3 In this essay I argue that Cicero’s apparent ethical concessions to political needs are not an abdication of moral resolve. Rather, Cicero’s normative and philosophical arguments explain how he could reconcile his rhetoric with his morality. Because Cicero does not explicitly apply these arguments to rhetoric, I offer a Ciceronian defense of rhetoric that is, to a degree, speculative. But if we take seriously Cicero’s claim that rhetoric is an ethical art, then the effort to harmonize his rhetorical and normative views should not be considered alien to his perspective. I discuss Cicero above other rhetoricians because his writings are especially devoted to rhetoric and ethics, despite the possible tensions between the two. In addition, Cicero dedicates his De officiis (On Duties) to the relationship between the honorable and the beneficial; although Cicero does not address this work specifically to the orator, the seemingly irreconcilable goals that Cicero attempts to resolve—virtue and expediency—are also the ends that the ethical orator must balance. Moreover, I focus primarily on Cicero because he influenced the rhetorical tradition more than any other rhetorician or orator.4 Because of this influence, it is likely that making sense of Cicero’s own ethical justifications of rhetorical practice would provide insight into understanding his successors’ ideas about the moral character of rhetoric.

morality of rhetoric, Cicero condemns the corruption of the state or a judge through eloquence as worse than their corruption by bribery: “For even a virtuous man can be corrupted by oratory, though not by a bribe.” Cicero De re publica 5.9.11. 3. On the division in Aristotle between philosophy and practice, see Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 72–73. On this split in Cicero, see Jakob Wisse, Ethos and Pathos: From Aristotle to Cicero (Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert, 1989), 297–98. This gap between morality and rhetorical expediency in Cicero has also been said to mirror another apparent split: his more “principled” commitment to Stoicism and more practical acceptance of Academic Skepticism’s expediency. 4. Thomas Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition (New York: Longman, 1990), 34.

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Beginning with Aristotle, the principal exponents of classical rhetoric, including Cicero, have identified three basic categories of speech: deliberative, judicial or forensic, and epideictic or demonstrative.5 The deliberative genus has its origins in the political assembly, where the deliberative orator seeks to persuade or dissuade his audience from taking some action, such as going to war. Judicial oratory is used in the courtroom, where the speaker tries to persuade the jury of his (or his client’s) innocence or guilt.6 Epideictic oratory is the genre concerned with praise and blame, intended, most often, for ceremonial occasions like funerals. Because I am most interested here in the moral compromises that politics exacts from the orator, I focus on the deliberative genre of oratory. Deliberative oratory, however, shares with the forensic and epideictic genres many of the same questionable practices; for example, both political speakers and lawyers are accused of lacking principles, obfuscating the truth, and manipulating their audiences. And the lines between deliberative oratory and the other genres are often blurred. Thus, while the judicial genus dominated Roman oratory, and Cicero emphasized judicial rhetoric in his own work, Roman forensic rhetoric was not easily distinguished from deliberative speech because of the political character of many trials.7 When Cicero defended the former praetor and governor, Lucius Valerius Flaccus, against charges of extortion, Cicero himself commented on the political significance of his judicial cases: “In reaching their decisions responsible and intelligent jurors have always considered what the interests of the citizens, the common safety and the circumstances of the body-politic required” (Pro Flacco 98). Cicero also connects epideictic oratory to political activity when he writes 5. Aristotle Rhetoric, bk. 1, chap. 3; Cicero De inventione 1.5.7; Quintilian 3.4.12–15. 6. In ancient Greece, the accused normally pleaded their own cases. By contrast, in Rome most major cases were pleaded by professional orators, called patrons. See George Kennedy, “The Rhetoric of Advocacy in Greece and Rome,” American Journal of Philology 89 (1968): 419–36, and James M. May, “The Rhetoric of Advocacy and Patron-Client Identification: Variation on a Theme, American Journal of Philology 102 (1981): 308–15. 7. Cicero’s early work, De inventione, deals almost exclusively with forensic oratory. In De oratore, Antonius concerns himself mostly with the oratory of the law courts. Cicero, however, counterbalances Antonius’s focus on judicial oratory with Crassus, who points up the importance of rhetoric in politics, while attacking forensic oratory for “making the orator abandon a vast, immeasurable plain and confine himself to quite a narrow circle.” De oratore 3.19.70; Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric, 34; M. L. Clarke, Rhetoric at Rome: A Historical Survey (London: Routledge, 1996), 64. Concerning the blurring of the political and the judicial, Fergus Millar writes: “All trials before iudicia [ judicial assemblies] were by their nature ‘political,’ because they took place in the same public space as did contiones [public meetings] and meetings of the comitia tributa [tribal assemblies]; because they tended to

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of that genre that “there is no class of oratory capable of producing more copious rhetoric or of doing more service to the state, nor any in which the speaker is more occupied in recognizing the virtues and the vices” (De partitione oratoria 20.69).

the critique of rhetoric Before turning to Cicero’s ethical defense of rhetoric, though, I examine the moral arguments against rhetoric. In explicating these arguments, I rely most heavily on Plato’s Gorgias, which remains the classic critique of rhetorical norms to this day. Cicero acknowledged that he “read [the Gorgias] with close attention.” But Cicero offers no more profound answer to Plato’s criticisms than that the Athenian philosopher, “when making fun of orators . . . himself seemed . . . to be the consummate orator” (De oratore 1.11.47).8 Brian Vickers’s In Defence of Rhetoric confirms the Gorgias’s continuing status as the definitive critique of rhetoric. Vickers, a contemporary champion of eloquence, devotes more space in his book—about one hundred pages—to discussing and refuting Plato’s critique of rhetoric, primarily found in the Gorgias, than to any other attack on eloquence. But while Vickers replies to the Gorgias’s arguments in greater detail than did Cicero, highlighting the logical difficulties of the dialogue, he never vindicates rhetoric of Plato’s charge of moral turpitude. For all Vickers’s claims that rhetoric promotes freedom, tolerance, and fairness,9 he does not reconcile his claims of rhetoric’s goodness with the orator’s abandonment of conventional morality in pursuit of victory. Plato’s points against rhetoric do not all speak to us equally today. Many of Plato’s criticisms derive from assumptions that most of us do not share. Plato opposed democracy, and in the Gorgias, he disparages the will of the multitude, posits a dichotomy between the pleasant and the good (in which rhetoric pursues the former and is, therefore, bad), and seeks to replace the uncertainties of political decision making with the verities of philosoinvolve persons engaged on political careers, careers that were profoundly affected by a person’s conduct in such cases and by the good or bad reputation gained; and because they were exposed to and much affected by crowd reactions and . . . were often disturbed by outright violence.” Fergus Millar, The Crowd in Rome in the Late Republic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 87–88. 8. See also 3.32.129 and Clarke, Rhetoric at Rome, 54. 9. Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric, 7, 155.

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phy. But Plato’s critique of rhetoric is not based solely on antidemocratic assumptions, and elements of it should still be considered pertinent today. J. Peter Euben maintains that, at a minimum, “Socrates is more of a democrat than he seems and that much of his criticism of democracy is directed at the way democracy’s Athenian defenders construe democracy, not against democracy per se.”10 Euben suggests that Socrates, in the Gorgias, may be a truer friend of democracy than its putative supporters. Whether or not we accept Euben’s interpretation of the Gorgias, we must concede the enduring relevance of the Gorgias’s critique of rhetoric; Plato’s arguments have been used by democrats and liberals to explain their rejection of rhetoric. In the Gorgias, Plato makes Socrates argue that rhetoric is irrational, deceitful, and indifferent to the common good. Socrates compares rhetoric to the “irrational” (alogon) sham art of cookery (“as cookery is to the body, so rhetoric is to the mind”). Rhetoric, like cookery, “lacks rational understanding either of the object of its attentions or of the nature of the things it dispenses (and so it can’t explain the reason why anything happens)” (Gorgias 465a, 465d–e). In the dialogue, Socrates acknowledges that the interlocutor Polus had “an excellent training in rhetoric,” but observes that Polus has “taken no interest in how to carry on a rational argument” (471d)—as if this disinterest was a corollary of his instruction in rhetoric. Not bound by rational argument, the orator can argue as easily for falsehood as for truth, for right as simply as for wrong. And orators are not committed to truth and right, because their goal is to convince their audience of whichever side they are arguing. As Socrates notes: “Rhetoric is an agent of the kind of persuasion which is designed to produce conviction, but not to educate people about matters of right and wrong.” Rhetoric produces conviction, according to Socrates, through appealing to the passions; rhetoric “traps and deceives foolish people with the promise of maximizing immediate pleasure” (454e–455a; 471e–472a; 464d). Plato has Socrates contend in the Gorgias that, like cookery, rhetoric is “contemptible . . . because its aim is pleasure rather than welfare.” Rhetoricians are unconcerned with what is best for their audience. They do not intend their speeches to perfect their fellow citizens; rather “they restrict their dealings with the members of . . . assemblies to trying to gratify them, and don’t take the slightest interest in whether or not they’re 10. J. Peter Euben, Corrupting Youth: Political Education, Democratic Culture, and Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 204.

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made better or worse people in the process.” Socrates exemplifies this disjunction between rhetoric and the common good by assailing the respected Athenian statesmen of the past: Themistocles, Cimon, Miltiades, and Pericles. Although the interlocutor Callicles believes that each man had “left his fellow citizens better people than they had been when he found them,” Socrates says that “in sofar as they were rhetoricians,” they did not aim at the public good; they did not lead their citizens into becoming better people (465a; 502e; 515d; 517a–c). For Plato, then, rhetoric is not controlled by reason, but by the passions. And orators purvey immediate pleasure rather than the public good, so that they may win their listeners over to their position. Plato’s criticism of rhetoric as irrational anticipates more recent arguments advanced by some advocates of deliberative democracy, who contend that true democracy is characterized by reasoned public discourse. As Socrates condemns rhetoric for not explaining the reason anything happens, a prominent proponent of deliberative democracy—Seyla Benhabib —criticizes rhetoric because it “moves people and achieves results without having to render an account of the bases upon which it induces people to engage in certain courses of action rather than others.”11 Similarly, Jürgen Habermas, the intellectual progenitor of deliberative democracy, states that deliberations should be determined by the “force of the better argument,” so that participants in deliberation are “required to state their reasons for advancing proposals, supporting them or criticizing them.”12 Euben notes the agreement between Socrates and deliberative democrats on the need for rational discourse when he speaks of the “Habermasian” voice in the Gorgias, which anticipates “the possibility of philosophical dialogue as an idealized analog for democratic deliberation.”13 The Gorgias’s attack on rhetoric as deceptive is echoed in the liberal tradition by John Locke, for whom rhetoric is “that powerful instrument of Error and Deceit.” Like Socrates, Locke distinguishes between “Truth and Knowledge,” which rhetoric cannot discern, and “Pleasure and Delight,” which eloquence offers. “All the Art of Rhetorick,” Locke writes, is “for 11. Seyla Benhabib, “Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy,” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 83. 12. Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. T. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975), 108; Joshua Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” in The Good Polity: Normative Analysis of the State, ed. Alan Hamlin and Philip Pettit (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 22. 13. Euben, Corrupting Youth, 216.

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nothing else but to insinuate wrong Ideas, move the Passions, and thereby mislead the Judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheat.”14 In line with Socrates and Locke, Immanuel Kant views rhetoric as “the art of deluding by means of a fair semblance.”15 For Kant, as for Socrates and Locke, the passions are the means by which orators move, and deceive, their audiences. All three condemn rhetoric for its emotional manipulation.16 Kant underscores more than the other two, however, the orator’s coercive power to deny autonomous decision making. Kant writes that rhetoric wins over men’s minds to the side of the speaker before they have weighed the matter, “to rob their verdict of its freedom.” Rhetoric is “an art that knows how, in matters of moment, to move men like machines to a judgement that must lose all its weight with them upon calm reflection.”17 Deliberative democrats embrace Kant’s concern with independent judgment. “Non-coercive persuasion,” according to Simone Chambers, is fundamental to the ethics of deliberative democracy; force should be excluded from deliberations. But Chambers claims that “force does not always come in the form of a state with a big stick.” She agrees with Kant that force can also come in the form of “emotional” and “rhetorical manipulation.”18 In the Gorgias Socrates maintains that rhetoric does not promote the public welfare. At times, Socrates’ solution in the dialogue as to how the common good should be implemented appears to anticipate the elitist response of the Republic’s Socrates, who believes that a philosopher ruler should impose the Good on the masses. For example, the Gorgias’s Socrates posits a good citizen’s only responsibility as “persuading, or even forcing, . . . fellow citizens to adopt a course of action which would result in their becoming better people” (517b). But Socrates in the Gorgias also assumes that individual citizens can be reasoned with and can arrive at truth. He states: “My expertise is restricted to producing just a single witness in support of my ideas—the person with whom I’m carrying on the discussion— 14. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 508. 15. James Creed Meredith, Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911), 192. For the argument that Plato, Kant, and Locke denigrate rhetoric as a means of empowering their favored genre of discourse, for example, philosophy, see Robert Hariman, “Status, Marginality, and Rhetorical Theory,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 72 (1986): 38–54. 16. Euben speaks of “Socrates’ concern with democracy’s susceptibility to rhetorical manipulation.” Euben, Corrupting Youth, 206. 17. Meredith, Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, 192, 193 n. 1. 18. Simone Chambers, Reasonable Democracy: Jürgen Habermas and the Politics of Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 151–52; 187 n. 30.

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and I pay no attention to large numbers of people; I only know how to ask for a single person’s vote, and I can’t even begin to address people in large groups” (474a). Socrates rejects rhetoric because it is public speech.19 He trusts, however, in the efficacy of dialectic. Euben argues that Socrates believes that “all members of a community are regarded as sufficiently well qualified to participate in making binding collective decisions on all issues that significantly affect their good or interest.”20 Perhaps Euben makes the Gorgias’s Socrates into more of an egalitarian and a democrat than he deserves. Nevertheless, Plato uses Socrates to criticize the orator as a demagogue, that is, as a leader who pretends to be a friend of the people, while secretly despising them. And this criticism raises questions about rhetoric’s elitism—questions that are morally troubling for contemporary democrats who define equal political participation as a moral requirement.21 Plato points up rhetoric’s elitism through his characterization of Callicles. As a politician in a democracy, Callicles must rely on the common people for support; he gains their favor by gratifying them, without making them better. Although he needs the people, Callicles makes plain his disdain for them. He refers to the masses as “an assembly of slaves and assorted other forms of human debris who could be completely discounted if it weren’t for the fact that they do have physical strength at their disposal.” He accepts the superiority of a natural elite to rule over “second rate people.”22 While Callicles’ contempt for the masses may not reflect the feelings of most orators, his desire to manipulate the 19. “No one who appears before a crowd can be a political educator, not because the hoi polloi are individually incapable of learning how to think seriously about political and moral matters but because the dynamics of a crowd, particularly one subject to the rhetorical skills of a Gorgias, erodes the capacity to think.” J. Peter Euben, “Democracy and Political Theory: A Reading of Plato’s Gorgias,” in Athenian Political Thought and the Reconstruction of American Democracy, ed. J. Peter Euben, John R. Wallach, and Josiah Ober (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 218. 20. Euben, Corrupting Youth, 208. Euben further writes: “Though Socrates proposes the idea of expert political knowledge, the dialogue he has with his interlocutors in the Gorgias neither illustrates nor claims it.” 21. According to Benhabib, for example, a moral principle that undergirds deliberative democracy is “egalitarian reciprocity,” which maintains that “each individual has the same symmetrical rights to various speech acts, to initiate new topics, to ask for reflection about the presuppositions of the conversation.” Equality dominates James Bohman’s list of the “basic normative requirements and constraints on deliberation.” Benhabib, “Toward a Deliberative Model,” 78, see also 69–70; James Bohman, Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity, and Democracy (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996), 16. 22. Plato Gorgias 489c; 489e–490a: “A single clever individual” from the elite is “superior to ten thousand others.”

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people into doing what he wants is typical of orators. Callicles’ example shows that, even in a democracy, the relationship between orator and audience is hierarchical. And Socrates, though he may criticize democracy, offers in his dialectic a model of conversation that is more egalitarian than rhetoric. Thus, many democrats today, from Habermas and supporters of deliberative democracy to John Rawls and Bruce Ackerman, look to conversation as an ideal for democratic communication.23 Rhetoric, by contrast, appears morally suspect. Euben gives voice to this perspective: “Rhetoricians and sophists tell people what they want to hear as a way of gaining power over them. Socrates calls even the most obvious things and accepted views (about Pericles, wisdom, power, happiness) into question as a way of sharing power with them, whether in the dialogue or city.” Euben argues that unlike rhetoricians, who place themselves above the people, Socrates attempts “to educate every Athenian to be a leader.” While oratory is performed before the public, not by the public, “dialectic . . . could be taught and practiced by anyone.”24 In this section, I have identified some criticisms of rhetoric found in the Gorgias. I did not intend to suggest that these were Plato’s only arguments against rhetoric, rather that they were criticisms that some of today’s democrats continue to see as relevant. Similarly, in the next section, I do not offer an exhaustive response to the philosophical critique of rhetoric. Instead, I try to take a first step toward applying Cicero’s ethical ideas to the practice of oratory.

a ciceronian response: argument IN UTRAMQUE PARTEM A partial answer to Plato’s critique of rhetoric as irrational and deceitful is found in the Ciceronian conception of argument in utramque partem, on either side of an issue. This method of analyzing every case was associated with the Academic skeptics, who denied the existence of epistemological certainty. Cicero relates how the skeptic Carneades (c.213–129 b.c.e.) argued convincingly in favor of justice one day, only to refute his arguments 23. Michael Walzer, “A Critique of Philosophical Conversation,” Philosophical Forum 21 (1989–90): 182–96; Gary Remer, “Political Oratory and Conversation: Cicero versus Deliberative Democracy,” Political Theory 27, no. 1 (1999): 39; Gary Remer, “Two Models of Deliberation and the Ratification of the Constitution,” Journal of Political Philosophy 8 (2000): 70–75. 24. Euben, Corrupting Youth, 215; Euben, “Democracy and Political Theory,” 220.

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convincingly on the next (De republica 3.5.9). For Cicero, an orator who could argue both sides of any issue “would be the one and only true and perfect orator.” He preferred the skeptics’ rule of “discussing both sides of every question,” not only because this method makes the orator a better debater (“it gave the best practice in oratory”), but also because it promotes the probable truth (“in no other way did I think it possible for the probable truth to be discovered in each particular problem”), and according to the Academic skeptics like Cicero, probability is the best truth available (De oratore 3.21.80).25 Because Plato assumes that reason leads to a single, simple truth, he concludes that presenting the two (or more) sides of a debate as plausible goes against reason and hinders the discovery of truth. Plato condemns the orator’s ability to argue both sides of an issue: “Then he whose speaking is an art will make the same thing appear to the same persons at one time just and at another, if he wishes unjust. . . . And in political thinking he will make the same things seem to the State at one time good and at another the opposite” (Phaedrus 261c–d). Cicero, however, sees arguing both sides of an issue as elucidating the strengths and weaknesses of competing truths. He explains that “we could not get a clear view of what is ‘probable,’ unless a comparative estimate were made of all arguments on both sides” (De officiis 2.2.8). From this perspective, argument in utramque partem does not create doubt; it only recognizes the fact of uncertainty, particularly in politics, where there are diverse rational policies from which to choose. Two contemporary historians of rhetoric, Thomas Conley and Thomas Sloane, imply that Plato’s critique of rhetoric and Cicero’s presumed response are based on differing philosophical premises about truth and knowledge. Conley writes that while Plato moves “from universals and differences to assimilate ‘lesser’ truths to ‘greater’ truths,” Cicero’s method is “multivoiced, . . . in which practical or philosophical formulations are situated in divergent frames of reference, brought into conflict in debate,

25. On the importance of arguing in utramque partem for Cicero, see Alain Michel, Rhétorique et philosophie chez Cicéron: Essai sur let fondements philosophique de l’art de persuader (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960), 158–73; Cicero Tusculan Disputations 2.3.9. See also De re publica 3.5.8, where Laelius tells Philus that “we are quite familiar with your habit of arguing on the other side, because you think that it is the easiest means of reaching the truth.” Cicero writes of his Academic skepticism: “As other schools maintain that some things are certain, others uncertain, we, differing with them, say that some things are probable, others improbable.” Cicero De officiis 2.2.7.

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and tested for their respective claims of probabilitas.”26 According to Sloane, Cicero adopts an “unPlatonic notion of wisdom, sapientia.” In contrast to Plato, who believes that there is only one correct side to any debate, Cicero uses “the analytical, pro-con operations of inventio” because, in his conception of wisdom, debate is “a contest between two ideas of seemingly equal merit.”27 Conley and Sloane do not distinguish between the use of pro-con reasoning in philosophical conversation and in deliberative (and other genres of) oratory. For example, Conley identifies the principle of in utramque partem as “at the heart of Cicero’s rhetorical and philosophical methods” and as “creating the conditions necessary for arriving at decisions and negotiating differences in a reasonable way in both politics and philosophy.” For Conley, “rhetorical invention and philosophical inquiry [are] alike.”28 But Cicero’s conceptions of philosophical conversation and deliberative oratory differ in morally relevant ways. In philosophical conversation, Cicero commits himself to truth above victory, and he opposes irrational appeals. The object of philosophical dialogue, for Cicero, is “to discover the truth, not to refute someone as an opponent.” And Cicero excludes appeals to authority or passions: relying on someone else’s opinion substitutes blind faith for reason, and the passions “conflict with deliberation and reason.”29 In oratory, though, Cicero sometimes chooses victory over truth and accepts emotional manipulation. The orator must win the favor of his hearer and “have the latter so affected as to be swayed by something resembling a mental impulse or emotion, rather than by judgement or deliberation.” Cicero’s statement that the orator must be able “to inflame the minds of his hearers and turn them in whatever direction the case demands” suggests that expediency, not truth, is the orator’s highest commitment.30 Marcus Antonius, in De oratore, describes using argument in 26. Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition, 37. 27. Thomas Sloane, On the Contrary: The Protocol of Traditional Rhetoric (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1997), 30–31. For positions similar to Conley and Sloane, see Richard A. Lanham, The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 160–61, 187–89, and Michael Leff, “Cicero’s Pro Murena and the Strong Case for Rhetoric,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 (1998): 63–65. 28. Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition, 37. 29. Cicero De finibus 1.5.13; Cicero De natura deorum 1.5.10; Cicero Tusculan Disputations 5.15.43. See also Cicero De officiis 1.38.136, and Remer, “Political Oratory and Conversation,” 43–49. 30. Cicero De oratore 2.42.178; Cicero Brutus 80.279; Remer, “Political Oratory and Conversation,” 41–43.

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utramque partem in his own legal preparations. Cicero has Antonius relate, in dialogue with Lucius Crassus and other leading Romans, how in private he plays, with perfect impartiality, three characters: himself, his opponent, and the judge. In public, however, Antonius’s presentation is one-sided: “Whatever consideration is likely to prove more helpful than embarrassing I decide to discuss; wherever I find more harm than good I entirely reject and discard the topic concerned” (De oratore 2.24.102–3). Antonius employs his “perfect impartiality” here not to arrive at an impartial decision, but to support his own position: considering all sides of the debate shows him which points to discuss and which to gloss over. Pro-con debate in deliberative oratory is not a neutral search for truth; orators are partisans who attempt to bias their audiences through appeals to their emotions. Therefore, although pro-con reasoning in philosophical dialogue can be justified, based on Cicero’s conception of truth and his method of discovering it, this method applied to deliberative oratory remains ethically tainted as long as conventionally offensive practices, like deceit and manipulation, cannot also be morally justified.

the good of the republic is the greatest good Accommodation to circumstance—embodied in the principle of decorum— is a universal characteristic of classical rhetoric. As Cicero states: “This, indeed, is the form of wisdom that the orator must especially employ—to adapt himself to occasions and persons” (Orator 35.123).31 Accommodation includes, for orators, the need to balance between competing goods. Cicero demonstrates this balancing in his rhetorical handbook De inventione, where, after ranking three “necessities” in descending order—the necessity of “doing what is honorable,” “the necessity of security,” and “the necessity of convenience”—he concedes that we must sometimes depart from the set order: “It is often necessary to weigh these, one against the other, so that, although honor is superior to security, it may be a question which it is preferable to follow.” (Similarly, in De officiis Cicero concerns himself with reconciling, or balancing, the “apparent conflict” between different virtues, between beneficial things, and between benefit and the virtues.”)32 Cicero elaborates further on the need to adapt ethics to cir31. See also Gary Remer, Humanism and the Rhetoric of Toleration (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 14–16. 32. Cicero De officiis 1.152–60; 2.88–90, and book 3.

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cumstance: “There are then certain matters that must be considered with reference to time and intention and not merely by their absolute qualities. In all these matters one must think what the occasion demands and what is worthy of the persons concerned, and one must consider not what is being done but with what spirit anything is done, with what associates, at what time, and how long it has been going on” (De inventione 2.58.173–76).33 Classical rhetoric, then, involves a weighing of ethical necessities. The political orator’s balancing of goods seems more acceptable to us when it is presented as the need to sacrifice a little of one good for the sake of another, for example, to forgo a modicum of the honorable for greater security. We are apt to find compromising on the honorable less tolerable, however, once we realize that it suggests the orator’s pursuit of morally repugnant tactics like deceit and manipulation. Yet Cicero accepts that orators must use ethically objectionable techniques. Thus, he concedes that orators must sometimes speak in ways that philosophers, who are removed from public life, would find “not only wanting in discretion, but positively unseemly and disgraceful” (De oratore 1.53.227). Quintilian provides such an example when he writes that “to vindicate the claims of truth and justice,” orators must “force and occasionally throw [their audiences] off their balance by an appeal to their emotions” (Institutio oratoria 5.14.29); manipulation is the necessary price for achieving truth and justice. Cicero allows that “occasions often arise when the actions that seem most worthy of a just man, of him we call good, undergo a change, and the opposite becomes the case” (De officiis 1.31).34 According to Quintilian, Cicero even took pride in confusing his audience with oratory: “Cicero had boasted that he had thrown dust in the eyes of the jury in the case of Cluentius” (Institutio oratoria 2.17.21). Although the rhetorician’s moral balancing is not as pure as the philosopher’s moral absolutes, Cicero did not see the rhetorical path as immoral or amoral. For Cicero, orators were moral figures whose compromises with virtue did not detract from their own moral status. Among the values that the orator balanced, the welfare of the res publica, the common good, was supreme. Cicero repeatedly makes this point in De officiis, a work on practical ethics. He contends there that assisting “one’s country . . . [takes] precedence in all duties.” He maintains that no 33. For a similar view of Cicero’s ethics, see Leff, “Cicero’s Pro Murena,” 69: “The strong case for rhetoric . . . would claim that ethical and political standards are themselves grounded in action and in particulars.” See also 75–76. 34. Translation from Cicero, On Duties, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, ed. M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 13. Hereafter Griffin and Atkins.

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fellowships are more serious, more dear, than our relations with the republic. “Parents are dear, and children, relatives, and acquaintances are dear, but our country has on its own embraced all the affections in all of us.” He urges public officials to follow Plato’s two pieces of advice: “First to fix their gaze so firmly on what is beneficial to the citizens that whatever they do, they do with that in mind. . . . Secondly, let them care for the whole body of the republic rather than protect one part and neglect the rest.” Cicero not only gives priority to the obligation to one’s country, he believes that serving the interests of the country is honorable by definition (De officiis 3.90; 1.57; 1.85; 3.40).35 Cicero justifies acts that, in and of themselves, are immoral, when they are necessary for the republic’s benefit. Cicero asks the question: “Is stealing another’s food to save your own life morally acceptable?” He replies that, generally, it is not. “If, however, you are the kind of person who, if you were to remain alive, could bring great benefit to the political community and to human fellowship, and if for that reason you deprive someone else of something, that is not a matter of rebuke” (3.29–30).36 Communal benefit, Cicero argues, trumps the injustice of depriving persons of their individual goods. Cicero makes other similar claims: “Things that relate to truth and to keeping faith” must sometimes be set aside for the sake of the common advantage; the duties of justice, for example, if one’s country “were suddenly and critically endangered, . . . must be given precedence over the pursuit of knowledge and the duties imposed by that”; and normally dishonorable acts—like unseemly public displays that fulfill a precondition for receiving one’s inheritance—may become honorable, if one “contributes the money to the republic to meet some important contingency” (1.31; 1.154; 3.93).37 Cicero’s arguments subordinating all actions to the well-being of the republic apply to orators who employ questionable words and deeds. Although Cicero does not explicitly justify the orator’s performance of normally dishonorable acts in these terms—he declines to explain the morality of these acts at all—the case of the orator is comparable to the earlier instances of justifying conventionally ignoble means by the ends of the republic’s welfare. Cicero not only views the true orator as a moral person, but also considers rhetoric as essential to the good of the state. In line 35. Ibid., 134–35, 23–24, 33–34, 115. See also Cicero De officiis 1.44.158. 36. Griffin and Atkins, 110–11. 37. Ibid., 13, 60, 136.

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with other rhetoricians who have glorified rhetoric as beneficial to the common good, Cicero writes that “eloquence [was] bestowed by Nature for the safety and protection of our fellowmen” (2.14.51). Yet Cicero advises orators to use means of persuasion he elsewhere condemns. Thus, Cicero sometimes obscures the facts of a legal case by addressing himself largely to his client’s character rather than to the legal charges against him. Cicero, however, also commits himself to the principle “that what is true, simple and pure is most fitted to the nature of man”—a principle seemingly inconsistent with his “occasionally defending a guilty man” by hiding the defendant’s guilt behind the facade of good character (1.13, 2.51).38 In his speech for Plancius, an aedile prosecuted for corrupt election practices, Cicero devotes only about one-twentieth of the speech to the specific legal indictments against his client, focusing instead on his personal indebtedness to his client. Christopher P. Craig argues that Cicero’s emphasis on Plancius’s relationship to him says something about the character of his client, and “the character of the citizen can properly weigh in the juror’s reckoning not only insofar as it argues his guilt or innocence, but insofar as it argues his usefulness for the republic.” The truth of a man’s guilt in a political trial like Plancius’s is sometimes outweighed by “the individual’s value to the republic, rather than the justice of a past act.” Plancius, Cicero maintained, was the kind of citizen that the republic needed to keep.39 Similarly, Cicero recommends that orators sway the audience with something resembling mental impulses or emotions rather than by judgment or deliberation: “For men decide far more problems by hate, or love, or fear, or illusion, or some other inward emotion, than by reality” (De oratore 2.42.178). But Cicero also denounces such techniques. He insists that “the impulses obey reason,” that virtue depends on “restraining the dis-

38. Ibid., 7, 82. 39. Christoper P. Craig, “Demanding Decency in Cicero’s Speeches” (paper delivered in honor of Nate Greenberg, Oberlin College, September 1997). Craig, however, does not present the appeals to a client’s character as a departure from truth as much as a legitimate concern in a quaestio publica, like Plancius’s. Another example of the subordination of the law, narrowly conceived, to political concerns is found in Cicero’s Pro Murena. According to Michael Leff, Cicero implies that Murena (elected consul in 63 b.c.e.) should not be convicted of bribery (and denied his consulship) because “the welfare of the state [must take] priority over the letter of the law.” With the failed candidate for consul Lucius Catiline threatening to seize the government by force, Cicero believed that the good of the republic required that both consuls be in place at the beginning of the new year. Leff, “Cicero’s Pro Murena,” 78, 70–71.

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turbed movements of the spirit (which the Greeks call pathe) and making the impulses (which they call hormai) obedient to reason”; and that “surely anger should be denied on all occasions” (De officiis 1.101; 2.18; 1.88).40 Cicero’s seemingly contradictory views can be reconciled if the orator’s actions are justified by some higher end, particularly the republic’s good. Cicero believes that orators cannot persuade a public audience unless they resort to appeals to authority and emotions. If the orator persuades the audience to act for the common good, the orator’s means can be justified. Cicero rejects emotional appeals—at least emotions like anger and hatred— in philosophical conversation because they are inimical to rational debate. And because the orator uses emotions like anger only as a means toward some higher end, that is, such emotions are not valued in their own right, Cicero maintains that the orator himself should not surrender to these emotions: “But of all men an orator should not be irascible; to feign to be so is not unbecoming.” Orators may play the roles of angry men well, “but they are played without bitterness and with a mind at peace” (Tusculan Disputations 4.25.55).41 Cicero’s rationalism and his attacks on anger do not mean that he regards all emotions as inimical to proper deliberation. He rejects the classic Stoic goal of apathy, described by the Academic skeptic Crantor as “that sort of insensibility which neither can nor ought to exist. . . . For this state of apathy is not attained except at the cost of brutishness in the soul and callousness in the body” (quoted in Tusculan Disputations 3.6.12–13). Rather, Cicero only deems those passions destructive that are uncontrolled by reason. Not included in these prohibited passions are constructive emotions, like devotion, the desire for truth, or the impulse toward fellowship (4.25.55; De officiis 1.4.13). In his De officiis, Cicero accepts the Stoicism of Panaetius of Rhodes (185–c.110 b.c.e.), who (unlike the classic Stoics) believed that the soul was composed of both rational and irrational parts and, therefore, that the earlier Stoic ideal of eliminating all emotions was impossible.42 (Cicero 40. Griffin and Atkins, 39–40, 69, 35. See also Cicero De re publica 1.38.60: “If reason holds dominion, there is no room for the passions, for anger, for rash action.” 41. See also Quintilian Institutio oratoria 2.17.20–21: “An orator, when he substitutes falsehood for the truth, is aware of the falsehood and of the fact that he is substituting it for the truth. He therefore deceives others, but not himself. When Cicero boasted that he had thrown dust in the eyes of the jury in the case of Cluentius, he was far from being blinded himself.” 42. Francesca Alesse, Panezio di Rodi e la Tradizione Stoica (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1994), 195–98.

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explained his own use of Stoicism as consistent with Academic skepticism. His Academic skepticism permitted him, he argued, to draw from the “fountains [of Stoicism] when and as it seems best, using my own judgement and discretion”; De officiis 1.7).43 Panaetius alludes to Plato’s myth of the charioteer, raising the possibility that Panaetius accepts the conception of the soul implicit in this myth. In the Phaedrus, Socrates compares the nature of the soul to “the union of powers in a team of winged steeds and their winged charioteer.” This charioteer controls two steeds, “one of them is noble and good, and of good stock, while the other has the opposite character, and his stock is the opposite” (Phaedrus 246b).44 One steed represents the intellect, the other the nonintellectual parts of the soul. Although Plato uses this myth to show that the passions must be controlled, he implies that the intellect and the passions must work in tandem—like the two steeds. Martha Nussbaum interprets Plato’s myth as suggesting that “if we starve and suppress emotions and appetites, it may be at the cost of so weakening the entire personality that it will be unable to act decisively; perhaps it will cease to act altogether.”45 Even if Nussbaum’s interpretation cannot be fully applied to Panaetius’s appropriation of the Platonic metaphor, neither Panaetius nor Cicero think it possible— or desirable—to treat human beings as if they were solely intellects, without emotions. Nevertheless, the appeal to (especially violent) passions instead of reason, which Cicero generally condemns, can best be understood, in Ciceronian terms, as the use of dubious means toward a greater end.

safeguards against rhetorical abuse Justifying normally unjust methods by adverting to “the republic’s wellbeing” would appear to give orators carte blanche: they serve the republic, and the republic takes precedence over all other duties. Cicero, however, limits the breadth of justifications by distinguishing the country’s true good from its apparent good, its long-term from its short-term 43. Griffin and Atkins, 4. See also 3.20: “In any case, our Academy grants us great freedom, so that we may be justified in defending whatever seems most persuasive.” 44. Apparently, Cicero also alludes to the myth of the charioteer in a fragment from De re publica 2.41.68: “as an untrained charioteer is dragged from his chariot, trampled, lacerated, crushed.” 45. Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 214.

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interests. The orator can justify normally unethical methods by the country’s true, permanent well-being, not its apparent, temporary good. For example, Cicero contends that “some things are so disgraceful, or so outrageous, that a wise man would not do them even to protect his country.” Cicero does not argue here that persons should avoid these “repellent” actions simply out of a concern for their personal dishonor. Instead, he implies that such actions oppose the authentic good of the republic: “And so a wise man will not undertake such things for the sake of the republic, and indeed the republic will not want him to undertake them for its sake. But in fact it turns out conveniently that a situation could not arise where it would benefit the republic for such a man to perform any such deed.” Although the republic may gain in the short run by adopting highly dishonorable means, it will lose in the long run. Cicero distinguishes between the long- and short-term good of the res publica when examining the apparent conflict between the duty to one’s father and the responsibility to one’s state. According to Cicero, a son should not denounce to the magistrates a father, who “despoil[s] a temple, or dig[s] a tunnel to the treasury.” Although the son’s silence in this case seems to subordinate the well-being of the republic to that of the father, Cicero believes that protecting the father, in this case, is consistent with the principle that one’s country takes precedence in all duties because “it actually assists one’s country to have citizens who revere their parents.” A republic that fosters filial piety is bound to be more long-lived than a state that undermines such respect— even if the latter turns up more malefactors than the former. Only under the most dire circumstances, as when a father cannot be dissuaded from acts that will “lead to the ruin of his homeland” (for example, by imposing a tyranny or betraying his country) should a son inform on him (De officiis 1.159; 3.90).46 The orator’s freedom to use all means of persuasion available is further limited by the principle of decorum, which obliges orators to speak in a manner appropriate to the occasion.47 Thus, decorum sets limits on the kinds of emotional appeals permitted even in deliberative oratory. Cicero decries some “rhetorical fireworks” as too extreme because they do not fit the audience or the occasion (De oratore 2.51.205). Cicero also concedes that decorum does not prevent orators “from occasionally defending a guilty man, provided he is not wicked and impious. The masses want it; custom 46. Griffin and Atkins, 61–62, 134–35. 47. For classical rhetoricians, propriety extends beyond speech into the realm of action. Cicero Orator 21.71.

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permits it; humanity tolerates it.” But decorum, apparently, forbids threatening the civic status of an innocent man by prosecution (De officiis 2.51).48 For Cicero, decorum is grounded on more than the public’s transient attitudes, but stems from the deeply rooted values of the community. He writes that “in oratory, the very cardinal sin is to depart from the language of everyday life, and the usage approved by the sense of the community” (De oratore 1.3.12). The “sense of the community,” which delimits the boundaries of what the orator can say or do, corresponds to “the established customs and conventions of a community,” which ought to control what all members of the community do (De officiis 1.41.148). Like the community’s “established customs and conventions,” the “sense of the community” derives its authority from its long-standing tradition. While critics of rhetoric may interpret decorum as a matter of expediency—what the orator does to be most persuasive—Cicero also views decorum as an ethical ideal. “Such is [decorum’s] essential nature,” Cicero writes, “that it is inseparable from moral goodness; for what is proper is morally right, and what is morally right is proper.” Cicero links decorum to morality by arguing that decorum (propriety) agrees with nature—and nature is inherently moral—“in the sense that [propriety] manifestly embraces temperance and self-control, together with a certain deportment such as becomes a gentleman” (1.27.93–94, 96). The boundaries decorum places on the orator’s range of actions, therefore, is moral, not merely expediential. Nevertheless, Cicero, like other rhetoricians, does not divide sharply between morality and expediency, the honorable and the beneficial. Cicero maintains that the moral duty to act with decorum includes “also our concern for the good opinion of those with whom and amongst whom we live” (1.25.126). Another safeguard against orators overstepping moral bounds is the pursuit of glory. Although in De officiis Cicero emphasizes the dangers of an unfettered quest for glory (1.43, 1.65, 1.68), he identifies glory there as a beneficial thing, that is, something to be sought after for its instrumental value. Panaetius, whose essay on ethics served as Cicero’s model for De officiis, is even more emphatic about the importance of glory; he places honor et gloria atop the hierarchy of external goods.49 (Cicero displays his fondness for glory more fully in his personal letters.)50 These formal 48. Griffin and Atkins, 82. 49. Cicero De officiis, book 2; Andrew R. Dyck, A Commentary on Cicero, “De Officiis” (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 160, 216. 50. Dyck, Commentary on Cicero, 195. See also Cicero De re publica 5.7.9: “[Our] ancestors

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statements of appreciation for glory reflect the desire for gloria, characteristic of the classical world in general, and of the classical orator in particular. Cicero writes: “There is no doubt that debate [oratory] has the greater effect when glory is the object (for that is what we mean by eloquence)” (De officiis 2.48).51 Cicero argues that glory, though not strictly defined as a virtue, leads to the practice of virtue. Glory is most easily attained by behaving “in such a way that one is what one wishes to be thought. . . . If anyone wishes, then, to win true glory, let him fulfil the duties of justice” (De officiis 2.43). The implication of Cicero’s argument for rhetoric is that if orators want glory—a prima facie truth—then they can best reach their goal by acting virtuously. Isocrates (436–338 b.c.e.) makes a similar argument about the relationship between honor and goodness in rhetoric: “When anyone elects to speak or write discourses which are worthy of praise and honour, it is not conceivable that he will support causes which are unjust or petty or devoted to private quarrels, and not rather those which are great and honourable, devoted to the welfare of man and our common good” (Antidosis 276). Cicero and Isocrates agree that the pursuit of glory and honor, though they are partly motivated by self-interest, push the politician or orator toward the honorable. For them, as for other rhetoricians, it is difficult to distinguish between those prompted by “nature” and those motivated by glory, those impelled by virtue and those driven by lesser incentives.52 Implicit in the rhetorical division between three modes of persuasion—ethos, pathos, and logical explanation—is the assumption that persons must be appealed to on different levels. Rhetoricians, I believe, are aware that the motivation to perform good actions is similarly complex.

participation and representation in the rhetorical situation Another ethical problem with rhetoric, as Plato implies in the depiction of Callicles, is its elitism. In the Gorgias, Callicles exploits the people’s passions not for the common good, but to achieve his personal goals; he must were inspired to many wonderful and admirable deeds by their eagerness for glory. . . . [And] the leading man of a State must be fed on glory.” 51. Griffin and Atkins, 81. 52. Dyck, Commentary on Cicero, 160. Leff argues for an attitude toward rhetoric that “would accept a measure of promiscuity in the motives and goals informing any kind of discourse.” Leff, “Cicero’s Pro Murena,” 69.

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ingratiate himself to the demos to gain their support, but he secretly despises them. Plato uses Callicles to exemplify the orator in a democracy—someone who relies on the people, while viewing himself as their superior. For some modern democrats, the image of the orator is further blemished by the unequal political participation inherent in rhetoric. According to these critics, the orator dominates politics through speech, while the silent, manipulated listeners are denied their moral right to political participation and autonomous decision making. Cicero, however, tells a different story about the relationship between orator and audience. For him, the rhetorical situation cannot be easily classified as either elitist or egalitarian. Rather, speaker and listeners are in a reciprocal relationship that has elements of both hierarchy and equality. In Cicero’s period, deliberative orators were part of the elite, and they exercised more political power than average citizens. Cicero expected orators/statesmen to lead the citizens toward the right decisions.53 He even tolerated the speakers’ use of conventionally objectionable means to achieve good ends. In the Roman Republic, deliberative oratory was practiced in the Senate or in contiones, informal public assemblies in which speakers addressed the audience on political matters.54 But the public was generally barred from speaking in both arenas: Senate debate was restricted to members, and the speakers in contiones had to be invited by the presiding tribunes.55 In De republica, Cicero uses the concept of the mixed constitution, which he deems the ideal, to limit the power of the populus vis-à-vis the “better” sort. The mixed constitution is an evenly balanced mix between the three good constitutional forms: kingship, aristocracy, and democracy. This even balance, which Cicero identified with the Roman Republic, manifests itself in the greater weight the state accords the “good” or “respectable” people (boni), who are few in number, over the “many” (multi).56 With the common people excluded from public speech, Cicero presumably believes 53. “The ability in speaking, which has often carried weight in the choice of a consul, by argument and eloquence to sway the opinions of the Senate, the people and the juryclass is also important and highly regarded. A consul must when required have the ability as a speaker to check the follies of tribunes, to calm the passions of the people and to stand up against bribery.” Cicero Pro Murena 24. 54. Millar argues that while political debate also took place in the Senate, the contio in the Forum was the essential vehicle of persuasion and debate. The Crowd in Rome, 219. Contiones were called especially before the people assembled to vote on legislation. 55. Lily Ross Taylor, Roman Voting Assemblies: From the Hannibalic War to the Dictatorship of Caesar (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), 15–19. 56. Neal Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 165–68.

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that the orator will come from among the boni.57 At times, Cicero even exhibits an attitude toward the “mob” that resembles Callicles’. Contemptuous of the masses, yet aware of needing their good will, Cicero writes in a letter that he has kept the favor of “the filth and dregs of the city.”58 A selective reading of Cicero that focuses solely on his conservative ideology would confirm the critique of rhetoric’s elitism advanced in the Gorgias and expanded by some modern democrats. But the orator’s domination over a passive populus is only part of the truth. The orator (and the “better” people from which he most likely emerged) did not monopolize political power in the Roman Republic. Instead, power was shared in complex ways. Although average citizens could not speak in contiones, they had the right to vote in the popular assemblies. (The common people were excluded from the Senate, but formally this body was consultative, not legislative.) And in the comitia tributa (tribal assembly), which was the most important of the Roman political assemblies in the later Republic, each citizen had an individual, direct, and equal suffrage, without the vote being weighted in favor of wealth—as it was in the comitia centuriata (centuriate assembly).59 Notwithstanding his pro-aristocratic sympathies, Cicero acknowledged the people’s right to vote. In mixed constitutions, he maintains, “certain matters should be left to the judgment and desires of the masses”; the masses must have their share of liberty where they are not “entirely excluded from deliberation for the common weal and from power.”60 The common people could also make themselves heard through less formal avenues than voting. For example, though average citizens were largely barred from speaking at contiones, they were not necessarily passive listeners. They could interrupt with shouts, 57. Cicero states that “eloquence is dependent upon the trained skill of highly educated men.” Cicero De oratore 1.2.5. He also includes oratory in such gentlemanly callings as philosophy and civil law. Cicero De officiis 1.115; Griffin and Atkins, 45. 58. Millar, The Crowd in Rome, 120; Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought, 195. 59. The comitia tributa was composed of the common people divided, eventually, into thirty-five “tribes,” or voting units. Citizens had a single, equal vote within each tribe, and the majority vote in each tribe determined that voting unit’s position when it voted as one of thirty-five tribes. When eighteen tribes voted in agreement, the procedure ended, for a majority had been reached. Because the thirty-five tribes were not equal in size—and the more four urban tribes were more populous and poorer—“in actual practice the vote cast in the tribute assembly was not equal in the sense that each vote had the same weight.” See Millar, The Crowd in Rome, 19–24, and Karl Loewenstein, The Governance of Rome (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 110–13. 60. Cicero De re publica 1.15.69; 1.27.43; Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought, 165–66.

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engage the speaker in a dialogue, or express their opinions by simply departing.61 Because the speeches were delivered before crowds in the Forum, it can be assumed that relatively few people heard the speakers directly. But there is evidence that the contents of speeches were known by a large number of people who had not attended the contio: Cicero regularly commented on these public statements, even when he was not present at the contio.62 The circulation of political speeches among the people gave them the opportunity to discuss public matters between themselves in a way that the contio, which immediately preceded voting in the popular assemblies, did not. Through voting, listening to opposing opinions, and even discussing them privately (or occasionally reacting to them publicly), the masses in the Roman Republic participated politically.63 Because the people possessed the suffrage, the orator needed to persuade them to support his position. To persuade the audience, orators had to ensure that their message conformed to the “sense of the community” discussed earlier. As I argued before, the orators’ need to abide by communal values limited their ability to use all means to achieve their ends. The orators’ adherence to these values, though, also demonstrates a facet of the reciprocal relationship between orator and audience, elite and mass. As Josiah Ober argues in his study of mass-elite relations in democratic Athens, orators typically declared their belief in the idea of collective wisdom. For example, Demosthenes denied that he would have come before the Assembly if the Athenians’ views were contrary to his own opinion on the matter at hand: “I, being one, would be more likely to be mistaken than all of you.”64 Rhetoricians accepted popular consensus, since orators had to rely on the community’s values to persuade their audiences. But Cicero and other rhetoricians assumed that consensus was also evidence of probable truth. Cicero considers a “judgement [that] rests on the common practice of mankind if all men in general have approved of it or have followed it” as indicating probability, the Academic skeptic’s standard of truth.65 Although sometimes disdainful of the common people, Cicero 61. Millar, The Crowd in Rome, 47. 62. Ibid., 126, 224. 63. Because the people were the only ones who could legislate in the Roman Republic, particularly the more popular comitia tributa, which was the “normal assembly for the passage of leges—Millar concludes that, “in purely formal terms, the Roman res publica has to be characterized as a democracy.” Ibid., 210. 64. Josiah Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 163–65. 65. Cicero De inventione 1.30.47–48; Remer, Humanism and the Rhetoric of Toleration, 60.

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recognized their collective capacity to achieve a level of wisdom they lacked as individuals.66 While the orator had to heed the voice of the people, he also bore the responsibility to lead the populus toward their own good. (In the Gorgias Socrates contends that the orator does neither well: he does not follow the demos inasmuch as, like Callicles, he seeks to fulfill his own private ends; and he does not lead them because he only gratifies their immediate passions, against their true interests.) Cicero believed that since the good orator’s duty was to act for the republic’s welfare, he should necessarily oppose, at times, the mass’s ephemeral sentiments. Ober shows how even in democratic Athens, the perception of the rhetor as a leader and guardian of the people permitted public speakers to assume an independent stance contrary to mass opinion. Thus, orators might castigate the people for not living up to their own ideals. Ober argues that, in Athens, egalitarianism and respect for the rhetor’s special status stood in a precarious balance.67 Athenian democracy survived because elite rhetor and mass audience both participated in the political life of the polis. I contend that the Roman Republic also maintained a balance, albeit different than the Athenian balance, between orator and mass audience that guaranteed a political role for each. The tensions between the orator’s elitism and the democrat’s call for equality may be better understood by viewing the orator as a kind of representative.68 I refer to the orator as a kind of representative because he had no such formal status. Republican Rome, like democratic Athens, was not a representative government. In the Roman popular assemblies, citizens, not representatives, legislated, and senators were not elected representatives. Nonetheless, the political orator shares the representative’s obligation “to make present that which is absent,” that is, to make the people’s interests present. True, when the orator spoke in the Forum, many 66. On the innate rationality of all men, see Cicero Laws 1.10.29–30. 67. Any one Athenian who deliberately set himself apart from and in opposition to the demos was taking a great risk. But castigating the people and opposing their will were central and expected parts of the political orator’s function; this is amply demonstrated by the tendency of rhetores themselves to attack the evils of public flattery and demagoguery.” Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens, 316–24. See also 187–91. 68. Ober speaks of the orator as a type of delegate: “Political power resided with the demos, but the demos was willing to ‘delegate’ its powers in certain circumstances: . . . the demos could, when it chose, grant to the orators the authority to advise the demos on a regular basis and even to lead the state in times of crisis.” Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens, 323.

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people were already present in the audience. But the orator was entrusted with the duty of speaking for the people, as the people had no right to speak in public meetings themselves. Orators spoke for the people, in part, when they followed Cicero’s injunction never to “depart from the language of everyday life, and the usage approved by the sense of the community.” For Cicero, however, orators also spoke for the people when they acted for the republic’s good, even when their position was not immediately popular. The dual character of orators as followers and leaders of the crowd is analogous to the dilemma of elected representatives: whether to act as spokespersons for their electors or as their “trustees.” The first view is supported, for example, by those who favor “binding instructions” for representatives, which obligates them to vote according to their electors’ instructions.69 The use of binding instructions was common in the American colonial period, especially in New England, and in Massachusetts many towns expected their delegates to the Constitutional Convention to reflect the views of their constituents. From this standpoint, the people’s will is truly represented only when their delegates vote according to their direct desires. The second view has been voiced, most prominently, by Edmund Burke in his “Speech to the Electors of Bristol.” Burke argues there that certainly the constituents’ “wishes ought to have great weight with [the representative]; their opinions high respect; their business unremitted attention.” Nevertheless, the representative ought not to sacrifice “his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience” to anyone. The representative, according to Burke, owes his constituents “his judgment, and he betrays them, instead of serving them, when he abandons it to their opinion.”70 History has not resolved the conflicting duties of either the orator or the representative. In practice, the two attempt to act, simultaneously, as guides and followers. Classical rhetoricians, like Cicero, recognized that there was no other choice, that orators have to balance and shift between the two roles. The orator’s ambivalent position suggests that rhetoric is not as egalitarian as some democratic theorists would wish. Neither, however, is as elitist as its critics argue. 69. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 189; Terence Seery Morrow, “Prudence, Decorum, and Character in the Constitutional Ratification Debate” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1995), 55–70. 70. Burke’s Politics: Selected Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. Ross J. S. Hoffman and Paul Levack (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), 115.

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conclusion In this chapter I have, first, presented an ethical critique of rhetoric, based largely on Plato’s Gorgias. I argued that although many Platonic assumptions there may seem dated today, some arguments against rhetoric have persisted and have been adopted, explicitly, by democrats like J. Peter Euben and, implicitly, by several proponents of deliberative democracy. I focused on Plato’s criticism of rhetoric as irrational and deceitful and his argument that rhetoric does not promote the common good. Related to these claims, I argued, are the charges that rhetoric is manipulative and elitist. Second, I presented a Ciceronian response to the Platonic critique. It is “Ciceronian,” rather than “Cicero’s,” because although I based this response on Cicero’s own arguments, I assembled them in a fashion that Cicero himself did not. Although Cicero maintains that rhetoric is a moral art, he does not justify rhetoric’s apparent departures from accepted norms. Cicero, however, develops practical ethical arguments, particularly in De officiis, that are relevant to a moral understanding of rhetoric. Cicero maintains that the orator’s ability to argue both sides of a question, which has been criticized for fostering equivocation, is a means of elucidating the truth. To those who contend that orators use immoral means to achieve their ends, Cicero’s ethical theory allows him to respond that the pursuit of certain means, specifically the well-being of the republic, permits orators to employ normally unethical means to reach higher ends. Moreover, I have shown that Cicero recognizes different safeguards (which, like decorum, are built into the persuasive process itself) that would limit the orator’s ability to make use of immoral means. Furthermore, I have explained how the rhetorical situation is not simply elitist, but is a reciprocal relationship between speaker and audience that balances hierarchy against equality. This balance, I argue, is also characteristic of the “representative,” whom I compare to the orator. If Cicero’s rhetorical ethics permits, under certain situations, deceit and manipulation, and if Cicero’s political rhetoric is inegalitarian, is it possible to speak of “Ciceronian deliberation?” If deliberation is understood to preclude insincerity and hierarchy, as it is by some supporters of deliberative democracy, then Ciceronian rhetoric and deliberation are irreconcilable. But deliberation need not be conceived of so narrowly, and thus “Ciceronian deliberation” is not an oxymoron. Deliberation can be, and has been, viewed more expansively to include debates in which the speakers’ motivations and rhetorical means may be complex and varied, and in

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which deliberators do not participate equally.71 Political deliberation does not have to pattern itself after an academic colloquium. Ciceronian deliberation in many ways resembles the real-life deliberations of today’s representative democracies, where select speakers address each other in more official settings, while deliberations between unofficial deliberators (the voting public) also take place under a broad range of circumstances. These deliberations may not conform to the demands of an “ideal speech situation,” but they are legitimate nonetheless.

71. See, for example, Nadia Urbinati, Mill on Democracy: From the Athenian Polis to Representative Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

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6 disarming, simple, and sweet: augustine’s republican rhetoric John von Heyking

Just as the property of roundness—by virtue of which all lines drawn from the center of a circle to its circumference are equal—is the same in a large dish as in the tiniest coin, so the importance of justice is not diminished when small matters are performed with justice. —Augustine De Doctrina Christiana1

Augustine of Hippo is usually not invoked in discussions of rhetoric and deliberative democracy. His views on scriptural rhetoric and language have received extensive comment, but his alleged “otherworldliness” has led interpreters to wonder whether he has anything at all substantive to say about politics.2 Furthermore, his early career as a teacher of rhetoric in Rome and his later position as a bishop in the Christian church would seem to make him an unlikely source for democratic and republican thought. Thus, it would appear farfetched to claim that Augustine can contribute to the burgeoning scholarship on “deliberative democracy,” which came of age in the 1980s and has been called the heir to the tradition of “radical” democracy, rooted in Rousseau’s distrust of representative institutions.3 1. Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, trans. R.P.H. Green (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 4.99. Hereafter cited in the text. 2. The standard works that attribute to Augustine the view that politics is simply due to sin, propter peccatum, include Herbert Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), and R. A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). 3. See the summary article by James Bohman, which includes an extensive bibliography of this field: “Survey Article: The Coming of Age of Deliberative Democracy,” Journal of Political Philosophy 6, no. 4 (1998): 400–425. On Augustine’s general trust of representative institutions, see my “A Headless Body Politic? Augustine’s Understanding of Political Representation,” History of Political Thought 20, no. 4 (1999): 549–74.

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Although many authors writing in this tradition have more recently come under the influence of Aristotle and Madison, and made their peace with representative institutions by viewing them as facilitating, rather than hindering, deliberation, their world and that of Augustine appears as far apart as ever. Augustine’s general political views, and his rhetorical idiom of moderate (temperata) glory, do not obviously lend themselves to the concerns of deliberative democrats for issues such as “public reason” with its attendant considerations about political justification of policy proposals that requires free public reasoning of equal citizens, the institutionalization of “public reason” in parliamentary procedures, and finally, constitutionalism, which considers the “background understandings and social conditions in deliberative practices.” 4 The concept of “public reason” is the most common (although perhaps not the most illuminating) area of these three in which one can look to Augustine for guidance, because one’s understanding of “public reason” determines the limits of what kinds of arguments can be put forth in political speech. Religious views do not always pass muster for deliberative democrats because such views are seen to “impose” moral views on others and fail to fulfill the democratic requirements of reciprocity and reasonableness.5 I will address some of these concerns, in particular Augustine’s political rhetoric and the standards of reasonableness he affords to it. However, I will also consider the relationship between his understanding of rhetoric and the basis of politics (which relates to the deliberative democrats’ concern with constitutionalism) because of the fundamental difference between modern constitutionalism and Augustine’s understanding of politics as a composite of poetic and persuasive activities that takes place within what he calls a moderate (temperata) style of rhetoric. Augustine’s views are all the more informative because they are so distant from our own; he forces us to question the rationalist premises from which modern political life is derived. For instance, Iris Young argues that contemporary deliberative democrats are restrictive because they are too coolly 4. Bohman, “Survey Article,” 413. On the other hand, Joshua Mitchell points to the necessity of learning from Augustine to illuminate the difference between speech and “talk,” or useless prattle, in democracies, and the effect that difference has on the possibility of virtue in a liberal democracy. Mitchell, “The Use of Augustine, After 1989,” Political Theory 27, no. 5 (1999): 694–705. 5. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement: Why Moral Conflict Cannot Be Avoided in Politics, and What Should Be Done About It (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 65. On these issues, see the symposium on Rawlsian liberalism and Augustinian politics in the Journal of Peace and Justice Studies 8, no. 2 (1997): 1–73.

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rationalistic in a way that excludes communication through other modes such as “testimony, rhetoric, symbolic disruptions, storytelling and cultural- and gender-specific styles of communication.”6 Contestation about the fundamental assumptions about politics and rhetoric from within that debate enables us to consider Augustine’s alternative views on rhetoric, deliberation, and the purposes of politics. The links between Augustine and the issues of deliberative democracy can be seen in some recent scholarship on Augustine, which suggests that Augustine had a more positive view of political life than earlier modern interpreters noticed. While some have argued that his understanding of political language is “postmodern” in the sense of deconstructing political myths that hide domination, others have argued on the basis of the analogy he draws between ethics and musical harmony that his political rhetoric can provide the basis of a robust democratic politics and rhetoric.7 Some interpreters, among them John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, draw an analogy between Augustine’s “musical” ethics, which is based on his understanding of love of God and of neighbor, and his political views, with Pickstock characterizing his political ethics as democratic. Similarly, Michael Oakeshott concludes his On Human Conduct by comparing his own ideal constitution of a conversational societas with Augustine’s model of speech: And since men are apt to make gods whose characters reflect what they believe to be their own, the deity corresponding to this selfunderstanding is an Augustinian god of majestic imagination, who, 6. Iris Marion Young, “Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy,” in Democracy and Difference, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 129. See Bohman, “Survey Article,” 410. 7. More positive accounts can be found in John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993), 380–434; Jean Bethke Elshtain, Augustine and the Limits of Politics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995); and Peter Burnell, “The Status of Politics in St. Augustine’s City of God,” History of Political Thought 13, no. 1 (1992): 13–29. Comparisons between Augustine and postmodernism include Milbank’s discussion of the City of God as a “counter-genealogy” of Roman paganism; Robert Dodaro, “Eloquent Lies, Just Wars and the Politics of Persuasion,” Augustinian Studies 25 (1994): 77–94; and J. Joyce Schuld, “Augustine, Foucault, and the Politics of Imperfection,” Journal of Religion 80, no. 1 (2000): 1–18. On Augustine’s musical democratic deliberations, see Catherine Pickstock, “Ascending Numbers: Augustine’s De Musica and the Western Tradition,” in Christian Origins: Theology, Rhetoric, and Community, ed. Lewis Ayres and Gareth Jones (New York: Routledge, 1998), 185–215. I have given a more sustained account of Augustine’s essential attitude toward politics in Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001).

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when he might have devised an untroublesome universe, had the nerve to create one composed of self-employed adventurers of unpredictable fancy, to announce to them some rules of conduct, and thus to acquire convives capable of “answering back” in civil tones with whom to pass eternity in conversation.8 For this group of interpreters, Augustine’s understanding of love of God and neighbor necessitates a political model according to which political society is conceived as a series of deliberations and articulations by political actors who seek out the various sympathies of their partisan positions; and like a musical composition or a conversation, the activity of their seeking is the very constitution of their political society. Deliberation is embedded within a political society, which Augustine defines as a “rational multitude which is associated by a communal concord [concordi ] of the things it loves [diligit].”9 He defines political society in terms of a concord that simultaneously constitutes the underlying unity of society that is glimpsed only implicitly by partisans, as their encounters with common objects of love are themselves constituted by their deliberations, much like speeches are composed word by word, and music is composed tone by tone. The relationship between rhetoric and politics for Augustine is a close one, and his insights into rhetoric in general as well as political rhetoric specifically offer us insights into deliberative democratic political practices and their limitations. Augustine shows how small matters reveal a lot about large matters.10

i We need to consider Augustine’s understanding of language and rhetoric before turning to its political implications, because the purpose and limits of language illuminate the ability of human beings to weld together a community. Augustine articulated and practiced a mode of rhetoric that recognizes that language can never do anything more than communicate and make persuasive arguments concerning partial truths that are perpetually 8. Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 324. 9. Augustine, City of God Against the Pagans, trans. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 19.24. Hereafter City of God. 10. See Augustine, Confessions, trans. F. J. Sheed (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1970), 6.10. Hereafter cited in the text. See also Luke 16:10–11.

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subject to misunderstanding. Human being’s relationship with language provides a model of political life because language constitutes a world of signifiers, whose meanings derive from agreement, and that, in Jean Bethke Elshtain’s words, “both moves and one is moved by.” 11 We move and are moved about in a world of language and of politics; and how we use and learn language, for Augustine, illuminates how we speak, deliberate, and act in political life. He describes the spoken and written word within a broader discussion of signification (which also includes bodily gestures) (De Doctrina Christiana 1.5, 2.3). Signs such as words signify things, including both physical objects or abstractions like justice, and even other signs. Their purpose is to communicate thoughts and emotions from one mind to the next. They are also ambiguous because they can have many meanings and because those meanings derive from agreement or convention: “People did not agree to use [them] because they were already meaningful; rather they became meaningful because people agreed to use them” (2.94). The claim that language is based on convention should not be taken too far because the function of language is natural and the means by which human beings interact among the plurality of experiences and things of creation. In a similar vein, Augustine elsewhere describes custom as a kind of second nature: “For it is not for nothing that custom is called a sort of second and fitted-on nature. But we see new senses in the judging of these kinds of corporeal things, built by custom, by another custom disappear.”12 Customs, including those that govern language and politics, constitute the particularly human way of engaging with the world and of making a home within it. Thus, Augustine draws a strong link between a child’s self-identity and the language he learns to find his way through the world (Confessions 1.18). Furthermore, if language were simply natural, that is, if there were a permanent and exact correlation between signs and the things signified, humanity would possess a common language. Yet Augustine understood the story of the tower of Babel as teaching that the common language that humanity built was always a fabrication that falsely appeared to human beings as natural, and God introduced the confusion of languages to remind human beings of the impossibility of any human fabrication that mimics God.13 The convention of language and the art of rhetoric are 11. Elshtain, Augustine and the Limits of Politics, 31. 12. De Musica, in Writings of Saint Augustine, Fathers of the Church, vol. 2, trans. Robert Catesby Taliaterro (New York: Cima Publishing, 1947), 6.7.19. 13. However, Augustine believed that nonverbal signs like facial expressions, glances of the eye, gestures, and the tone of one’s voice constitute a kind of natural language common

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positive goods in their own right, and he recommends that Christians embrace them (De Doctrina Christiana 2.101). While language is the means by which human beings find their way within creation, language can also be the occasion of sin, and of domination in particular. He writes that superficial rhetorical style led Roman rhetoricians to be more concerned with the show of verbal skill rather than with justice, and to think that it was more contemptible to drop the “h” from “human” (homo) than it was to hate another human being: “Such a man will be most vigilantly on guard lest by a slip of the tongue he drop an ‘h’ and murder the word ‘human’: yet worries not at all that by the fury of his mind he may murder a real human” (Confessions 1.18). The emphasis on style over proper purpose also meant that speech became nothing more than the means to flatter emperors and to perpetuate the ideology of domination within the Roman empire (6.6). The limitations of language and the problems of Roman culture illuminate the limitations of political life. Language binds people together in community, but its limitations also show the darkness that divides human beings from one another in what Hannah Arendt called the “web of relationships” and “space of appearances,” in which language can serve as intentional and unintentional means of domination. For instance, Augustine laments how friendships, “our one true solace in human society,” can be ripped apart by simple misunderstandings (City of God 19.6). He also laments the uncertainty that a judge faces when determining the guilt or innocence of an accused; the accused may proclaim innocence while actually being guilty, and the accusers and witnesses may be lying. The judge, and political actors in general, are caught in a tragic web of darkness brought about by the inability of language to communicate the truth of things with finality. The fallenness of the human condition gives it a tragic element because ignorance is unavoidable and human society compels judgment (19.6).14

to all nations. Confessions 1.8. Contemporary research seems to corroborate this view. See Paul Eckman, “Facial Expressions and Emotion,” American Psychologist 48 (1993): 384–92. 14. See Paul Cornish, “Augustine on the Roman Republic” (paper presented to the American Political Science Association, Boston, 1998), 12; Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 181ff. The limitations of language are not meant to indicate that Augustine regarded human beings as nonpolitical, but the reverse. As Rowan Williams has argued, “Augustine’s condemnation of ‘public’ life in the classical world is, consistently, that it is not public enough.” Williams, “Politics and the Soul: A Reading of the City of God,” Milltown Studies 19/20 (1987): 68.

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The uncertainty found among friends and among people under the same laws is worsened among strangers: For if two men, each ignorant of the other’s language, meet, and are compelled by some necessity not to pass on but to remain with one another, it is easier for dumb animals, even of different kinds, to associate together than these men, even though both are human beings. For when men cannot communicate their thoughts to each other, they are completely unable to associate with one another despite the similarity of their natures; and this is simply because of the diversity of tongues. So true is this that a man would more readily hold a conversation with his dog than with another man who is a foreigner. It is true that the Imperial City has imposed on subject nations not only her yoke but also her language, as a bond of peace and society, so that there should be no lack of interpreters but a great abundance of them. But how many great wars, what slaughter of men, what outpourings of human blood have been necessary to bring this about! (City of God 19.7) This passage illuminates the dependence of community on language by showing the effects of the lack of a common language, both in making it impossible for two people to communicate and also by showing the evil of striving to forge some kind of community among different language communities by violence. This statement illuminates the collective action problem associated with the ambiguity of signs; their conventional nature makes their meaning uncertain, which makes it particularly difficult to conduct politics in which action necessarily assumes fixed and often abbreviated meanings. Augustine was aware of the difficulty that fixed and abbreviated meanings hide practices of domination, and he strove to articulate a rhetoric that was meant to be as free as possible of such practices. From a general consideration of language, we turn to see that the purposes of rhetoric illuminate his particular understanding, not only of political rhetoric, but of politics itself. While Augustine, like Cicero, thought rhetoric was best used for just purposes by virtuous people, he thought it misleading to characterize rhetoric as an art, if by art one means a set of principles that one learns in the abstract and then applies to concrete situations. For Augustine, the reverse is true in rhetoric specifically and in language in general. One learns the rules of rhetoric through the specifics of the human language and not by applying rules. Just as one best learns

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to walk by practice and imitation rather than simply by learning the rules (De Doctrina Christiana 2.134–35), the rules of rhetoric are best discovered by watching and imitating eloquent orators who “observe the rules because they are eloquent; they do not use them to become eloquent” (4.11; see also 4.21). The same is true generally for learning languages, as Augustine’s example of a child learning language through imitating those around him shows. Politics for Augustine has this same character. Its conventions and the means of communicating the just and appropriate arise through the specifics of a culture, so the attempt by deliberative democrats to articulate the appropriate rules of engagement ahead of time has its logic reversed because such rules consist of nothing more than abbreviations of preexisting customs and practices. Because of this “embedded” character of language and politics, Augustine stresses that, above all, the orator himself must be virtuous because his actions will persuade people of the truth of his words more effectively than the words themselves can do (4.151). The orator provides an exemplum for others to imitate, both in eloquence and in virtue.15 Augustine provides his most extensive treatment of rhetoric in his De Doctrina Christiana, a treatise on rhetoric for Christian preachers and teachers. While it is intended for people wishing to teach and exhort audiences to love God and neighbor within an ecclesiastical setting, it is possible to derive insight into political rhetoric from this treatise. Rhetoric has three purposes, and each purpose is associated with a particular style (De Doctrina Christiana 4.74–143). First, teaching entails the presentation of facts and evidence, and it is accompanied by a “restrained” (summisse) didactic style that attempts to engage listeners’ rationality. However, the orator must also use two other types of rhetoric in order to maintain his audience’s interest, and to engage the other faculties of their souls, including the passions. An orator can also delight and charm an audience with the moderate (temperata) style; this rhetoric is usually used in praising or blaming someone or something (De Doctrina Christiana 4.104, 111–17). It is characterized by ornamental eloquence meant simply to arouse the delight or perhaps the indignation of an audience, but it is not meant to rouse it to action because the beauty of the speech is meant to receive attention. While noting that all scriptural eloquence is meant ultimately either to teach or to move people to act toward salvation, Augustine provides the 15. See also Augustine De Trinitate 8.6.9 and City of God 5.14.

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example of Paul’s moderate ornamental style in listing the gifts of the Holy Spirit, where the graceful flow of phrases, balanced by other phrases, imitates the outpouring of the Holy Spirit (4.111–17, quoting Romans 13:6–16). However, the purpose of the moderate style is not simply aesthetic. Rather, the act of praise, for instance, is an act of glorification; it is an act of remembrance that expresses a community’s identity and, in Augustine’s terms, its common objects of love. The moderate style of rhetoric is thus the type of rhetoric in which persuasive activities are embedded but is itself not intended to persuade, but rather to glorify. Finally, the grand style is used to move listeners, especially antagonistic ones, to act: “But if listeners have to be moved rather than instructed, in order to make them act decisively on the knowledge that they have and lend their assent to matters which they admit to be true, then greater powers of oratory are required. In such cases what one needs are entreaties, rebukes, rousing speeches, solemn admonitions [coercitationes ], and all other things which have the power to excite human emotions” (De Doctrina Christiana 4.15; see 4.76–79 and 118–25). The grand style differs from the moderate style in purpose; in terms of eloquence, though, they differ on account of the latter’s greater heartfelt emotion, and less so on account of rhetorical ornaments. Augustine followed classical rhetoric by including coercion within the grand style. He cites Cicero’s threefold purpose of rhetoric to instruct listeners (by the restrained style), to delight them (by the moderate style), and to move them (by the grand style), where moving listeners is also “a matter of conquest [ flectere victoriae]” (4.74, citing De oratore 69). Augustine borrows Cicero’s military language of force to illuminate the difficulty in transferring the force of the argument to engaging people’s wills: “The reason why it is a matter of conquest is that it is possible for a person to be instructed and delighted but not to give assent” (4.76). Even so, Augustine recommends mixing styles in order to gain the maximum effect of rhetoric in persuading audiences (4.104, 134). Augustine explains these styles as suitable for Christian preachers but does not deal extensively with their other uses, despite his self-conscious borrowings from such Roman writers as Cicero and Quintilian, for whom these styles were to be used in public forums. He recognizes that these styles may be used in nonecclesiastical settings, and he mentions forensic rhetoric, the rhetoric suitable for public forums, in particular (De Doctrina Christiana 4.97). All three styles are suitable to forensic rhetoric, but their use should be tuned to their appropriate purpose. For example, it is appropriate to use restrained rhetoric when dealing with financial matters, a

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common topic for forensic rhetoric, because such a topic is mundane. On the other hand, grand rhetoric is appropriate for graver matters, such as when lives are at stake, but such rhetoric should be more restrained in comparison to that utilized in ecclesiastical settings by Christian preachers, for whom the salvation of souls is at stake. Thus, political rhetoric also mixes styles, but should be more moderate than that found in an ecclesiastical setting. However, the distance between political and ecclesiastical settings is not so far apart because he observes that finances deal with justice, and as seen in the epigraph used at the beginning of this essay, it makes little difference whether one speaks of justice about mundane matters like finance or of grander issues because both deal with justice. Further, Augustine provides an example of his own use of rhetoric to resolve a civil case in which he tried to convince the townspeople of Caesarea to cease their barbaric tradition of splitting off into factions and killing each other (4.139). He used the grand style to move them to stop, and he takes as evidence of his effectiveness the fact that he moved them to tears, which is a more reliable indicator of the effectiveness of the grand style than applause, as tears tend to signify a greater and more lasting change in the will. Political rhetoric differs both in degree and in kind from Christian rhetoric. Christian rhetoric deals with the salvation of souls, according to which all three styles are mixed together and where the grand style is utilized to move obstinate souls whose sins preclude them from accepting God’s grace. Political rhetoric, on the other hand, is more restrained because its direct goal is not the salvation of souls, although it is about political justice, which deals less directly with the salvation of souls.16 We should note Augustine’s view of scriptural rhetoric before turning to consider political rhetoric systematically. He long rejected scripture because he viewed it as inelegant compared to the writings of the Greek and Roman poets and philosophers; it was not until he encountered the books of the Platonists, who taught him about the difference between idea and matter, and his teacher Ambrose, who taught him the difference between figurative and literal meanings of scripture, that he regarded scrip16. Despite the City of God being Augustine’s preeminent political work, it is no less restrained than his sermons. Its use of the grand style can be understood in light of the fact that the work’s purpose is in part pastoral, and in part poetic in the sense that he intended it to be a monument for future generations set against an old civilization. As St. Jerome said, Augustine was the “second founder of the Christian faith.” Jerome, Epistle 195. Its purpose went well beyond serving as a livre de circonstance or as something resembling the policy document of a modern political party.

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ture as anything more than a collection of inelegant and vulgar stories for the common people (Confessions 3.5). Soon though, he became the first Christian writer to reflect systematically, not only on the content of scripture, but on its beauty and on its ability to serve, not only as a but as the model of rhetoric.17 Without reducing scriptural rhetoric to political rhetoric, and without implying that the purposes for reading scripture directly govern political rhetoric, we can draw out some implications of Augustine’s approach to scriptural rhetoric for his understanding of political rhetoric. First, reading and hearing scripture is intended to transform the reader and audience, and to reorient their spiritual and moral lives within the horizon that scripture provides. Brian Stock shows how, for Augustine, the reading self is very much a text on which the words of scripture write when the self reads reflectively. The self understood as a kind of text receives its definition from the text it reads, and is always subject to revision, rereading, and ascent to understanding.18 Ecclesiastical communities reflect upon the meaning of scripture, but it is anachronistic to draw too sharp a line between figurative and allegorical meanings of the text: “Instead, the terms describe the biblical text as it is read by persons who are themselves undergoing the process of spiritual transformation that God is using the text to help bring about. Allegoria and figura highlight two distinctive and, from Augustine’s point of view, necessary tensions in this process of transformative reading tensions between preservation and novelty, and eternity and temporality.”19 Augustine’s integration of scriptural interpretation, including its literal and figurative dimensions, with classical rhetoric illuminates the role that religion plays in his political thinking. While the division between literal and figurative meanings is simplistic, Augustine spent a considerable

17. See J. Cavadini, “The Sweetness of the Word: Salvation and Rhetoric in Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana,” in “De Doctrina Christiana”: A Classic of Western Culture, in Chrisianity and Judaism in Antiquity, vol. 9, ed. D.W.H. Arnold and P. Bright (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995); E. L. Fortin, “Augustine and the Problem of Christian Rhetoric,” in The Birth of Philosophic Christianity: Studies in Early Christian and Medieval Thought, Collected Essays, vol. 1, ed. J. Brian Benestad (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), 79–94; and the essays in J. McWilliam, ed., Augustine: From Rhetor to Theologian (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1992). 18. Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 111, 278. 19. David Dawson, “Figure, Allegory,” in Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. Allan D. Fitzgerald, O.S.A., et al. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1999), 365–66.

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amount of time combating restrictive literal interpretations of scripture by pointing out, as Paul did, that restricting one’s understanding of scripture to literal meanings kills the spirit of the word (see De Doctrina Christiana 3.20). While one normally begins with a literal reading of scripture, Augustine soon shows that both literal and figurative meanings are to be understood as consistent with the findings of natural reason. What scripture presents as contrary to nature, such as what appear to be direct commands from God or seemingly immoral acts (when considered in the light of reason), Augustine argues that these must be read as figurative and in accordance with reason (3.33, 42). Further, just as he warns against following academic fads that appear to prove scripture wrong, so too does he warn Christians to avoid speaking ignorantly about scientific topics such as astronomy, biology, and geology in such a way that undermines the rationality inherent in scripture: Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.20 Scripture, then, stands above philosophical discourse as well as political discourse, although as Word of God, it informs human beings’ scientific, political, and moral understandings by giving them the fullest account of human being’s relationship, not only with God, but with each other and the world, as his “literal” interpretation of Genesis shows. Thus, scripture does not contradict natural reason, and one can even use the techniques of pagan rhetoric to gain a good understanding of its meaning (De Doctrina Christiana 2.16–42). However, rhetorical uses of scripture are to be done prudently and with reference to good morals as intelligible to natural reason.21 20. The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Ancient Christian Writers, vol. 41, trans. John Hammond Taylor, S.J. (New York: Newman Press, 1982), 1.19.39. 21. Augustine generally regards reason and faith as issuing in compatible moral norms.

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Even so, scripture provides a simple down-to-earth model of rhetoric that is not generally available to classical rhetoric because scripture is intelligible both to philosophical elites and to the uneducated, which creates an egalitarian basis for communicating moral truths in a democratic culture. He notes that while scripture’s wisdom transcends that of the philosophers, its “vulgarity” and simplicity actually humbles the proud, and he points to the fact that uneducated fishers and carpenters were able to draw from it to transform their moral and spiritual world: It is incredible that a very few men, of mean birth and the lowest rank, and no education [ignobiles, infimos, paucissimos, inperiotos ], should have been able so effectually to persuade the world, and even its learned men, of so incredible a thing. . . . But if [sceptics] do not believe that these miracles were wrought by Christ’s apostles to gain credence to their preaching [ praedicantibus ] of His resurrection and ascension, this one grand miracle suffices for us, that the whole world has believed without any miracles. (City of God 22.5; see also 16.2) Such people were “untrained in the liberal arts and untaught in the learning of the pagans, not skilled in grammar, not armed in dialectic, not puffed up with rhetoric” (City of God 22.5). In this sense, the Apostles constitute the exempla for Augustine’s virtuous rhetoricians, who persuade primarily by their actions and gestures, and secondarily by their words. Their lack of education, their mean birth, and low rank made them plebs. The ability to testify to moral and spiritual truth puts everyone on a more equal footing with regard to the ability to live an upright moral life. The virtues of such uneducated human beings are not restricted to obedience and moderation, as they are in Plato’s Republic, for example.22 As Elshtain has noted about the way the “language of Christianity” affected peoples’ lives, The things Christ held dear and cherished—forgiveness, succor, devotion—helped to forge the terms of their own lives, that and the fact that the Christian rhetoric Augustine at first found inelegant See Frederick J. Crosson, “Structure and Meaning in St. Augustine’s Confessions,” in The Augustinian Tradition, ed. Gareth B. Matthews (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 27–38, and von Heyking, Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World, chap. 6. 22. For example, see Plato Republic 431c–3.

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and even vulgar was simple and direct—told in the language of the people, cast in the forms of everyday speech, speech that communicated, speech with a liberatory moment that reached out to incorporate into a new community—the koinonia—those who were severed from the classical polis, women and the poor.23 As these passages and the discussion on the virtue of orators indicate, the communicability of scripture depends not so much on the ability to make rational arguments as it does on the ability of orators to serve as exempla by living upright and wholesome lives and their ability to speak simple, direct, and perhaps even vulgar truths. We now turn to consider how this simple and sweet speech embeds itself into political life.

ii Despite the seemingly antipolitical rhetoric one finds in works such as the City of God, Augustine was concerned about the relationship between rhetoric and the “minor things” because even the minor things, such as politics, include considerations about justice. Augustine’s rhetoric in that treatise is meant, through all three types of rhetoric, to tame the political ambitions of his readers and to harness them to virtue. His rhetoric appears immoderately antipolitical because he considered most of his audience’s passion for political glory as inordinate and deformed, and his rhetoric is meant to illuminate goods that transcend politics and to demonstrate how political glory is insufficient to secure the complete happiness that Roman statesmen implicitly sought by way of their ambitions. Augustine shows how the inordinate ambitions of his audience degenerate into the lust for domination (libido dominandi) if the goals of these desires are taken as the greatest human good. He disarms their inordinate ambitions by utilizing what can be described as a dialectic of excess over excess, which warns them of the extremes to which their excessive ambition leads and thus shows them the incoherence of their ambitions. In his own terms, he utilizes a grand style intended to persuade, to shame, and to move his audience, by stripping down their inordinate ambitions to prepare the way for a more substantive political teaching. In so doing, he provides some clues to indicate that he does not deny the goodness of political life altogether. His 23. Elshtain, Augustine and the Limits of Politics, 29.

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purpose and hope is to give his readers nothing more than a Platonic education in recognizing the limitations of political life with the hope that they can return to their political duties with moderated ambitions and expectations of the happiness political life may bring.24 Augustine’s audience consisted of pagan philosophical and political elites who blamed Christianity for Rome’s collapse. The former he tried to convince that Christianity taught nothing more than what is intelligible to natural reason, or at least could not be denied by human reason; the latter were composed of those who sought all glory from politics. For this latter group, Augustine attempted to show why their inordinate love of glory led to domination, and then he attempted to “deconstruct” and then harness that love of glory to virtue. His strategy toward those dominated by the lust for domination is straightforward and the most familiar. It consists in what Milbank calls his counter-genealogy of pagan ethics; it consists in showing his audience that political life in general, and their beloved Rome in particular, are nothing more than one sorry and senseless bloodletting after another. He does this by quoting their own authors back at them (thus implying that Rome’s greatest minds such as Sallust and Cicero were capable of providing Rome with its own internal critique). He also appeals to their shame (at least for those who, unlike Nero, still possess some shame) (City of God 5.19). For these readers, he shows how Sallust, the great Roman historian who celebrated Roman glories, himself admitted that the love of liberty that had governed the republic at the beginning had quickly given way under the empire to the lust for domination (3.14, 5.12). This lust was rooted in and justified by their beloved civil theology, which included numerous examples of Jupiter’s and Juno’s own lusts (5.12, quoting Virgil Aeneid 1.279–85). Thus far, Augustine’s rhetoric simply unmasks the pretensions, not only of his audience’s particular political leanings, but of the entire constitutional order. While this strategy might be commendable as a general, though incomplete, theoretical critique, it must be supplemented by a more positive account of political life if it is to be used in political deliberations; otherwise, deliberation is destroyed by the assumption that all political opinions are necessarily simple ruses for domination: that the entire political process itself is such a ruse put on by one faction, or that an empire is nothing more than piracy on a grand scale, to cite an example used by 24. Explained in greater detail in Heyking, Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World, chap. 1.

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Augustine (City of God 4.4) and Cicero (De republica 3.14.24). Augustine understood the implications of extending this strategy too far, so he hinted of his own positive view of politics within his discussion of glory. Augustine also recognized the constructive elements of the love of glory, and he used the complexity of that love as a means to elevate his audience’s intention toward virtue and away from the libidinous desire for domination. He observes that the love of glory improves desires in two ways. At a minimum this love prevents shameful acts. He quotes Horace on how to curb the lust for domination: To curb the lust for domination, [Horace] sang: Wider will be your realm if you conquer Greed in your heart, than if to distant Gades [Spain] Libya you should join, and the two Punic peoples Give to one master. (City of God 5.13, quoting Odes 2.2.9–12) It also suppresses the love of base things such as wealth: “So also these despised their own private affairs for the sake of the republic, and for its treasury resisted avarice, consulted for the good of their country with a spirit of freedom” (City of God 5.15). Augustine repeats this observation elsewhere: “Nevertheless, they who restrain baser lusts, not by the power of the Holy Spirit obtained by the faith of piety, or by the love of intelligible beauty, but by desire of human praise, or, at all events, restrain them better by the love of such praise, are not indeed yet holy, but only less base” (5.13). Augustine observes that the love of praise, as a part of the love of glory, can perform a form of social sanction in preventing people from engaging in shameful acts. The love of glory, however, also accompanies the love of virtue. Quoting Sallust again, Augustine writes: “Praise of a higher kind was bestowed upon Cato, for he says of him, ‘The less he sought glory, the more it followed him.’ We say praise of a higher kind; for the glory with the desire of which the Romans burned is the judgment of men thinking well of men” (City of God 5.12, quoting Sallust The War with Catiline 54.6). This leads Augustine to warn his readers that virtue is not to be sought for the sake of glory, although he adds that virtue can be sought by means of glory. Augustine elsewhere provides examples of Roman noble deeds that serve as models of sorts for Christians to follow (5.18), which also suggests that the love of glory can motivate virtuous deeds in addition to restraining shameful

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desires. One might also point to the example of Regulus as a Roman who practiced virtue and loved and received due glory (1.24). Glory is indeed a good (but not the highest good), and so can be sought viciously and can be transformed into the lust for domination. Augustine cites Sallust, who claims that glory can be gained either by virtue or by vice: “‘For glory, honor, and power are desired alike by the good man and by the ignoble; but the former,’ he says, ‘strives onward to them by the true way [vera via] while the other, knowing nothing of the good arts, seeks them by fraud and deceit’ ” (5.12, quoting Sallust The War with Catiline 11.1–2; see also City of God 5.19). Furthermore, Augustine regarded the love of glory as more conducive to the common good than the self-interested pursuit of wealth, for example, because glory can be shared more easily. Just as the language of utility serves as the primary idiom of contemporary moral and political discourse, the language of glory structured moral and political discourse in Rome. Augustine writes of the Romans: “Glory they most ardently loved: for it they wished to live, for it they did not hesitate to die” (City of God 5.12). He quotes the historian Sallust’s assessment: “They were ‘greedy of praise, liberal with money, desirous of great glory, and happy with riches honorably gained’ ” (5.12, quoting Sallust The War with Catiline 7.6). Glory is proclaimed in the opening words of the work: “Most glorious is and will be the city of God” (City of God 1.pr.). However, Augustine’s use of the idiom of glory is more than a mere concession to the particular vices of his contemporaries. Augustine’s transposition of the idiom of glory is based on a more general view of human anthropology and the function of glory in community and politics. He defined glory as clear knowledge together with praise (clara cum laude notitia).25 Glory is the combination of love and knowledge; and praise, through the moderate style of rhetoric, is the means of expressing it. The bond between love and knowledge, between will and intellect, implies that politics is about more than the utilitarian calculation of interests among autonomous agents who attempt to maximize the most advantageous contractual relations among them.26 He accepted the idiom of glory because he accepted the ancient view that politics is about more than persuasion (although it certainly includes it), but politics is also a poetic activity in which 25. “Answer to Maximinus the Arian,” in Arianism and Other Heresies, trans. Roland J. Teske (Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City Press, 1995), 2.13.2. 26. Paul J. Griffiths argues that Augustine’s philosophical anthropology requires the use of the language of praise and thanks. Griffiths, “The Gift and the Lie: Augustine on Lying,” Communio 26 (Spring 1999): 29.

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community is bound together by affection and the memories of its achievements. The idiom of moderate glory complements his view that virtuous rhetoricians and teachers serve primarily by their being exempla, and secondarily by their rational demonstrations, as praise constitutes the appropriate response to such exempla. By securing a kind of immortality through memory, glory is the appropriate means by which a political community compensates for the brevity of each individual’s mortal existence. Over the yawning gap of forgetfulness and the “sphere of demise and succession where the dead are succeeded by the dying,” a society has nothing besides glory to tie one generation to the next: “What else but glory should they love, by which they wished even after death to live in the mouths of their admirers?” (City of God 5.14). Glory is the means by which a city, and not only Rome, strives for immortality, and how its heroes utilize the city to ensure their own glory. However, for Augustine, only a few Romans were able to bind glory to virtue, partly because only a few Romans knew of an adequate judge of glory. Augustine spent a considerable amount of space in the City of God arguing that only God can be the perfect judge of one’s glory, but in keeping with the principle articulated in the statement that serves as the epigraph of this chapter, his description of political life and his conception of a populus suggests that one can find numerous partial judges who can bestow glory but whose nature as partial judges necessitates that such glory will always be subject to deliberation and contestation. Thus, the bestowal of glory is necessarily set within a process that extends indefinitely into the future.

iii We now turn to unfold what goods political rhetoric aims to secure. That is, what kind of justice is implied by Augustine’s comment about rhetoric securing justice in both small and large matters? One finds that Augustine reasons about politics and deliberation in terms analogous to his view of language as something that we move but that simultaneously moves us. This claim is not obvious, as Augustine appears to lend himself to the morally neutral view of procedure when he reinterprets Cicero’s definition (given through the voice of Scipio) of a populus as an assemblage bound by the objects of its loves, whereas Cicero’s Scipio had defined it as a “multitude associated by a consensus of right and by a community of interest” (City of God 2.21, quoting Cicero De republica 1.25.39):

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A people is a community of a rational multitude which is associated by a communal concord [ concordi ] of the things it loves [ diligit ], then in order to discover the character of any people, we have only to observe what they love. Yet whatever it loves, if only it is a community of rational creatures and not beasts, and is bound together in communal concord as to the objects of love, it is not absurdly called a people; and it will be a superior people in proportion as it is bound together by higher things, inferior in proportion as it is bound together by lower. (City of God 19.24) Many commentators such as Herbert Deane and R. A. Markus have viewed Augustine’s reformulation as the transition from classical virtue-based politics toward the modern instrumentalist social contract teaching. This view has been challenged on the ground that better objects of love beget a more virtuous populus.27 In fact, Augustine explicitly identifies what we would call the morally neutral state, and the principle of self-interest on which it is based, as a ruse for domination: Let provinces be subordinate to governors not as directors of morals but as lords of their possessions and providers of their pleasures; and let them not honour them in sincerity but fear them in servility. Let the laws penalize the damage a man does to his neighbor’s vineyard rather than the damage he does to his own life. Nor should a man be led into court unless he harms another’s property, home, health, or is a nuisance or impediment to someone against his consent. Otherwise, let each one do what he will with his own either in the company of his own people or of anyone else who is willing. (City of God 2.20) Augustine viewed what we would call neutral laws, based ostensibly on the protection of self-interest, as a veil for domination. Conversely, Augustine’s skepticism of a politics of self-interest and the morally neutral state did not lead him to equate concord with “correct conclusions” or consensus as the goal of political deliberation. If love of neighbor is allowed to flourish and domineering modes of speech are at least restrained, then partial political opinions, like the groups that fit together

27. Heyking, Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World, chaps. 2 and 3.

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to form society, relate to one another as parts of a song or a discourse relate to one another and to their whole. Augustine compares political order to the beauty and arrangement of the Psalms: “For the rational and moderate harmony of diverse sounds insinuates the compact unity of a well-ordered city” (City of God 17.14). The order that the city represents is a harmony of its parts: “For each single human being, like one letter in a discourse [sermon], is as it were the element of a city or kingdom, however wide is the occupation of land” (4.3). Each individual, with his own goodness, is a part that helps to constitute the whole, but who, conversely, contains the “whole” within him. Augustine chooses to compare the whole to a discourse, which becomes senseless and incomplete when it lacks its parts, just as a Psalm would lack harmony if it lacked the full amplitude of notes and words that comprise it.28 He articulates a political ethics whereby he viewed the political process as embedded in terms similar to the way human beings are embedded in a web of language, so that like language a populus is constituted, not by preexisting abstract rules that stand apart from practice, but rather as an indefinite series of deliberations and articulations that its particular actors invoke without seeing fully the totality of its meaning. These comparisons of the city with music and speech reflect his willingness to consider actual historical cities, full of the virtuous and the reprobate, as capable of bringing the multitude of individual potentials to a kind of conversational perfection.29 This “perfection,” however, does not consume its parts, as does aggressive nationalism or collectivism, for example. Love of God and neighbor mean that the part and whole relate dialectically, like a musical series and like language, and as a result of human being’s participation within creation in general, which Augustine characterizes in terms of constant beginnings (City of God 12.21). Yet the ongoing nature of the song indicates that the whole (e.g., the populus of Rome, indeed of any nation) is never fully present to its con28. Elsewhere, he calls individual human beings the elements and seeds (elementa et semina civitatum) of cities. See Augustine Expositions on the Psalms 9.8. 29. The perfect freedom associated with the musical analogy of part and whole resides, of course, in the mystical city of God: “In the heavenly city then, there will be freedom of will. It will be one and the same freedom in all, and indivisible in the separate individuals.” Augustine City of God 22.30. Commenting on this passage’s articulation of the relationship between a populus and its constituent parts, Milbank observes that “not only, therefore, is there a structural parallel between ‘whole’ and the unit: in addition, the ‘whole’ is in some sense present within the unit, because the unit exists in a position fully defined by the unfoldings of an infinite sequence.” Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 405.

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stituent parts. Thus, political activity in general can only indicate a sympathy or concordia that never fully appears, and political deliberation in particular is what Oakeshott called the “convincing exposure of a sympathy, present but not yet followed up, and the convincing demonstration that now is the appropriate moment for recognizing it.”30 In other words, just as learning the rules of rhetoric involve making implicit practices explicit or just as Augustine’s City of God attempted to make explicit what Roman philosophers already discovered and what Roman culture was already intimating, deliberation involves making explicit and exposing the intimations of common objects of love (City of God 19.24) already found within the tradition of behavior within a republic. To repeat a previous point, this model of deliberation shows the deliberative democrat’s project of establishing preexisting norms and rules for deliberation to be the result of reversed logic. Augustine’s model finds the norms in the practice, and its “fairness” is internal to the process itself because the musical ethics on which it is based necessitates that process to be open-ended, like a song or a language, to enable “losers” on one policy issue to regroup, as it were, and to initiate changes and become “winners” on another. Augustine uses affective language in his definition by stating that a populus is bound in concord, and indicates that he saw a populus as a kind of political friendship. Human beings seek to become like or to imitate the objects they love or prize. Just as one becomes more godlike by imitating Christ, and just as one’s soul is dispersed into the flux of the world when one inordinately pursues worldly goods, so too do political societies increasingly resemble the objects their people love. Behind this statement about politics is Augustine’s principle that people are drawn to and imitate what they prize, and praise what they prize with the moderate style of rhetoric. Concors means literally “with heart,” which implies a close solidarity and like-mindedness within a society. It can be defined as meaning “of the same mind,” “united,” and “harmonious.” It is the root of concordia, which means “mutual agreement,” “concurrence of feeling,” “friendship,” “harmony,” and “state of peace and amity between opposing parties.” Augustine elsewhere calls peace among human beings an ordinate concord (ordinata concordia) (City of God 19.13), and he approvingly quotes Scipio’s comparison of concordia of a city with the harmonia of musicians: “What musicians call harmony in singing, is concord in the city” (2.21, quoting Scipio De re publica 2.42.69). He speaks of it elsewhere when he points out that the Roman 30. Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991), 57.

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empire would have been more humane had the nations (gentes) entered by agreement or concord (concorditer) rather than through compulsion, which indicates that each particular nation, perhaps through some form of federalism, could have helped to constitute the Roman empire through a common like-mindedness (City of God 5.17). Further, concord depends on justice, as Augustine equates it with the health (salus) of the populus (19.24). Augustine’s analogy between the deliberative process and music and language suggests that the deliberative process is an ongoing and open-ended conversation. Looking to the so-called constitutional level, the concord or sympathy of a political society as a whole also has the character of an ongoing conversation whose contours and identity undergo constant revision. For instance, at several times Augustine consoles his Roman readers that despite the sack of Rome and all the difficulties it was enduring, Rome itself endures. Augustine argues that Rome remained a people even when it underwent its internal transformation from a republic to a decadent empire: “But what this people loved in its early and in subsequent times, and by what moral decline it passed into bloody sedition and then into social and civil warfare, and disrupted and corrupted that very concord, which is, so to speak, the health of the people, history bears witness” (City of God 19.24). A people remains a people even when concord breaks down, when the body politic becomes unhealthy but is not yet dissolved. This remained true even after the invasion of Rome by Alaric: “The Roman Empire has been shaken rather than transformed, and that happened to it at other periods, before the preaching of Christ’s name; and it recovered. There is no need to despair of its recovery at this present time. Who knows what is God’s will in this matter?” (4.8). Concord is a condition for the health of a people, but the existence of a minimum of concord does not affect the status of Rome as a people, “so long,” Augustine concludes, “as there remains some sort of [ qualiscumque ] gathering of rational beings united in fellowship by a communal accord about the objects of its love” (19.24). The populus of Rome was a higher entity than the particular claimants to its title in the civil wars, and this entity included all Romans. Yet, as our discussion about parts and wholes shows, the whole of Rome, or any other political society, is not separate from its parts in the sense that the parts are absorbed into the whole; rather, Augustine seems to suggest that political societies form a whole in a fluid manner analogous to the way language, as based on convention and agreement that moves and is moved by its participants, forms a whole with respect to the very words that constitute it. In asserting their partisan claims, participants catch glimpses of

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the whole, which can only become present through engagement with other participants, and analogously through dramatic imitation and praise of exempla. Simultaneously, participants constitute the whole by engaging in the ongoing conversation. Augustine’s musical understanding of parts and whole in a republic led him to appreciate a system of trading offices among parts. This is seen in two ways. First, no part of a republic possesses the totality of virtue. Augustine observes that virtuous leaders made Rome superior by defeating Rome’s wealthier neighbors in war (City of God 5.12). This observation reflects Augustine’s view that political regimes are spoiled by luxury and idleness that result from inordinate private wealth. The rulers who made Rome virtuous themselves became even more vicious than the people they ruled (1.30), which was a result of their corruption in political office. This indicates that Augustine considered undue reliance on one part of the regime as destructive to the political society. Second, the needfulness of trading offices can be seen where Augustine frequently contrasts a ruler whose lust for rule is so great that he is unable to share rule with others, to a virtuous, worshipful ruler who is “not afraid to have partners” (5.24). As a result, a good ruler would not mind sharing rule because he sees himself sharing virtue with others. Because his interests lay elsewhere, Augustine never gave a systematic exposition of the differing parts of a republic, but he does speak in favor of people choosing their own leaders, their role in decision making, and of the Roman office of dictator, which was charged with dealing with emergency situations.31 Like Aristotle’s or Cicero’s understandings of republicanism, offices need to be rotated, and there must be a proper balancing of different parts or factions within political society.

iv Augustine, the practicing rhetorician and bishop, who was involved with civil as well as ecclesiastical cases, understood political deliberation in terms analogous to the way he understood language itself. Human beings find themselves embedded in a world of conventional language and nonverbal signs that seem to transcend those particular customs; yet these very customs 31. Augustine On the Free Choice of the Will 1.6.14–15; Augustine City of God 3.17, 10.3; see also Epistle 213.2.

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are under constant revision and rearticulation. One learns language and the rules of rhetoric by imitating great examples; one does not learn them by memorizing abstract rules prior to practice. Similarly, political deliberations are not set within preexisting abstract rules, but those very rules are discovered over the course of deliberations. Thus, in politics as in rhetoric, virtue is crucial for Augustine because it draws people’s attention toward those things that a populus prizes. Further, the populus utilizes the idiom of moderate glory, conveyed by the moderate style of rhetoric, to infuse the populus with knowledge and love for another, and to teach it that its totality is never fully present to it, just as no part of a discourse or a song is fully present to a single letter or note. Augustine’s ethics of love, and his analogy of the way human beings are embedded in language and politics, remind us that politics is an ongoing and often tumultuous activity. They suggest that attempts to construct and institute a priori rules governing “public reason” undermine politics and are not true to political experiences. Yet in agreement with the goals of deliberative democracy, his political attitude also supports a meaningfully pluralistic political life that contains competing and contesting viewpoints that can maintain their sympathy and concord because the political process remains open so that “losers” on one issue can “win” further down the series, in terms analogous to the way that Augustine advocates multiple voices in a discourse or a song. Finally, by reminding us that the totality of a populus is never fully present to its constituent parts, he reminds us that the disarming and simple words we use in political deliberations are distantly related to the sweet word on which they are based.

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7 the road to heaven is paved with pious deceptions: medieval speech ethics and deliberative democracy Cary J. Nederman and Tsae Lan Lee Dow

Honesty is a fine quality, Max, but it isn’t the whole story. —Cartoon caption in New Yorker

democracy, reason, and truth One of the claims that most clearly distinguishes deliberative democratic theory from so-called realist views of democracy—such as those associated with Joseph Schumpter and E. E. Schattschneider, for whom democratic politics pertains solely to conflict and the mobilization of influence in the decision-making process1—is that political life is characterized by a measure of reason. As James Bohman and William Rehg remark, “Broadly defined, deliberative democracy . . . evokes ideals of rational legislation, participatory politics, and civic self-governance. In short, it presents an ideal of political autonomy based on the practical reasoning of citizens.”2 Versions of this paper were presented at the 2001 meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, California; as a plenary address to the conference “Pageantry and Power in the Middle Ages and Renaissance,” sponsored by Convivium: Siena Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, October 2000; and to the Texas A&M Political Theory Convocation, January 2003. Thanks are due to participants in those meetings, as well as to Ed Portis, Lisa Ellis, Tom Murphy, and Judson Garrett, for their thoughtful comments on preliminary drafts. 1. Edward Bryan Portis, “Deliberation, Debate and Participatory Democracy” (paper presented at the 2000 meeting of the Southern Political Science Association, Atlanta); John Medearis, Joseph Schumpeter’s Two Theories of Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). 2. James Bohman and William Rehg, “Introduction” to Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1997), ix.

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Likewise, Amy Gutmann stresses that “deliberative democracy articulates a compelling conception of people as self-governing, who reflect, evaluate, and decide issues on the basis of a broad range of relevant considerations. . . . Accompanying this conception is an ideal of politics whereby people routinely relate to one another not merely by asserting their will or fighting for their predetermined interests, but by influencing one another through the publicly valued use of reasoned argument, evidence, evaluation, and persuasion that enlists reason in its cause.” 3 The deliberative feature of this sort of democratic principle requires that participants eschew a whole range of tools—“weapons and wallets, titles and degrees,” as Michael Walzer says 4—that stand outside the realm of democratic politics. Built into the model of deliberative democracy, then, are determinations of a moral nature about what does and does not constitute an adequate standard for the rational conduct of politics, a yardstick that involves, most crucially, a public dimension of debate, dispute, and discourse. Susan Bickford emphasizes how “verbal exchange in public settings must undergird other modes of participation, for it is through such engagement that we sort through conflicting claims about various alternatives and come to a better understanding of the consequences of particular actions. There is no private reasoning process that is adequate for making these judgments; we need communicative interaction to help ourselves think publicly about the power we exercise and the decisions to be made.”5 Likewise, Gutmann and Dennis Thompson insist that the “first principle” of deliberative democratic reasoning “is reciprocity. . . . When citizens reason reciprocally, they seek fair terms of social cooperation for their own sake; they try to find mutually acceptable ways of resolving moral disagreements.”6 Consequently, Gutmann and Thompson continue, “Having good reason as individuals to believe that a policy is not just does not mean that collectively as citizens we have sufficient justification to legislate on the basis of those reasons. The moral authority of collective judgements about pol-

3. Amy Gutmann, “The Disharmony of Democracy,” in Democratic Community, ed. John W. Chapman and Ian Shapiro, Nomos 35 (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 141. 4. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 304. 5. Susan Bickford, The Dissonance of Democracy: Listening, Conflict, and Citizenship (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 11–12. 6. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement: Why Moral Conflict Cannot Be Avoided in Politics, and What Should Be Done About It (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 2.

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icy depends in part on the moral quality of the process by which citizens collectively reach those judgments.”7 It is evident, then, that for deliberative democrats the moral evaluation of the political process constitutes an inescapable by-product of the standard of reason that they invoke. What kinds of behaviors are thereby excluded from the public realm? Certainly, at minimum, deliberative democrats seem to have in mind distorting influences (such as coercion, money, and status) that may be invoked to limit discussion artificially. But what about other, less straightforward tools of political speech and action? For example, is honesty necessary for democratic institutions and processes? It would seem so. After all, engaging in deception in order to obtain some political benefit (even of a high-minded sort) replaces efficiency or control (political success) for reciprocity as the guiding principle of the political process. It seems to be on precisely these grounds that Gutmann and Thompson argue that deliberation entails “publicity,” the open flow of truthful information between government and citizenry that permits democratic decisions to flourish. Misleading the public, even passively by the keeping of secrets, stands directly at odds with the value of publicity and must be excised from politics.8 Jürgen Habermas is yet more emphatic that communicative action, as the discursive foundation of democracy, is inherently oriented toward truthfulness and sincerity. Deception constitutes, by contrast, a mode of “strategic” action, the purpose of which is merely to influence the behavior of people by whatever means available.9 Falsehood would seem, then, to be naturally excluded by the moral standard of reason invoked by deliberative democrats. Deliberative democracy, therefore, implicitly requires a strict ethics of speech, which does not permit the “evils” of rhetoric (the ability to distort communication and information so as to make the worse argument appear the better) to enter into the public arena of deliberation. The issue of the use and abuse of political speech is not, of course, an especially new or

7. Ibid., 4. 8. Ibid., 95–127. 9. Jürgen Habermas, “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Philosophical Program of Justification,” in The Communicative Ethics Controversy, ed. Seyla Benhabib and Fred Dallmayr (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1990), 62–67; Habermas, The Theory of Communication Actions, Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 85–101. On this point, see Martin Morris, Rethinking the Communicative Turn: Adorno, Habermas, and the Problem of Communicative Freedom (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 100–104.

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unique one. Throughout the intellectual history of the West, the use of language has generally been subject to evaluations of a normative sort. The ethical dimension of discourse may be understood in various ways, of course: morally in terms of lying, legally in terms of fraud, politically in terms of deception, and rhetorically in terms of manipulation. Regardless of terminology a widespread belief persists that how a person uses language is somehow reflective of the character traits that he or she possesses. We legitimately judge people, in other words, by what they say.10 This is not to suggest, however, that delineating the ethics of speech has been simple and straightforward or that anything like unanimity exists among the many authors who have reflected on the matter. Rather, the use of language to deceive has posed a complex set of dilemmas. Is mendacity in all cases immoral? Is every instance of deception to be evaluated equally? Might dissimulation be permitted in order to achieve a greater good? To these questions, the responses have varied widely over the terrain of Western thought. Some have condemned false speech without exception as evil and inexcusable. The quintessential statement of this view is perhaps to be found in the writings of St. Augustine. Others, adopting a more flexible approach, permit forms of deceit to the extent that they serve an end or purpose deemed to be of overriding worth. The locus classicus of this teaching generally is identified with the eighteenth chapter of Machiavelli’s The Prince, according to which those who wish success in politics (and perhaps in all interactions with human beings) are advised to imitate the fox in their manipulative use of language.11 The Machiavellian perspective suggests that speech ethics are situational: political goals will sometimes dictate deception, and rhetoric is itself a form of force. As Victoria Kahn explains, “Machiavelli’s defining truth pragmatically (la verità effettuale), rather than ontologically or epistemologically as correspondence to a fixed or absolute origin,” coupled with his emphasis on the performance of political power, “turns prudence into what the humanists (and their detractors) always feared it would become—the amoral skill of versutia or mere cleverness.”12 When applied to deliberative democracy, this historical picture— which dichotomizes truth (as whole, pure, an absolute good) and lying (as partial, corrupting, and pragmatic)—apparently denies the conceptual pos-

10. See Sisela Bok, Lying, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). 11. This theme is highlighted by Ruth W. Grant, in Hypocrisy and Integrity: Machiavelli, Rousseau, and the Ethics of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 1–56. 12. Victoria Kahn, “Virtù and the Example of Agathocles in Machiavelli’s Prince,” in

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sibility of dishonesty ever being entwined with moral and ethical reasoning. Just as the deliberative democrat would want to exclude the gun and the open wallet from a place in the political sphere—since these are antithetical to the reciprocal exercise of reason—so she would be required to keep the lie (or the willingness to lie to gain certain goals) out of a truly democratic politics. We intend to argue, by contrast, that this rigorous insistence that mendacity has no role in a morally defensible and rational politics is misguided. We hope to disclose an historical, ethical, and theoretical space between the Augustinian tradition and Machiavellian orientations. It seems to us that deliberative democrats implicitly deem open, honest, and transparent communication to be the ontological good, which facilitates the development of other political goods. By implication, then, partial, less-than-honest, or clouded communication cannot enable political or social goods. An investigation into the Latin Middle Ages, however, suggests that truth can be viewed as a normative good (and the political and moral health of the body politic the ontological good) without necessarily dissolving into “mere” rhetoric. Despite the dangers of (mis)representation and the lures of pure power, it is possible to maintain, in theory and in practice, a connection between morality and speech that does not rely on a straightforward ontological alignment between truth and the good. Now, one might expect that the Christian Middle Ages has little relevance to debates concerning democratic speech ethics. However, closer examination of such medieval thinkers as John of Salisbury and Christine de Pizan suggests that it is not only possible, but useful, to place deliberative democratic debates under this unusual analytic lens. We see three primary reasons for this approach, which aims to gesture toward new lines of inquiry, analysis, and comparison. First, it is necessary to have a real understanding of our own intellectual history, perhaps most especially those eras that seem far removed from our secular, liberal, capitalist, consumerist, democratic present. It is only in this way that we can locate the origins of those echoes of many of our dominant assumptions about language, reason, politics, and truth. As well, if we are unable to appreciate the variations within our own past, we are unlikely ever truly to come to terms with cultural-religious beliefs and political systems different from our own. Clearly, there is a desperate need in the present for Western democracies Machiavelli and the Discourse on Literature, ed. Albert R. Ascoli and Victoria Kahn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 198.

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(deliberative or otherwise) to take seriously and respect normative frameworks that seem alien and other. Second, the different sociocultural and religious paradigms between our medieval past and the present make explicit the fact that truth is itself a historically and culturally located and produced concept. In other words, discourse is always contextual, and must be so to carry meaning. A final and related point is that, given the noted differences between the medieval past and the present, it is fascinating to consider the extent to which similar issues arise about the ordering of the political realm, publicity, reason, credibility, veracity, and what constitutes the greatest good of human community. This reinforces our earlier point, that the issues raised by deliberative democrats may have less to do with democratic institutions and ideals of an informed and reasoning public citizenry than with larger questions about reason, language, and rhetoric. It serves as a reminder that definitions of such concepts continue to be contested, often indirectly in debates concerning deliberation and veracity, and are likely to remain shifting conceptual categories. Thus, it is helpful to see what significant writers between Augustine and Machiavelli have considered to be the faculty of reason, the purpose of language and writing, the advantages and dangers inherent in rhetoric and oratory. During the Christian Middle Ages, speech ethics constituted an important topic of dispute. Several scholars have lately documented a growing concern during the course of medieval period about so-called deviant speech and, specifically, lying.13 The explanation for this development is multifaceted. In part, it stems from the more general regularization of penitential and confessional practices on the part of the Roman Church.14 Moreover, the reemergence of classical rhetoric as a tool of oral as well as written communication raised fears about the ability of writers and speakers to abuse language by persuading their audiences that falsehoods were true.15 And the institutionalization of courtly practices (not to mention the entrenchment of the interests of courtiers) led to the proliferation of flattery as an instrument of obtaining and retaining royal patronage.16 In the medieval framing of these debates, generally speaking, the Augustinian position on 13. Carla Casagrande and Silvana Vecchio, I piccati della lingua: disciplina ed etica della parola nella cultura medievale (Rome: Instituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1987). 14. Edwin D. Craun, Lies, Slander, and Obscenity in Medieval English Literature: Pastoral Rhetoric and the Deviant Speaker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 3, 10–13. 15. Virginia Cox, “Ciceronian Rhetoric in Italy, 1250–1350,” Rhetorica 17 (summer 1999): 371–83. 16. Mark D. Johnston, “The Treatment of Speech in Medieval Ethical and Courtly Literature,” Rhetorica 4 (1986): 21–46.

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mendacity predominated. Yet it is possible to find a few medieval authors who were inclined, not to prefigure the Machiavellian line whereby “reasons of state” justifies the means, but rather to recognize that veracity and morality need not be commensurable. Indeed, we show that certain medieval thinkers maintained a duty to engage in deceitful linguistic practices, an obligation derived from their conceptualization of the social and political nature of human beings. In other words, for some writers, a principled ethics of speech necessarily entailed the occasional employment of the arsenal of untruth. It is these positions that we focus on in this chapter, contrary to deliberative democratic ideals that tend implicitly to polarize truth and lying and to equate this with a dichotomy between a moralrational and an immoral-irrational political process. Our argument takes a generally favorable view of honesty and truthful communication as the preferred basis of political interactions, but nevertheless countenances the possibility that dissembling, misrepresentation, and dishonesty are at times not only rational and reasonable, but may serve some worthwhile good for a political community. In fact, we go so far as to contend that it may only be through challenges to dominant sociocultural “truths” that a polity can become or remain an equitable and inclusive community. In some instances what is accepted as truth or falsehood depends on widespread, culturally embedded conceptions of human nature(s) and the purpose of communal life, and the explication of these founding assumptions may lead us to revise dominant beliefs. We are thinking here, for example, of medieval challenges to tyranny and to the place of women in social and political life. In order to defend the general proposition that there are occasions when untruth may promote social harmony and/or a greater political good, we examine, first of all, the conceptual foundations of the Augustinian rejection of the deceptive use of language that prevailed during the Middle Ages. In Augustine’s view, speech was a direct grant of God to humanity for the communication of truth, and thus its abuse by falsehood was an affront to the Lord. By contrast, in the work of John of Salisbury, the twelfth-century English churchman, one encounters a more nuanced approach to the complex issues posed by speech ethics. John emphatically rejects mendacity as a form of conduct in the vast majority of instances. Yet as an experienced denizen of European courts, familiar with the complex ways of the political world, he acknowledged that there are moral, and perhaps even religious, grounds for exempting certain sorts of dishonest language from condemnation. In particular, because he views language in a more naturalistic light, as a creation of human effort and art rather than

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simply a gift from God, he is able to justify an equivocal stance toward speech that deceives. In fact, John is able to identify times when people may be under a discernible duty to speak falsely. Finally, we focus on the writings of Christine de Pizan, who flourished in the early fifteenth century and is often hailed as the first French woman of letters. Her work offers a perspective that differs slightly from John’s, since she writes, as a woman, mother, and widow, from the margins of the political realm, directing her words to the powerful, predominantly male elite, as well as to powerless women of all social stations. Her writings, both in form and substance, demonstrate the need to be careful of how one addresses different audiences and suggest that there are times when the revision and manipulation of cultural norms and “truths” may be necessary to expand the political community. Thus, Christine adapts and falsifies biblical and patristic tales in order to “prove” that women are rational and have an important political role to play. Christine, like John, announces the importance of honesty. However, she allows that women, both in domestic and public circumstances, will occasionally be justified in hypocrisy, dissimulation, and silences for their own security and for the health and harmony of the community.

framing medieval speech ethics: the augustinian tradition St. Augustine devoted a large body of writing over twenty years or so to the elaboration of a sophisticated theory of language—in particular, of signs and signification—that exercised a considerable influence in the European Middle Ages,17 and still commands attention from scholars today.18 An important motive for Augustine’s articulation of this conception of language, as Marcia Colish has recognized,19 was his concern about the nature and

17. Craun, Lies, Slander, and Obscenity, 26–47. 18. R. A. Markus, “St. Augustine on Signs,” and B. Darrell Jackson, “The Theory of Signs in St. Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana,” in Augustine: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. R. A. Markus (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1972); Marcia Colish, The Mirror of Language, rev. ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 7–54; Tzvetan Todorov, “A propos de la conception augustinienne du signe,” Revue des Etudes Augustiniennes 31 (1985): 209–14; John M. Rist, Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 23–40. 19. Marcia L. Colish, The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1990), 1:181–98.

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moral status of lying. Indeed, he composed two treatises specifically on the topic of mendacious speech and touched on the theme in many more works. In other words, linguistic theory formed an important underpinning for his theological ethics. The central principles of this framework, stated across the range of the Augustinian corpus, may be summarized as follows: 1. God has granted speech to mankind in order that individuals may express themselves to one another in accordance with reason. 2. The only valid use of reason should be the exploration and recognition of Truth, that is, God. 3. Those who abuse language by expressing what is not true (that is, deceiving in some way) affront reason and violate the plan of God’s creation. 4. The only explanation for such falsehood is that the speaker’s moral will is directed away from God. 5. Therefore, all deception, no matter how small or supposedly well-intended, is a sin of a serious nature. Medieval authors drew several conclusions from these fundamental precepts. First, although the ability to speak permits human beings to communicate their knowledge in the quest for truth, it remains parasitic on a narrowly individualistic conception of reason. As the anonymous author of the thirteenth-century De lingua asserts, “The tongue is the organ of reason inasmuch as it is used for speech. The word is truly the messenger of reason, just as Augustine says.”20 In other words, it is not through dialogue that reason is drawn out, but rather each person reasons first and only thereafter employs signs to externalize what is inward. “God gave us the tongue to express our thoughts to each other,” comments the Speculum morale formerly attributed to Vincent of Beauvais, “and what is greater and better still, He gave it to us to entreat for pardon in confession and to earn grace and merits in prayer.”21 This position seems to correlate rather directly with Augustine’s well-known view that postlapsarian humanity enters an asocial condition that requires political remedy. As fallen creatures, we (and our reason) are confined within individualized circumstances. Second, language has an inherently salvific bearing, and as such is not intended by God to be employed in inquiry into mundane matters. As Etienne de Bourbon wrote in the thirteenth century, “When the brothers 20. Craun, Lies, Slander, and Obscenity, 29. 21. Ibid., 35.

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came together and spoke about things pertaining to edification, one saw holy angels standing among them and rejoicing; they delighted in the language of God. . . . However, when they spoke about worldly things or things not pertinent, immediately the angels, full of righteous anger, drew back quite far and demons in the form of pigs drew near and were delighted.”22 The implication is that the use of language to seek earthly ends is in fact an abuse of God’s gift, and a form of deceit. One key element of the Augustinian tradition, then, is that silence is generally to be preferred to speech except when one’s words are intended to express a truth that will aid in the illumination of one’s fellows. Augustine’s theory of language, then, is intertwined with a moral absolutism that all but eradicates the gregarious, not to mention garrulous, aspects of human life. This became the prevalent perspective among a range of moral and theological authors of the High Middle Ages, especially those involved in instructing the lay clergy on confessional practices. Not only was all manner of falsehood, regardless of circumstance, condemned for sinfulness, but even apparently innocent uses of the tongue were an invitation to evil. Augustine’s moral absolutism in this connection, as J. M. Rist observes, means that no trade-off between greater and lesser evils is permissible. The individual must refrain from deceptive language even if a greater sin would be committed by another as a result of one’s honesty.23

social foundations of speech While it seems safe to say that the inflexible Augustinian ethics of speech predominated during the medieval period, it was by no means the only approach available to address the problem of deception. The twelfth century witnessed a growth of interest in classical rhetoric, stimulated by the development of the ars dictaminis as well by the renewal of ancient paradigms of political life. One of the consequences of the renewed reading of rhetoricians such as Cicero was the diffusion of a conception of language somewhat different from that found in Augustine’s writings. In particular, Cicero taught that language was a natural endowment that encouraged human social and political fraternity, but also that basic speech could (and 22. Ibid., 35–36. 23. Rist, Augustine, 193.

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should) be refined and enhanced by education in the art of eloquence.24 Thus, the Ciceronian position stood at a distance from the theologically informed and morally absolutist vision of discourse found in Augustine’s writings. In turn, the Ciceronian doctrine, inasmuch as it emphasized naturalistic duties toward friends and country, opened the possibility that language might be used deceptively in order to serve a higher end. One finds the Ciceronian stance explored in some detail, for instance, in the writings of the famed twelfth-century humanist and courtier John of Salisbury. During the 1150s, John composed three works touching on philosophical matters: the Entheticus de Dogmate Philosophorum, a didactic and satirical poem about life in school and court; the Metalogicon, a discussion of contemporary pedagogy and curriculum; and the Policraticus, a treatise on the good order of political society and its members. These treatises amount to a comprehensive appraisal of the moral condition of the literate elite of John’s day. As Michael Wilks has noted, the commonalty of their themes invites us to read them as handbooks of ethical regeneration and renewal.25 John seeks to identify the means by which the learned men of the time might acquire the education necessary in order to live upstanding lives devoted to promoting the good of their fellow human beings as well as of salvation. John’s principal target, as he states in the opening passage of the Metalogicon, is the pseudonymous (and possibly mythical) “Cornificius” and his followers.26 The Cornificians subscribe to the view that all of one’s intellectual abilities are determined by divine dispensation at birth, and thus education in the liberal arts with a view toward improving one’s mind and expression is futile. As a consequence, John believes, the Cornificians oppose all the works of human interaction and civilization, and are enemies of earthly happiness. “One cannot imagine how any kind of happiness [ beatitudo] could exist entirely apart from mutual association and 24. On the basics of Cicero’s doctrine, and its medieval diffusion, see Cary J. Nederman, “Nature, Sin, and the Origins of Society: The Ciceronian Tradition in Medieval Political Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 49 (1988): 3–26; Nederman, “The Union of Wisdom and Eloquence Before the Renaissance: The Ciceronian Orator in Medieval Thought,” Journal of Medieval History 18 (1992): 75–95; and Nederman, “Rhetoric, Reason, and Republic: Republicanisms—Ancient, Medieval, and Modern,” in Renaissance Civic Humanism, ed. James Hankins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 247–69. 25. Michael Wilks, “John of Salisbury and the Tyranny of Nonsense,” in The World of John of Salisbury, ed. Michael Wilks (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 263–86. 26. John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, ed. J. B. Hall and K.S.B. Keats-Rohan (Turnhout: Brepols, 1991), 14–17. Hereafter cited in the text.

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divorced from human society,” John declares (12). In turn, such happiness necessitates that human beings not only employ, but also improve, the faculties of reason and speech that they possess by birth. Cornificius targets the linguistic facility, in particular, which John regards to form the essence of the social bond to which we are impelled by nature: Speechless wisdom may sometimes increase one’s personal satisfaction, but it rarely and only slightly contributes to the welfare of human society. Reason—the mother, nurse, and guardian of knowledge as well as of virtue—frequently conceives from speech, and by this same means bears more abundant and richer fruit. Reason would remain utterly barren, or at least would fail to yield a plentiful harvest, if the faculty of speech did not bring to light its feeble conceptions and communicate the perceptions of the prudent exercise of the human mind. Indeed, it is this delightful and fruitful copulation of reason and speech that has given birth to so many outstanding cities, has made allies and friends of so many kingdoms, and has united and knit together in bonds of love so many peoples. (13) Language assumes the active role in John’s account of the fundamental faculties of human nature, echoing Cicero’s views on the centrality of speech in writings such as De inventione.27 So far from constituting a mere instrument for the expression of previously well-thought-out concepts, speech allows reason to refine its weak insights into more defensible and truthful doctrines. It is not prayer and preaching, but genuine dialogue, that constitutes John’s discursive paradigm.28 Speech also makes possible the creature comforts afforded by mutual protection and exchange that, while by no means constituting the sum of human happiness, are integral to a satisfactory life on earth. By denying to humanity the opportunity to achieve these goals, the Cornificians reveal themselves as opponents of “all cities and political life” (Metalogicon, 14). John’s Ciceronian conception of language and its social bearing, then, directs us away from the individualistic, parasitic, and elevated notion of speech suggested by Augustine’s theory. Speech is a force through which 27. Cicero De inventione 1.1–3. 28. See Cary J. Nederman, Worlds of Difference: European Discourses of Toleration, c.1100–c.1500 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 39–52.

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reason is promoted and improved, and it also contributes to the earthly well-being and legitimate happiness of humanity. This proves to be a common thread running through John’s writings. In the Metalogicon, John is concerned with promoting pedagogical techniques that are likely to enhance the improvement of civilized life. In the Policraticus, John castigates modes of speech that detract from good government by leading the ruler and his counselors and servants down the path to vice. Specifically, he rails at length against flattery, by which is understood the use of speech by courtiers to manipulate their superiors in ways that favor the speakers themselves. Much of book 3 forms an extended attack on flattery, which John says is always “accompanied by deception, fraud, betrayal, [and] the infamy of lying.”29 John’s standard of speech is free and open debate, sincere in seeking after the honorable and the virtuous course of conduct. In his view, one should “prefer to be criticized by anyone whomsoever rather than be praised by one who . . . flatters; for no critic need be feared by the lover of truth” (1:231). Flattery is inimical to the kind of rational discourse that he believes must accompany any government whose goal is truly to seek the common good and justice for the governed. Such a view follows directly from John’s conception of language as the indispensable medium through which the welfare and happiness of humanity as a whole are realized.

“pious deception” Yet John stops short of condemning all forms of deceit out of hand, in contrast to the Augustinian view. In the Entheticus de Dogmate Philosophorum, John addresses the situation of the good courtier who wishes to follow the path of virtue among so many who are evil. In order to survive in such circumstances (which John, himself a court dweller, understood only too well), it becomes necessary to adopt falsely the behavior of those whom one privately disdains. In order that their savageness may grow more gentle, [the good courtier] usually 29. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, 2 vols., ed. C.C.J. Webb (1909; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1979), 1:184. Hereafter cited in the text. [Translations from my partial English rendering of the Policraticus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) will be indicated in italics following the citation to the Webb edition—Cary J. Nederman.]

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Feigns many things, he simulates that he himself is also savage; He becomes all things to all people, in appearance only he assumes the role of the enemy, in order that he may learn with equal zeal how to love God. That trick is good that yields profit to utility, When through it joy, life and salvation are procured.30 John then proceeds to explain how in all walks of life—from the nursery to the battlefield to the classroom—such deception forms a necessary element in the conduct of good people. Appearing to be what one is not, and employing false or deceptive speech, may be justified by the worthy results that are achieved—consequences that could not otherwise be attained. John returns to this theme in a very personal way in the prologue to the Policraticus. Explaining that his use of the classical sources on which he relies may not be entirely reliable, he admits, “It is my obligation to confess to the use of lies. And if the enemy will not be quiet—for I too have my Cornificius and Lavinus—I agree that I have told lies, for we know from the Scriptures that ‘every man is a liar,’” a reference to Psalms 116:11 (1:16; 6). This admission seems to be connected with John’s famous creation of a fictional text—an entirely fraudulent letter of instruction by Plutarch addressed to the Emperor Trajan—that is employed as the source for the organic analogy that frames books 5 and 6 of the Policraticus. Yet John begs the indulgence of his readers by claiming that his “fictional authorities” are not really a deception at all. “If it is discovered that what has been written somewhere is other than its author’s words, still one should not maintain that I am being deceptive,” he insists (1:17; 7). How can he maintain that his lies are not truly deceptive? The answer appears to stem from how the Policraticus defines deception. To deceive, John claims, is limited to the intention to do harm: “Deceit is when one thing is done and another is pretended; whatever is performed with the intention of doing harm, it is always bad.” John thus implicitly distinguishes between “just” and “unjust” deception, since he states (following Cicero) that “justice chiefly consists in this: do not do harm and prevent the doing of harm out of a duty to humanity” (1:277; 62). Presumably, then, an act of deception performed for the sake of defending against harm—which is coextensive with the breaking of social of political bonds—is not sinful or 30. John of Salisbury, Entheticus de Dogmate Philosophorum, ed. Jan van Laarhoven (Leiden: Brill, 1987), 198.

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evil. This stems from the very nature of language as a uniting force supporting the solidarity of human association. Indeed, in the Metalogicon, John had ostracized any person who threatened such unity: “Whoever tries to ‘thrust asunder what God has joined together’ for the common good should rightly be judged a public enemy” (13). Hence, the crucial point here is that deception seems to fall within the appropriate use of language when the very purpose for which speech itself exists is threatened. This conceptualization of deceitful language breaks apart any simple categorization of just, good/unjust, evil as coextensive with dishonesty/untruth. Open and honest communication remains a normative good but not the epistemologically necessary foundation for the body politic (or even, it seems, salvation). Furthermore, the Policraticus explicitly legitimizes the use of the weapons of deceit—flattery among them—in connection with what John perceives to constitute the gravest danger to social and political order, namely, tyranny. John signals his approval of occasional dishonest communication when, in the final chapter of book 3, after his relentless attack on flattery, he suddenly and unexpectedly introduces an exception: “In the secular literature, there is caution that one is to live one way with a friend and another with a tyrant. It is not permitted to flatter a friend, but it is permitted to flatter the ears of a tyrant. For in fact, the man whom it is permitted to flatter, it is permitted to slay. Furthermore, it is not only permitted, but equitable and just, to slay tyrants” (1:232; 25). Leaving aside the much-debated issue of John of Salisbury’s theory of tyrannicide, the relevant point of this passage is that the rules of civilized society do not apply in the case of the tyrant, whom John likens to a traitor and a public criminal. Since the tyrant rules by violence and fraud, purely according to his own will, he violates the basic, naturally endowed and divinely inspired precepts of social harmony and justice. The tyrant is, John says, a “public enemy, and whoever does not prosecute him transgresses against himself and against the whole body of the earthly republic” (1:233; 25). Thus, deceitful flattery is legitimated for John in the case of the tyrannical head of state, precisely because of the grievous harm that he commits. Deception ceases to be a sin or an evil when directed to the defense of humanity against tyranny. Indeed, on the same grounds that one may have a duty (both to God and to one’s fellows) to kill a tyrant, one has a duty to deceive him with flattery if by that sleight further harm is deflected. John underscores this point when he returns to the topic of slaying the tyrant in the final book of the Policraticus. Initially, he reiterates the general principle enunciated in book 3: “It has always been permitted to flatter

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tyrants, it has always been permitted to deceive them, and it has been honorable to kill them if they could not be otherwise restrained” (2:364; 205). Slightly later, John applies this precept to the biblical Judith’s slaying of Holofernes. In order to be admitted to the presence of Holofernes, Judith engages in a feint by dressing herself in an alluring manner and promising to reveal to the tyrant secrets that would enhance his power (2:376–77; 208–9). Under ordinary circumstances, John would condemn such “stealth and deception” as the work of “a cheat” (1:220). But because Judith’s behavior was intended to save her people from a tyrant, John’s conclusion is quite the opposite: “The woman could not have been accorded access to the tyrant unless she has concealed her hostile purpose in a pious deception. For that which maintains the faith and serves charity is not deceitful” (2:376; 207). The reason for this remarkable claim seems to stem from John’s previously noted association of deception with harm. Judith’s intention was purely to serve her people and her God, and thus she cannot stand accused of or be held accountable for deceit. The good end excuses the employment of means that would otherwise be blameworthy. Indeed, those who would refuse to follow Judith’s example on the grounds that deception is always sinful would, in John’s view, be derelict in their responsibility as reasonable human beings to protect society from injury. How does any of this concern or impact deliberative democrats? As readers of deliberative democratic literature are aware, tyranny is antithetical to “a fully realized democracy.” James Fiskin argues that “nontyranny”—along with political equality and open communication— constitutes one of “the three fully essential conditions” of a democratic process.31 Is it the case that under other than ideal circumstances the honest rules of polite politics cease to apply? If this is so, then deliberative democrats are left with an interesting choice. On the one hand, perhaps their commitment to truthful and sincere speech is not ontological, since under tyrannical conditions they might countenance deceitful speech as a necessary evil. This would make them no different than John, who very firmly holds to the ethical value of truth as a positive moral good. Should this be so, however, it is unclear why deliberative democratic theory refuses all forms of deceit under the conditions of rational political discourse, if it can be demonstrated that the result thereof would be a better, more rational outcome. If tyranny is irrational, and therefore not subject to the ontological principle of truthfulness in language, then 31. James Fishkin, Deliberation and Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 29.

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why should democracy be any different? John of Salisbury’s willingness to create convenient and illuminating fictions, and to countenance “just deceptions” alerts us to subtle, but significant, distinctions in the value(s) of truth. Either truthfulness is an absolute good, the ontological good, or it is not. If not, then deliberative democrats cannot eo ipso demand its eradication from the public space. The best they can say is that lying is less necessary, and therefore a greater moral evil, under democracy most of the time than under alternative political systems. And this does not seem to be the force of their theoretical claims about the role of reason in politics. In a sense, deliberative democratic theory is hoisted on the petard of its own dichotomy.

“patience and dissimulation” Italian-born Christine de Pizan began her literary career when she was left a widow, without family connections, in the French court of Charles V. It is a testimony to her capacity to win patronage that she was able to support herself, her three children, and her mother on her writing skills. Initially gaining renown as a poet, she entered overtly political debate with a series of letters concerning The Romance of the Rose, in which she argued forcefully that the depictions of women were demeaning and belittling. Similarly, many of Christine’s best-known works focus on conceptualizations of women and on specific advice to women on how to behave in a variety of situations, such as The Book of the City of Ladies (1405) and The Treasury of the City of Ladies (1405 or 1406). Women are Christine’s specific target audience in these works, which, she explains, she has written at the behest of Ladies Reason, Rectitude, Justice, and in the case of Treasury, Worldly Prudence. Both pick up on Christine’s concerns with maleness, femaleness, and the gendering of work and social activities. In Treasury, Christine examines the roles, duties, and social possibilities available to women in concrete and pragmatic terms. One nexus of Christine’s most persistent concerns are those that relate to appearance, reputation, and representation. If Machiavelli can be described as constructing the political as the art of the possible, Christine could be distinguished as defining the political—at least for women—as the art of the necessary. It is worth quoting at length from her practical advice manual to give a sense of how her concerns about seeming and being impacted on her injunctions regarding the proper appearance of womanly speech:

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Sobriety will so correct, chastise and control the mouth and the speech of the wise lady, whom she will keep principally from talking too much (which is a most unseemly thing in a noble lady, or any woman of quality), that she will hate with all her heart the vice of lying. She will love truth, which will be so habitually in her mouth that people will believe what she says and have confidence in her as one has in a lady whom one has never heard lie. . . . Sobriety will prevent her from saying any word, especially in a place where it could be passed on and reported, that she has not well examined. Prudence and Sobriety will teach the lady to have controlled speech and sensible eloquence, neither too solemn nor too frivolous, but sweet, calm and composed. She will speak rather softly and with a pleasant expression without making grimaces or movements of the body or the hands. Sobriety will keep her from laughing too much and without cause. It will prevent her, above all else, from ever speaking badly of any other person or saying any word of criticism, but rather she will always emphasize the good, and willingly keep a tight rein on empty and indecent words and never say them.32 Throughout the text Christine exhorts women for religious and moral reason to “love truth.” God sees and knows all, and is therefore aware of the truth of a woman’s thoughts, heart, and soul. Nevertheless, women must survive in a man’s world, and the moral and physical health of women assumes ontological centrality in Christine’s theory. Christine, advocating truth and integrity in oral communication, was well aware of the power of speech, both as what is said directly, and as slander and gossip. In The Book of the Body Politic (1406 or 1407), which was quite specifically targeting an elite male audience, Christine recommends princes to cultivate “fair words and frank movement of the body, fair eloquence and honorable bearing”33 as “a sign of good understanding, steadfast thought, and constant courage”34 necessary to the practice of governance.35 That is, 32. Christine de Pizan, The Treasury of the City of Ladies or the Book of the Three Virtues, ed. Sarah Lawson (London: Penguin Books, 1985), 57–58. Hereafter cited in the text as Treasury. 33. Christine de Pizan, The Book of the Body Politic, ed. Kate L. Forhan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 47. 34. Ibid., 48. 35. It is worth noting that the image of the body politic that Christine uses in this text

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Christine sees the expression of the spoken word and embodied presentation of the self as part of the performance of power and the mastery of language as a crucial skill for political actors. While truth has an intrinsic value, and Christine expresses a normative preference for honesty, her emphasis is on the appearance of truth. A woman’s credibility is at stake, and so she must at all times be careful to represent herself as chaste and pure so that “neither in word nor deed . . . will there be anything for which she could be reproached or criticized” (Treasury, 59). If, in order to maintain the appearance of moderation and good character, a lady must resort to dishonest speech to create a false (or more precisely, an accurate) impression “she should be so wise and circumspect that no one can perceive that she does it calculatingly” (69). Thus, there are circumstances when Christine condones deception. In order to protect herself a lady is encouraged to employ the legitimate tactic of “patience and dissimulation” (70). To avoid harm “great dissimulations” are permitted, and in fact are not deemed sinful or evil. “Thus the wise lady will use this discreet pretence and prudent caution, which is not to be thought a vice, but is a great virtue when it is done in the cause of goodness and peace without injuring anyone in order to avoid a greater misfortune” (70). Similarly, hypocrisy is condoned when “it strives toward good and the avoidance of evil” and may be called a “‘just hypocrisy’ ” (72). Christine’s insistence on the value for a woman of a ladylike reputation stems from two primary considerations, one oriented to the individual, the other to the community. First, it is to a woman’s benefit and protection to be considered a lady. Noblewomen, largely dependent on male relatives for economic and social well-being, were vulnerable to rumor and vilification, and consequent loss of security and status. Women who had to earn a living had little recourse against slander, insinuation, or the appearance of complicity in socially reprehensible activities. For example, Christine counsels the chaperone of a headstrong noble lady involved in an illicit affair to be “in all things circumspect” and “keep absolutely quiet about this thing” (96–97), as her own position could be jeopardized by her misis based on John of Salisbury’s fictitious letter to Trajan. In Christine’s time this was accepted as a historical document, accepted on John’s authority. Thus, despite his warnings, John’s fiction was taken at face value and passed into the literary and historical canon. The metaphor of the body politic, articulated by John as what we might consider a literary fiction, became a framing political metaphor that, despite its hierarchic nature, was used to emphasize the interconnected nature of medieval polity. Again, the boundaries between literature, history, fiction, and theory are revealed as unstable.

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tress, the lover, or the family of the mistress. Thus silence may be a safer option than speaking the truth. The second reason Christine insists on the importance of maintaining a good reputation even if it requires the occasional deception is explicitly for the greater good of the community. The example of goodness, honesty, and appropriate degrees of generosity will incite others to virtue and acts of charity (see, for example, 72). Women, in fact, seem to have special responsibilities in this regard, both specifically to other women and to the community at large. Women must protect each other’s reputations and, when possible, act as mediators who pacify and calm men’s tempers (see, for example, 51). It becomes clear that for Christine speech, fully truthful communication, and deceptive language are to be judged on their utility in enhancing the overall good and harmony of the community. Contrary to perspectives that grant truth an ontological foundation as the necessary good, Christine views language and even honest language as encompassing a range of ethical possibilities. This conceptualization highlights the power relations that form an interactive dynamic with types and contexts of communicative actions. In this case, on the one hand, women are conceived as marginalized and disempowered in relation to men (and hence have special moral and sociopolitical duties toward one another). On the other hand, Christine believes women are political agents despite their indirect influence (and thus women have a duty to mediate for the peace of the larger community). One line of analysis that results from Christine’s understanding of social relations in which the potentials of speech are embedded is the questioning of the public/private split necessary to maintain the integrity of the democratic realm as conceptualized by deliberative theories. Christine’s teachings are, therefore, directed to women who “have the authority, good sense and power” (80) to put them into action. Christine recognizes that there are women who are so closely guarded that they are powerless: “Ladies . . . held on such a tight rein cannot put into effect sensible precepts . . . they are to be excused” (80). While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to do more than gesture toward this avenue of inquiry, it is worth noting that feminist theory has long questioned the theoretical paradigms on which the public/private dichotomy is founded36 and the psychological implications for the concept and lived experience of citizens.37 The possibility emerges that fully honest com36. Elisabeth J. Porter, Women and Moral Identity (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991). 37. Jane Flax, Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990).

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munication, rather than being the prerequisite condition for political good, is in fact only a potential good possible in an utterly equal culture.

phallic fallacies We have seen how Christine’s valuation of truth as a normative good subverts any easy correlation between truth/lies and good/evil. There are further implications in Christine’s political philosophy when we examine her larger project as presented in The City of Ladies. In this work, Christine deploys intimations of revelation, reasoning and logical argument, biblical interpretation, reworked classical myths, historical events and reevaluation of accepted facts, allegory, and analogy to challenge the accepted “truth” “that the behavior of women is inclined to and full of every vice.”38 These multiple strategies throw into doubt our own sense of stability between fact and fiction. Story, history, myth, fact, and knowledge are revealed as shifting and contested. Cultural truths or common knowledge that appear stable and rational at one time and place as a legitimate basis for rules of law, social norms, and political conduct may later appear as fallacious. Truth and common sense are not straightforwardly stable epistemologies upon which to found political theory. Rather, these are fluid conceptual constructions inextricably entwined in an interactive dynamic with historical and sociocultural change. The example raised in Christine’s work is the place and status of women as moral and political agents in late medieval society. This examination is conducted in Christine’s text through an examination of the status of truth, falsehood, and opinion. The City opens with Christine’s perusal of a book that “discussed respect for women.” Christine decides that the topic, as treated by the author Matheolus, was “not very pleasant for people who do not enjoy lies, and of no use in developing virtue or manners, given its lack of integrity in diction and theme” (3). Yet Christine feels overwhelmed in the face of the seemingly learned opinions of “so many famous men— such solemn scholars,” philosophers, poets, and orators, despite examination of herself and the women she knows who do not appear to bear out “the devilish and wicked” traits culturally ascribed to women (4). Overcome by this “series of authorities,” Christine bows to common knowledge and accepts that woman is indeed “an abominable work which, from what they 38. Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York: Persea Books, 1982), 4. Hereafter cited in the text.

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say, is the vessel as well as the refuge and abode of every evil and vice” (5). Christine, overcome by what we might call the tyranny of the opinion of the majority, despairs. The text thus sets up the commonly held opinion of the many and the powerful against the reasoning individual: “So I relied more on the judgement of others than what I myself felt and knew” (4). At this point the narrative takes a dramatic turn. Christine is visited by Ladies Reason, Rectitude and Justice, an event described in overtly religious terms. The Ladies tell Christine that “we have come to bring you out of the ignorance which so blinds your intellect that you shun what you know for a certainty and believe what you do not know or see or recognize except by virtue of many strange opinions” (6). In this instance, it seems, the weaker argument has defeated the stronger. In other words, the text warns against rhetorical and deceiving arguments, recommending instead that a person should reason with his or her own intellect, study empirical evidence, and not be swayed by the words of philosophers and poets, however convincing they may seem. Speech is dangerous and a tool of the powerful in its capacity to establish norms and accepted ideas based on hearsay and myth rather than clear-sighted facts. People take into account the “authority of [the] author” (7). Because of the credibility of these authors, later writers will follow their line of argument. Thus, “Others, in order to show they have read many authors, base their own writings on what they have found in books and repeat what other writers have said and cite different authors” (18). These power dynamics are further emphasized in the extended discussion of the reasons behind the slander and lies directed at women (18). Furthermore, Christine, writing as Lady Reason, explains that the status and nature of women is a crucially important topic on which few absolutely agree. It is not only that many people are well intentioned in debates but nevertheless speak falsely, but also that people may intend to deceive or may be misinterpreted. Great philosophers rarely concur, and many poets intentionally speak “on many subjects in a fictional way and . . . often they mean the contrary of what their words openly say” (7). Intention, truth, and fiction are difficult to pin down. In what follows, Christine explains how she works with the Ladies to construct a city in words, built “in the course of our common deliberations” (12). These deliberations include the extensive range of strategies just mentioned. These falsifications, fictional reconstructions of historical events, and reworkings of other author’s narratives (for example, Ovid and Cato) are all directed to creating a history39 and philosophy that concep39. Earl Jeffrey Richards, “Christine de Pizan and Sacred History,” in The City of

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tualize women as rational and political beings. This raises complex issues as to the status of truth. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski clarifies this point when discussing Christine’s Mutacion de Fortune. In this work, Christine extensively reorients many tales of classical mythology, making careful distinctions between fable and metaphor. Examining the idea of “fable” as used by Christine as both true and false, Blumenfeld-Kosinski explains that “it was false from a doctrinal perspective and it was false because it was fiction; yet it became true through the poet’s ingenuity” so that we can understand that Christine “actually uses fables to convey truths, be they psychological or political.”40 Christine’s work complicates and destabilizes distinctions between fiction and story on the one hand, and fact and rational political discourse on the other. There are important implications here that suggest that forms of narrative, whether written or oral, will vary. The idea of rational deliberation must be extended to grant a political status to a range of forms of expression, especially when we take into account that those marginalized from the “official” forms of political discourse may seek other forms of expression. More significant still, types of discourse not generally accepted as rational and factual may contain truths and critiques. Truth will come in many forms, sometimes couched in deceptive terms. Lies will often be accepted as common sense by the majority of the population (“All Muslims are potential terrorists”; “Women are more emotional and irrational than men”). Not only are notions of “truth” and forms of political discourse historically and culturally specific, but these truths require continuous interrogation.

conclusion While John of Salisbury and Christine de Pizan were not necessarily typical of the Middle Ages in their attitudes toward the permissibility of deception, they were not the only authors to express a dissenting point of view. In his masterful examination of the precursors of Machiavelli, Alan Gilbert uncovered several late medieval writers who found principled grounds on which to recommend dissemblance as a political strategy.41 But where most Scholars: New Approaches to Christine de Pizan, ed. Margarete Zimmerman and Dina De Rentiis (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1994), 15–30. 40. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, “Christine de Pizan and Classical Mythology: Some Examples from the ‘Mutacion de Fortune,’” in Zimmerman and De Rentiis, City of Scholars, 11. 41. Alan Gilbert, Machiavelli’s Prince and Its Forerunners (Durham: Duke University Press, 1938), 124–27.

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of these authors were beginning to evolve the modern logic of “reason of state” to justify deception, John and Christine remained fully within what Maurizio Viroli calls the “old notion of politics,” which “aims at the preservation of human society” through the exercise of moral virtue.42 What the examples of these medieval scholars demonstrate is that even within that traditional medieval paradigm there was room for theorizing ethical flexibility in matters of speech. But these authors’ accounts of speech ethics are not merely of antiquarian interest. To the extent that they suggest problems with the predominant Augustinianism of the Middle Ages, they also afford lessons about the limitations of the approach to language held implicitly or explicitly by today’s deliberative democrats.43 In particular, the rhetorical conception of society adopted by John and Christine treats speech not as a good in itself but as a means to the promotion of social harmony. Thus, even while honesty is one of the better policies, it is not unequivocally, universally, and without exception the best. From this perspective, discourse demands truthfulness at all times when it promotes concord—which will generally be the case—but never at the expense of social bonds. Truth and honest communication, therefore, have a positive normative value. By contrast, because the deliberative democratic position assumes rational language to possess an ontological status within the process of public debate, these values must always fail in favor of uncompromising honesty. In sum, we have argued that the often implicit and rarely rigorously interrogated correspondence constructed by deliberative democratic perspectives between truth and lies and good and evil requires serious reexamination. Such a hard and fast ontology may well be easier to maintain than the complex questions raised by regarding truth as a normative, but not necessary, good, in terms of what constitutes legitimate grounds for falsehood in the political realm. Nevertheless, mendacity and ethical deliberation are not mutually exclusive a priori. Rather, as the theoretical and political positions advanced by John of Salisbury and Christine de Pizan

42. Maurizio Viroli, From Politics to Reason of State: The Acquisition and Transformation of the Language of Politics, 1250–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 271. 43. Where, one wonders, would deliberative democratic theorists fall on the question of a legal ban on lying? Just such a ban was proposed in spring 2003 by the mayor of a small Iowa town who had become frustrated with the extent of his fellow citizen’s mendacious conduct (New York Times, April 25, 2003, A20). It strikes us that it would be difficult for deliberative democracy to find fault with legislation to impose a program of rigid honesty upon citizens, with effects that are intriguingly chilling.

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demonstrate, truthful speech and fully open communication are not necessarily the prerequisites of an ideal political realm. In fact, absolute veracity has a range of moral and sociopolitical possibilities that must be carefully thought through. Thus, the medieval doctrines surveyed in this chapter demonstrate that there is important ethical ground between the Augustinian tradition and the Machiavellian disconnection of moral and practical reasoning. Furthermore, historical perspectives as a mode of analysis of, interrogation of, and comparison with current debates concerning honesty, communication, fact, reasoning, and publicity in democratic culture remind us that such categories are historically and culturally located. The rhetoric of truth as an ontological necessity and absolute good in deliberative democratic theorizing is part of the production of these value-laden concepts, and would do well to recognize itself as such. This does not equate to a headlong collapse into pure relativity in moral reasoning and political decision making. It does require the recognition that dissimulation, deception, and omission can be motivated by rational ethical considerations and result in morally positive political outcomes. Only in the process of historicizing and particularizing their own epistemologies can deliberative democratic theories truly open themselves up for discussion and debate with other perspectives and other value paradigms. Does this mean that we advocate mendacity as a policy for democratic polities or institutions? Recent events stemming from the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq suggest that the justifications for lying occur too easily to politicians—and even to their philosophically trained advisers. But the view that government must regularly and as a matter of policy lie to the populace—the position that seems to inform some members of and advisers to the Bush administration44—differs dramatically from the position that democracies ought not to insist upon transparency and openness as the sine qua non of their existence. There is nothing in the predicament of democratic politics that requires political leaders to engage in deception, and much to suggest that lying—even for such supposedly laudable ends as justifying the destruction of a morally repugnant regime—cannot be supported. But the question of how and when mendacity may be justified as a requirement of justice within the political process remains itself an open and debatable one—a view that the deliberative democrats, with their ontological obsession with truth, foreclose. 44. See the quotations (from those associated with the Straussian school of political philosophy, both in and out of government) gathered by Seymour M. Hersh, “Selective Intelligence,” New Yorker, May 12, 2003, 48, 50.

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8 deliberative democracy and the public sphere: answer or anachronism? Thomas Murphy

Philosophically speaking, deliberative democracy can trace its lineage back to ancient Athenian democracy. However, little more than a decade ago, David Held, in his survey of models of democracy, had literally nothing to say about “deliberative democracy,” only addressing a model of “participatory democracy” based on the writings of Carole Pateman, C. B. MacPherson, and Nicos Poulantzas.1 Despite the relatively recent vogue of the term “deliberative democracy”2 one should probably trace the A previous version of this paper was presented at the Western Political Science Association Annual Meeting, San Jose, Calif., March 2000. 1. David Held, Models of Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press, 1987), 254ff. 2. Recent contributions to this literature include Seyla Benhabib, “Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy,” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 67–94; Joseph M. Bessette, The Mild Voice of Reason: Deliberative Democracy and American National Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); James Bohman, Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity, and Democracy (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996); James Bohman and William Rehg, eds., Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1997); Joshua Cohen, “Procedure and Substance in Deliberative Democracy,” in Benhabib, Democracy and Difference, 95–119; Joshua Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” in Bohman and Rehg, Deliberative Democracy, 67–91; John Dryzek, Discursive Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Jon Elster, ed., Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); James S. Fishkin, Democracy and Deliberation: New Directions for Democratic Reform (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement:

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concept back at least to 1962, the year of publication of Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere), in which Jürgen Habermas rehabilitated the normative concept of the public. For the purposes of this chapter, our interest in deliberative democracy lies in the ways various current models employ versions of the public sphere3 as a site to secure certain normative presuppositions concerning equality, accessibility, and rationality in the formation of public opinion. The concept of the public sphere envisioned in such cases is what will be termed the “conversational public sphere”—the public sphere understood as “specifically a part of ‘civil society,’ ” and hence constituted by the web of interpersonal interchanges that arise in the intermediate associations that constitute civil society.4 The nature of the “publicity” assumed inherent in the conversational public sphere promotes certain assumptions concerning the immanent existence of principles of equality,5 inclusiveness,6 and rationality.7 These principles, which Habermas has argued were immanent within the bourgeois public sphere, provide the normative basis for asserting that processes of deliberation within the modern public sphere ultimately result in decisions that are uniquely legitimate and rational. The logic is simple: if by means of the conversational public sphere all can parWhy Moral Conflict Cannot Be Avoided in Politics, and What Should Be Done About It (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996). 3. “By ‘the public sphere’ we mean first of all a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed. . . . A portion of the public sphere comes into being in every conversation in which private individuals assemble to form a public body.” Jürgen Habermas, “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article,” New German Critique 3 (1974): 49. 4. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1989), 3. Hereafter cited as “ST.” Civil society is a collective term whose purpose is to define “a sphere of social interaction between economy and state composed above all of the intimate sphere (especially the family), the sphere of associations (especially voluntary associations), social movements, and forms of public communication.” Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992), ix. 5. Sites of discourse within the public sphere encouraged “a kind of social intercourse that, far from presupposing the equality of status, disregarded status altogether.” Habermas, ST, 36. 6. “However exclusive the public might be in any given instance, it could never close itself off entirely and become consolidated as a clique; for it always understood and found itself immersed within a more inclusive public of all private people.” Ibid., 37. 7. “Public debate was supposed to transform voluntas into a ratio that in the public competition of private arguments came into being as the consensus about what was practically necessary in the interest of all.” Ibid., 83, emphasis in original.

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ticipate equally and the result is determined by the unforced force of the better argument, then the decisions must be both democratically legitimate and of the highest possible rationality. The conversational public sphere is therefore uniquely able to provide models of deliberative democracy with a site for securing one or both of the following two key presuppositions: (a) the peculiar democratic authority of deliberative decisions, and (b) the resultant high quality of deliberative decisions. Of course, as we shall see much further on, one need not necessarily embrace dialogue as envisioned by the conversational public sphere as the only normative resource available to participants in the public sphere. No conversation can match mediated forms of communication for accessibility and the ability to disseminate information. Mediated forms—by the very fact of their impersonal nature—can also be quite effective in minimizing variations in status and power. The use of a medium, whether it is samizdat or BBC radio, can also help insulate those actively receiving communication from the negative sanctions of authorities, social superiors, or neighbors. And only mediated forms of communication enable strangers to interact in shaping identities and communities in ways that are today taken for granted. Despite these facts, however, for the most part theorists of democracy have seized upon the conversational aspect of civil society as the normative anchor of the public sphere. While demonstrating how deliberative models of democracy employ the conversational public sphere is the first task of this chapter, it is also necessary to critically examine the concept of the public sphere. It is widely understood that Habermas’s history in certain respects distorts the actual historical development of the public sphere.8 However, the important question is whether such distortions of the historical record negate the important normative claims made on behalf of the public sphere. I shall restrict my attention to the question of the mode or means of communication that predominates within the public sphere. The immanent ideals of the conversational public sphere are derived from a model of communication understood as dialogue. Yet a review of recent work in medieval history 8. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992), 109–42; Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, The Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Spheres, trans. Peter Labanyi et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); David Zaret, “Religion, Science and Printing in the Public Spheres of Seventeenth-Century England,” in Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, 212–35.

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concerning the transition toward “modern literacy” during the Middle Ages points to literate means of communication as an increasingly predominant factor in shaping standards of communication throughout the previous millennium. By demonstrating that the question of the mode of communication has important theoretical implications for the plausibility of the conversational conception of the public sphere, this chapter poses a challenge to models of deliberative democracy that attempt to employ the public sphere to guarantee either legimate democratic authority or heightened quality of political decision making.

two presuppositions of deliberative democracy Not every theory of deliberative democracy depends upon both presuppositions: authority and quality.9 Although three of the five models that I shall briefly examine explicitly qualify the presupposition of democratic authority, each model examined depends in some degree upon the two presuppositions concerning authority and quality. In Habermas’s words: “A discourse-theoretic interpretation insists on the fact that democratic will formation draws its legitimating force not from a previous convergence of settled ethical convictions but both from the communicative presuppositions that allow the better arguments to come into play in various forms of deliberation and from the procedures that secure fair bargaining processes.”10 Habermas is quite clear here: legitimate democratic authority does not arise from an overlap between policy and public opinion. Neither, presumably, does the authority of democratic decisions derive from forms or procedures of representation—Edmund Burke’s “public trustee” need not apply. Democratic legitimacy is supplied through the active constitution of public opinion, which occurs within the public sphere through “various forms of deliberation and from the procedures that secure fair bargaining processes”—as guided by certain “communicative presuppositions.” Hence the public sphere—when properly regulated—is the source of democratic legitimacy. It should be obvious that the same forms of deliberation that supply democratic legitimacy also “allow the better 9. The two extremes of “epistemic proceduralism” and “fair proceduralism” depend solely on the presuppositions, respectively, of quality and authority. See Bohman and Rehg, Deliberative Democracy, xviii. 10. Jürgen Habermas, “Three Normative Models of Democracy,” in Benhabib, Democracy and Difference, 24.

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arguments to come into play” and therefore lead to more rational and hence higher quality decisions being made. The link between legitimacy and rationality is even clearer in the work of Seyla Benhabib: “According to the deliberative model of democracy, it is a necessary condition for attaining legitimacy and rationality with regard to collective decision making processes in a polity, that the institutions of this polity are so arranged that what is considered in the common interest of all results from processes of collective deliberation conducted rationally and fairly among free and equal individuals.”11 Once again a direct connection is drawn between legitimacy, rationality, and the results of processes of collective deliberation (properly conducted). Like Habermas, Benhabib takes pains to explain that it is the actual, proper functioning of the public sphere—not an ideal such as a fictitious general deliberative assembly— that is the source of democratic authority. The procedural specifications of this model privilege a plurality of modes of association in which all affected can have the right to articulate their point of view. These can range from political parties, to citizens’ initiatives, to social movements, to voluntary associations, to consciousness-raising groups, and the like. It is through the interlocking net of these multiple forms of associations, networks, and organizations that an anonymous “public conversation” results. It is central to the model of deliberative democracy that it privileges such a public sphere of mutually interlocking and overlapping networks and associations of deliberation, contestation, and argumentation.12 For Benhabib (as well as Habermas) the conversational public sphere embedded within civil society is considered not merely a means for generating philosophical regulative ideals (like Rousseau’s General Will) or as counterfactual thought experiment (like Rawls’s veil of ignorance). It is also considered, to a certain degree, a sociological fact that results in normative, empirical consequences when actual processes of deliberation take place. With regard to the second presupposition pertaining to the enhanced quality of deliberative decisions, Benhabib has endorsed what might be termed a “transformative” understanding of how deliberation enhances quality: “The deliberative model of democracy that I am advocating seeks 11. Benhabib, “Toward a Deliberative Model,” 69. 12. Ibid., 73–74; emphasis in original.

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to bridge the gap between high and low politics by raising the quality of ordinary people’s everyday deliberations. . . . My assumption is that the more such ordinary political deliberation approximates the model suggested above, the more the likelihood increases that it will be informed by constitutional principles in the ‘right way.’ ”13 Not simply the level of debate but the very thought processes of ordinary citizens themselves— and hence their “everyday deliberations”—are transformed through exposure to deliberation. Joshua Cohen tries to justify not only democratic decision making but also a whole panoply of civil liberties.14 In so doing, he has sought to distinguish between his own variant of deliberative democracy and what he has termed merely “aggregative” (procedural) models of deliberative democracy. While he does agree that “a deliberative conception puts public reasoning at the center of political justification,”15 the outcomes of such public reasoning require qualification. Cohen derives his qualifications (the “acceptable outcomes of a deliberative process”)16 in a neo-Kantian fashion. He deduces from certain basic premises (what counts as a reason in deliberation, the “fact of reasonable pluralism”) certain principles (the “principle of deliberative inclusion,” a notion of a deliberative “common good,” and a “principle of participation”).17 Yet the emphasis that Cohen has placed upon the derivation of substantive rights should not obscure the role of informal deliberation within the “social base”—that is to say, the conversational public sphere—in Cohen’s version of deliberative democracy. “Any well-functioning democratic order satisfying the principles of participation and the common good requires a social base. Beyond the 13. Ibid., 89. 14. In this regard his project bears important similarities to the work of Jean Cohen and her attempt to derive the rights of “inviolate personality” from the presuppositions of the role interlocutor in a conversational public sphere constitutive of deliberative democracy. See Jean L. Cohen, “Discourse Ethics and Civil Society,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 14 (1988): 315–37, and “Democracy, Difference, and the Right to Privacy,” in Benhabib, Democracy and Difference, 187–217. 15. Cohen, “Procedure and Substance,” 99. 16. Ibid., 105. 17. Unfortunately, like the Supreme Court’s own tortured history of deriving substantive liberties from procedural guarantees—now sanctioned by stare decisis, Joshua Cohen’s arguments only solidify the strong impression that he attains his admittedly noble aims by means of a flawed logic. Even putting aside all historical considerations concerning the development of civil liberties, a consideration of Cohen’s arguments in light of Occam’s razor is alone sufficient for casting considerable doubt upon the cogency of his thesis concerning the derivation of civil liberties from strictly deliberative considerations.

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world of voters and parties, secondary associations—organized groups intermediate between market and state—are needed both to represent otherwise underrepresented interests . . . and to add to public competence in advancing the common good.”18 Cohen, who considers such informal deliberation important enough to warrant active state intervention in order to foster the “right kinds of secondary association,”19 directly connects informal deliberation within the conversational public sphere to the quality (“public competence”) of decision making. Like Joshua Cohen, Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson have developed a model of deliberative democracy that among other things seeks to qualify—but not disavow—the presupposition that the deliberation within the public sphere is the source of democratic authority. “The deliberative perspective we develop, then, explicitly rejects the idea, sometimes identified with deliberative democracy, that deliberation under the right conditions—real discourses in the ideal speech situation—is sufficient to legitimate laws and public policies.”20 However, Gutmann and Thompson have objected to neo-Kantian thought experiments as well as to procedural theories that smuggle “guarantees of basic liberty and opportunity into the ideal conditions of deliberation,” embracing instead what they call “middle democracy”:21 Deliberation should not be confined to constitutional conventions, Supreme Court opinions, or their theoretical analogues. It should extend throughout the political process—to what we call the land of middle democracy. The forums of deliberation in middle democracy embrace virtually any setting in which citizens come together on a regular basis to reach collective decisions about public issues—governmental as well as nongovernmental institutions. They include not only legislative sessions, court proceedings, and administrative hearings at all levels of government but also meetings of grass roots organizations, professional associations, shareholders meetings, and citizens’ committees in hospitals and other similar institutions.22

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Cohen, “Procedure and Substance,”110. Ibid. Gutmann and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement, 200. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 12–13.

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According to Gutmann and Thompson’s account, deliberation within the “land of middle democracy” (that is to say, the conversational public sphere) is understood as a fallible, ongoing process, ideally characterized by reciprocity, publicity, and accountability. While the content of this process should be subject to certain constraints (basic liberty, basic opportunity, and fair opportunity), it represents the best means for attaining justifiable results. “Deliberative democracy does not assume that the results of all actual deliberations are just. In fact, most of the time actual democracy falls far short of meeting the conditions that deliberative democracy prescribes. But we can say that the more nearly the conditions are satisfied, the more nearly justifiable are the results likely to be.”23 While differing from Joshua Cohen in certain methodological respects, Gutmann and Thompson appear to share with him the same overall assessment of deliberative democracy as something more than mere political process but rather an entire way of life inclusive of certain substantive liberties. This perspective is dependent upon informal deliberation within the conversational public sphere as both a source of democratic authority, as qualified by substantive liberties, and as productive of an enhanced quality, whether described in terms of “public competence” or “justifiability,” of deliberative decisions. James Bohman has distinguished his model of deliberative democracy from procedural models24 but also from what he terms a “precommitment” model (identified with the work of John Rawls): a model that “precommits” the polity to certain substantive principles. He has proposed a “dialogical” model in which “the criterion for successful deliberation is that it restore the conditions of ongoing cooperation in problematic situations.25 Identification of the criterion of successful deliberation has enabled Bohman to specify three conditions that permit continued commitment to dialogue after a given decision: nontyranny, equality, and publicity.26 Not only is the dialogical model compatible with the common deliberative dem23. Ibid., 17. 24. Bohman initially defines public deliberation as “a dialogic process of exchanging reasons for the purpose of resolving problematic situations that cannot be settled without interpersonal coordination and cooperation. On this definition, deliberation is not so much a form of discourse or argumentation as a joint, cooperative activity.” Bohman, Public Deliberation, 27. 25. Ibid., 240. 26. Ibid., 35. “Whereas equality and non-tyranny refer to the standing of citizens in deliberation, publicity constitutes and governs the social space necessary for democratic deliberation: the public sphere.” Ibid., 37.

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ocratic standards of democratic authority,27 it also claims to yield higherquality decisions both in terms of persuasiveness and on epistemic grounds. “Deliberation in the sense examined here is interpersonal; it concerns the process of forming a public reason—one that everyone in the deliberative process finds acceptable. A fine-grained analysis of this process is necessary to show that the reasons produced for decisions not only are more convincing than reasons that have not undergone the scrutiny of public testing in free and open dialogue of all citizens but also are likely to be epistemically superior to them.”28 In these respects Bohman recognizes that his dialogical model—like the other models examined—requires what I have termed the conversational public sphere. “All these models [precommitment, procedural, dialogical] demand the presence of a well-functioning public sphere as the social location of deliberative activity. . . . The public sphere provides the practical implementation that a radical democratic theory often lacks; for democratic control over complex institutions, deliberation requires a spatially and temporally extended form of publicity.”29 Despite the diversity of opinion under examination, all five models endorse the authority presupposition (although one could argue that all— and not simply the last three models examined—seek to qualify their endorsement). All five models also endorse the quality presupposition, with our second model going so far as anticipating a transformation of everyday discourse. Bohman effectively sums up how the conversational public sphere is conceived and employed in the various theories of deliberative democracy as the site for deliberation that realizes these presuppositions. Let us now examine how the conversational public sphere came to be understood as the site of deliberation.

the conversational public sphere Having briefly fleshed out how current deliberative theories of democracy employ the conversational public sphere, let us now move on to an evaluation of the latter concept. What follows is a brief recapitulation of the 27. “According to most proponents of deliberative democracy, political decision making is legitimate insofar as its policies are produced in a process of public discussion and debate in which citizens and their representatives, going beyond mere self-interest and limited points of view, reflect on the general interest or on their common good.” Ibid., 4–5. 28. Ibid., 25. 29. Ibid., 43.

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Habermas narrative.30 The aim of Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit was actually to illuminate two structural transformations of the public sphere: a transition from feudal “representative publicness”31 to the bourgeois public sphere and a subsequent “refeudalization” of the public sphere. According to Habermas, the genesis of the bourgeois public sphere resulted from a combination of early capitalist commercial development and the organization of territorial nation-states.32 The creation of national or territorial market economies precipitated the rise of bourgeois civil society, where private economic conditions were now “for the first time” of general interest (ST, 19). These economic trends, in conjunction with the growth in bureaucratic-administrative patronage, stimulated the further growth of news journals, which by easing the cost of access to cultural goods, stimulated the development of a critical public sphere, initially with regard to literary matters ( 51ff.). The bourgeois conjugal family is central to the Habermas narrative, for it is within the intimate sphere of the bourgeois family that he sought to tease out the communicative norms presumed inherent in the dialogue form. Although the bourgeois conjugal family no longer played the key role in economic production, it remained indispensable as a site of reproduction and socialization. The intimacy of the bourgeois conjugal family was based on an ideology of “voluntariness, community of love, and cultivation . . . conjoined in a concept of the humanity that was supposed to inhere in humankind as such” (47). The ideological basis of such ideals did not prevent the experience of familial intimacy—particularly with regard to the cultivation of a subjectivity “always already oriented to an audience” (that is to say, in anticipation of dialogue)—from coloring family members’ understanding of their relations to one another. 30. The seminal influence of the Habermas narrative coupled with the lack of any counternarratives produced by other deliberative democrats requires me to focus upon the work of Habermas for the remainder of the chapter. Although this narrowing of focus does not materially alter the overall thrust of the more general argument, the reader should naturally take this narrowed focus into account when thinking through the implications of what I have written here for alternate theories of deliberative democracy. 31. Representative publicness involved a re-presenting or staging for the purposes of display and acclamation, hence “this publicness (or publicity) of representation was not constituted as a social realm, that is, as a public sphere; rather, it was something like a status attribute, if this term may be permitted.” Habermas, ST, 7, emphasis in original. 32. “These elements of early capitalist commercial relations, that is, the traffic in commodities and news, manifested their revolutionary power only in the mercantilist phase in which, simultaneously with the modern state, the national and territorial economies assumed their shapes.” Ibid., 17.

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Although the needs of bourgeois society were not exactly kind to the family’s self-image as a sphere of humanity-generating closeness, the ideas of freedom, love, and cultivation of the person that grew out of the emergences of the conjugal family’s private sphere were surely more than just ideology. As an objective meaning contained as an element in the structure of the actual institution, and without whose subjective validity society would not have been able to reproduce itself, these ideas were also reality. In the form of this specific notion of humanity a conception of what existed was promulgated within the bourgeois world which promised redemption from the constraint of what existed without escaping into a transcendental realm. This conception’s transcendence of what was immanent was the element of truth that raised bourgeois ideology above ideology itself, most fundamentally in that area where the experience of “humanity” originated: in the humanity of the intimate relationships between human beings who, under the aegis of the family, were nothing more than human. (ST, 48) The normative basis of the subjectivity oriented toward dialogue was fostered by the experience of intimacy within the bourgeois family and sharpened through literary debate. Although based on an ideological understanding of the concept of a shared common humanity, it transcended its own ideological origins through the experience of unfettered dialogue. As a broad swath of the population became increasingly dependent upon markets (and therefore directly subject to the influence of administrative economic measures),33 such dialogue came to be employed with regard to questions of political economy. Habermas understood the bourgeois public sphere as an unstable conflation of two overlapping but not congruent “spheres”: the “political public sphere” and the “literary public sphere.” These spheres corresponded to the roles of the capitalist property-owner caught up in the requirements of the market and of the member of the “intimate sphere” [Intimsphäre] of the bourgeois conjugal family. “The fully developed bourgeois public sphere was based on the fictitious identity of the two roles assumed by the privatized individuals who came together to form a public: the role of property owners and the role of human beings pure and simple” (ST, 33. “Not the notorious dress codes but taxes and duties and, generally, official interventions into the privatized household finally came to constitute the target of a developing critical sphere.” Ibid., 24.

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56). Yet it was precisely this conflation—as manifest in “the specific notion of humanity”—that Habermas believed “promised redemption from the constraint of what existed without escaping into a transcendental realm” (48). In consequence, “that zone of continuous administrative contact became ‘critical’ also in the sense that it provoked the critical judgment of a public making use of its reason” (24). “The now emerging public sphere of civil society . . . developed to the extent to which the public concern regarding the private sphere of civil society was no longer confined to the authorities but was considered by the subjects as one that was properly theirs” (23, emphasis in original). According to this reading of events, the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere roughly coincided with the advent of the term “public”: in the mid-seventeenth century in Great Britain, the eighteenth century in France and Germany (26). Habermas linked the “refeudalization” or the “second transformation” to the decline of the same institution that he deemed responsible for inculcating the necessary subjectivity for engaging in rational-critical debate: the bourgeois conjugal family and its associated literary sphere. He attributed this decline to the blurring of the distinction between the public and the private. “Only this dialectic of a progressive ‘societization’ of the state simultaneously with an increasing ‘state-ification’ of society gradually destroyed the basis of the bourgeois public sphere—the separation of state and society” (142). From the 1860s onward the “state-ification” of both the economy and the family resulted in a “deprivatized” society. This was accomplished through the increasing concentration of capital and intrusive social welfare legislation. The bourgeois family, deprived of its economic support role and stripped of monopoly over socialization began to “dissolve into a sphere of pseudo-privacy” (157). “The social psychology of the type of privacy that evolved during the eighteenth century out of the experiential context of the conjugal family’s audience-oriented intimate sphere provides a key both to the development of a literary public sphere and to certain conditions of its collapse. The public sphere in the world of letters was replaced by the pseudo-public or sham-private world of culture consumption” (159–60). The mass “mediatized public” was described by Habermas as one that consumes culture, abstains from literary and political debate, is subject to manipulation, and is “called upon more frequently and in incomparably more diverse ways for the purposes of public acclamation.” According to this narrative the rise of the mass “mediatized public” should be traced to structural transformation of the bourgeois family itself (180).

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The reader may well be forgiven for wondering at this point—given the rather dire note on which Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit concludes— what possible resources such a theoretically informed historical reconstruction of the public sphere could provide for theorists of deliberative democracy. The resources may appear less meager and the situation for theorists less desperate when one appreciates the robustness of the normative element of Habermas’s study: the dialogue model of communication that lies at the core of what consequently I have termed the “conversational public sphere.” Habermas’s depiction of the centrality of the subjectivity fostered by the bourgeois conjugal family is at one and the same time a depiction of the normative resources supposedly encoded in dialogue. In a reverse manner the discussion of the “refeudalization” demonstrated how the lack of dialogue distorted and destroyed the public sphere.34 The status of the subjectivity “always already oriented to an audience”—that is to say, always already oriented to engage in dialogue with an audience—is in fact the measure of the normative health of the conversational public sphere. Dialogue is the key to the Habermas narrative even despite the fact that the public sphere’s “decisive mark was the published word” (ST, 16). For Habermas the “published word” could either facilitate dialogue or usurp it (188). In the former case mediated communication was depicted as subordinate to face-to-face dialogue or even wholly assimilated to it (34, 42). In the latter case mediated communication was depicted as an agent of destruction and decay—facilitating the creation of “a public sphere in appearance only” (170, 181ff.). In short, dialogue represented the—admittedly idealized—normative core of the bourgeois public sphere. Yet how, the reader may ask further, can Habermas get away with depicting the bourgeois public sphere as essentially a dialogue, albeit even if only in an extended form? He accomplishes this in part by identifying the bourgeois public sphere with bourgeois civil society—essentially reducing the former concept to the “public sphere of civil society.”35 This reduction enables him to split off from the “genuine” bourgeois public sphere 34. “In the course of our century, the bourgeois forms of sociability [salons, clubs, reading societies] have found substitutes that have one tendency in common despite their regional and national diversity: abstinence from literary and political debate. . . . The characteristic relationship of a privacy oriented toward an audience was also no longer present when people went to the movies together, listened to the radio, or watched TV. . . . The private form of appropriation removed the ground for a communication about what has been appropriated.” Ibid., 163. 35. Ibid., 3, 23; John Durham Peters, “Distrust of Representation: Habermas on the Public Sphere,” Media, Culture, Society 15 (1993): 554.

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the “negative” elements that he attributes instead to the “refeudalized,” “mediatized” public; for example, with regard to the role played by commercial interests in creating a public sphere through the promotion of textual commodities for consumption. This particular reading of history allows the evidence to be read as a struggle between the “virtuous” public sphere and its evil doppelgänger, the “vacuous” public sphere identified with modern popular culture. This reading also permits Habermas to depict as the particular value of the public sphere its ability to amplify (but not shape or distort) the countless myriad conversations that comprise social relations in civil society. In effect, the bourgeois public sphere was reduced to the discussions of individuals within the matrix of voluntary associations of bourgeois civil society.36 Finally, given the subsequent decay of the bourgeois family, the postulated linkage between the public sphere and civil society provides scholars and activists a potential site for theorizing the reconstitution, the normative core of the public sphere—a fact amply demonstrated by the variety of contemporary theories of deliberative democracy. The ultimate irony of this reductive account of the public sphere is not that it results in the apotheosis of idealized oral dialogue within civil society, but rather that the idealized oral dialogue as described is in many ways nothing more than a celebration of norms (accessibility, equality, “rationality”) some have considered characteristic of print culture. Furthermore, the dissemination of this concept of idealized oral dialogue has been almost completely dependent upon printed texts. So theorists of deliberative democracy—who present themselves as championing the perceived authenticity of “real conversations” in civil society—in reality seek to impose upon such conversations what could be regarded as an alien set of norms rather than acknowledge the complex relationships that exist between various communicative modes. Yet could an alternative reading of history result in a different understanding of the normative basis—something other than ideal dialogue— for the public sphere? Such has not proven to be the case with regard to the most obvious shortcomings in the Habermas narrative, those pertaining to class and gender exclusions.37 Despite criticisms of historical par36. This reduction represents a common “family characteristic” also observable in the deliberative public spheres denoted by the terms “anonymous public conversation,” “middle democracy,” and the “social base.” 37. Geoff Eley, “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,” in Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, 289–339; Fraser,

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ticulars and the “specific form” (namely, the bourgeois public sphere), such critics have invariably endorsed the “general idea” of the conversational public sphere.38 The story changes, however, when the criticism touches upon questions related to the dominant mode within the public sphere— dialogic or mediated?39 The Habermas narrative systematically undervalues those aspects of history indicative of the importance of mediated communication—for example, with regard to: • the role of the press and commercial interests in the constitution (and

not simply the “refeudalization”) of the modern public sphere;40 • the commodity status of textual items;41 and • the importance of representation and rhetoric in the constitution of the public sphere.42 Unlike the class and gender exclusions I have mentioned, the question concerning the dominant mode of the public sphere does challenge the “general idea” of the conversational public sphere. It calls into question the privileging of dialogue that lies at the normative heart of the conversational model. The dominance of mediated communication would also represent a challenge to the presumed linkage between the public sphere and civil society. Finally, once one questions the necessary linkage between the public sphere and civil society, then one is free to investigate whether the

“Rethinking the Public Sphere”; Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); and Negt and Kluge, The Public Sphere and Experience. 38. Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 111. 39. For an insightful investigation of “dialogue” and “dissemination” as two modes of communication, see John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: The History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 33–62. 40. Alexandra Halez, The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Zaret, “Religion, Science and Printing.” “Whereas formerly [in the bourgeois public sphere] the press was able to limit itself to the transmission and amplification of the rational-critical debate of private people assembled into a public, now conversely this debate gets shaped by the mass media to begin with.” Habermas, ST, 188. 41. “The function of the market was confined to the distribution of the cultural goods and to their removal from the exclusive use of wealthy patrons and noble connoisseurs.” Ibid., 165. 42. Alexandra Halasz, The Marketplace of Print (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Peters, “Distrust of Representation”; and Neil Saccamano, “The Consolations of Ambivalence: Habermas and the Public Sphere,” Modern Language Notes 106 (1991): 695–98.

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public sphere may possibly antedate the advent of bourgeois civil society.43 In sum, the question concerning the dominant mode within the public sphere represents not simply an antiquarian scavenger hunt but rather a question fraught with sociological interest for the past and normative importance for theorizing politics today. As the next section demonstrates, recent historiography provides ample material for constructing a subversive counter-history of the public sphere.

literacy and the mediated public sphere In tracing the origins of the public sphere, I shall not trace the rise of civil society but rather briefly sketch the rise of a critical publicity.44 Such publicity is crucially dependent upon mediated communication for the extension of discourse both temporally and geographically.45 Mediated communication requires, at least initially, some type of literacy. Not all literacies are the same, however, and the European development of what has come to be called “modern literacy” represents an important, if obscure, event in the “prehistory” of the public sphere.46 Often in transitions to lit43. With regard to studies that seek shed light on the public sphere prior to the eighteenth century, Habermas has stated: “I have some doubts about how far we can push back the very notion of the public sphere into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries without somehow changing the very concept of the public sphere to such a degree that it becomes something else.” Habermas, “Concluding Remarks,” in Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, 465. Such doubts are quite valid, for it is precisely his “notion” of the conversational public sphere linked to bourgeois civil society—and not the public sphere per se—that suffers in the light of such research. 44. In researching the origins of critical publicity I was guided by the basic, reasonable definition of the public sphere encompassed in the phrase: “a sphere of private people come together as a public.” Habermas, ST, 26. Such a public should be reasonably accessible and open to contribution regardless of status as well as foster the exercise of public reason. I had anticipated that the advent of printing would have created opportunities to satisfy these basic criteria. However, my research taught me that private people had been coming together as public communities in order to critically and publicly engage each other over the meaning of texts long before the invention of the printing press. What follows is a brief sketch of the developments that enabled common folk—heretics and protonationalists— through the means of mediated communication to form public communities that critically challenged the authority and status of the hierarchies of church and state. 45. Bohman, Public Deliberation; Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Public Culture 14 (2002): 49–90. 46. “Modern literacy” is probably best described as a Weltanshauung or ideology rather than simply a technology; see Brian V. Street, Literacy in Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 1ff. The importance of this distinction is that it high-

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eracy texts are relegated to the status of mere supplements to memory and remain governed by established oral traditions.47 Texts do not function as primary sources of authority; they function instead as memory aids for the authorizing rituals and acts.48 A key moment in the development of European literacy was the Carolingian reforms that followed the Merovingian decline.49 The role of Latin in the revival of imperial authority and church reform associated with the Carolingian renaissance underscores the unique importance of the written word in medieval European society.50 The subsequent development of European literacy—a process that lasted centuries—was characterized by what has been termed an ‘intermediate’ form of literacy known as “textuality.”51 The resolution of Carolingian textuality in favor of what we would recognize as modern literacy seems to be due in large part to the historical uniqueness of European circumstances. The serendipitous development of European literacy is well illustrated by the example of the Carolingian reforms of Latin. The practice of Latin orthography, syntax, punctuation, and pronunciation had degenerated during the Merovingian period. Reform was influenced by non-native speakers (Anglo-Celtic missionaries), who derived their knowledge of the language from texts.52 The Carolingian renaissance and its program of thoroughly Christianizing Europe depended in large part upon the rehabilitation of the authority of

lights the issue of predominance. Literacy and orality coexisted throughout the medieval period as indeed they continue to do down to the present day. Modern literacy does not imply the obliteration of oral practices but rather the subordination of oral practices to standards derived from literate practices. 47. Jack Goody and Ian Watt, “The Consequences of Literacy,” in Literacy in Traditional Societies, ed. Jack Goody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 39–40. 48. The “word of God” represents a special situation. 49. Patrick Geary, Before France and Germany: The Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 50. Rosamond McKitterick, The Carolingians and the Written Word (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 51. Textuality is a term for describing an “intermediate” type of literacy. In a society characterized by textuality, a text memorializing an oral transaction may possess no legal status if oral evidence is available whereas it may possess evidentiary status in cases when oral sources are no longer available. A text may also, depending upon its status, supersede oral evidence. See Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 7. 52. The best example of the practical consequences of the ascendency of the text over actual oral practice was Alcuin’s reform of Latin pronunciation, which introduced a sound for every written symbol. See Roger Wright, Late Latin and Early Romance in Spain and Carolingian France (Liverpool: F. Cairns, 1982).

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written resources.53 The political fragmentation associated with the period after the death of Charlemagne effectively obscured this achievement. It was only when a relative degree of social stability was restored that standards associated with literacy began to make decisive inroads against older oral traditions.54 The “renaissance of the twelfth century” witnessed increasing numbers of documents in circulation55 as well as regularized and standardized methods of production. Institutions that reflected the growing importance of literate means of communication came into being: chanceries, archives, libraries, and universities. The new status accorded texts is also discernible in the new intellectual tools for textual analysis developed by medieval scholastics: the summa, the gloss, and a new hermeneutic that revalued the literal content of the given text.56 These new ways of reading in turn led to new ways of writing and eventually to new ways of thinking.57 While the multiple skills that are today associated with literacy remained limited to a literate elite, the growth in the production and circulation of practical documents was not.58 Documents constituted a familiar part of 53. McKitterick, Carolingians. 54. Such a transition was far from a simple process: “Documents did not immediately inspire trust. As with other innovations in technology, there was a long and complex period of evolution . . . before methods of production were developed which proved acceptable both to traditionalists and to experts in literacy. There was no straight and simple line of progress from memory to written record. People had to be persuaded—and it was difficult to do— that documentary proof was a sufficient improvement on existing methods to merit the extra expense and mastery of novel techniques which it demanded.” M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, 2d ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993), 294. 55. Although evidence indicates that the dramatic increase in the number of documents in circulation was Europe-wide in its scope, M. T. Clanchy’s From Memory to Written Record, which focuses on Anglo-Norman England, is the exemplar in the field. Despite dramatic and at times erratic changes in the scale of document production, the overall trend reflected moderate growth in literate practices and the forms of oppression that could result from such practices. From Memory to Written Record, 162. This growth was also reflected in the variety of forms (charters, chirographs, royal writs, warrants, certificates), which may be taken to indicate a growing social desire for written forms of proof in instances where previously none was necessary. Ibid., 81ff. 56. “By the end of the twelfth century, the book takes on a symbolism which it retained until our time. It becomes the symbol for an unprecedented kind of object, visible but intangible, which I shall call the bookish text. In the long social history of the alphabet, the impact of this development can be compared with only two other events: the introduction of full phonetic script, which occurred around 400 b.c., making Greek a language upon which the speaker could reflect, and the diffusion of printing in the fifteenth century, which made the text into a powerful mold for a new literary and scientific worldview.” Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 115. 57. David Olson, The World on Paper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 143. 58. Natalie Zemon Davis, “Printing and the People,” in Society and Culture in Early

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village life. The “illiterate” had recourse to notaries and clerks not only to read and write but often also to translate. The lack of effective bureaucracies meant that although chanceries may have been instrumental in encouraging the production and use of practical documents, they often did not hold the upper hand when it came to employing documentary materials. As is still the case today in the writing, interpreting, and administration of law, the self-interested petitioner oftentimes had a better understanding of the documentary history than the harried civil servant. From the second half of the thirteenth century, English peasants were using warrants as proof of ownership and personal identification as well as conveying property by means of charters.59 Close familiarity with documentary procedures was also manifest in the selective destruction (and issuance) of documents by peasant insurgents during the rebellion of 1381.60 Texts can be understood as one of the most important forms of “neutral media” to intercede in and substitute for the social bond that formerly was necessary for a relationship to exist between two persons. Like other forms of “neutral media” (currency, clocks, compasses, and firearms), texts facilitated the loosening of the bonds inherent in traditional face-to-face relations that governed access to skills, property, or knowledge.61 This “loosening” oftentimes worked against the stability of the prevailing social order. This is clearly the case with regard to heresy and the founding of heretical textual communities from the eleventh century onward.62 Despite the predictable variety of ideological, doctrinal, national, and social differences that existed among the various heretical communities, each typically sought to use texts as the basis for dissent from traditionally sanctioned beliefs and practices.63 The founding and maintenance of such communities was rendered viable, not simply by distribution of texts, but by the notion of authority that came to be associated with the very concept of the text.64 In short, literate standards derived from familiarity with texts Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975); Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 59. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 48–49. 60. Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994). 61. Stock, Implications of Literacy, 84. 62. Peter Biller and Anne Hudson, eds., Literacy and Heresy, 1000–1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 63. Stock, Implications of Literacy, 88. 64. Indeed, the concept of the text and associated literary standards of verification became sufficiently authoritative that such authority could be employed by individuals who had

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came to structure and inform even strictly oral interactions.65 Literary standards of authenticity usurped the standards associated with oral tradition in previous centuries, thereby altering the understanding and reception of such traditions. In this way a continuity of social forms actually concealed transformations in the social meaning of traditional rituals,66 ceremonies, and even the aural reception of sermons.67 Mediated communication and the norms associated with it came to predominate over face-to-face communication many centuries prior to the rise of bourgeois civil society. The increasing demand for textual resources pushed existing means of production to their limit, encouraging the development of the paper industry (introduced to Italy in the twelfth century), the university pecia system of lending out quires, and eventually the invention and exploitation of the printing press. As momentous as the invention of the printing press was, however, it should be clear that the invention of printing alone would not have led to the effective exploitation of such technology without the literary cultural conventions already developed.68 The work of Elizabeth Eisenstein has sensitized us to how the use of print altered methods of data storage, collection, and retrieval, as well as the size and scope of communication networks.69 Apart from standardization and the alleviation of labor costs, the major contribution of the printing press to a critical public sphere was the enhanced ability to surreptitiously disseminate texts—a boon to heretics everywhere.70 The capital outlays involved in running a printing shop encouraged both economic efficiency and activity. Pamphlets and mastered the appropriate text—even if they were “illiterate.” Ibid., 90. Such was the case with regard to Peter Waldo (or Waldes)—who learned the text of the Bible through preachers and literate employees. See Frderick Heer, The Medieval World: Europe 1100–1350, trans. Janet Sondheimer (New York: Mentor Books, 1962), 197. 65. Stock, Implications of Literacy, 455. For a nuanced interpretation of the interplay of orality and literacy during the Late Middle Ages that disputes certain aspects of Stock’s account, see Jesse Gellrich, Dominion and Discourse in the Fourteenth Century: Oral Contexts of Writing in Philosophy, Politics, and Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 66. For example, Lollards ceased to understand the value of religious rituals like confession or baptism in terms of “ministered magic” but rather subjected them to principled interpretation—much as one would analyze a text for meaning. 67. Preaching was indispensable for introducing texts and literate standards of authentification (precedence, documentation, identification of objectivity with texts) to “illiterates.” Stock, Implications of Literacy, 91. 68. Printing technology had been invented independently in both China and Korea prior to Gutenburg’s invention; see M. R. Guinard, “The Chinese Precedent,” in The Coming of the Book, ed. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin (London: Verso, 1976), 71–75. 69. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. 70. Halasz, The Marketplace of Print, 4.

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other printed commodities were aggressively marketed for common consumption by chapmen, peddlers, and balladeers.71 Printing accelerated certain trends initially attributable to the advent of modern literacy: the written use of vernacular languages, identification with nationality, and the spread of religious diversity. All of this was made possible by a public sphere in which the mediated consumption of textual commodities led to the formation of new (textual) communities and new identities (both religious and national) that challenged the traditional hierarchies of aristocracy and church.

deliberative democracy: answer or anachronism? This review of the history of the development of European literacy and reception of printing will have to serve for the purposes of this chapter as a brief counter-history of the public sphere. This counter-history provides us material for constructing a very different conception of the public sphere, one that I will term the “mediated” public sphere. The mediated public sphere is characterized not by face-to-face conversation but rather by mediated communication spanning both time and space. Unlike the conversational public sphere the mediated public sphere “comes into being only in relation to texts and their circulation.”72 This may seem restrictive until one realizes that under the social conditions of modern literacy people tend to “read” virtually everything as “text”—seeking coherence, meaning, principled understanding. Unlike the conversational public sphere the mediated public sphere is not characterized by dialogue but rather by dissemination.73 The commodity status of texts aids in their dissemination, because the separation of production from consumption allows the recipients to consume textual commodities freely, without interpretive constraint. Such freedom is connected to two other aspects of modern life that tend to be taken for granted—anonymity and the personal exercise of judgment. It was precisely the free, anonymous consumption of textual commodities that both stimulated and allowed individuals to exercise reason in coming to judgments over public issues—thereby rendering the mediated public

71. Ibid., 14; Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 72. Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” 50. 73. Peters, Speaking into the Air, 33–62.

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sphere so fruitfully heretical. It was through the multiple, cyclical, mediated interactions—dissemination, interpretation, and judgment—that private individuals who were otherwise strangers came together as a public and critical public opinion was formed.74 None of this is meant to imply that the mediated public sphere is without its flaws. It is marked by hierarchies in dissemination (writer/publisher/reader) and does not inculcate more “rational” forms of interaction except in the sense of brokering more inclusive identities through the dissemination of texts. Yet the idealized portrait I have sketched is not any less valuable for being an idealization. By crystallizing those ideals immanent within the mediated public sphere it provides an “alternative ideal” by which we can assess the health of the public sphere. As the embodiment of an alternative ideal, the mediated public sphere is not any less idealized than the ideal of dialogue that lies at the heart of the conversational public sphere. However, to merely assert the value of one idealization as more “noble” or “worthy” cannot resolve the matter in a fashion in keeping with the aim of providing a historically and sociologically informed account of the normative underpinnings of the public sphere. Habermas, in writing Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, did not seek merely to describe how things should be in an ideal world, he sought to reconstruct the normative ideals immanent within a historical, sociological formation. Likewise, when Seyla Benhabib defended her normative vision of deliberative democracy, she did so not simply on the normative basis of what should be but also on the basis of a sociological analysis of the immanent logic of the modern social formation. I understand [the deliberative model of democracy] to be elucidating the already implicit principles and logic of existing democratic practices. Among the practices that such a theory of democracy can elucidate are the significance of deliberative bodies in democracies, the rationale of parliamentary opposition, the need for a free and independent media and sphere of public opinion, and the rationale for employing majority rule as a decision procedure. For this reason, the deliberative theory of democracy is not a theory in search of practice; rather it is a theory that claims to elucidate some aspects of the logic of existing democratic practices better than others.75 74. Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics.” 75. Benhabib, “Toward a Deliberative Model,” 84.

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This aim shared by both theorists is one I share also—and it is neither utopianism nor an exercise in the history of ideas. Both Habermas and Benhabib have sought to practice a truly critical social theory capable of delineating the normative infrastructure of the public sphere through a thorough study of our historical and sociological heritage.76 Hence the value of the resulting analysis of the normative infrastructure is directly related to the quality of the historical and sociological analysis that informs it. In attempting to decide between any two such ideals and their associated concepts of the public sphere one must ask, therefore, not which normative ideal is more appealing but rather which account comes closest to rationally reconstructing the experience of the public sphere. In seeking to assess the relative merits of these two concepts of the public sphere for the purposes of this chapter, let us simplify matters by focusing upon how plausibly their associated ideals elucidate the logic of the public sphere. During the medieval period under discussion, what helped spark the growth of the textual communities and imagined identities that would over time overthrow the traditional religious and political hierarchies? Was it the greater dissemination of texts and ideas (including literary standards of assessing validity) resulting from the transition to modern literacy, or were more rational forms of dialogue responsible? Is it still plausible to assert that both the rise and “fall” of the bourgeois public sphere hinged upon inculcation in the psychodynamics of dialogue under the aegis of the bourgeois conjugal family? Or were there other factors (in the case of the “fall” subsumed under the rubric of “mass society” and “popular culture”) that disrupted the established patterns of dissemination, thereby undermining the elite status of a given class of opinion-makers? Finally, with regard to contemporary society, what better explains the conventions (mentioned in the quotation from Benhabib) devised for limiting conflict and reaching compromise in democratic societies characterized by value pluralism? Has the world been swept by a new appreciation for the value and worth of dialogue as a mode of communication? Or have the people of the world come to learn through centuries of struggle and bloodshed that the value pluralism enabled and encouraged by modern forms of dissemination cannot be stemmed by anything short of totalitarian means? If this is the case (and totalitarianism is not an agreeable option), then to some 76. The pursuit of critical theory cannot help but introduce a tension between the normative and sociological aspects of the endeavor. However, when done well, such tension is productive and fruitful.

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degree the value pluralism fostered by dissemination has to be tolerated (typically through guarantees of freedom of speech and conscience) and perhaps even accommodated (through representative assemblies). In each case above, the mediated public sphere explains the logic inherent in the situation more adequately than the conversational public sphere; and consequently, as an example of critical social theory, the mediated public sphere represents the better choice.77 What effect—if any—does substituting the mediated public sphere for the conversational public sphere have for theories of deliberative democracy? My hope is my demonstration that the public sphere does not function according to the logic of ideal dialogue will prompt theorists of deliberative democracy to reevaluate the uncritical regard with which dialogue is promoted as a panacea for the ills of democracy. It is hard to resist the impression that deliberative democrats—like John Dewey—have been captivated by nostalgia for the lost virtue of a face-to-face community that in all probability never existed. There is no limit to the liberal expansion and confirmation of limited personal intellectual endowment which may proceed from the flow of social intelligence when that circulates by word of mouth from one to another in the communications of the local community. That and only that gives reality to public opinion. We lie, as Emerson said, in the lap of an immense intelligence. But that intelligence is dormant and its communications are broken, inarticulate and faint until it possesses the local community as its medium.78 77. Subsequent to the publication of Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, Habermas expended much time and effort in the attempt to provide a philosophical argument for privileging dialogue through means of his theory of universal pragmatics and the ideal speech situation. In brief the argument is as follows: since the telos of communication is understanding, then the very act of communicating must presuppose an “ideal speech situation” that includes certain counterfactual assumptions concerning equality and respect—for otherwise interlocutors could never place any faith in the validity of communication. The term “counterfactual” is meant to indicate certain beliefs that are intellectually understood as always contrary to actual fact but which nevertheless represent unavoidable assumptions. They are not Kantian regulative ideals but constitutive fictions that enable human communication. See Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1978), 306–10. Suffice it to note that this theory remains highly controversial, particularly on a number of points. These points include the assumption that “understanding” is the telos of speech, Habermas’s distinction between “genuine” and “parasitic” forms of speech, and the appearance that the theory actually presupposes the very norms that it claims to justify. See Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), and Allan W. Wood, “Habermas’ Defense of Rationalism,” New German Critique 35 (1985): 145–64. 78. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 1954), 219.

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One can certainly appreciate the value of dialogue as a mode of communication—particularly for teachers—since face-to-face dialogue is very effective in securing the “grounding” of communication.79 However, the very constraints80 that enable dialogue to ensure grounding so effectively also ensure that it is also effective in limiting the creative reception of communication and hence for imposing, maintaining, and promoting ideological hegemony. These same constraints also virtually ensure that differentials in status and power will necessarily impinge upon the process. While this may be a positive aspect from the point of view of a teacher (since the pupil should naturally defer to the mentor), it cannot help but further limit the creative reception of communication and the exercise of individual judgment necessary for the health of democracy. In contrast, no amount of dialogical counterfactuals can efface the badges of status and power as effectively as the mediation of one’s thoughts through a text. Likewise, no amount of dialogical counterfactuals can promote accessibility and freedom of opinion like the reader’s ability to consume a text privately and anonymously and, in so doing, exercise judgment without fear of the oversight of one’s social superiors. Mediated communication—conducted initially through the form of the neutral media of texts-as-commodities—has helped free people from the personal dependencies and systems of hierarchy inherent in the face-to-face organization of society. Strangers were made able to relate to one another in ways previously not possible and, in so doing, created new identities and communities. Such developments, when marshaled to explain the reformation of a revealed religion, present most people with little difficulty; why is it so different when the concern is temporal authority? The public sphere provides us with certain normative resources with which to confront current threats to democracy—the Scylla of media conglomerates and the Charybdis of ethnonationalism—but in so doing we must beware of being distracted by the siren call of nostalgic anachronism.

79. Herbert H. Clark and Susan E. Brennan, “Grounding in Communication,” in Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition, ed. Laursen B. Resnick et al. (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 1991), 127–49. 80. These constraints are copresence, visibility, audibility, cotemporality, simultaneity, and sequentiality. Ibid., 141–42.

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9 auditory democracy: separation of powers and the locations of listening John Uhr

The connections of the ear with vital and outgoing thought and emotion are immensely closer and more varied than those of the eye. Vision is a spectator; hearing is a participator. —John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems1

This chapter investigates political listening as an aspect of institutional design neglected in most investigations of democracy and public deliberation. Much of the contemporary interest in democratic deliberation derives from theories of deliberative democracy, which tend to focus on forms of public participation associated with “speaking up” rather than “listening in.” My aim is to revise conventional accounts of deliberative democracy by balancing the prevailing focus on political speech with analysis of the neglected place of political listening and its several locations. I acknowledge two caveats. First, theories of deliberative democracy, despite their current prominence in political theory, are not the sole or necessarily the best treatment of democratic deliberation. For example, many practices of democratic deliberation take a rhetorical form, which baffles many deliberative theorists who favor models of direct rational discourse. By contrast, I consider political rhetoric as part and parcel of political deliberation, as important to effective political listening as it is to effective political speech, and an important shaper of the contours of a 1. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 1991), 218–19. Consider Yaron Ezrahi, “Dewey’s Critique of Democratic Visual Culture and Its Political Implications,” chapter 10 in Sites of Vision: The Discursive Construction of Sight in the History of Philosophy, ed. D. M. Levin (Cambridge: The MIT Press 1997), 315–36.

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democratic public sphere.2 Second, my reworking of separation of powers themes looks backward, not forward, opening up for reconsideration the historical framework of liberal democracy rather than directly opening up future possibilities for “talking democracy.” But historical analysis can help clarify future options. My aim is to provide a richer picture of the institutional design behind liberal democracy so that we better appreciate the range of options facing those interested in promoting more effective democratic deliberation, including the contribution of political listening to the vitality of a democratic public sphere. My chapter reviews separation of powers doctrines to recover an original liberal expectation about the importance of the institutional setting for political listening in the constitution of liberal democracy. My account of liberal expectations draws on the contributions of Hobbes, Locke, and Montesquieu to liberal constitutionalism. The concept of “auditory democracy” tries to capture the self-understanding of these classic advocates of liberal democracy. Regimes of auditory democracy contain several locations of listening. This concept acknowledges the role of the people as auditors, delegating governing powers to their political representatives over whom they retain important levers of audit and accountability. This approach also points to the role of political representatives and official decision makers as listeners across the horizontal separation of powers of governmental institutions and through the vertical division of powers separating representatives from the people they claim to represent.

deliberation and listening As an idealized account of liberal democracy, the institutional design for the separation of governmental powers contains two phases of separation. First, there is an initial separation of the general powers of government from the many to the few: from the body of those represented to the few who exercise powers as their representatives. Second, there is the separation of the powers of government into three distinct branches: the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary. My argument is that influential

2. John Uhr, “Political Leadership and Rhetoric,” in Australia Reshaped, ed. G. Brennan and F. G. Castles (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 261–94. See also John Uhr, Deliberative Democracy in Australia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 13–29.

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advocates of liberal democracy devised an institutional design to promote two corresponding forms or locations of political listening. The two forms can be thought of as complementary structures of political communication, one vertical and one horizontal, with each location involving twoway flows of listening. The first is listening within the political elite across the three branches of government when managing power-sharing and overlapping responsibilities of office. I note later that the role for the people is here confined to a mode of accountability as watchfulness. The second is listening by the people to their representatives to determine broader public accountabilities, including obligations of representatives to listen to those represented. The mode of the people here is a more active one of accountability as attentiveness. The concept of auditory democracy identifies the important contribution of both forms of political listening to the practical operation of representative democracy. This chapter provides an exposition of the place of practices of political listening based on liberal-democratic theory. My aim is to reveal aspects of liberal self-understanding of the role of political listening rather than to evaluate contemporary performances of auditory democracy. There is, however, an interesting link to contemporary practices of liberal governance to the extent that my reconstruction of liberal expectations matches many strategies of rule analyzed by “governmentality” scholars inspired by Foucault. Take the prominent example of Nikolas Rose, who in a recent book subtitled “reframing political thought,” examines the important contribution to liberal governance of public authorities that drill citizens in various forms of civic attentiveness.3 His examples include traditional state activities such as citizenship training as well as more recent neoliberal state activities such as employment training and welfare assistance. Liberal-democratic rule enlists many public agencies responsible for “controlling, regulating, shaping, mastering or exercising authority over others.” Public authorities listen to the populations subject to their control and devise “schemes, programs, techniques and devices which seek to shape conduct,” including the conduct of taking note of what public authorities say about appropriate civic conduct. Government shapes society by shaping citizens through a regime of “citizen-forming devices.” Listening to social expectations is an important social discipline basic to the liberal construction of “sociality.”4 3. Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 4. Ibid., 15, 18, 20, 46.

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My approach draws attention to aspects of political listening missing in theories of deliberative democracy or practices attributed to liberal “governmentality.” Political deliberation involves quite extensive exercises in listening: by different sets of public officials within government, by government to different sets of interested civic groups, and by the public to their political representatives. The literature on deliberative democracy can be improved by bridging the gap between contemporary accounts of speech-based political participation and original expectations for listeningbased forms of political participation. For its part, the “governmentality” school provides excellent maps of the rulers’ techniques for getting the attention of citizens but few guides to liberal expectations of political listening within the state and by state officials to their subject populations. In contrast to the top-down surveillance theme prominent in “governmentality” studies, I reveal a bottom-up watchfulness consistent with democratic accountability. I go further to show how separation of powers was expected to transform popular watchfulness into a bridge of liberal attentiveness between the people and their representatives, each listening to and being restrained by the other. I begin by revisiting the original objections to public talk of democracy, expressed with characteristic vigor by Thomas Hobbes, at the time of the original development of the theory of modern representative government. Hobbes is rightly regarded as one of the forerunners of liberalism: his close treatment of individual equality in the state of nature and of the comprehensive and undivided powers of the sovereign to promote civil peace are basic constructs in the liberal state. Hobbes provides us with the classic pre–separation of powers case for the importance of political listening, namely, civic listening to the teachings of the sovereign. Then I will briefly review Locke’s reworking of the powers of a sovereign government in his response to Hobbes’s case for undivided sovereignty, to demonstrate a version of representative government that gives greater value to the power of popular sovereignty and opens the door to the possibility of institutional arrangements that rework from bottom to top the pathology of political listening. Accordingly, Locke substitutes watchfulness for Hobbes’s fearfulness as the listening mode expected of the people. A companion section reviews Montesquieu’s contribution to political listening through his influential “doctrine” of the separation of powers, involving an additional separation between the two political powers and an independent, impartial judiciary. Montesquieu elevates Locke’s watchfulness into a more active form of listening as attentiveness. The impor-

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tance of judicial independence is that this power has special capacity to make citizens pay attention and listen, particularly when those exercising judicial power are seen as impartially applying “the law” when arbitrating conflicts over rights. In conclusion, I return to the contemporary debate over deliberative options and suggest that the field of political listening is misunderstood by both political realists and democratic idealists and worth attending to, as one way of revitalizing our understanding of the function of political auditing in schemes of democratic accountability.

auditing and accountability While hearing might well be a natural activity, listening is more of a learned one.5 In politics as in many other areas of life, individuals learn how to listen and respond to only the most relevant of those many matters of which they hear. For democratic theorists, this distinction between the general case of hearing and the more specific case of listening raises interesting questions about how democratic regimes can and should structure political communication to promote the listening as well as the talking side of public deliberation. One wonders whether in the political sphere there are distinctive practices and institutions capable of assisting the civic listening process; and whether one can construct a model, not simply of a listening government, but more democratically, of a listening polity inspired by recent philosophical investigation of “the listening self.”6 This question is rarely asked by deliberative theorists, and this neglect feeds the cynical reaction to the ideal of free and equal civic deliberation that surfaces in the query: “Just who is supposed to be doing all the listening?” in the envisaged new world of open public deliberation. The skeptics do have a point, especially in their challenge to the champions of deliberative democracy to identify just who they think is really doing the listening in their envisaged ideal of community deliberation 5. Consider Dianne Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses (Visalia, Calif.: Vintage, 1990), 175–225; Michael Billig, Arguing and Thinking: A Rhetorical Approach to Social Psychology, 2d ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); D. Idhe, Listening and Voice: The Phenomenology of Sound (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1977); Coraddi Gemma Fiumara, The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening (New York: Routledge, 1990); and Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places (New York: Free Press, 1963), 193–215. 6. David M. Levin, The Listening Self (New York: Routledge, 1989), 15–18, 29–35, 83–89, 186–204. See also Fiumara, The Other Side of Language, 28–51.

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culminating in public reason.7 The skeptics are able to present themselves as realists who appreciate the practicalities of democratic government, particularly the practical importance of governing elites managing fortunes of liberal-democratic regimes. Some of the skeptics fail to be persuaded that representative government was ever really intended to allow greater public deliberation in government decision making. Here they can enlist a long tradition of elite theorists who have been friends to liberal constitutionalism but never really enthusiasts of democratic ideals. In this tradition, democracy is itself a rhetorical ploy, used by governing elites to keep the people on their side as beneficiaries of rule through a constitutional system of elite accommodation.8 The ruling elites are certainly capable of taking note of public discussion but it is doubtful that they ever really listen to the people. Despite these misgivings, the tradition of political inquiry has long maintained an interest in political listening. In particular, students of political rhetoric have long been interested in the importance of listening, but very little of this scholarship has found its way into the research agenda on deliberative democracy.9 This chapter provides an opportunity to build on this historical interest in the arts of listening to reinterpret the contribution of the separation of powers in terms of the promotion of political lis-

7. See John Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Michael Saward, ed., Democratic Innovations (New York: Routledge, 2000); John Ferejohn, “Instituting Deliberative Democracy,” chapter 3 in Nomos XLII: Designing Democratic Institutions, ed. Ian Shapiro and Stephen Macedo (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 75–104; Bruce Brower, “The Limits of Public Reason,” Journal of Philosophy 91 (January 1994): 5–26; Thomas Christiano, “Deliberative Equality and Democratic Order,” in Political Order, ed. Ian Shapiro and Russell Hardin (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 251–87; Mark Warren, “Deliberative Democracy and Authority,” American Political Science Review 90, no. 1 (1996): 46–60; C. B. Macpherson, Democratic Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973); Norberto Bobbio, Democracy and Dictatorship (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989); Robert Dahl, On Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), and “On Deliberative Democracy,” Dissent, Summer 1997, 54–58. 8. J. G. March and J. Olsen, Democratic Governance (New York: Free Press, 1995), 49–89; Ian Budge, The New Challenge of Direct Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996). The classic account of elitism is J. A. Schumpter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1942). See also Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class (New York: MacGraw-Hill, 1939), and Robert Michels, Political Parties (New Yor: Collier, 1962). 9. See, for example, Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric (London: Penguin, 1991), 1.2–1.15; Plutarch, “On Listening,” in Essays, ed. Ian Kidd (London: Penguin, 1992); Billig, Arguing and Thinking, 81–111; and K. Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), particularly 49–69.

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tening. Only recently have political analysts begun to investigate the listening side of democratic political life, but so far none has noticed the importance of political listening in the institutional arrangements for the separation of powers.10 Others have focused more directly on the arts of political rhetoric required of political participants in the deliberative process. My contribution here is to focus on the institutional underpinning of political listening revealed through the separation of powers. For the most part, the separation of powers is understood as a device to promote accountable government by enlisting each branch of government as a check and balance against the political pretensions of the other two. This is correct as far as it goes, but I contend that effective democratic accountability requires more than a mechanistic balance within the system of government of three equally weighted political forces. In democratic regimes, public accountability also arises out of processes of public listening where the people exercise their sovereignty in the manner they listen and respond to the political justifications from each branch of government. Thus, a novel view of political auditing can provide us with a fresh understanding of the place of public accounting in democratic regimes. The concept of auditory democracy draws attention to various locations of listening that are important to the effective functioning of modern democracy.11 My review of the institutional design for listening associated with the separation of powers doctrine highlights the many forms of political listening favored by the articulators of this doctrine. It is not simply a case of government listening to the people but more interestingly of the different institutions of government being forced to listen to one another. Thus, auditory democracy provides a fresh interpretation of democratic accountability that can point us to the locations where political listening plays its important part in promoting liberal-democratic government.

10. Notably Susan Bickford, The Dissonance of Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), particularly 141–73; see also Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 163–212, and Deborah Tannen, The Argument Culture (London: Virago, 1998), 215–43. 11. As noticed, for example, by Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond, 147–57; James Tully, Strange Multipliciticy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 131–33; Lisa Jane Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 210–21; Arlene Saxonhouse, Athenian Democracy: Modern Mythmakers and Ancient Theorists (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), 59–86; and Iris Marion Young, “Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy,” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Selya Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 120–35.

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listening to the sovereign Hobbes is important to the development of liberalism because he made prominent three of the most basic topics of the later liberal state: individual equality, representative government, and political sovereignty. Liberalism can live without democracy, and Hobbes in particular is no friend of democracy, even though he is a pioneer of systems of representative government designed to secure the legitimate rights of all citizens. Representative government as modeled by Hobbes is best served through a single sovereign limited only by its commitment to comply with Hobbes’s rendition of natural law, with novel expectations of the constitutional limits restraining the power and might of the sovereign. For Hobbes, the mode of political listening expected of the people is really one of fearfulness, based on the one-way path of accountability they owe to the sovereign. Hobbes’s compatibility with liberalism makes his antidemocratic orientation all the more relevant to this chapter. Hobbes takes democracy very seriously as a political option and invests considerable energy in examining the political perils of toleration of democracy-talk. The price of tolerating open civic interest in democracy is disabled government with the potential of civil war and the surrender of sovereignty by those in positions of rule. Precisely because he takes seriously the risks to sovereignty posed by civic interest in democracy, Hobbes provides us with a considered examination of the problem of democrats who refuse to listen to the authority of the sovereign. The relevance of this examination is that it opens up the more general issue of political listening, understood by Hobbes as a basic requirement of political obligation met through compliance with the word of the sovereign. Later theorists of the liberal state were to begin to reverse this requirement to ensure that governments accepted their obligations to listen to the emerging new sovereign in the form of the people. Thus Hobbes’s account is important in clarifying the important place of political listening in representative government, even if Hobbes’s preferred arrangements were to fade along with his model of inflated and undivided sovereignty sketched in his Leviathan.12 Analysts of listening such as D. M. Levin have noted that the root meaning of “obedience” is “listening from below.”13 In some interpretations, 12. Jürgen Habermas, Theory and Practice (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1974), 62–81; Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 20–38. 13. Levin, The Listening Self, 126, 194, 224.

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such as Levin’s, this is taken to imply that effective listening is by nature inclusive, paying particular heed to muted signals emanating from marginal or peripheral sources. In this way, listening takes on an open and democratic character. For Levin, this means that political listening in democratic regimes should “facilitate the hearing of dissonance.”14 But another interpretation is more consistent with Hobbes’s antidemocratic understanding in stressing that obedience requires that the obedient many, when “listening from below,” engage in strictly focused listening to the commands of the few in political authority. For Hobbes, political listening should facilitate the hearing of a consensus in support of the sovereign. For Hobbes, democracy-talk is dangerous. In Leviathan, he identifies open talk about the virtues of democracy as one of the primary causes of civil discord. The Leviathan singles out democracy and democrats as seditious forces precisely because of their power to distract citizens from their obligation of obedience to the sovereign. Hobbes does not limit his analysis to features that make democracy a defective regime: rather, he mounts an extended attack on democracy as an unduly talkative form of political conduct by those not prepared to listen to the sovereign.15 Democrats talk too much; and because they do not attend to the natural law, they stray from their obligations to the civil law. Democrats are themselves distracted by philosophers like Aristotle, who are, or can be made to seem, friendly to popular government: “favoring tumults, and of licentious controlling the actions of their Sovereigns; and again of controlling those controllers, with the effusion of so much blood.”16 This enthusiasm for ancient republicanism separates democrats from the majority of law-abiding citizens, who have the good civic sense to pay attention to the many benefits provided by a protective sovereign. Elsewhere, Hobbes distinguishes between “the delight of hearing” taken in its natural sense and the dangers of listening, particularly when taken in the sense of listening to political advice and counsel.17 Many of Hobbes’s 14. Ibid., 197; cf. Bickford, Dissonance of Democracy, 142–45. 15. David Johnston, The Rhetoric of Leviathan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 114–33. See also G. P. Gooch, English Democratic Ideas in the 17th Century (New York: Harper, 1959), 87–117. 16. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Penguin, 1968), 267. On Aristotle’s political rhetoric, see also Bickford, Dissonance of Democracy, 41–51, and Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 343–56. On Hobbes and Aristotle, see Joseph Cropsey, “Hobbes and the Transition to Modernity,” in Political Philosophy and the Issues of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 291–314. 17. Thomas Hobbes, Human Nature, 46–47, and De Corpore Politico, 225, in Thomas

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most arresting comments about the arts of listening are found in his examination of the use and abuse of counsel.18 But when dealing with the lesser arts of listening expected of ordinary citizens, Hobbes speaks of the importance of those “artificall chains, called civil laws” fastened at one end to the lips of the holder of sovereign power “and at the other end to their own ears.”19 As a manual on governance, Leviathan works through these two levels of listening: the craft and cunning required of rulers when dealing with counselors and their temptations to attend more to their own rather than the sovereign’s interests, and the obligation of compliance incumbent upon ordinary citizens. Focusing here on the lower level of listening, we can see how closely Hobbes works at the contrast between, on the one hand, the compliant many who listen and learn and, on the other hand, the seditious democrats who talk and preach. The problem is that philosophers like Aristotle “and those democraticall writers” inspire a mistaken self-confidence in the arts of moral philosophy and thereafter in the arts of civil government.20 The solution is to discourage democracy by cutting away this trace of ancient republicanism. This attack takes two forms: by showing first that sources like Aristotle are in truth not friendly to democracy (namely, that Aristotle really favors the few who are born to rule), and second, that effects like republicanism are incompatible with the purposes and practices of representative government (their “false shew of liberty”).21 Just as ordinary citizens must be taught to listen to the sovereign authority, so too readers of Leviathan must be taught to see through “Aristotle, Cicero and other men, Greeks and Romans,” whose “books of Policy” have provided the grounds for repeated sedition. After reading Leviathan, no sovereign authority would think twice about “allowing of such books to be publickely read.”22 So what should be publicly read? Among the central thrusts of Leviathan is the lesson that the sovereign authority commands respect through the

Hobbes, Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, ed. J. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). See also Johnston, Rhetoric of Leviathan, 29–46. 18. See, for example, Hobbes, Leviathan, 302–11, 391–93; see Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 349. 19. Leviathan, 263–64; cf. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 386–90. 20. Leviathan, 370; see also Johnston, Rhetoric of Leviathan, 77–84, and Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 406–7, 418. 21. Leviathan, 211, 270. 22. Ibid., 267, 369–70. See also Habermas, Theory and Practice, 76–81.

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cultivation of listening. Hobbes outlines a comprehensive policy of public instruction that reaches from the few in the universities to the many in the schools and churches. Consistent with his commitment to representative government, Hobbes uses this strategy of public instruction to shape the citizenry as compliant listeners who can learn their civic obligations through frequent attention to the political teachings inspired by the sovereign and broadcast by his many instruments of instruction. In outlining the “office of the sovereign representative,” Hobbes reveals his comprehensive policy of public instruction.23 If Leviathan itself is addressed to the talented few who can read for themselves, Hobbes turns their attention to their civic responsibility for the many who prefer to listen to others who can thereby engage in “the instruction of the people in their fundamental rights.” Hobbes outlines his agenda of public instruction, which involves gathering the people conveniently together in their various assemblies to “hear those their duties told them.”24 The very image of the artificial man presented in Leviathan captures the importance of political listening. In Hobbes’s account of his all-seeing sovereign, much of the work of monitoring is entrusted to “publique ministers.”25 Hobbes suggests that these ministerial agents of the sovereign “may be compared to an eye in the body naturall.” This prompts the question: which public office in this artificial body-politic best compares with the natural ears? Through what political orifice does the sovereign obtain intelligence about public opinion? Hobbes’s answer is that “the public eare” is found in those ministers “appointed to receive the petitions and other informations of the people.”26 The Leviathan says little directly about how the sovereign engages and deploys these listening rods. What is clearer is that only through actively listening to the public mood, including the mood for democracy, can the sovereign begin to command the public’s attention. As we have seen, the Leviathan has more to say about the cultural counterattack; but one of the limits of Hobbes’s fascinating strategy is that it rests on a very traditional view of the unified and undivided power of the ruling sovereign. Hobbes’s approach to political listening reflects the limits of his preliberal view of governance. From the perspective of later liberalism, one 23. Leviathan, chap. 30, 376–94. See also M. M. Goldsmith, Hobbes’s Science of Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 214–27. 24. Leviathan, 379, 381. 25. Ibid., chap. 22, 289–94. 26. Ibid., 294; see also Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 388–90.

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important limit is the absence of any scheme for the separation of powers of government. Hobbes, of course, sees things differently, as is evident from his insistence that the sovereign authority never be divided.27 Leviathan elides many of the divisions between public and private, church and state, government and society. Many of Hobbes’s successors accepted his commitment to representative government yet balked at his retention of the vast apparatus of undivided sovereignty. The next great step in the development of democracy and political listening occurred when successors like John Locke reworked Hobbes’s concept of undivided sovereignty from an organizing principle of governmental power to a constitutive principle of political society. Locke turned sovereignty on its head, investing it with the authority of popular sovereignty in order to construct a new model of political society based on a division of governmental power into several branches. The people as fearful listener to an undivided sovereign become the people as watchful listener to a government of separated powers. This is part of the early construction of the modern separation of powers doctrine, to which we turn to see the important elaboration of political listening in a new environment of liberal constitutionalism.28

popular sovereignty and separated powers Locke’s political theory is commonly regarded as one of the most influential steps on the liberal road to constitutional democracy. Even Locke’s astutest critics find a valuable richness in his presentation of arguments for representative political institutions based on popular sovereignty.29 But less well appreciated is Locke’s general interest in systems of separate institutions to manage political power, which is an important precondition of the more formal separation of political powers articulated in part by Montesquieu and in whole by Publius when jettisoning parliamentary models of political representation.30 27. See, for example, Leviathan, 368, 372; see also Barry Hindess, Discourses of Power (Williston, Vt.: Blackwell, 1996), 35–40. 28. M.J.C. Vile, Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 58–67; cf. Manent, Intellectual History of Liberalism, 39–52. See, for contrasting recent accounts, Harvey Mansfield, Jr., Taming the Prince (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 181–246, and Geoffrey Brennan and Alan Hamlin, Democratic Devices and Desires (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 211–32. 29. See, for example, Macpherson, Democratic Theory, 25–31, 228–33. 30. But consider Julian H. Franklin, John Locke and the Theory of Sovereignty (New York:

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Our concern here is with Locke’s approach to the structure of government, and this concern reflects the standard view of the separation of powers as an aspect of the evolving “body of organizational prescriptions” about structures of government.31 But Locke’s contribution to the developing understanding of forms of government is only one aspect of his contribution to the analysis of power as a feature of civil society. My analysis here follows the contours of Locke’s treatment of the separation of political powers and is confined to his more directly institutional analysis of political order. Other commentators like Barry Hindess have drawn attention to other and perhaps more fundamental aspects of Locke’s analysis of power, such as his account in the Essay of Human Understanding of the “law of opinion or reputation” through a carefully structured regime of civil consensus, where social conformity arises through compliance with social opinion.32 Locke’s understanding of the constitution of civil society goes well beyond the formal institutional structures to include the subtle arts of rule, including the rule of political rhetoric, upholding the prevailing social powers of particular regimes. This subtle form of social regulation involves a concentration of power to comply with shared support for socially approved types of civil conduct. This social concentration of power is consistent with a formal legal separation of governmental power because both strategies promote a liberal regime, the first by cultivating support for a liberal model of citizenship and the second by restraining and limiting government to comply with liberal means and ends. A complete account of Locke’s theory of power relationships would have to include the ruling arts of what Locke called moral relations as well as the formal structures examined here. With this qualification, we turn now to Locke’s Second Treatise, the standard text dealing with the formal structures of political power.33 Locke Cambridge University Press, 1978), 87–126; Richard Ashcraft, Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (London: Unwin Hyman, 1987), 151–95; Geraint Parry, John Locke (St. Leonards, N.S.W.: Allen and Unwin, 1978), 110–47. 31. See, for example, William B. Gwyn, “The Separation of Powers and Modern Forms of Democratic Government,” in Separation of Powers—Does it Still Work? ed. R. A. Goldwin and A. Kaufman (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1986), 65–89. 32. Hindess, Discourses of Power, particularly 58–63. See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), particularly 348–60. On state-sponsored political listening, see also Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), particularly 32–34. 33. “Second Treaties of Government,” in John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Denver: Mentor Books, 1963), 305–477. Citations in the text are to the paragraphs as numbered in the Laslett edition.

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adopts much of Hobbes’s understanding of the natural equality of humankind in the prepolitical state of nature. But Locke renders this picture more attractive by not drawing immediate attention to the impediments to individual liberty in this prepolitical state. One feature of the natural condition is that prepolitical humanity draws on a merged set of legislative and executive powers. In sketching the transition to political society, Locke suggests that one of the most troublesome aspects of the natural condition is this defective set of self-regulatory powers. What exists in a merged state in natural society is then separated into distinct institutions in political society. The importance of this separation of powers and institutions is that it forces holders of legislative and executive power to watch over each other’s institutions, in the knowledge that at the same time both are under the watchful eye of public scrutiny. The two political institutions then have an incentive to hold each other to public account by testing the value of what each contributes to the public interest. In particular, the sovereign people can listen more attentively to detect evidence that either branch of power is allowing inappropriate individual interests to dominate their use of political office. Locke’s description of the state of nature shows the instability of the merged powers wielded by individuals and the need for some sort of separation between individual and public interests. The separation of legislative and executive powers serves as a precaution against misplaced individual interest. The first political capacity highlighted by Locke is the natural right that all individuals have to exercise “a power to execute” offenders of the natural law (par. 7). Locke admits that “this strange doctrine” means that by natural right individuals are empowered to become “executioner[s] of the law of nature”—so long as their individual interests in self-preferment do not get in the way of their common duty to the selfpreservation of all (pars. 4–14). But what appears to be the distinctive virtue of the state of nature (namely, this cohesive unity of legislative and executive powers) soon turns out to be a striking vice.34 Political society is constructed in part because of the need to establish reliable social arrangements where individuals will have the fewest possible opportunities to rule others according to their own interests. Like Hobbes, Locke defines the state of nature as that where there is no common judge ( pars. 19, 86). The Second Treatise contains no extended treatment of judges or judicial power, which is subsumed under 34. Parry, John Locke, 39–61.

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the executive power as an important form of implementing the law. But judicial impartiality is used as the standard to condemn the behavior of most individuals in the state of nature. Political society emerges as an inevitable restraint on “the partiality and violence of men”—including the very real possibility of individuals being judges in their own causes: a condition that robs the state of nature of its potential natural advantages (par. 13). Natural society is severely limited by this lack of judges capable of “an unbiassed application” of natural law ( par. 20). Locke’s contrast between the naturally merged and politically separated arrangements of power is his contribution to the separation of powers doctrine. The defect of the merged set of powers is that individuals succumb to the temptation to be lawmaker and judge of their own interests. This defective but natural partiality can be overcome in political society if individuals are prepared to separate the two core institutions responsible for legislative and executive power. A result of this separation is that each institution will be on guard against the undue sway of the other institution and both institutions will be under the scrutiny of the sovereign public to whom both are accountable. The people listen in their mode of watchfulness, expecting government committed to the promotion of civil liberty but fearful of breaches of public trust. Thus for Locke, accountability becomes the conduit of political listening.35 The implication from Locke’s presentation is that the contrived tension between legislators and executives in political society has the potential to become creative and productive. But this will only occur if and when both realize that the sovereign people hold ultimate power to judge the performance of both sets of institutions. To exaggerate for effect, Locke’s rendition of deliberative democracy rests on the capacity of the sovereign people to listen to and judge the public argument from holders of legislative and executive power about the policy and institutional implications of their changing balance of power. Locke is more explicit than Hobbes about the role of public accountability in the operations of representative government. Accountability emerges as the counterbalance to responsibility: the responsibilities exercised by the holders of legislative and executive powers are kept in check by the accountability that both owe to the sovereign people. Accountability is delivered through the giving of accounts by officeholders to the people whom they are placed in positions of public trust to represent. Accountability is first identified in terms of the obligations of answerability that 35. Mansfield, Taming the Prince, 181–93.

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individuals owe to “the rest of mankind” for letting personal partiality undermine public interest (par. 13). It is most elaborated in terms of the accountability that government ministers owe to the legislative body to explain and justify the manner in which they discharge executive responsibilities (pars. 151–52). Accountability is thus in many ways a matter of words designed for listening: words given by those under obligations of accountability and words given back by those responsible for taking account. Although Locke has nothing explicit to say in the Second Treatise about the role of political listening, we can now see how his focus on accountability makes prominent the place of political listening in generating accountable government. Judges are commonly taken as models of accountability. Hobbes’s Leviathan has much of interest to say about the performance of judicial hearings, which, at their best, seem to model institutional listening.36 Locke’s characteristic focus is not on judicial proceedings but on the capacity of the people to act as judge: provisionally in relation to the establishment of political society, operationally as agents of accountability supervising the holders of legislative and executive power, and ultimately as judge of the fateful decision to dissolve political society in the event that legislative or executive powerholders have systematically broken their public trust.37 The separation of powers is introduced as part of Locke’s criticism of those rulers who unite “both legislative and executive power” and who therefore cannot be expected to decide things “fairly, and indifferently” (pars. 91, 125, 127). Political society is characterized by the support of individuals for a system of legislative power to regulate social exchanges and a system of executive power to punish infractions of the authorized rules (pars. 129–30). Locke develops this orientation to the separation of powers in three stages. First, through an initial stage separating the sovereign people and the holders of legislative power who need reminders that they are not a separate class with distinct interests but representatives of the people. Second, through an institutional separation between legislative and executive powers highlighting the distinctive governance capacities of political prudence to be deployed by the executive, including the federative powers of war and peace. And third, through a separation between basic 36. See, for example, Leviathan, 325, 328–29, 372–73. 37. Franklin, John Locke and the Theory of Sovereignty, 87–98; Grant, John Locke’s Liberalism, 66–72; James Tully, A Discourse on Property (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 170–74.

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executions of the law and a higher duty associated with executive “dispatch” (par. 160), particularly those extraordinary exercises of discretionary prerogatives to protect the community against unforeseen circumstances—in Locke’s words, the “power of doing publick good without a rule” (par. 164; see also pars. 161, 168).38 In the context of later developments in this constitutional doctrine, it is important to recognize that Locke’s approach does not turn on what he terms the “encroachments” of one power on another (par. 163). This is so because Locke is not that interested in any permanent articulation of distinct spheres of legislative and executive powers: he views both sets of powers as instrumental and variable.39 The sovereign people are capable of permitting a wide range of institutional configurations that will vary with circumstances: the test of degree of separation relates primarily to the people’s judgment about what arrangement best promotes the security of their rights and liberties. In practice, that arrangement is best which allows the holders of legislative and executive power to satisfy the legitimate demands of accountability raised by the sovereign people. Thus the degree of institutional separation rests ideally on the state of the dialogue between powerholders and the people. Again in marked contrast to Hobbes and the mode of popular fearfulness, Locke advocates a mode of popular watchfulness consistent with the sovereign power of the people. Given that the “people alone can appoint the form of the government,” it follows that the precise form varies with the location of the legislative power. Forms of government vary, depending on “the placing of the supreme power, which is the legislative” (pars. 141, 132).40 The people (or “the community”) alone have the constitutive power to reallocate the legislative power out of one set of hands into another whenever they judge that the legislative power has betrayed its trust and that government is therefore dissolved (pars. 149; 212–17, 226, 240). So long as the system of government subsists, “the legislative is the supream power” (pars. 150, 157). Supreme does not imply boundless or formless. Consistent with his interpretation of the nature and limits of representative government, Locke 38. Compare the three stages or levels presented by James W. Caeser, “In Defense of Separation of Powers,” in Goldwin and Kaufman, Separation of Powers, 174–78. Note also Locke’s contemporary relevance as presented in Peter L. Schultz, “The Separation of Powers and Foreign Affairs,” in ibid., 118–37. 39. Parry, John Locke, 124–45; Manent, Intellectual History of Liberalism, 49–52. 40. Caeser, “In Defense of Separation of Powers,” 176–77; cf. Tully, Discourse on Property, 158–61.

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identifies a range of limitations on the manner and form of legislative power associated with due process. Four prominent limitations are the illegitimacy of arbitrary rulemaking, the importance of relying on “settled standing laws,” the rule of revenue that taxation may only be raised through formal majority decision, and the prohibition on the subdelegation of legislative power to a new body of legislators (pars. 137, 140–41). Nor does supreme in principle mean sole institution in practice. Locke’s realistic understanding of the separation of powers is also evident in his acknowledgement of the other claimants for the title of supreme power. For instance, executive power is also held by a single person as in the case of the English monarch, who “in a very tolerable sense may also be called supream” (in the sense that he is the “supreme executor of the law”). This is because he exercises power with no superior legislative power, other than the one which requires his participation for its own effect (par. 151). This version of the separation of powers grants the sovereign people authority to establish a range of powerholders capable of sharing in this popular supremacy because they share in representing the public interest. The acknowledgement of the supremacy of a crown is but the first of a series of acknowledgements that Locke makes of other equally supreme powerholders.41 Two forms of executive power that can claim supremacy are the federative power relevant to war and peace and the prerogative power in relation to unforeseen emergencies (pars. 146–48, 158–68). Locke’s version of the separation of powers turns on this division between the procedural formalities of the legislative function and the prudential informalities and indeed abnormalities of the executive function. But both are responsible for promoting the public interest and both are restrained by their obligations of accountability to the sovereign people: both have good reasons to listen closely to the people, and the people have even better reasons to listen closely to official explanations of the carriage of legislative and executive power. Institutionally, the most significant aspect of Locke’s approach is the separation of executive responsibilities from the sphere of legislative activities. This separation establishes the legitimacy of an executive office as a more permanent body than the legislative body. The justification is again in terms of freeing legislators from the temptations to confuse personal with public interest, or to try to exempt themselves from compliance with 41. J. Stoner Jr., Common Law and Liberal Theory (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1992), 145–48.

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their own laws. Locke is especially attentive to the problem that the understandable interest in “private advantage” can activate legislators to “a distinct interest from the rest of the community, contrary to the end of society and government” (at par. 143; cf. par. 138). This requirement for the holders of the legislative power to abide by a general rather than a specific interest means that the legislative power should be exercised only from time to time when legislators need to assemble. Legislative power is meant to be used “for all the parts and for every member of the society” (par. 150). Any use of executive power to erect or “promote an interest distinct from that of the publick” is illegitimate ( par. 164). From this lack of permanency, Locke constructs a separate and permanent executive establishment, separate but equal in stature to the legislative body because of the shared accountability to the sovereign people.

formulating a fair hearing Montesquieu is well known as advocating the forerunner of the separation of powers doctrine that found its first practical expression in the U.S. Constitution. In The Federalist Papers, Publius acknowledges the primary importance of “the celebrated Montesquieu” as “the oracle who is always cited and consulted” on the separation of powers, which itself is described as “the celebrated maxim of this celebrated author.”42 In this section, I highlight the place of political listening in Montesquieu’s account of the separation of powers in The Spirit of the Laws.43 Central to Montesquieu’s contribution is the separation of judicial power from the two political powers in the legislative and executive spheres. This brings forward two avenues of political listening: a political avenue with relationships between citizens and their political representatives, and a legal avenue protecting citizens rights to fair hearings from public authorities, which themselves have special responsibilities to listen closely to civic complaints about threatened rights. 42. The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rossiter (Denver: Mentor Books, 1961), 301, 303. See on Montesquieu on the extended republic: 73–76, 275, 277–82. And on Montesquieu and an independent judiciary: 465–66. See also Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1965), 148–53, 155. On Arendt on political listening, see Bickford, Dissonance of Democracy, 55–93 43. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. and ed. Anne Cohler, Basia Miller, and Harold Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

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I make no specific claim that Publius or the other framers followed the precise line on listening developed by Montesquieu in the wake of early developments by Hobbes and Locke. But I contend that the constitutional architecture of the U.S. political system is consistent with Montesquieu’s approach in reserving an important place for various forms of political listening as essential ingredients in liberal representative government. Montesquieu features in The Federalist Papers in three celebrated ways: generally as a defender of the ideal of the small republic, most obviously as deviser of the separation of powers doctrine, and least obviously as the architect of an independent judiciary.44 My focus here is on the more specific second and third of these three. Locke’s distinctive contribution to political listening comes through his reminder to governments of the revolutionary costs of not heeding the ultimate power of the sovereign people. With Montesquieu, the focus shifts away from popular sovereignty and the rights of revolution to judicial independence and the right to a fair hearing. In Montesquieu’s words: “The masterwork of legislation is to know where properly to place the power of judging” (Spirit of the Laws, 2.11.11, p. 169). But Montesquieu’s own masterwork is itself difficult to master. Readers search and do not always find the so-called doctrine about the separation of powers. Jeremy Bentham, for instance, was a warm advocate of democracy but he had little time for political or literary rhetoric. Bentham’s attack on Montesquieu’s “pseudo-metaphysical sophistry” in The Spirit of the Laws illustrates a more general suspicion of Montesquieu’s rhetorical indirectness and lack of clearly discernible doctrine.45 This is useful to remember when trying to identify exactly what Montesquieu means by what almost all commentators term the “doctrine” of the separation of powers. Perhaps Bentham had a point: discovering Montesquieu’s doctrine on anything is extremely difficult. This is a salutary warning about the importance of not approaching The Spirit of the Laws with the expectation of finding a hard and fast doctrine about the separation of three powerful institutions. Montesquieu’s account of the separation of powers occurs in the context of his elaboration of the constitutional setting for political liberty. Montesquieu identifies “three sorts of power,” which resemble, but are institutionalized somewhat more firmly than, Locke’s earlier set of pow44. See Rossitor, Federalist Papers. 45. Jeremy Bentham, A Fragment on Government (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 56.

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ers. The legislative power is put alongside the two forms of executive power, one in relation to “the right of nations” and another identifying a separate power of “civil right,” which is also called “the power of judging” (2.11.6, pp. 7–8). But missing from Montesquieu’s presentation is any solid “doctrine” about the ideal relationship among these powers. The precise degree of separation among the three powers varies according to the historical nature of the particular regime and the intensity of commitment to the principle of liberty. Liberty requires the protection of powerful institutions but “is present only when power is not abused.” Montesquieu approaches the promotion of liberty through a systematic strategy to prevent abuses of power: and this strategy rests on the belief that “power must check power by the arrangement of things” (2.11.4). Checking requires linked relationships among institutions rather than separate, isolated institutions. Montesquieu’s account emphasizes the variety and flexibility among these possible relationships, suggesting that his interest is less in doctrinal purity and more in what we would now call institutional design.46 When interpreting the meaning of the separation of powers, Montesquieu’s context is as important as the content. For Montesquieu, the investigation of the formal constitution of political liberty is a companion piece to his subsequent review of the informal constituents of civil society that promote the individual liberty of the citizen (2.11 and 2.12). Thus the treatment of the separation of powers is part of a larger whole dealing with the two levels of liberty: the political and the personal. While it is true that personal civic liberty presupposes the political liberty of a free state, Montesquieu is far from doctrinaire about the so-called doctrine of the separation of powers. His innovative if measured praise of a commercial society suggests that the civic environment is just as important for the promotion of personal liberty as the legal infrastructure. In this way, Montesquieu is attracted to something very like Locke’s “law of reputation” as a power of social cohesion to promote the liberal virtues of commercial civility. Further, Montesquieu admits that the three structural powers may be well distributed in relation to the liberty of the constitution but not the liberty of the citizen (2.11.18, p. 182). The relevance of the English constitution is that it illustrates the reverse side of this view: that it is possible to secure the liberty of the citizen in what appears to be a system of monar46. Vile, Constitutionalism, 76–97; Stoner, Common Law and Liberal Theory, 152–54; Mansfield, Taming the Prince, 237–38. On institutional design, see R. E. Goodin, ed., The Theory of Institutional Design (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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chic absolutism. The secret is that there can be an effective arrangement for the separation of powers even in the absence of a clear constitutional arrangement specifying a free state. To use one of Montesquieu’s classic distinctions (1.3.1, p. 21), the nature of the English constitution derives from its formal institutions, whereas the principle of the English constitution stems from its driving force, which is its spirit of commercialism and the two favored enterprise zones of a free economy and a free culture.47 Like Locke, Montesquieu’s separated powers are intended ideally to work in the environment of a social consensus favoring commercial civility. Thus the structural arrangements for the separation of powers occupy the middle ground between nature and principle. Montesquieu locates the English constitution within the long historical context of popular governments. England stands out as a model of popular government because it is a free state organized around a constitution that, despite its monarchical form, has developed a degree of separated powers that is more effective in promoting individual liberty than earlier and avowedly popular regimes. Montesquieu’s relevance to modern democracy stems from his insistence that the English constitution is compatible with the virtues of democracy while being free of democracy’s persistent vices. He understands democracy as a regime with popular sovereignty, the nature of which may vary but the defining principle of which remains constant: variously identified as the warm virtue of public spiritedness or the cooler virtue of personal civility (1.2.1–2, pp. 10, 21). Montesquieu refers to a commitment to “the public interest” rather than to moral excellence as such. This civic virtue is not so much the love of the good as the “love of the laws and the homeland” (1.3.3, pp. 22–24; 1.3.4, pp. 35–36). In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu is open to democracy but is convinced that the power of the people as practiced in ancient democracies was never really compatible with the liberty of the people, which is his chief preoccupation and that which makes him one of the classic theorists of liberal constitutionalism.48 Montesquieu defines political liberty in terms of “the tranquillity of spirit which comes from the opinion each has of his security.” One implication is that forms of government are judged primarily not by their internal organization but more fundamentally by reference to one primary effect: 47. Manent, Intellectual History of Liberalism, 60; Pangle, Montesquieu’s Philosophy of Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 146–60. 48. Arendt, On Revolution, 148–49; Manent, Intellectual History of Liberalism, 62–63; Stoner, Common Law and Liberal Theory, 159–61; Mansfield, Taming the Prince, 213–30.

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the absence of fear among citizens, or more positively, the growth of civic confidence in individual security (2.11.6; 2.12.1–2).49 The defect of ancient republics was in large part an institutional defect: the unity in popular hands of the two powers of “judge and accuser at the same time” (164; cf. 2.11.11–19). This example helps explain Montesquieu’s curious interest in “the power of judging” rather than the power of the judiciary. He is searching for ways of taking the power of judging away from the people’s political representatives and protecting its integrity against the predictable institutional interests of legislative and executive officers. Although he concedes that the people or “persons drawn from the body of the people” are capable of exercising “the power of judging” in juries, this is only one aspect of judicial power (2.11.6, p. 158). The history of ancient democracy shows that the people are too easily swayed by and blindly follow the political accusations of their political representatives. As a consequence of the widespread political injustices associated with popular government, a free people needs to learn to see and hear those entrusted with the power of judging as nonpolitical and therefore impartial public decision makers—public officials capable of listening to their grievances, to whom they in turn should listen. Is it feasible to reconstitute political power in a democratic setting so that popular government is consistent with popular liberty? This is where the separation of powers begins to enter, as a discovery for—if not exactly of—democracy. Montesquieu emerges as one of the earliest political philosophers setting out to make democracy safe for the world, through the medium of a commercial republic regulated by the separation of powers. Democracy is good to the extent that its practice is compatible with liberty. This compatibility between democracy and liberty emerges when one appreciates the importance of a distinction between on the one hand “the power of the people” to do what they want, and on the other hand, “the liberty of the people” to do what “one should want to do” (2.11.2).50 The secret of effective constitutionalism is to ensure that there are no surplus constraints standing in the way of “the things the law does not oblige” and no missing facilities that would prevent citizens “doing the things the law permits” (2.11.4). Commerce consolidates constitutionalism. Montesquieu identifies the spirit of modern commerce as useful to political virtue even if it falls short 49. Manent, Intellectual History of Liberalism, 53–54. 50. Ibid., 55; Pangle, Montesquieu’s Philosophy of Liberalism, 55–70.

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of the higher road of moral virtue (6.29.1, p. 602).51 Commerce teaches people to listen closely to themselves, to blunt the edges of their self-interest, and to learn to share the public space of civil society as a public resource. Commercial civility can take the sting out of popular government, just as the separation of powers can bring back popular sovereignty in its safest form. Both the spirit of commercial civility and the shape of the separation of powers are prime illustrations of Montesquieu’s characteristic interest in political “moderation.” His practical ideal is a regime of moderate government, even moderately monarchical government, so long as it is open, at the bottom, to the political virtues of public-interestedness and closed, at the top, to the political vice of arbitrary rule. The moderate Montesquieu has few high expectations of political virtue, just as he has unusual tolerance for peaceful forms of individual vice. But his vision is a substantial one: of civility within nations as well as the vision of peace among liberal trading partners.52 Montesquieu’s openness to democracy is really the preamble to his more enthusiastic support for representative government as the safest carriage for popular government.53 Montesquieu concedes that, at least ideally, “the people as a body should have legislative power.” But he devotes many pages to documenting how at the practical level, the people rule best when ruling indirectly—through “their representatives” (2.11.6, p. 159). As Montesquieu states, “one of the great drawbacks of democracy” is that the people “are not at all appropriate” for discussions of public business, which is the primary responsibility of their representatives. The “people’s capacity” is limited to the choice of representatives, particularly as “every one is able to know” who among those putting themselves forward for election “sees more clearly” than the others (2.11.6, p. 160). The people’s choice is compatible with their capacity to decide “on facts that are evident to the senses” (1.2.2, p. 11).54 To use his example, the people can listen and determine who among available candidates is the one capable of seeing what has to be done: the people’s ears allow them to identify the candidate with vision. The English constitution is Montesquieu’s model of political liberty. England is the model of the people who have made the most of commerce and liberty. In his idealized account of the English constitution, Montesquieu 51. Pangle, Montesquieu’s Philosophy of Liberalism, 104–6, 200–215. 52. Thomas Pangle and Peter J Ahrensdorf, Justice Among Nations (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1999), 157–61. 53. Manin, The Principles of Representative Government, 70–74. 54. Ibid., 73–74; Manent, Intellectual History of Liberalism, 57.

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presents it as having “the form of an absolute government over the foundations of a free government” where “no citizen would fear another citizen” (2.11.6; 3.19.27, pp. 330, 332, 343). For our purposes, it is important to note that Montesquieu’s praise for the English constitution is not explained by any rigid institutional separation of powers, at least between the two political powers.55 Indeed, in relation to the two separate parts of the legislative body, Montesquieu shows each of them “chained to the other” through their shared ability to veto each other; further, these two parts are also “bound by the executive power,” which itself is “bound by the legislative power.” The distinctive quality of the English constitution is not so much separated as divided: into two sets of powers, one being an impartial judiciary that is independent of the two surprisingly interdependent political powers, which are arranged so that the legislative and executive are “forced to move in concert” (2.11.6, p. 164).56 Montesquieu’s account of checks and balances is primarily about internal divisions within the legislative body, including limited forms of judicial functions.57 The “representative body” is responsible for making the laws and also for checking “to see if those they have made have been well executed.” The representative body can also be itself separated into bodies of nobles and people with “separate views and interests,” each with “the right to check” the other. But the people’s representatives alone should have the right to initiate legislation: this “faculty of enacting” can then be balanced against the noble’s “faculty of vetoing” (2.11.6, pp. 160–61). Montesquieu’s account focuses more on the weaknesses of united powers than on the strengths of separated powers. A good illustration is his contention that there is no liberty where legislative and executive power are “united . . . in a single person or in a single body.” Under a system of united legislative and executive powers, citizens would have reason to fear for their safety from the arbitrary power of the executive. So too in a system uniting the power of judging with the other powers: the civic opinion of security requires that the power of judging be “separate” from the other two powers.58 Remember that Montesquieu’s justification for this series of 55. Vile, Constitutionalism, 83–86; Pangle, Montesquieu’s Philosophy of Liberalism, 114–17, 121–38; Manent, Intellectual History of Liberalism, 56–59; Mansfield, Taming the Prince, 230–40. 56. Vile, Constitutionalism, 95; Mansfield, Taming the Prince, 238–40. 57. See, for example, Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 2.11.6, p. 163. See also Vile, Constitutionalism, 93–95, and Mansfield, Taming the Prince, 237–38. 58. On judging as listening, see Bickford, Dissonance of Democracy, 81–93. On

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separations is importantly negative rather than positive: the ground for separated powers is not to enhance governance but to reduce civic fear. Although the legislative body should “not have the reciprocal faculty of checking the executive power,” it can exercise vital powers of accountability over executive officials. The legislative body has the right “to examine the manner in which laws it has made have been executed” and so to hold executive officers accountable “for their administration” of the laws (2.11.6, pp. 162–64). After all, ministers who are “answerable” tend then “to take the straightest road” (3.19.27, p. 330). But civil liberty requires an energetic executive to overcome the legislature’s pride in its priority of representation.59 The executive power is best exercised by a single person not drawn from the legislative body. The executive power differs from the legislative power in always being in existence; permanent existence of the legislative body would “overburden the executive power” and probably render itself corrupt. Therefore, the executive power should be responsible for convening the legislative body. Also, the executive must have “the right to check the enterprises of the legislative body.” Political executives are rightly armed with a “faculty of vetoing” in order to protect their “prerogatives,” even though the executive generally should not “enter into discussion of public business.” The executive exercises a power over action rather than deliberation: thus, the executive’s control of the army is an important illustration that in general the executive “is more concerned with action than with deliberation” (2.11.6, pp. 161–65).60 Hence, the secret of good government does not rest in the separation of powers as such. Security depends more on “the goodness of the criminal laws” than on the excellence of the political regime or on even the presence of political virtue (2.12.2, p. 188; cf. 1.3.3, pp. 22–24).61 But good criminal laws themselves grow out of a good constitution based on the separation of powers. The power of judging is distinctive because it deals with particular wills, whereas the other two powers deal with the general will. Montesquieu’s own rhetoric plays down the political power associated with judicial decision makers. He remarks that the judicial power can in a sense Montesquieu’s approach to judging, see Stoner, Common Law and Liberal Theory, 155–57; Vile, Constitutionalism, 88–90; and Pangle, Montesquieu’s Philosophy of Liberalism, 132–33. 59. Manent, Intellectual History of Liberalism, 57–58. 60. Vile, Constitutionalism, 87; cf. Pangle, Montesquieu’s Philosophy of Liberalism, 235–38. 61. Pangle, Montesquieu’s Philosophy of Liberalism, 92–97, 139–42; Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 153–57.

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be called null. He emphasizes that judges are simply “the mouth that pronounces the words of the law”; they are not one of the “visible powers” (2.11.6, pp. 158, 160, 163; cf. p. 325). Yet Montesquieu’s account of the modesty of judicial power is comparatively bold: his strategy is to restrain politics within the sphere of legislative and executive representatives by deflecting attention from the political importance of the power of judging. Nothing in The Spirit of the Laws matches this artful realignment of one of the most potent powers in a system of representative government. Montesquieu’s rhetoric on the judicial function deserves comparison with that of Hobbes and Locke. All three recognize that the classic illustration of unrepresentative government is partial judgment by self-serving holders of public power. But only Montesquieu finds a safe institutional location for public judgments about private rights—safe because separate not only from the immediate power of a sovereign people but also from the sovereign’s political representatives. This remarkable but indirect defense of the judicial function tells us much about the spirit of liberal lawfulness as envisaged by Montesquieu’s expanded version of the separation of powers.

conclusion This chapter has reviewed the development of the separation of powers doctrine by throwing new light on political listening as one of its essential but neglected ingredients. Hobbes, Locke, and Montesquieu were grand theorists of representative government. It took special circumstances and special gifts to put theory into practice, and we would have to turn to Publius’s contribution to see the next explicit step, which is the justification of a plan for concrete institutions organized around popular sovereignty and the separation of powers into three distinctive institutions. This innovation in constitutional form merits separate investigation, the aim in this chapter being limited to clarification of the place of political listening in the theoretical prehistory of liberal democracy. Similarly, it would take another chapter to trace through the later developments in U.S. constitutionalism relating to the political listening dimension of the separation of powers. Commentators like M.J.C. Vile have provided the pathway along which such an investigation might proceed.62 62. Vile, Constitutionalism, 119–75; Ann Stuart Anderson, “A 1787 Perspective on Separation of Powers,” in Goldwin and Kaufman, Separation of Powers, 138–67.

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Others like Richard E. Neustadt have drawn attention to the U.S. system of separation of powers as in fact one of “separated institutions sharing powers,” much along the lines we have seen in Montesquieu.63 Here it is more useful to take stock of three aspects of political listening that emerge from this chapter’s selective review of the origins of the separation of powers in liberal political philosophy. Again I emphasize that a comprehensive account of political listening in liberal-democratic regimes would put into wider context my focus on structures of public decision making. The modern liberal polity is itself a product of the political listening of its intellectual founders, carried on by successive rulers and ruling interests that have shaped the liberal citizenry around a set of listening skills concerning their place in the polity. I acknowledge that the original liberal understanding falls short of contemporary standards of democratic listening. Our interest here is in liberalism’s self-understanding of the importance of a limited range of constitutional structures designed to facilitate political listening within the core processes of public decision making.64 Among contemporary issues not faced by early liberal theorists are the blockages to democracy posed by concentrated media power and the challenges to traditional forms of liberal governance posed by direct democracy. If democracy means self-government, then the powers and public persuasion exercised by the media weakens the prospect of direct democracy by making it harder for the people individually to “hear themselves think” and collectively to listen to themselves. Liberal democracy is a form of indirect rather than direct democracy, with the public sphere shaped more powerfully by political establishments than by citizens themselves. Yet although the separation of powers theorists identified in this chapter had little enthusiasm for direct democracy, their contribution to a public sphere of shared political deliberation is undercut by the emergence of the media as a significant public power. Deliberative theorists like James Bohman have investigated the antidemocratic reality of the concentration of media powers in ways that deserve comparison with the idealized separation of powers examined here.65 An exemplary public sphere resembles direct democracy in its devotion to the spirit of open dialogue; in contrast, 63. Richard E. Neustadt, Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents (New York: The Free Press, 1990), 29. 64. Consider Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond, 12–20. 65. James Bohman, Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity, and Democracy (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996). See also Robert Hariman’s review of Bohman in Philosophy and Rhetoric 31 (1998): 321–26.

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media-managed publicity illustrates the established power of discourse rather than the emergent powers of dialogue, to use one of Bohman’s useful distinctions. To use another of Bohman’s terms, democratic public deliberation requires forms of political listening called “deliberative uptake,” with speaking and listening shared in equal measure by all participating citizens. This is a more contemporary version than that found in earlier separation of powers theories, consistent with the priority now accorded to the public sphere as a deliberative medium undistorted by the power of concentrated media.66 By contrast, three features of the original liberal design for political listening emerge from this chapter. First, the basic problem about political listening was originally identified by Hobbes in terms of inattentive publics. Political listening for Hobbes meant that the people had to be properly fearful of the sovereign. The root problem common to all varieties of liberalism was originally illustrated by Hobbes as the natural reluctance by individuals to acknowledge a common judge. The separation of powers arises in response to Hobbes’s own solution to this liberal problem of political order. Hobbes tried to construct a model of government built out of the diversity of discordant interests that have been reshaped into submission to a sovereign orchestrating all dimensions of political and judicial power. With Hobbes, power is aggregated rather than separated.67 The direction of political listening for Hobbes is from obedient citizen to powerful sovereign. The various formulations of the separation of powers are attempts to reconstruct political order along more liberal lines that empower the sovereign people with a greater say—and open up new channels through which governments can be made to listen. Second, Locke’s contribution opens up the possibility for both of these structural alterations: through his reconstruction of sovereignty in terms of popular power and his recognition of the separate functions of legislative and executive power. Locke’s legislators are more representative than Hobbes’s lawmaker because they are accountable to their electors, just as the holders of executive office are accountable to the body of legislators. For Locke, the pathways of political listening track those of watchful and accountable government. But Locke sufficiently respects the realities of ruling that he allows the holders of executive power remarkable latitude to stray from the immediate control of the legislative body. The sovereign 66. Bohman, Public Deliberation, 58–63, 116–21, 204–8. 67. Hindess, Discourses of Power, 23–27.

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people are positioned to exercise ultimate control over the balance of legislative and executive powers. The two sets of powerholders listen to the people who have final responsibility for judging the success of those in government. Third, Montesquieu refines the internal checks and balances within the legislative body, secures the separation of the political executive, and justifies an independent judiciary on the basis of its impartial exercise of its nonpolitical powers. The tone of Montesquieu’s approach is suggested by his jibe at the religious order of Jesuits for their promotion of a religion that humbles those who listen without disciplining those who preach (1.4.6, p. 37). Montesquieu considerably refines Locke’s orientation to accountability, focusing more on the benefits of balanced institutions: Locke and Montesquieu thereby illustrate two of the core versions of the separation of powers doctrine identified by William B. Gwyn.68 For Locke, accountability derives from popular sovereignty and brings discipline to representative government by holding decision makers accountable: executive officers to legislators and legislators to their electors. From Montesquieu’s perspective, this is a necessary but insufficient element of the framework for liberal government: Montesquieu goes beyond this model of accountability as watchfulness to a richer version of accountability as attentiveness. Locke’s construction of political powers focuses on the controls of oversight; Montesquieu’s elaborated version with its separation of powers introduces greater political listening by promoting closer attentiveness—within as well as over government. Thus, the history of liberal constitutionalism displays a transformation of the checks and balances of accountability from the eyes of political vision to the ears of political listening. Neither Locke nor Montesquieu reduces the constitution of representative government to the architecture of accountability. And neither they nor Hobbes really reduce rule to the power of proclaiming regulations, whether it be through a command center or through a system of separated powers.69 Montesquieu, for instance, realistically acknowledges the discretionary responsibilities of political leaders to use their own eyes and ears, as it were. The executive is distanced from the legislative body and from the degree of popular responsiveness expected of elected holders of executive power. But it is not only the political executive that gains through this elaboration of powers. Some commentators have seen in this separa68. Gwyn, “Separation of Powers,” 68–70. 69. Hindess, Discourses of Power, 42–44, 57.

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tion of executive and legislative activities the beginnings of a philosophical justification for the legitimacy of an institutionalized opposition.70 This is balanced by a new emphasis on an independent judiciary that can bring impartiality to the exercise of judicial power: the hearings presided over by holders of judicial power give greater latitude to listening by taking the politics out of the process of settling disputed rights. Contemporary theories of deliberative democracy have sparked widespread interest in the historical role of deliberative practices in the development of liberal democracy. Among the many versions of deliberative democratic theory, two in particular stand out. Some approaches to deliberative democracy suggest that the contemporary search for effective public deliberation is a novel solution to a long-standing defect of modern democratic regimes, which is their closed and elitist character. In this view, the focus on greater public deliberation comes from the attempt to enhance the democratic side of liberal democracy. The most effective way to promote deliberative democracy is to open up contemporary democratic polities to a more inclusive span of individuals and groups who can participate through new forms of public decision making. This approach, evident in theorists like Benjamin Barber or Ian Budge, includes new forms of multicultural deliberation, bringing to bear new voices and new forms of political rhetoric.71 Other approaches to the promotion of more effective public deliberation suggest that deliberative processes are really what is distinctive and most attractive about the liberal democratic polity, at least as a political ideal. In this view, public deliberation emerges from the liberal side of liberal democracy. Here the task is one of promoting deliberative democracy by rethinking in more contemporary terms the institutional architecture of constitutionalism. This approach, evident in a thinker like John Rawls, means saving deliberation from the rough and tumble of democracy and in particular protecting the deliberative process from the excesses of party government.72 Missing from both versions of deliberative democracy is an appreciation of the place of political listening as a device for political deliberation 70. Manent, Intellectual History of Liberalism, 58–62; Vile, Constitutionalism, 92–93, 96; Mansfield, Taming the Prince, 245–46. 71. Consider Barber, Strong Democracy, and Budge, The New Challenge of Direct Democracy, 172–93. 72. John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 132–40. For an alternative treatment of the problem of audibility in contemporary politics, see Bickford, Dissonance of Democracy, 95–111.

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in the institutional design for liberal democracy. This chapter has attempted to fill out that missing dimension. The epigraph from John Dewey suggests that a concept like auditory democracy captures the spirit of effective deliberative democracy. This chapter has attempted to specify the basis of auditory democracy by revealing the historical development of liberal democracy from its early preoccupation with the watchfulness of accountable government to its later exploration of liberal attentiveness as facilitated by the separation of powers.

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10 reading j. s. mill’s T H E S U B J E C T I O N O F W O M E N as a text of deliberative rhetoric Nadia Urbinati

The most important causes of emancipation and democratization have been promoted and were successful thanks to an effective rhetorical strategy. Yet contemporary theory of deliberative democracy does not have a friendly relation to rhetoric. Participants in deliberative practice, writes Jürgen Habermas, must consider one another as “competent subjects” and “morally and politically equals.” Deliberation is suspicious of rhetoric for the very reason that it is democratic, that is to say an expression of freedom which entails inclusion and noncoercion.1 Habermas believes rhetoric ignores these two principles insofar as it teaches us to use speech for the sake of victory, not necessarily a good victory or reasoned consent. Democratic procedures, although like rhetoric they are designed not to attain “impartiality of judgment,” are meant to guarantee “freedom from influence or autonomy in will formation” and “to prevent some from simply suggesting or prescribing to others what is good for them,” two goals that do not belong to rhetoric.2 This means two things. On the one hand, political deliberation bears a resemblance to rhetorical speech because it does not merely consist in the correct application of procedures and is not modeled out of 1. Jürgen Habermas, “Reconciliation Through the Use of Public Reason: Remarks on John Rawls’s Political Liberalism,” Journal of Philosophy 92 (March 1995): 109–15. 2. Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholson (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993), 71.

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the true/false criterion. On the other, precisely because of the unavoidable judgmental partiality that political deliberation involves, rhetoric can have a negative impact, since it structurally mistreats both freedom from influence and autonomy in will formation. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson are less sanguine than Habermas in their defense of deliberation and do not actually think that deliberation has “priority over liberty and opportunity,” two values they regard as prior to, and in this sense autonomous from, the democratic process of deliberation. For this reason, Gutmann and Thompson are theoretically more prone than Habermas to make a place for rhetoric in public discourse. Gutmann and Thompson distinguish two levels in deliberation: one precedes the moment issues reach the political agenda, and the other consists in the actual deliberation on the issues that have been admitted in the political agenda. The former is identifiable with political action broadly speaking, and thus can, and actually does, include forms of political activity that do not necessarily need to be shaped in the form of deliberative speech. Movements, petitions, and rhetoric inhabit this space. Their function is to give visibility to issues and make them reach the political agenda within which they will then undergo public democratic deliberation. “Deliberation cannot occur unless an issue reaches the political agenda. Nondeliberative means may be necessary to achieve deliberative ends.”3 Rhetoric is admitted, thus, but once again not within deliberation. It belongs to the realm of nondeliberative means and is identified with “impassioned and immoderate speech.” On some occasion, it may be necessary to resort to it in order to make the deliberative setting sensitive to a given issue. Thus although Gutmann and Thompson do not ostracize rhetoric, like Habermas they locate it outside deliberation. Yet we owe the first most comprehensive definition of deliberation to a text of rhetoric. In The Art of Rhetoric, Aristotle defines deliberation as the most excellent form of rhetoric, a form that encompasses “reasoned discourse” and judgment, ethical principles and political virtue. He distinguished it both from cognition and from the other two rhetorical genres, namely forensic speech and display oratory. Whereas the difference between deliberation and forensic and display oratory is internal to rhetorical speech and in this sense not substantial, the difference between deliberation and scientific forms of inference is instead substantial and pertains 3. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement: Why Moral Conflict Cannot Be Avoided in Politics, and What Should Be Done About It (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 135.

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to the structure of syllogism or the form of logical deduction. The goal of a cognitive syllogism is to produce conclusions that are as certain as the premises, while the goal of an enthymeme (rhetorical syllogism) is to derive conclusions that are, like their premises, probably true or possible, but not necessary.4 Its imperfect truthfulness speaks for the character of the political domain itself, which is one in which decisions can be reversed. It does not, however, make rhetorical deliberation either identical to manipulation or to a kind of “immoderate speech,” as Aristotle’s teacher Plato argued a few decades earlier. The place of deliberative rhetoric is the assembly; and moreover, a democratic kind of assembly within which only free speech and competition among different views and characters can take place. Its audience’s mind is thus future oriented because legislation, although it has the past and the present as its empirical and contextual premises, pertains to decisions on something that is not yet actual but could become so. Deliberative judgment is the outcome of the application of the general principles that shapes a given political audience to a specific case in order to prove that the decision to be made is consistent with those shared principles and convenient or just for the whole community. The “deliberative orator, although he often sacrifices everything else, will never admit that he is recommending what is expedient or is dissuading from what is useful.” The dimension of public discourse is thus unavoidably tied to the domain of opinions and beliefs, and in this sense open to manipulation. To contain this risk, Aristotle insists that rhetoric needs to be complemented by the study of logic, ethics, and politics. Good character and political virtues are essential to a correct or just performance of deliberative speech; procedures and norms are not enough. Contemporary theorists of deliberative democracy seem to prefer to side with Plato (and Rousseau) rather than Aristotle. However, it is possible to detect in the history of political thought a different perception of the place and role of rhetoric in deliberative politics. In what follows, I shall discuss a case that, I believe, can be employed to show the relevance that deliberative speech in Aristotle’s sense may have in public discourse. The case I present explores the arguments John Stuart Mill devised in the 1860s to defend and promote the equality of women. It is my conviction 4. Aristotle The Art of Rhetoric, trans. John Henry Freese (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 1.3.6. For a critical analysis and a general overview of Aristotle’s rhetoric see the anthology edited by Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, Essays on Aristotle’s “Rhetoric” (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999).

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that they provide a fresh perspective on deliberative democracy even though Mill was neither a full-fledged democrat nor the author of a comprehensive theory of deliberation. While providing a key to his political theory, his arguments on the emancipation of women reveal a view of political discourse that seems to be richer than many contemporary accounts insofar as it connects deliberation more dynamically to the complex world of beliefs and stresses the centrality of rhetoric.

a radical text Contemporary scholars, and feminist scholars in particular, regard John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women as a text of “liberal feminism” that employs the principles of individual liberty and equal opportunity to criticize a firmly established practice of inequality and injustice.5 The liberal reading has dictated the fortunes of Mill’s feminism because it has transferred to it the virtues and the vices of a liberal politics of emancipation: its principled argumentation is too abstract; it overestimates the power of legislation to change habits and conventions; and it pays insufficient attention to the cultural and social factors of gender subordination.6 By approaching the subjection of women as a case of choice-impediment, critics argue, Mill locked himself into an opportunity-based discourse that prevented him from understanding “the massive changes required in people’s desires and outlooks before sexual equality becomes a reality.”7 Finally, Mill’s feminism was crippled by an unsolvable contradiction between his theoretical claims (which were radical) and his practical proposals (which were timidly reformist).8 His associationist psychology amplified his weak 5. John Gray, introduction to John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), xxiv. 6. Richard Krouse, “Patriarchal Liberalism and Beyond: From John Stuart Mill to Harriet Taylor,” in The Family in Political Thought, ed. Jean Bethke Elshtain (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), 145–72. 7. Julia Annas, “Mill and the Subjection of Women” [1977], in John Stuart Mill’s “The Subjection of Women”: His Contemporary and Modern Critics, ed. Lesley A. Jacobs and Richard Vandewetering (Delmar, N.Y.: Caravan Books, 1999), 330–31. 8. Along with Annas’s essay, see also Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 226–28, and Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 20–21; Leslie Goldstein, “Mill, Marx, and Women’s Liberation,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 18 (1980): 325–30; and Jennifer Ring, “Mill’s The Subjection of Women: The Methodological Limits of Liberal Feminism,” Review of Politics 47 (1985): 27–44.

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egalitarianism insofar as it presumed individuals as rational agents and, simultaneously, depicted women as essentially emotional.9 All in all, The Subjection of Women appears as a shot in the dark; its pars destruens is as radical as its pars construens is cautious. Since the 1990s, scholars have taken several important steps to correct this reading. On the one hand, they have stressed the salience of Mill’s ideal of marriage as a relationship of friendship and cooperation and vindicated his courageously democratic proposal of family revitalization.10 On the other, they have recovered his feminism by challenging the individualist reading of his philosophy.11 Finally, they have located the radical significance of his ideas in the moral character of his philosophy of progress. His “primary reason for advocating legal change was that such change constituted the surest route to moral improvement.”12 This “primary reason” made his feminism “radical (and shocking)” and The Subjection of Women a “moral text” and the target of Mill’s contemporaries, who captured the subversive implications of his feminism much better than late-twentiethcentury readers. Arguments that situate the limits of Mill’s feminism in his alleged individualism are simply wrong. His is not an individualist philosophy, if by individualism is meant—as critics frequently do mean—a deracinated and atomistic conception of the Self. This reading has become a self-reinforcing cliché that cannot be reconciled with Mill’s own writings. Mill’s actual individual is a cooperative person whose striving for self-fulfillment is supposed to enrich herself while enriching others. The process of self-development is a journey each makes according to her own style in constant 9. Jean B. Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 141, and Susan Mendus, “The Marriage of True Minds: The Ideal of Marriage in the Philosophy of John Stuart Mill,” in Sexuality and Subordination: Interdisciplinary Studies of Gender in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Susan Mendus and J. Randal (London: Routledge, 1989), 190. I have discussed and criticized this interpretation in “John Stuart Mill on Androgyny and Ideal Marriage” [1991], in Jacobs and Vandewetering, John Stuart Mill’s “The Subjection of Women,” 379–406. 10. Mary Lyndon Shanley, “Marital Slavery and Friendship: John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women,” in Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory, ed. Mary Lyndon Shanley and Carole Pateman (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), 64–80. 11. Wendy Donner, The Liberal Self: John Stuart Mill’s Moral and Political Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), chap. 5, and “John Stuart Mill’s Liberal Feminism,” in Mill and the Moral Character of Liberalism, ed. Eldon J. Eisenach (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 131–41. 12. Susan Mendus, “John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor on Women and Marriage,” in Jacobs and Vandewetering, John Stuart Mill’s “The Subjection of Women,” 420–34.

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dialogue with others. Mill’s conception of individuality involves an interactive view of the human world, and thus of marriage, which mere legal equality and a merely opportunity-based liberty simply cannot fully capture.13 The Subjection of Women and Chapters on Socialism are the texts that more clearly highlight this perspective while challenging individualistic interpretations. Concerning the critique that stresses Mill’s legalism, this critique does not pay attention to the distinction Mill makes between the legal and existential dimensions of social institutions. While he is quick to claim that the law should allocate rights and duties among women and men equally, he thought that a marital union of equality and respect could not be built on the maxims of legal justice alone.14 His ideal of marriage transcends both the politics of rights and liberalism itself. It entails a whole ethical life, a personalized unity of formation and reproduction of values and habits. Just laws are necessary because love and respect are neither a given nor guaranteed for life.15 Much like Hegel, Mill thought that legal norms enter the scene when love is gone, which means that the possibility of establishing “a mental communion” depends primarily on the sentiments and moral character of the partners, rather than on legal rights and obligations. This explains why Mill demands much more than equal opportunity and the marital contract when he addresses himself to the question of justice between men and women in their everyday lives. He believed that interpersonal relations in marriage involve a community of needs and solidarity that is quite different from a liberal community of rights and entitlements.16 13. “Mere unlikeness, when it only means difference of good qualities, may be more a benefit in the way of mutual improvement, than a drawback from comfort.” John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (1869), in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. John M. Robson et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969–89), 21:335. Hereafter cited as CW. 14. See in particular the essay “On Marriage” (1832–33) that Mill wrote along with Harriet Taylor (CW, 21:38–49) and the document he left on the occasion of his own marriage (1851): “And in the event of marriage between Mrs. Taylor and me I declare it to be my will and intention, and the condition of the engagement between us, that she retains in all respects whatever the same absolute freedom of action, and freedom of disposal of herself and of all that does or may at any time belong to her, as if no such marriage had taken place.” “Statement of Marriage,” in CW, 21:97. 15. In the realm of love “morality and inclination” coincide, while the need for external obligations and legal coercion testifies to a deficiency in intimate relations, and a lack in moral education; self-dependent individuals feel legal marriage to be a humiliating constraint. Mill [and Taylor], “On Marriage,” 39. 16. A similar representation of a community can be found in Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm and Utopia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 341, and in Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 229–32.

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His ideal marriage is an agape of complementary characters and “friendly emulation.” It alludes to a model of community that recalls his idealization of Athenian democracy, rather than a liberal polity.17 This metalegal approach brings me to argue for an interpretation of Mill’s feminism that challenges the canonical reading of The Subjection of Women as a text of liberal feminism but without turning it into simply a “moral text.” Mill’s text is indeed radical. It is radical, not because it translates gender inequality into a moral philosophy of progress though, but because it uses political categories to analyze kinds of interpersonal relation that are not intrinsically political. Mill’s feminism springs from a stringent and merciless criticism of family and marriage as power relations that affect the most intimate and existential dimension of individual life. Patriarchal marriage turns women into “cattle and slaves” because it engenders a climate of fear that represses and silences their sense of being their own “judges.”18 The Subjection of Women has such extraordinary rhetorical power because it deploys the categories of despotism and the polis for theoretical purposes. Mill uses the former to denounce the absolute immorality of existing family relations and the latter to give an outstanding moral character to his ideal marriage. There is little room for compromise in a portrait of marriage as a form of despotism. Even legal reformism is insufficient because, while the legal guarantees of individual freedom and marital contract can define and limit the absolute power of the despot, they cannot make the despot a cooperative partner or marriage a mutually respectful and cooperative union.19 Thus, to overcome the impasse coming from a reading of The Subjection of Women as merely a pamphlet of “liberal feminism” or as a “moral text,” we need to situate Mill’s discourse on women’s emancipation within his theory of liberty. Furthermore, we need to study his essay as a rhetorical text.

liberty as freedom from subjection The fact that Mill uses political categories to analyze and criticize, and then reform a “private” institution such as the family, illustrates the richness of 17. I developed this argument in “John Stuart Mill on Androgyny and Ideal Marriage,” 632–35. 18. Mill, The Subjection of Women, 273–74. 19. “The security of society cannot rest on merely rendering honour to right, a motive so comparatively weak in all but a few, and which on very many does not operate at all.” Ibid., 329.

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his theory of liberty. Despite Isaiah Berlin’s influential interpretation, Mill’s liberalism does not claim that noninterference alone is a sufficient guarantee to individual liberty, nor does it deem the form of government (and of power relations more generally) irrelevant to the enjoyment of individual liberty. Mill states quite clearly that while individual rights and intellectual freedom are a necessary condition of political deliberation, the deliberative process cannot profit from an antisocial freedom that demands “a maximum degree of non-interference compatible with the minimum demands of social life.”20 Noninterference alone, he writes, “acknowledges no right to any freedom whatever, except perhaps to that of holding opinions in secret, without ever disclosing them.”21 Mill had a comprehensive notion of liberty that was richer than the liberal one. He does not simply call for an extension of negative liberty to women. Freedom-as-noninterference would not suffice to liberate women, since the source of their lack of freedom as individuals is their relation of total dependence as wives or daughters. Their inability to enjoy individual freedom stems from the asymmetrical power relation that constrains their choices as relational individuals. Women’s claim for emancipation is no mere demand to be left alone: it entails a quest for moral and social interaction based on individual freedom expressed and enjoyed with, not in opposition to, the other. Thus their liberty is not to be measured in terms of their husbands’ and fathers’ decision not to interfere with their choices. It is to consist, instead, in a climate of reciprocity and cooperation that will reshape the nature of women’s relation to their husbands and fathers, and their own perception of their identity and potential. “The moral regeneration of mankind would only really commence when the most fundamental of the social relations are placed under the rule of equal justice, and human beings learn to cultivate their strongest sympathy with an equal in rights and in cultivation.”22 Thus, Mill’s theory of freedom encompasses an additional idea of negative liberty that I shall call freedom from subjection.23 Contrasted with lib20. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” [1958], in Four Essays On Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 161 and 129. 21. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), in On Liberty and Other Essays, 99. 22. Mill, The Subjection of Women, 336. 23. My tripartite model (liberty as noninterference, liberty as nonsubjection, and liberty as moral autonomy) relies on Pettit’s and Skinner’s elaborations of a negative notion of liberty as nondomination. Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), and Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). The word “subjection” belongs to Mill’s own vocabulary.

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erty from interference, liberty as freedom from subjection refers to more than interference with a specific action, and it interrogates the social and emotional dynamics of interpersonal relations. In particular, it focuses on the formation of passions, and the existential and psychological effects of arbitrary rule over the mind and the will of the subject. Liberty from subjection focuses on the form or manner of decision making, and the position of those who are affected by decisions as a result of the overall process. As a claim to an equal voice and consideration, it is a liberty that unerringly unmasks relations of submission, docility, and “complete abnegation” of some individuals to the wills of others. Such relations produce a condition of infantilization.24 Infantilization presumes the existence of a two-tiered humanity or, in John Gray’s words, a society in which “the moral right to autonomy is possessed, not by all men, but only by those possessing in some degree the capacities of an autonomous agent.”25 Mill explicitly rejects this dichotomy. As one reads in the Principles of Political Economy, the theory of dependence and protection implies that “only those possessing in some degree the capacities of an autonomous agent” have the power to decide the destiny of the others. It implies that only some enjoy “the moral right to autonomy.” “The rich should be in loco parentis to the poor, guiding and restraining them like children. Of spontaneous action on their part there should be no need.”26 Dependence is Mill’s word for a “hostile” environment that involves “a breach of those rules which are necessary to social stability and survival” (of liberty as security). It also signifies obstruction of the process whereby the individual acquires moral and psychological independence.27 This means that liberty as freedom from subjection demands more than a politics of restriction on power. It demands also an actual doing—on the part of the subjects themselves, and the law—to remove the causes of subjection. Although liberty as nonsubjection is structurally negative, it requires positive intervention. That is what distinguishes it from liberty as noninterference, which is negative both in conceptual definition and in practice. An environment can be “hostile” when the distribution of power gives

24. Mill, The Subjection of Women, 283–85, and 288–89. 25. John Gray, Mill on Liberty: A Defense (1983; London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 5. 26. John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy [1848; 1853], bk. 4, chap. 7, par. 1, in CW, vol. 3. 27. Gray, Mill on Liberty, 57.

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one party disproportionate influence over the destiny and lifestyle of another. Here, a “hostile” environment is, properly speaking, a “system of inequality of rights,” or inequality in power holding.28 Mill’s notion of freedom from subjection is grounded in his interpretation of rights and liberty as political acquisitions, rather than natural endowments. A right is a “claim,” or a vindication, not “a separate element in the composition of the idea and sentiment.”29 As a claim, it defines how individuals seek to associate and regulate and distribute their obligation. The concept of liberty includes that of limit: to impose a limit on somebody’s action in a specific sphere implies ipso facto the extension of somebody else’s power of action in that sphere. This means two things: first, that liberty—or rights— needs to be conceived historically and progressively, as a process of gradual (and sometime revolutionary) change within a system of social and political relations; and second, that liberty presumes not isolated beings, but a form of interaction among individuals.30 Calls for a “just” distribution of power are predicated on a relational view of liberty and the individual. As we shall see, a “just” distribution of power in the family aims to end domination; it signals the transition from patriarchalism to partnership. This makes liberty as freedom from subjection a radical category that transforms the denunciation of coercion into a powerful moral appeal for emancipation. Women’s security is the sine qua non of their freedom to choose, according to Mill; in order to develop their capacity to form opinions and make choices, they must be free from fear, and thus be not subjected to the will of their father or husband. Women must be able to depend on a legal structure that protects them by eliminating the discretionary authority of their male relatives. This, however, is not enough for them to be free. Furthermore, they need to feel they are their own “judges” in order to pursue the development of their individuality.31 The claim that one ought to be one’s own judge is an essentially democratic claim. It shapes both Mill’s theory of representative government and his social criticism. In a Kantian sort of way, he interprets the process of political emancipation as progress from coercion to obedience by con28. Mill, The Subjection of Women, 272. 29. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (1861), in On Liberty and Other Essays, chap. 5. 30. This explains why, in order to discuss liberty, Mill needs to discuss the limits to liberty. Hence, Hamburger’s thesis that On Liberty aimed to be “a defense of both liberty and control” is somewhat overstated. Joseph Hamburger, John Stuart Mill On Liberty and Control (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 4. 31. Mill, The Subjection of Women, 273–74.

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sent. First by a consent based on the calculation of “circumstantial advantages,” to finally a consent justified by the consciousness of the “intrinsic nature” of human beings as individuals capable of reasoned speech.32 Thus liberty as nonsubjection is an exquisite democratic liberty that Mill employs both to criticize asymmetrical forms of powers and to devise just or legitimate relations of power. He employs it to portray patriarchal marriage and capitalism as modern forms of despotism, and to devise a theory of “free government.”

mill’s deliberative rhetoric These theoretical premises clarified, I can show how Mill was able to translate them into political arguments and make them the principled guidelines of his arguments for emancipation. Hence, I need to resume my early suggestion on the opportunity to analyze The Subjection of Women as a rhetorical text. Why is the distinction between a theoretical and a rhetorical text important? The first step in any interpretive work is to assess the identity of a text, or, in Mill’s words, “What is the meaning of it?”33 In fact, one reason scholars conclude that Mill’s feminism is self-contradictory (radical in principle but timid and conservative in its proposals) is that they have missed Mill’s rhetorical strategy and approached his argument from a purely theoretical point of view, and as a logical exercise. How could a refined logician like Mill start from the premise “Women and men should be in a relation of ‘perfect equality,’ ” and then end justifying the “desirable custom” of keeping women within the family? The logical contradiction was especially striking given that Mill himself acknowledged that freedom to choose a profession was “essential to the dignity of women.”34 The Subjection of Women was conceived, written, and published as a political pamphlet to address a specific audience, not a hypothetical humanity, and not even the république des lettres or a neutral and impartial reader. He 32. Mill, Utilitarianism, chap. 2. But see also the essay “On Marriage” that he wrote along with Harriet Taylor in 1832. Here, the vision of an ideal marriage based on mutual responsibility functioned as the normative criterion to define a philosophy of history based on the antithesis between “immoral” and “moral” passions or, in political terms, between coercion and free consent. CW, 21:38, 40–41. 33. John Stuart Mill, “Coleridge” (1838), in CW, 10:119. 34. Mill, The Subjection of Women, 298. This criticism is a topos in Mill literature; see, for example, Okin, Women in Western Political Thought, 226–28, and Krouse, “Patriarchal Liberalism,” 164.

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wrote it to help the campaign of emancipation and strengthen the ground for future parliamentary battles on suffrage, after his own had failed. Mill started writing about women’s equality in his youth with his friend, and then wife, Harriet Taylor. In fact, this is one of the topics that crisscrosses and is consistent throughout his entire intellectual biography. Mill’s and Taylor’s approaches differ mainly in style and rhetoric: Taylor is more radical and uncompromising, while Mill is more attentive to achieving consensus and winning support. Since Mill believed in the urgency of women’s emancipation, he chose his deliberative strategy carefully.35 As we know, he wrote the book eight years before he published it.36 He thought strategically: on this and other political issues, he was acutely aware that timing and presentation maximize political effectiveness. Mill was not an academic, nor was his feminism academic: “It is necessary on such subject [women’s equality] to be as far as possible invulnerable.”37 The structure of The Subjection of Women is forensic for deliberative purposes. Although Mill sets up his adversarial strategy by stating the liberal principles of equality and liberty explicitly from the outset, he does not limit himself to liberal arguments. The two liberal principles provide the basic structure of his rhetorical syllogism, central to which was the analogy of marriage to despotism. Mill derived his arguments in favor of women’s emancipation from this analogy, not from the principle of equal opportunity, and not even from that of marital contract, which in fact he conceived as the minimal condition for a higher and more ambitious project: transforming the family into a miniature polis. The Subjection of Women employs the important rhetorical strategies of a deliberative speech. It aims to be a vindication of a just cause, and to exhort its readers “to support the principles here advocated,” both by supporting his reform project and by revising their own lives according to the ideal marriage he was promoting in order to be just and to serve as a model for others.38

35. John Stuart Mill to Florence May, [after March 22, 1868], in CW, 16:1377. 36. “The intention was to keep this among other unpublished papers, improving it from time to time if I was able, and to publish it at the time when it should seem likely to be most useful.” John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (1873), in CW, 1:265. 37. John Stuart Mill to W. E. Hickson, May 1851, in CW, 14:66. 38. Mill, The Subjection of Women, 295. The criticism that Mill was “concerned only with middle- and upper-class women” is unwarranted (Okin, Women in Western Political Thought, 226), since his audience could not but be a literate audience. What is important is the fact the he was a vigorous advocate of the radical reform of education and a general emancipation of all women from their enforced ignorance.

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Mill shapes his argument according to Aristotle’s rules of rhetoric. As the Art of Rhetoric instructs, the structure of a public speech is similar to, though not identical with, the syllogism in logic and science. Like a syllogism, the enthymeme, or rhetorical syllogism, strives for “demonstrations,” since its goal is to convince an audience that the cause is reasonable. It presumes an open forum and a process of discussion that entails public exchange of justified opinions, not merely preferences. The principles of equality and liberty Mill states at the beginning of his essay allow him to challenge his adversaries to justify their views publicly and to dare them to oppose his claim with reasoned arguments, rather than with “preferences” or dogmatic assumptions.39 So from the very beginning, Mill presents The Subjection of Women as a text of advocacy. Furthermore, Aristotle, as I have mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, clarified the difference between a syllogism oriented toward truth, and one oriented toward action and decision; between logical and scientific conviction, and rhetorical persuasion. Unlike a logical and scientific syllogism, the enthymeme, Aristotle explains, is not grounded on an indubitable truth, because its conclusions are not already contained within the premise. Rather, it is true in a general or “verisimilar,” sense, but is not necessarily true.40 In the first chapter of The Subjection of Women, Mill sets up the premise of his enthymeme and states the principles whereby he then derives both his denunciation of patriarchalism and, in the final chapter, his alternative model of marriage. As premises of a rhetorical syllogism, liberty and equality are defined as a priori principles. Mill does not use the term a priori in a metaphysical sense, nor does he claim that the principles were natural or innate. Instead, he justifies them historically, and sees them as the highest abstractions of notions that, thanks to Hellenism and Christianity, are embedded within Western civilization in the form of common views and beliefs.41 As 39. “Before I could hope to make any impression, I should be expected not only to answer all that has never been said by those who take the other side of the question, but to imagine all that could be said by them—to find them in reasons, as well as answer all I find: and besides refuting all arguments for the affirmative, I shall be called upon for invincible positive arguments to prove a negative.” Mill, The Subjection of Women, 262. Compare this strategy with the one he discussed in On Liberty, where he equated the discursive habit of the orator to the Ciceronian rhetorical style. Mill, On Liberty, 42. 40. Aristotle Rhetoric 1.2.8. On the logic of demonstration in rhetorical syllogism, see M. F. Burnyeat, “Enthymeme: Aristotle on the Rationality of Rhetoric,” in Rorty, Essays on Aristotle’s “Rhetoric,” 105–9. 41. Mill, The Subjection of Women, 295. Mill locates the liberal principles of liberty and

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widely shared values, liberty and equality are self-evident, and in this sense a priori. They ground Mill’s “demonstrations” of the actual conditions of injustice women suffer. The second step of the rhetorical syllogism, Aristotle continues, consists in developing good demonstrations. In deliberative speech, “demonstrations” must be logically consistent, must be derived from facts the audience is familiar with, and must be articulated in a plain and effective language. Deliberative argumentation is not rationalistic. Indeed, the speaker’s aim is to reach both reason and the emotions, not reason alone because the “advocate” has to convince and be persuasive.42 He has to awaken those emotions which can move people’s will and action, for instance arousing indignation about an unjust practice, as well as compassion for its victims. “Demonstrations” lay the groundwork for the final step of the enthymeme: the exhortation to take action, to change one’s behavior and vote in favor of a given proposal. According to Aristotle, if the exhortation is to be effective, the audience must see it as benefiting the common welfare, and as a source of “happiness” and good for all, not only for those on behalf of whom the cause was pleaded.43 In sum, the advocate must be a good logician and a good psychologist.44 His work has to be a composite of various approaches and disciplines. In chapters 2 and 3 of The Subjection of Women, Mill seeks to “demonstrate” his claim through several kinds of evidence, psychological, historical, logical, and moral. He vividly describes the oppressive character of Victorian marriage laws and the mental and physical violence women suffer as a consequence of male domination. Drawing on historical examples of women’s excellence, and employing the empirical rule that forbids any evaluation of their capabilities until women have been given the chance equality within a St. Simonian and Owenist philosophy of history, articulated in the form of an antithesis between “moral” and “immoral” passions, sensuality, and chastity. I have explored this topic in “John Stuart Mill on Androgyny and Ideal Marriage,” 623. But see also Alice S. Rossi, “Sentiment and Intellect: The Story of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor,” introduction to John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, Essays on Sex Equality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). 42. Aristotle Rhetoric 1.1.10. 43. Ibid., 1.5.2. On the relationship between individual interest and community wellbeing in Aristotle’s account of the “good” in his essay on rhetoric, see Stephen Halliwell, “The Challenge of Rhetoric to Politics and Ethical Theory in Aristotle,” in Rorty, Essays on Aristotle’s “Rhetoric,” 183–85. 44. Indeed, it was precisely because of its completeness and interdisciplinary character that Mill described Aristotle’s Rhetoric as the text “containing many of the best observations of the ancients on human nature and life.” Autobiography, 15.

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and instruments to express themselves freely, he refutes the common view of women’s intellectual inferiority. He claims, finally, that women’s emancipation will lead to moral progress, and to the general improvement of the whole society, and that such progress is consistent with the institution of representative government, which actually assumes the existence of, and requires independent citizens. This orientation toward the future, as well as the link between social and political institutions, strengthens his critique of the domestic system. Mill believed that the world was moving toward democracy, and yet the most important school of moral and social sentiments was still organized as a tyranny. Whereas society had need of citizens, the family provided only despots and subjects. Because experience was the principal “school” for the education of sentiments, family roles and rules had to be changed.45 When stressing the contradictions and weaknesses of Mill’s feminism, critics target the two elements that make Mill’s a rhetorical text—the variety of approaches it proposes and the kind of evidence it adduces. On the one hand, critics complain that Mill’s book is a “mixture” of different approaches and, as such, not rigorous in defending the radical principles he had endorsed in the first chapter.46 On the other, critics focus on the “demonstrations” Mill devised to justify his claim and criticize precisely those arguments he uses to capture his audience’s sympathy and approval. Indeed, most of the objections concentrate on the final pages of the second chapter, where Mill tries to assure his Victorian readers that giving women freedom of choice would not necessarily destroy the family, since presumably, women would choose to raise children instead of look for jobs. However, it is inappropriate to analyze this argument in terms of theoretical consistency with the a priori principles of equality and liberty, because Mill was not trying to build a general theory of justice, but to make a radical principle (“perfect equality” of men and women) palatable to an audience that was not radical at all, as the furious reactions to his book show.47 A rhetorical demonstration is necessarily crafted in a contextual and contingent manner. It cannot be indifferent to the passions, knowledge, traditions, and tastes of its audience. Mill wanted first and foremost to be politically effective and give that issue strong visibility. According to the 45. Mill, The Subjection of Women, 294–95. 46. Annas, “Mill and the Subjection of Women,” 317–18. 47. An interesting testimony of the reaction of Mill’s contemporaries to his pamphlet has been collected by Jacobs and Vandewetering in John Stuart Mill’s “The Subjection of Women,” 159–312.

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rules of deliberative speech, he had to make a claim of convenience and soundness to prove that the changes he was proposing would not disrupt the social fabric.48 In any case, to point out that some of Mill’s opinions are weak is simply to say that as a political pamphlet his text is the product of a specific time and place. Its theoretical value does not lie in the kinds of “demonstration” he uses, but in the core argument of his vindication. Indeed, it is this argument that makes The Subjection of Women a radical and still powerful text. The core argument consisted in Mill’s denunciation of the subjection of women within the family and marriage as a form of despotism—whose institutional antonym was the polis. His strategy was to use a republican argument, one that was familiar to his contemporaries also as a result of the debates surrounding the American Civil War.49 Moreover, his strategy was consistent with his view of liberty as freedom from subjection. The arguments for individual free choice, for marriage as a contractual relation, and for a policy of equal opportunity were all insufficient for his rhetorical purposes. Mill’s critics notwithstanding, a consistently liberal strategy would not accomplish his desired goal.50 “He insisted that the subjection of women could not be ended by law alone, but only by law and the reformation of education, of opinion, of social inculcation, of habits, and finally of the conduct of family life itself.”51

the rhetorical power of the categories of despotism and the polis Casting marriage as despotism worked both as a critical weapon in itself (a “brandished” sword, as Cicero wrote) and as an a contrario introduction to the ideal marriage as a miniature polis.52 Since Herodotus, Plato, and Aristotle, despotism and the polis have been cast as antagonistic and irreconcilable 48. Aristotle Rhetoric 1.5; Mill, The Subjection of Women, 336. This prudent strategy was very common among the early emancipationists, not only in England. I have found the same argument among the first radical feminists in Italy: Le civili libertà: Positivismo e liberalismo nell’Italia unita, with a preface by Norberto Bobbio (Venice: Marsilio Editori), 54–65. 49. See Stefan Collini, introduction to CW, 21:xxiii–xxvi. 50. Krause, “Patriarchal Liberalism,” 39. 51. Mary Lyndon Shanley, “Marital Slavery and Friendship: John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women,” Political Theory 9, no. 2 (1981): 229–67. 52. Cicero De Oratore, with an English translation by H. Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 3.53.206.

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models. The former implies civic enmity, mistrust, and the selfish isolation of the subjects. The latter suggests a form of freedom wherein each participates responsibly according to his or her competence and character. In the polis, the empire of the laws allows equal enjoyment of liberty, and therefore the expression of individual variety. Whereas despotism generates and requires atomistic homogeneous subjects devoid of individuality, the polis is based on individual specificity and voluntary commitment. Here, equality refers to a condition of reciprocity in power relations, to a plurality of roles and ways to contribute to the general good.53 Mill was not the first theorist to use a political category to criticize nonpolitical power relationships. In his An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1796), William Godwin castigates the existing marital “contract” as a “fraud” and the worst of all monopolies, since it institutionalizes a relation of slavery.54 Mary Wollstonecraft worked up Godwin’s argument to challenge Rousseau’s exclusionary republicanism and claim—as Mill would later—that by living with pariahs, free male citizens were de facto condemning themselves to spend most of their lives in relationships with nonhumans. The subjection of women precluded men themselves from achieving recognition as the bearers of the highest human qualities, such as virtue and intelligence.55 Wollstonecraft made equality a prerequisite for the recognition of men as well as women. In Mill’s time William Thompson used the analogy of despotism to attack James Mill’s article “On Government,” which justifies the political exclusion of women in the name of the general interest.56 Thompson published his Appeal of One Half of the Human Race the same year the older Mill’s essay was reissued as an abstract by the Encyclopedia Britannica (1825). The Appeal contains the core argument of The Subjection of Women, which Locke and Rousseau had also used to refute the doctrine of political power as a voluntary act of subjection by some to an irrefutable, absolute, and discretionary power of others. Thompson’s scolding blurred any distinction between the criteria for judging and regulating public and private 53. Mill, The Subjection of Women, 337. 54. “So long as I seek, by despotic and artificial means, to maintain my possession of a woman, I am guilty of the most odious selfishness.” William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice: with Selections from Godwin’s Other Writings, ed. K. Codell Carter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 303. 55. Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of The Rights of Woman (1792), edited with an introduction by Miriam Brody (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1988), 85–89. 56. James Mill, “On Government” (1820), in Political Writings, ed. Terence Ball (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 27.

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relations, though. He treated marital relationships as a form of government, the most perverted form of all.57 This was the argument that made his feminism radical. Mill followed in Thompson’s footsteps, and used liberty as freedom from subjection as the normative principle to plead the cause of women’s equality and self-dependence, both in civil society and in politics. As a normative principle, it could not be traded off. A benevolent paternalism cannot compensate for the suppression of liberty, even if it proved (as James Mill’s article tried to show) able to satisfy the utilitarian principle of the general welfare.58 Mill does not refer explicitly to any of his radical ancestors in The Subjection of Women. He does, however, faithfully reshape their arguments.59 He revives the classical representation of the oikos as a place of domination in order to emphasize the value of civic government within the family and show the perverse effect of despotism both on the despot and on his subject.60 The category of despotism allowed Mill to politicize all facets of women’s subjection and gave his feminism a radical twist. The cause of women’s freedom became a cause of emancipation for the entire society, just like the cause of the slaves in American abolitionist writings, or that of the working class in Marx’s theory. Women’s subjection within the family and their exclusion from the demos are twin manifestations of a single phenomenon: a system of human relations ruled by an absolute and arbitrary power that defines the position and character of both the master and the slave. Mill’s phenomenology of subordination has both actual and moral facets. The subordination of women is both a system that coerces the actual 57. William Thompson, Appeal of One Half of the Human Race, Women, against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain them in Political, and thence in Civil and Domestic, Slavery; in Reply to a Paragraph of Mr. Mill’s Celebrated “Article on Government” (London: Longman, 1825), 60–67 and 107. For a reconstruction of the polemic between Thompson and James Mill, see Carole Pateman, The Social Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 156–63. 58. John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (1861), in On Liberty and Other Essays, 238. 59. However, Mill deradicalized Thompson’s argument because he dissociated it from the critique of the capitalist organization of production. Thompson argued that domestic subordination of women was functional to a society based on competition. Incapable of being competitive like men because of her natural qualities—less physical strength and her reproductive function—women have no other choice but relinquish their liberty to men in exchange for protection and survival. Women’s slavery is reinforced by a social order inherently inimical to human natural endowments and is therefore unalterable. Thompson, Appeal, xi–xiv. 60. Mill, The Subjection of Women, 288.

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choices and actions of women (as “brutality” and “animalism”) and an inner or spiritual form of domination that molds women’s very self-perception (“She forgets that she is not free”).61 In both cases, self-government, and thus self-dependence, are suspended. This is also true for the master, who by acting only as a ruler, is de facto unable to perform as a free and responsible person: to learn to rule without also learning to be ruled, Aristotle argued, is not appropriate training for citizens.62 The despotism analogy made Mill’s rhetorical strategy very powerful and was a logical application of his idea that liberty as nonsubjection, a good the individual does not enjoy alone or at others’ expense, and calls into question the “generality of a practice” that thwarts all aspects of human life. Like Aristotle’s oikos or Montesquieu’s despotic regime, marriage defines a total condition. Its impact is neither sectorial (women’s selfsacrifice as wives is functional to a social order that makes “the whole life of a women . . . a continued self-sacrifice”), nor is its evil confined to some wrong or malevolent individual deeds.63 “I am far from pretending that wives are in general no better treated than slaves; but no slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a sense of the word, as a wife is. Hardly any slave, except one immediately attached to the master’s person, is a slave at all hours and all minutes” as a wife is.64 As we saw in a previous section, Mill did not believe that individuals are born with fully developed potentials. Since life is a process of gradual refinement and actualization, though, autonomy is a way of life, not a status. A society is “progressive”—which to Mill means “just”—when, along with security, it offers each and every individual the conditions and stimuli they need in order to “exercise” their faculties. Mill calls this process “self-culture.”65 Self-culture entails a dynamic conception of individuality and liberty as a permanent learning process by which people acquire their adulthood or, in other words, the capability of obeying “by conviction and persuasion,” as autonomous beings. 61. Ibid., 288 and 330. 62. Aristotle The Politics, trans. Ernest Barker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 1259b18–1260b20. 63. Mill, The Subjection of Women, 332. 64. Arbitrariness is a condition of “nonliberty” and pertains to those cases in which the power holder is loved by his subject and recognized by her as a superior. “All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favorite. They have therefore put everything in practice to enslave their minds.” Ibid., 284. 65. David Johnston, The Idea of a Liberal Theory: A Critique and Reconstruction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 79.

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The link between security and individual autonomy appears more clearly from the perspective of autonomy deprivation. As Mill explains in his denunciation of patriarchal marriage, the power enjoyed by the husbandmaster is most apparent in the suppression of his wife’s mental and moral autonomy. Because men’s ultimate aim is to dominate women’s spirits, they are “averse,” Mill remarks astutely, “to instructed women.”66 In order for them to master their wives’ right to security they must first deprive them of “their moral right to autonomy.” Their master must make them docile and apathetic so they become willing to give their master their right to self-protection. The husband-master circumscribes his wife’s autonomy— he undermines her mental and spiritual life—in order to make her dependent upon him in her basic liberty as security: “Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiment.”67 They want their sentiment because they want to be seen by them as their protectors, not as their masters. Only in this way can they enjoy an absolute power over their wives, who will eventually see their husbands as the benevolent guardians of their security itself. Because domestic despotism does not necessarily entail a discrete series of violent deeds and brutal acts, it cannot be reduced merely to interference with women’s natural freedom of choice. The counterpart of Mill’s dynamic vision of individuality was the dynamic vision of domination as a process that moved from external coercion by force to hegemonic domination over the inner life of the mind. Mill knew that, though force marks the first stage of subjection, force alone does not constitute despotism. Indeed, domestic despotism is a vicious school of habit formation, a comprehensive reeducation of the passions and a manipulation of consciousness, the slow and molecular transformation of the wife from a victim of other’s “animalism” into a thing no longer aware of herself as a victim and, finally, no longer capable of perceiving her condition as one of subjection.68 Despotism—as described in The Subjection of Women—is a form of total and absolute power because it operates on the emotions, not just on action. The despot, unlike the tyrant, strikes with fear and love simultaneously. Subjects of the tyrant long to rebel; under the despot they become affectionate chattel. In the one case, repression, and thus potential freedom, is always latent; in the other, a condition of total surrender and pacification 66. Mill, Autobiography, 311. 67. Mill, The Subjection of Women, 271. 68. Ibid., 283–85, 288–89.

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produces “complete abnegation.”69 Tyranny represses action and violates negative liberty; despotism violates the individual’s very determination to act and robs her of her self-reliance. Much more perverse than tyranny, despotism induces its subjects to transfer their freedom to formulate choices and make decisions to their master, who will end up being seen as a source of tutelage rather than of coercion. This is why Mill argues that because women are not merely forced to serve their masters, but trained to desire to serve them, the position of women differs from that of all other subjected classes. “All women are brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character” is “not self-will, and government by self-control,” like men, but instead “submission, and yielding to the control of others . . . to live for others; to make complete abnegation of themselves, and to have no life but their affections.”70 By annihilating liberty as autonomy, despotism annihilates all liberty. As the literature on despotism shows, domination produces docility, not simply repression. The subjected person is forced to repress her consciousness and sense of freedom, her awareness that she has the right to security, her very awareness that she is laboring under a burden of compulsion. Despotism triumphs when both the sense of resistance and the consciousness of having rights are tamed, when its subjects are naturally obedient. So insofar as the two “rights,” security and autonomy, are concerned, autonomy must be crushed before security can be destroyed. This proves a contrario that security and autonomy are linked, that autonomy is a universal property: it belongs to those already conscious of their individual independence (such as the workers, in Mill’s writings) and those whose consciousness has been silenced (such as women). Had Mill envisaged autonomy as a liberty belonging only to the few; had he identified it with a status enjoyed only by actually autonomous individuals, as John Gray believes, he would not have had any theoretical tool to criticize marriage as a despotic institution. As a matter of fact, the most virulent critics of Mill’s feminism have attacked his egalitarian extension of liberty as autonomy to women, since it legitimated the denunciation of marital patriarchalism and upset any form of marital authority.71

69. Ibid., 271. 70. Ibid., 271–72. 71. On this matter, Gray rephrases the argument James Fitzjames Stephen developed in 1873 in his Liberty Equality Fraternity, ed. Stuart D. Warner (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1993), 130–46.

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The antonym of patriarchal marriage is marriage as a miniaturized polis, the subject of the concluding and most exquisite pages of The Subjection of Women, which contain the final exhortation of his advocacy for women’s freedom. Where despotism nurtures selfishness and mistrust, the polis nurtures friendship and mutuality. Friendship embodies the ideal relation between citizens, according to the classical literature, which was Mill’s source. A form of “mutual interchange of kind services,” Cicero cautioned, friendships between citizens last “as long as these kindnesses are mutual and acceptable.”72 Mutuality and voluntary acceptance are the criteria governing the distribution of public duties within a free government. They both entail equality and consent, the two principles that legitimize power and justify obedience.73 Mill believed that friendship, not the rule of justice, should be the rule between partners who want to live together freely and as equals. Only when consent and mutuality are absent do the partners need to appeal to the law, and in particular to the rights and obligations decreed by the marriage contract. Friendship, not right, is foundational.74 The extension of friendship to marital relations is both the most innovative aspect of Mill’s feminism and the most explicit evidence of its egalitarian implications. The first to make this egalitarian use of friendship in feminist thought was Mary Wollstonecraft. Classical political and moral theory represent friendship as the most perfect form of association, since it presumes equality and is entirely voluntary, thereby reflecting moral autonomy at its best. The humanists revived this classical ideal and delivered it to the moderns. Like Aristotle and Cicero, though, they thought that friendship could arise only between men, because, as Michel de Montaigne wrote, women are driven by irrational impulses, which keep them from developing disinterested affection and spiritual and mental intimacy. Nature confines women to the realm of maternal and sexual necessity. In extending friendship to marital relationships, Wollstonecraft claimed women’s ability to be impartial and to transcend the dimension of familial care; they are not simply a reverse image of the citizen.75 Mill 72. Marcus Tullius Cicero, De officiis, trans. Walter Mill, The Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 1.17.56. 73. Mill, The Subjection of Women, 264. 74. This is the theoretical answer to the objection that Mill’s practical proposals contradicted his liberal principles. “Had Mill discovered that managing the household to the exclusion of most other activity created an impediment to the friendship of married women and men, The Subjection of Women suggests that he would have altered his view of practicable domestic arrangement.” Shanley, “Marital Slavery and Friendship 375.” 75. Michael de Montaigne, The Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1991), 210; Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 112–14.

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picked up those ideas and used them to advance a notion of marital friendship as an agape of equal and distinct beings united by a communion of interests and tastes. He uses the same words in The Subjection of Women that he had used many years before when he confided to Sterling his sentiment of friendship as having found “one fellow traveler, or one fellow soldier,” a companion “in the pursuit of a common object.”76 This expresses Mill’s vision of life as an intellectual search (“travel”) and as a commitment to a goal that transcends the sphere of individual interests (“war”). Travel and war imply companionship and “the feeling of being engaged in the pursuit of a common object; of mutually cheering one another on, and helping one another in an arduous undertaking.”77 Mutuality and shared responsibility require equal partnership, shared values, and a unity of complementary strengths. All these are crucial characteristics that highlight the role played by classical language and ideals in Mill’s vision of ideal marriage as an ideal polis. In his view, the spiritual parity, as it were, involved in friendship, dis_ places selfishness, because it entails idem sentire de republica, or sharing “all the great objects of life,” not looking for another ego. Equality in friendship does not mean searching for one’s “own double” but rather a kind of friendly emulation enriching both the individuals and the couple. It mirrors the model of citizenship Pericles exalted in his Funeral Oration, which portrays the ideal communal life as a function of personal independence, which was an “element of happiness” for all. Mill revived Pericles’ manifesto in the final pages of The Subjection of Women, turning it into the ideal of the associational life of the moderns. “But it would be a grievous understatement of the case to omit the most direct benefit to all, the unspeakable gain in private happiness to the liberated half of the species; the difference to them between a life of subjection to the will of others, and a life of rational freedom . . . the community in which the reason has been most cultivated, and in which the idea of social duty has been most powerful, are those which have most strongly asserted the freedom of action of the individual—the liberty of each to govern his conduct by his own feelings of duty, and by such laws and social restraints as his own conscience can subscribe to.”78 To characterize Mill’s advocacy for the emancipation of women as a specimen of deliberative rhetoric allows us to restore to The Subjection of 76. Mill to Sterling, April 15, 1829, in CW, 12:30. 77. Ibid. 78. Mill, The Subjection of Women, 336.

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Women a political identity that the analytical approach has obscured. The parliamentary transformation of politics that Mill witnessed first hand, and consciously tried to shape has made the use of speech in public opinion formation essential. Forging theoretical arguments in view of gaining consent to a cause does not entail that the values these arguments encompass are relative or merely instrumental. As the history of the emancipation of women shows, political and theoretical arguments forged by intellectuals and movement leaders have contributed to rooting the values of equality and individual autonomy in people’s consciousness, laws, and institutions. A rhetorical perspective as in the Aristotelian tradition thus enriches both our understanding of the theoretical structure of Mill’s political work and the relationship between political discourse and deliberative rationality in general. It contributes to Mill’s scholarship and contemporary deliberative theory of democracy as well.79

79. A previous version of this essay was presented at the 2000 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Washington, D.C. I have included parts of it in Mill on Democracy: From the Athenian Polis to Representative Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

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11 criteria of rationality for evaluating democratic public rhetoric Douglas Walton

How can we devise criteria of rationality for evaluating argumentation used in democratic political rhetoric? What is the worth of public opinion as a rational grounding for a proposed action or policy in such argumentation? These questions are not often asked, or considered very seriously, because of the conventionally accepted view that rationality does not really matter in democratic politics. It is commonly accepted that in a democracy, policy should be decided by majority opinion, right or wrong. But recent exponents of deliberative democracy have expressed doubts about this view,1 arguing that arguments based merely on popular opinion can go badly wrong unless based on some kind of prior rational deliberation. But if so, these questions raise even more fundamental ones. Is there a normative structure of rational deliberation that can be used as a model to evaluate democratic political argumentation? Can such arguments, based as they are on public opinion, be judged stronger or weaker using evidential criteria? Answering these questions requires a consideration of the type of argument traditionally called the argumentum ad populum (appeal to popular opinion) in the logic textbooks. The so-called argumentation scheme 1. James S. Fishkin, Democracy and Deliberation: New Directions for Democratic Reform (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); James S. Fishkin, The Voice of the People: Public Opinion and Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).

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(form of argument) for the argumentum ad populum has to be identified in order to evaluate democratic political rhetoric. This form of argument needs to be seen as one that can default, and that can even be fallacious in some instances, but that can sometimes carry evidential weight in a deliberation process.2 Analyzing such forms of argument takes us back to Aristotle’s writings on rhetoric, practical logic, and ethics. Aristotle’s writings on practical reasoning, deliberation, and rhetorical argument provide foundations for a structure of rational argument that can be built into a new model of reason-based policy formation and decision making in a democratic system. The other necessary components are new models of deliberative polling, models of dialogue in argumentation theory, and recent work on defeasible reasoning in computer science. A defeasible argument is one that can be tentatively acceptable, but that can default or fail, as new information comes in. Getting a proper grasp of defeasible argumentation takes us again back to Aristotle, to rethink the old notion of enthymeme that has always been recognized as important for rhetoric, but that appears to have been misunderstood. Once these components are assembled, a model of deliberation is built up in this chapter that provides criteria of rationality for evaluating democratic political rhetoric. The model is one of rational deliberation as an intelligent and orderly process of thinking that leads through several stages to an informed decision on what to do in a situation requiring agents to make a choice between options. It provides a normative model of political thinking and deliberation in a democracy. The new model is applied to the typical kinds of argumentation used in the technical activities of policy formation and decision making in democratic politics.

appeal to popular opinion in american democracy Appeal to popular opinion, on first appearances, does seem to be a reasonable kind of argument in the context of democratic politics. As Charles Hamblin notes,3 only an “anti-democrat” could “unhesitatingly” assume that the argumentum ad populum is anything other than “the purest valid 2. I would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for a research grant, “Argumentation Schemes in Natural and Artificial Communication” that helped to support this work. I would also like to thank the two anonymous referees whose comments helped to improve it. 3. Charles Hamblin, Fallacies (London: Methuen Books, 1970), 44.

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reasoning.” After all, the ultimate decision making in a democratic political system is carried out by the majority of voters. In a democracy, whatever the majority decides is the policy that should be adopted. In some cases, public referenda are even used to decide whether to implement a policy or not. Here, it would seem, is an arena in which the argumentum ad populum is a reasonable form of inference. But is it? What if the majority is wrong? What about the overwhelming popular support for the Nazi party in prewar Germany? This suggests that the argumentum ad populum could be a weak form of argument that is sometimes badly wrong. Can it be argued that justifying the worth of the democratic system of government rests on the assumption that the argumentum ad populum is a rational form of argumentation? If majority vote in a democratic system is based on competition among groups seeking to maximize their own interests, the possibility is there of coming to decisions that are not good for the majority. But suppose the interest groups try to persuade others to support their interests. At least some discussion among the groups is taking place. That is one form of argumentation that could support the worth of the argumentum ad populum in a democracy. But there is another option that needs to be considered. Instead of negotiation or persuasion, another type of argumentation could be involved. Suppose that argumentation in a democratic system is based on intelligent and informed deliberations in which the voters examine the choices and decide on the prudent course of action that is best to take for everyone. Then the argumentum ad populum could be seen as a much stronger reasonable argument. Its strength comes from its use in the context of intelligent deliberation. This argument is the strongest defense of the worth of the democratic system of political decision making of the three possibilities considered above. It strongly supports the principle of reason-based deliberation. It begins to seem that the argumentum ad populum, although inherently weak and fallible, can be judged in the right political context as a form of argument that is reasonbased. It can carry weight as evidence in the context of an intelligent deliberation using the relevant facts to look to examine all sides of an issue. On the other hand, doubts about the rationality of the argumentum ad populum have often been expressed, most notably and emphatically by the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville. He coined the phrase “tyranny of the majority.” Tocqueville, as an outside observer of the American cultural and political scene during his time, made some astute comments about American practices of political decision making that are often quite rightly taken as showing some of the dangers of the argumentum ad populum in

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democratic rhetoric. His book Democracy in America (1835) is of lasting importance because it expresses these reservations about the use of the argumentum ad populum in democratic politics in the form of a hypothesis so precise and clear that it could be tested by later events. Tocqueville describes a certain ambivalence as characteristic of American political argumentation.4 On the one hand, there is great stress in American political rhetoric on freedom of speech, while on the other, there are sharp boundaries on political speech, and penalties for anyone who transgresses these boundaries. Tocqueville’s thesis has been reconfirmed in the twentieth century by the controversies about so-called political correctness. The perception of some is that “action groups” of various kinds try to enforce a political rectitude on speech that appears to contravene what they put forth as expressing moral boundaries on what is right or wrong. Tocqueville would no doubt have seen this development as confirming his thesis about the boundaries on free speech he saw as typical of American democratic politics. Tocqueville also observes that popular opinion as a driving force of political argumentation is subject to a certain kind of speed and instability. He wrote: “All of the projects (of the majority) are taken up with great ardor; but as soon as its attention is turned elsewhere, all these efforts cease.”5 This comment is quite astute, and one can easily see how the phenomenon Tocqueville observed has been magnified under the influence of the modern media. Something instantly becomes a public issue as all the media sources compete to give central attention to it. Then as some other “story” commands public attention, and has more immediate emotional impact, the previous “story” is dropped, and the public hears no more about it. The result is a kind of public thinking that lurches from one attentiongrabbing story to another. This disjointed thinking is now characteristic of the way the media jump from one “crisis” to another in reporting world news. The public gets a snapshot of the event, but not enough detail to follow through on resolving the problem. This way of thinking was later sharply criticized by Daniel Yankelovich and James S. Fishkin, who saw public opinion polls as encouraging it. If this kind of thinking is the basis of the argumentum ad populum, then certainly it is a form of argument that is inherently faulty. 4. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer and Max Lerner (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 235. 5. Ibid., 230.

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Tocqueville’s insights are quite significant on the question of trying to arrive at some sort of balanced approach to evaluating appeal to public opinion as a form of argument in the context of democratic politics. On the one hand, the argumentum ad populum is the central type of argumentation that drives political rhetoric, thinking, and decision making in a democratic system. This form of argument simply cannot be condemned as fallacious or as inherently erroneous. On the other hand, as Tocqueville’s critique rightly pointed out, this form of argument is subject to misuse and distortion of a kind that should make it highly suspect in some cases. Apparently, it is a powerful instrument of public thinking that can be used deceptively, to make a bad argument look good. The kind of shallowness and faults of the argumentum ad populum cited by Tocqueville were magnified in the context of twentieth-century political argumentation. We now have such institutions as media conglomerates, massive media coverage of political events, and constant public opinion polls on what are perceived as the major issues as reported in these media. Tabloid journalism concentrates on sensational stories, driven by the public appetite for news about spectacular events or celebrities. Media campaigns are directed by public relations firms. They have learned very well how to exploit and manipulate the argumentum ad populum for profit. All these things may seem rather obvious to us, because we are surrounded with them constantly. But probably the reason that Tocqueville’s critical insight on the dangers in the use of the argumentum ad populum in American democratic politics remains so important, and is so often referred to in political science, is that his hypothesis has been proved over and over again by events. Tocqueville’s argument, as a testable empirical prediction about American democratic politics, has been confirmed by the modern uses of public opinion polling techniques to drive public opinion by the use of subtly slanted questions. Consider the recent phenomenon of “push polling,” using a loaded question in a poll to attack an opposing candidate, or to push for a vote for one’s own. This tactic represents a calculated abuse of appeal to popular opinion that could rightly be classified as fallacious. Once the tactic is recognized as a technique that can be used quite effectively to manipulate public opinion in democratic politics, it becomes virtually impossible to resist using it over and over again. Indeed, if you don’t use it, your opponents will use it against you. From a practical perspective, you can’t afford not to use it. But isn’t this tactic a perversion of the kind of argumentum ad populum that should properly be used in democratic politics? Doesn’t

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its continued use distort the kind of rational thinking that should properly constitute public deliberations on important matters of national policies? The answer to both questions is quite clearly yes. Tocqueville, it is clear, was really onto something fundamentally important to rhetoric in democratic politics. The argumentum ad populum used in democratic political rhetoric can make political argumentation appear to be reason-based when it is not and subvert and undermine reason-based deliberation in democratic political argumentation. The problem with the usual public opinion polls is that the numbers are tabulated independently of the social contexts that allow for real deliberation on a complex issue.6 The respondents may be ignorant of the issue, but they will be pressed to give an opinion anyway, because of the way the poll is designed. Thus an appeal to popular opinion, if based on the traditional public opinion poll, is rightly judged to be often weak, or even fallacious. But appeal to popular opinion, while it is an inherently weak form of argument, can be strengthened by additional assumptions. Among the most important are the assumptions that the poll respondents have relevant information about the question they were asked and have deliberated about it, examining arguments on both sides. Another assumption is that these deliberations went through several stages. Another is that relevant information about the issue entered into the deliberation at the right stages. By joining these assumptions, a new model of rational (and irrational) thinking in democratic decision making can presented by taking a new approach to argumentation.

the principle of reason-based deliberation As Tocqueville showed, the appeal to popular opinion has its negative side in democratic political argumentation. Poll-driven political argumentation is too often antithetical to intelligent political deliberation of a kind that would meet a requirement of the principle of reason-based deliberation.7 Appeal to popular opinion is often used by interest groups to try to solidify public opinion into “political correctness,” and get the upper hand politically by suppressing arguments that should properly be heard in a reasoned deliberation. More than anyone, Tocqueville warned of this danger of the 6. Fishkin, Voice of the People, 25. 7. Ibid.

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appeal to popular opinion in American democracy. Tocqueville’s warning showed the negative side of the argumentum ad populum in the setting of democratic politics. Given such possibilities of the fallacious use of appeal to popular opinion, a problem is then posed. How can a model of reasonbased deliberation be set up that would enable an argument evaluator to deal critically with it by (a) proving that it is fallacious when it is, and (b) proving that it is reasonable when it is? Deliberative democracy rests on the assumption that when a group of people get together and deliberate, the conclusion they arrive at, if their deliberations are good, is reason-based. For lack of a better name, let’s call this assumption the principle of reason-based deliberation. It does not mean that deliberation always comes to the right conclusion. What it means is that if the deliberation is a good one, one that considers all the relevant arguments on both sides of an issue or choice, and weighs their relative merits thoughtfully and carefully, then the conclusion it arrives at can be properly said to be supported by evidence. Even though such evidence should not generally be regarded as conclusive, the principle of reason-based deliberation requires that the argumentation in the deliberation should give some evidential supporting weight to the conclusion. Historically, there appears to be a strong philosophical presumption against the principle of reason-based deliberation in Western culture. Logical empiricism is the view that argumentation is only reason-based if it is derived by logical inferences (deductive or inductive) from empirical premises. Logical empiricism sets great store by empirical evidence. Collection of “facts” or empirical data is regarded as the most important kind of evidence to rationally resolve a conflict of opinions. Statistical collection of data is regarded as decisive. Thus when it comes to determining public opinion on an issue, the method of choice for the logical empiricist is the public opinion poll, conducted by statistical sampling methods. On the other hand, logical empiricism is very skeptical about reason-based deliberation as a way to resolve a conflict of opinions rationally. For after all, just because a group of people get together and deliberate, and then decide by majority vote that a particular statement is true, it does not follow that this statement is true. In Western culture, the dominant philosophical view about evidence and rational argument since the Enlightenment has been the logical empiricist view. On this view, even though the argumentum ad populum is a fallacy, determining public opinion is central to political decision making. On this view, the way to determine

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public opinion is the public opinion poll, conducted in the usual way, with measures of statistical accuracy. But if the principle of reason-based deliberation is right, there are grounds for taking a different view of the argumentum ad populum. The form of argument traditionally called argumentum ad populum (argument to the people) is usually known in logic as the “appeal to popular opinion.”8 In modern political terms, in a context of democratic government, the expression “public opinion” would most likely be used instead of “popular opinion,” given the negative connotations of “popular.” But from the point of view of the principle of reason-based deliberation, the argumentum ad populum can be reasonable, if it is based on intelligent deliberation that is, in turn, based on knowledge of an issue. These conditions usually do not exist in the usual kind of poll. Unlike the participants in a reasonbased deliberation, the respondents in a poll may be ignorant about the issue, but do not want to expose their ignorance. They may respond even when they have not thought about the issue. Fishkin pinpointed the key problem with current public opinion polling: “most opinions are invented on the spot.” 9 Although polls can be very useful, and they are sometimes accurate indicators of public opinion, their basic fault is that they just give a “snapshot” of how the public feels at one point of time. People may answer yes or no to a question, but that may not reveal how they really feel about an issue. Public opinion polls can also be highly misleading,10 especially when used by advocates to promote a politician or a cause. To be a reasonable basis for political action, surely a public opinion must be informed by the relevant facts, and must be the product of group deliberation on these facts. Deliberative polls could overcome the deficiencies in current, nondeliberative polling by engaging respondents in dialogue rather than attempting to elicit simple yes or no answers to questions. In a setting of intelligent deliberation, the argumentum ad populum, while inherently fallible, might not be entirely worthless. Deliberation is supposed to seek out a prudent course of action by dealing with apparent inconsistencies. One unsettling observation is that pop8. Hamblin describes appeal to popular opinion as an emotional “appeal to popular favor.” But he adds (Fallacies, 44) that “it is not clear from its name that it does not consist of the purest valid reasoning, and only an anti-democrat could unhesitatingly assume the contrary.” 9. Fishkin, Democracy and Deliberation, 83. 10. Joel Best, Damned Lies and Statistics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001).

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ular opinion, even on matters of fundamental policy deliberation, can appear to be inconsistent. Polls may show that the public strongly professes to have a certain belief or value, but the actions actually carried out by the public may present even more compelling evidence that in reality the opposite view is accepted. A CBS poll showed that Americans favor increased energy conservation over higher energy production by a 60 to 26 percent margin.11 But Robert J. Samuelson notes a contradiction here: “By deed, we crave energy-draining comforts—from sports-utility vehicles to bigger homes.”12 Since 1986, energy demand has been steadily up. The contradiction is most apparent in the ads for gas-guzzling sports-utility vehicles that typically base the appeal on environmental values. Another interesting apparent contradiction of this sort is that many wealthy people profess a belief in equality but spend very little of their high incomes to remove inequality. G. A. Cohen, has discussed this apparent contradiction at length and articulated several arguments that could possibly be used to resolve it.13 Such apparent contradictions in popular opinions that are fundamental to national political deliberations suggest that it might be wise to be cautious about basing political deliberations on standard public opinion polls. Poll-driven politics is a reality, however. The problem is that basing national decisions on public opinion polls may be illogical. It should be no surprise then that it sometimes leads to contradictions. Although such contradictions can be clarified, or perhaps even be resolved in some cases, they suggest that arguments based on public opinion might be a lot more complex and subtle than they often appear to be. When we look to the history of the subject, the balance of intellectual opinion in Western culture has tilted heavily in recent years against the principle of reason-based deliberation. As noted, the modern viewpoint is to discount any form of argument other than objective evidence. This viewpoint has legitimated empirical public opinion polls, and made deliberation seem subjective. In the ancient world, however, deliberation was seen as representing an important framework of argumentation in its own right, as a way of giving evidence to support a conclusion. In his Rhetoric, Aristotle not only characterized deliberative rhetoric as an important kind of public argumentation but classified and analyzed many common forms 11. Robert J. Samuelson, “The Energy War Within Us,” Newsweek, May 28, 2001, p. 6. 12. Ibid. 13. G. A. Cohen, “If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?” Journal of Ethics 4 (2000): 1–26.

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of argument used in this kind of rhetoric. In fact, other works by Aristotle also seem to support the principle of reason-based deliberation. In the Nicomachean Ethics he presents a very clear description of deliberation as a process of reasoning in uncertain and changeable conditions. The Aristotelian model is still very influential in the accounts of deliberation one finds in modern argumentation theory.

deliberation as a model of rational argumentation The problem with appeal to popular opinion as a type of argument is that it falls between extremes. At one extreme, the argument seems very weak, almost worthless. Indeed, as Tocqueville showed, it can be fallacious. Belief in a particular proposition does not make it true, no matter how many people are doing the believing. For this reason, polls generally fail to tell us what is really true or false. They only tell us what people believe is true or false. At the other extreme, suppose that the group polled is a majority of experts in a domain of knowledge. For example, suppose that all physicians say that a certain drug is the best treatment for some disease. This argument, though an appeal to majority opinion, is quite strong. Why? Presumably because physicians are in a position to know about medical issues. We presume that scientific tests on this drug have been done, that the physicians know about the results of these tests, and perhaps even that they, as a group, have reached a consensus that this drug is the appropriate form of treatment for this disease. Now what about the kind of appeal to popular opinion that falls between these two extremes? This kind of appeal to popular opinion is not so well recognized, or so easy to dismiss or accept. Its strength seems to depend on whether the popular opinion being appealed to is the product of a properly conducted deliberation. Properly conducted, deliberation characteristically passes through four stages. At the first stage, some sort of practical problem that requires action is encountered. This first stage could be called the problem recognition stage. Typically, at this stage a dilemma is posed for an agent or group of agents. The problem can be posed in the form of a question. Should we build a new sewer system? Should I take this job offer? Should we send a peacekeeping force to Bosnia? There can be multiple options considered, but in the simplest case, there are two choices that are mutually exclusive and exhaustive. Of course, in real deliberations, as the deliberation proceeds, the choices often will need to be restructured, and other alternatives will need to be considered as well. Often the choice

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is between doing something and doing nothing. The second stage is that of taking on a commitment to going ahead with a serious deliberation that will look at the relevant issues and take into account the information relevant to these issues that can be found within the time and resources available. The third stage is the argumentation stage. In this stage, all the relevant arguments on both sides are expressed, criticized, and considered on their merits. A good method at the argumentation stage is often to list all the arguments on both sides, weighing one side against the other. The fourth stage is the concluding stage. At this stage, a decision is arrived at, on the balance of considerations, to take action or do nothing, in line with the conclusion indicated by the mass of evidence collected at the argumentation stage. Argumentation typically used in the deliberation is of the kind called practical reasoning, often associated with the Aristotelian practical syllogism. Sometimes it is also called means-end reasoning. It is based on a form of inference that has two premises. First, an agent has a goal. Second, the agent reasonably judges that a particular action is the means to achieve this goal. Based on these two premises, the agent arrives at the conclusion that to be practically reasonable, it should perform this particular action. The pronoun “it” is used to indicate the agent, because an agent can be a human being or a machine (or an animal, for that matter). Much recent research in computer science is on multi-agent systems in which the agent is a software entity.14 In the field of artificial intelligence practical reasoning is so common that it has virtually come to be equated with reasoning. Practical reasoning in the above two-premise form seems very simple. And it is. But in realistic deliberations various complications need to be taken into account. These complications can be expressed in the form of five critical questions.15 1. Is it realistically possible to achieve the goal? 2. Are there positive or negative consequences of either of the courses of action that should be taken into account? 3. Are there other means of achieving the goal that should be considered? 4. Which is the best of the various means available? 5. Are there other goals (possibly even conflicting with the goal at issue) that should be considered? 14. Gerhard Weiss, Multiagent Systems: A Modern Approach to Distributed Artificial Intelligence (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2000). 15. Compare Douglas Walton, The New Dialectic: Conversational Contexts of Argument (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998).

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As deliberations move forward, these questions are continually asked and answered. As new relevant information comes to light, new questions are asked and answered. One side will take the role of proponent of a proposed action or policy. The other side, called the respondent, asks critical questions that relate to the practical reasoning used by the proponent to defend her policy or recommended action. This dynamic aspect of deliberation is clearly revealed in the model of deliberation Yankelovich presents, as shown below. The argumentation used in the context of a deliberation will be stronger depending on how far along the argumentation stage the deliberation has proceeded. Evaluating depends on how far the argument of the deliberation has proceeded, on how much evidence on both sides of the issue has been considered, and on the critical questions that have been asked and answered.

deliberative polling Like Fishkin, Daniel Yankelovich, another well-known pollster, has long been aware that public opinion polls can be very misleading, because people are inclined to answer a poll question even though their knowledge of the issue posed by the question could be superficial. For example, a person may be for or against a policy, and yet not be aware of the consequences of the policy. Yankelovich gives as an example a poll in which more than 70 percent of respondents believed that the United States should have protectionist legislation.16 When the poll was run again, with respondents who were informed that protection might raise prices or restrict choice, support for protectionism dropped to around 28 percent. Examples like this one can be multiplied to show how public opinion polls can be misleading. Recent abuses of polls, like the use of political “push polls,” which use loaded questions to try to influence voters, have made some of the shortcomings of polling so obvious that there is growing suspicion about the superficiality of polling as a method of measuring real public opinion, especially on complex issues where the public may lack relevant information. Yankelovich astutely pinpointed a key problem posed by polling methodology. On issues of public importance in a democracy, the public 16. Daniel Yankelovich, Coming to Public Judgment (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 38–44.

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deliberates before taking action. Deliberation is a sequential process that needs to go through several stages as new information comes in and is processed. Polls too often oversimplify or distort a hypothesis about what or how the public is really thinking about an issue because the poll takes a “snapshot” of just one stage in the process of deliberation. This negative or critical point about polls made by Yankelovich is interesting, but by itself, it is not too novel. Many others have often criticized the shortcomings of public opinion polls. Yankelovich went further than just negative critique, however. He worked out an analysis of the process of deliberation as a sequential form of reasoning. He cited the following seven stages as characteristic of the process of public deliberation on an issue of public policy.17 First, the public becomes aware of the existence of a problem, and it is stated explicitly. Second, the public develops a sense of urgency about doing something to solve the problem. Third, policymakers begin to offer proposals for change. Fourth, resistance to change rises as people become aware of the possible consequences of the proposals. Fifth, people begin to “wrestle” with the trade-offs, trying to reconcile conflicting values. This fifth stage could be called an argumentation stage of the deliberation. Arguments on both sides are brought forth, and their weaknesses and strengths explored. When this fifth stage is ended, a sixth stage is reached where people reach an “intellectual resolution” on what action should be taken to deal with the issue. The seventh stage is the public acceptance, personally, emotionally, and morally, of the resolution of the issue. The problem with public opinion polls, according to Yankelovich is that the public does not get the information they need in order to go through this procedure of rational deliberation in a productive way.18 The media see their job as making people aware of new issues, but they typically do not follow up on an issue, its consequences, and its progress though the various stages of deliberation. They tend to emphasize stages one and two, then lose interest when some, yet newer controversy surfaces. Reporting lurches on, presenting a disjointed series of snapshots that fails to match up with the requirements of a rational deliberation process by an informed public. What is most important about Yankelovich’s analysis of polling in democratic decision making is not his negative critique of public opinion 17. Daniel Yankelovich, “A Widening Expert/Public Opinion Gap,” Challenge, MayJune 1992, p. 24. 18. Yankelovich, “Opinion Gap,” 25.

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polling, or his empirical observations about public deliberations. What is most fundamentally important is that Yankelovich can be seen as setting out normative requirements for a rational process of deliberation. This process represents a rational method of thinking by the public in a setting of democratic politics. Yankelovich sees the public as a group who are thinking together in a way that is comparable in its structure to the way that a rational individual should think when making decisions on how to take action when confronted with a problem or issue. Accordingly, the seven steps of the Yankelovich model can be seen as setting out requirements for a distinctive type of reasoning, or use of reasoning in a special context of use. The Yankelovich model suggests that deliberation should be seen as a kind of conversational interaction in which the public as a group decision maker is getting information through the media, and at the same time voicing their own opinions, often through public opinion polls. The process is a circular and dynamic sequence of argumentation. It is conversational in nature because questions are asked and answered at each stage of the unfolding conversation. The conversation is not only goal-directed. It has an order of the sequence of conversational moves. This order sets out a normative framework that can be used to apply to particular cases. In a given case, using the normative criteria, an evaluation can be made on how good or deficient the deliberation in the issue was at each stage of the deliberation. The deliberation is only good or productive at that stage if the appropriate critical questions are satisfactorily answered before the argumentation proceeds to the next stage. For example, suppose the public is polled on its opinion on the issue. Critical questions about the questions used in the poll should be asked. For example, the public’s knowledge of the consequences of the policy at issue should be considered, in judging the worth of a conclusion derived by inference from a public opinion poll. The format of the ordinary public opinion poll is designed to get a public opinion on an issue at a point of time, even though the public may lack information about the issue at that time. But there is another kind of poll, called a deliberative poll. The deliberative poll is designed to get the thoughtful opinion of the public after they have received the relevant information on an issue, and had a chance to think through its implications. Fishkin has succinctly summarized how a deliberative poll works.19 19. Fishkin, Voice of the People, 162.

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Take a national random sample of the electorate and transport those people from all over the country to a single place. Immerse the sample in the issues, with carefully balanced briefing materials, with intensive discussions in small groups, and with the chance to question competing experts and politicians. At the end of several days of working through the issues face to face, poll the participants in detail. The resulting survey offers a representation of the considered judgments of the public—the views the entire country would come to if it had the same experience of behaving more like ideal citizens immersed in the issues for an extended period. The deliberative poll is designed as a dialogue in which an issue is discussed. Any dialogue can be seen having to pass through four stages. There has to be an opening stage, in which the issue is formulated. Next there has to be an argumentation stage in which arguments on both sides of the issue are discussed. At this stage, there should be an interjection of relevant information on the issue from experts. By this means the deliberations can be made intelligent, and the ignorance of the participants can be overcome in order to capture the opinion the public would have if they were informed about the issue and had deliberated about it. The traditional public opinion poll fails to take into account the reasons a respondent has for holding a particular opinion. The probable or possible consequences of a policy may not even be considered. Fortunately, the ordinary poll is not the only method of judging public opinion on an issue. A deliberative poll can be based on an examination of the reasons why the public holds a particular opinion on an issue. But here we come back to models of rationality. The traditional public opinion poll has seemed like rational evidence in the past because it is backed up by the science of statistics. To the logical empiricist, empirical data are the best kind of evidence, whereas deliberation is merely a subjective process. And yet the deliberative poll is less susceptible to poll-driven politics and the fallacious argumentum ad populum. It probes deeper into the real opinion of the public, instead of just taking a superficial snapshot. But now we are back to the underlying logical or philosophical problem. How can an argument that is based on intelligent deliberation be seen as rational evidence? Fortunately, argumentation theory provides a model of rational argument that can answer this question.

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deliberation, persuasion, and other types of dialogue According to the principle of reason-based deliberation, it is a presumption of deliberative democracy that group discussion in the form of deliberation can be a rational basis for action. In other words, according to this principle, the argumentation that arises out of deliberation needs to be seen as reason-based. The arguments discussed and acted upon must be able to be rationally judged to offer good reasons to support the conclusion decided on. But rational deliberation is only one framework of argumentation that takes place in political discourse; there are several other kinds of argumentation that are important as well. A lot of political rhetoric can be described as persuasive communication. In persuasion, the proponent of the argument already has an agenda. She has a viewpoint or thesis that she wants the respondent (audience) to accept, unlike deliberation, which is more open to alternative courses of action and more collaborative in nature. Another kind of argumentation commonly encountered in political discourse is negotiation. Argumentation in negotiation is all about bargaining over goods that are in short supply. Yet another framework of argumentation is the eristic dialogue or quarrelsome type of discourse—a polarized verbal fight in which the aim is to defeat the other party by any means. Both Plato and Aristotle were aware of eristic or agonistic dialogue, in which the sole purpose is to get the best of the other part by using arguments that may only appear to be good. According to Plato,20 eristic arguments are the methods used by the Sophist. However, eristic dialogue is not always intentionally deceptive. It is often used by interest groups who see the “fight” for their cause as more important than engaging in a discussion in which the other side might be right. Finally, it is possible to distinguish one more basic framework of argumentation that sometimes has a role in political rhetoric—the inquiry. In the inquiry, the aim is to carefully prove (or disprove) a conclusion by using only evidence that has been carefully established and verified. This framework of argumentation is characteristic of the methods used to test a new drug or to investigate an air disaster. All six basic types of dialogue described above, persuasion dialogue, the inquiry, negotiation dialogue, information-seeking dialogue, deliberation, and eristic dialogue, have been studied in recent argumentation theory.21 20. Plato, Sophist, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 231e. 21. Douglas Walton, Appeal to Expert Opinion: Arguments from Authority (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).

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The method of analyzing and evaluating argumentation by using each type of dialogue as a normative model is identified with the approach called the new dialectic. The characteristics of each of the types of dialogue in the new dialectic can be summarized in Table 1. Table 1 Types of Dialogue Type of dialogue

Initial situation

Participant’s goal

Goal of dialogue

Deliberation

A dilemma or practical choice

To coordinate goals and actions

Persuasion

A conflict of opinions A conflict of interests

To persuade the other party To satisfy a need or desire

Eristic dialogue

A personal conflict

Inquiry

A need to have proof A need for information

To injure an opponent, if just verbally To find and verify evidence To acquire or give information

To choose the best available course of action To resolve or clarify an issue To find a reasonable settlement To reveal deeper basis of conflict

Negotiation

Informationseeking dialogue

To prove or disprove a hypothesis To exchange information

The new dialectic is built on the pragmatic foundations of H. P. Grice’s “Logic and Conversation.”22 According to this pragmatic approach, an argument can be seen as a contribution to an orderly, goal-directed conversation between two parties. It can be judged to be rationally acceptable to the extent that it made a collaborative contribution to moving the conversation toward its goal. This Gricean approach was supplemented by the typology of dialogues in the new dialectic, as shown in Table 1. By specifying the precise rules and goals of the different types of conversational exchanges, the new dialectic offers a method for evaluating argumentation of the kind that is commonly used in political rhetoric. Each type of dialogue has distinctive goals, turn-taking moves, and methods of argumentation used by the participants to work toward these goals together. Thus any given argument will need to be evaluated differently in the new dialectical approach, depending on what type of conversation it is supposed to be a part of. 22. H. P. Grice, “Logic and Conversation,” in The Logic of Grammar, ed. Donald Davidson and Gil Harman (Encino, Calif.: Dickenson, 1975), 64–75.

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James Bohman describes public deliberation as a dialogical process.23 Reaching toward putting this idea into some kind of coherent framework, recent democratic theorists have tried to identify the features of this dialogical process that make it a kind of rational thinking. But the framework as whole has been elusive, because of the logical empiricist assumption that any rational argument that proves anything must be based on fixed premises that are empirically verifiable and deductively valid inferences from these premises. Instead, deliberation needs to be seen as a process in which fallible arguments on both sides of a problem or issue are considered. Premises are not fixed, like scientific axioms, but variable. They are endoxa, based on popular opinions worthy of discussion and evaluation. As a set of propositions endoxa can even be inconsistent and still be worthy as premises of a thoughtful and productive public deliberation on an issue. The inferences drawn from the endoxa are not (exclusively) deductively valid, but rather fallible inferences, subject to doubt and critical questioning. They are generalizations that are subject to exceptions. Reasons in a public deliberation, viewed in this model, can be seen as convincing (rationally persuasive) when their probative weight is evaluated against the opposing arguments that have been given in dialogue. Of course, such arguments tend not to be conclusive. But as Aristotle would have maintained, it would be a mistake to expect conclusive and final arguments when dealing with uncertain subject matter. David Hitchcock, Peter McBurney, and Simon Parsons have proposed a formalized model of deliberation as a type of dialogue in which participants take turns making proposal and counterproposals. As well, the participants can make other kinds of moves, like asking questions, according to procedural rules. A deliberation dialogue, in this model, arises out of a need to take action, expressed by a governing question like, “How should we respond to the prospect of global warming?”24 As the dialogue proceeds, the participants try to answer the question by putting forward proposals for action that might solve the problem. The list of different types of moves gives the reader an idea of how the dialogue works.25 23. James Bohman, Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity, and Democracy (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996), 53. 24. David Hitchcock, Peter McBurney, and Simon Parsons, “A Framework for Deliberation Dialogues,” in Argument and Its Applications: Proceedings of the Fourth Biennial Conference of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation (OSSA 2001), ed. H. V. Hansen, C. W. Tindale, J. A. Blair, and R. H. Johnson, compact disk, 5. Also available on Peter McBurney’s web page at the University of Liverpool, Department of Computer Science: http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~peter/ 25. Ibid., 7.

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Open: Opening of the deliberation dialogue, and the raising of a governing question about what is to be done. Inform: Discussion of: (a) the governing question; (b) desirable goals; (c) any constraints on the possible actions which may be considered; (d) perspectives by which proposals may be evaluated; and (e) any premises (facts) relevant to this evaluation. Propose: Suggesting of possible action-options appropriate to the governing question. Consider: Commenting on proposals from various perspectives. Revise: Revising of: (a) the governing question, (b) goals, (c) constraints, (d) perspectives, and/or (e) action-options in the light of the comments presented; and the undertaking of any information-gathering or fact-checking required for resolution. (Note that other types of dialogues, such as information seeking or persuasion, may be embedded in the deliberation dialogue at this stage.) Recommend: Recommending an option for action, and acceptance or nonacceptance of this recommendation by each participant. Confirm: Confirming acceptance of a recommended option by each participant. We have assumed that all participants must confirm their acceptance of a recommended option for normal termination. Close: Closing of the deliberation dialogue. The various rules given by Hitchcock, McBurney, and Parsons govern not only what each participant can say at each move but also how each must respond to the other participant. Unanimity of the participants is required for their reaching a decision on a course of action to conclude a dialogue. This formal model of deliberation is commitment-based, meaning that the premises of one participant’s argument are furnished by the commitments of the other. This feature accommodates the possibility that general agreement of the group to commit to an argument can be an acceptable basis for provisionally going ahead in a deliberation. The idea that deliberation can be a framework for rational argument stems from the leading notion of rationality in Aristotle’s ethics and

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politics, that of practical reasoning. In his writings on logic, Aristotle did classify certain types of argument as “dialectical,” but deliberation was not one of them. But if we turn to Aristotle’s writings on rhetoric, deliberation is cited as an important framework of argumentation. Aristotle described the characteristics of deliberation very clearly in a way that makes his work still a leading resource on the subject.

aristotle on rhetoric, deliberation, and public opinion Aristotle defined rhetoric as “the faculty of discovering the possible means of persuasion in reference to any subject whatever.”26 But then later in the Rhetoric, he writes that the function of rhetoric is “to deal with things about which we deliberate” (1357a12). These remarks are puzzling, if a clear distinction between persuasion and deliberation is assumed. Is rhetoric about persuasion or deliberation? Some clarification is forthcoming in Aristotle’s classification of the kinds of rhetoric as corresponding to the three types of rhetorical speeches: deliberative, forensic, and epideictic (1358b3). The deliberative kind, we are told, is either hortatory or dissuasive. The forensic kind is either accusatory or defensive. The epideictic kind has praise and blame as its subject (1358b3). These remarks throw some light on the place of persuasion in deliberative rhetoric, especially in relation to Aristotle’s clear and forceful analysis of correctness of deliberation as a kind of excellence of thinking given in the Nicomachean Ethics.27 In this account, Aristotle wrote that we deliberate about things that are in our power, and that therefore deliberation is about future things that are fluid, or open to change, and not fixed (Nic. Ethics 1112b7). Deliberation concerns matters that are subject to rules that “generally hold good” but are uncertain (1112b10). Thus we get a picture of how Aristotle defined deliberation. It looks like a process involving a kind of argumentation or rational thinking in which a group or an individual is trying to decide on the best course of action in a situation requiring a choice but also involving uncertainty. The decision maker is looking at the arguments on both sides of the choice. This does not explain the role that persuasion plays in deliberation.

26. Aristotle, Rhetoric, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1937), 1356a2. 27. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, in The Works of Aristotle Translated into English, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928), 1142b15.

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The view of modern argumentation theory is that deliberation and persuasion are two fundamentally different kinds of discourse in which argumentation takes place. Each is a distinctively different framework of argumentation with its own goal. Each is a distinctive type of dialogue in its own right, as I have indicated. The initial situation of a deliberation dialogue is a practical choice of actions that needs to be made, and the goal of the dialogue is to decide the best (most prudent) course of action. The initial situation of a persuasion dialogue is a conflict of opinions about an issue to be discussed, and the goal of the dialogue is to resolve or clarify the issue by examining and weighing the arguments on both sides. In the type of persuasion dialogue Frans H. van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst call critical discussion, each side has a “viewpoint” or point of view, and each tries to convince the other side that its viewpoint is right.28 The two types of dialogue are similar in several important respects. Both are about an initial conflict or choosing among mutually exclusive alternatives. And in some cases, the persuasion dialogue can be about a conflict of opinions on which is the best policy or course of action. And yet they differ in an important way. Persuasion dialogue is about a proponent using argumentation to try to get the respondent to come to accept a proposition as true (or acceptable) that the respondent did not accept as such before the opening of the dialogue. Deliberation dialogue is about trying to look into the future by considering the pros and cons of two alternative possible courses of action. An example would be a group of citizens in a town meeting discussing whether or not to install a new sewer system. Of course, in such a meeting, persuasion will be involved, since there will be factions for both sides, but there will be—or should be—many who will really deliberate by getting as realistic an estimate of the costs and benefits, as they can. Since modern logic textbooks so often take appeal to popular opinion to be fallacious, you might think that Aristotle had done so as well. However, this does not prove to be the case when we turn to the various places in the Aristotelian corpus in which appeal to popular opinion is discussed. Dialectical reasoning was said by Aristotle to be based on what are called endoxa, or statements that seem to be true by the majority and the wise.29 Jonathan Barnes translates endoxon as “reputable” or “of good repute,” suggesting that endoxa are not only public opinions, but ones that 28. Frans H. van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst, Speech Acts in Argumentative Discussions (Dordrecht: Foris, 1984). 29. Aristotle, Topics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), vol. 1, 100b22–24.

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are generally respectable at any given time, as would be supported by the consensus of scientific opinion.30 There seems to be no single English term for this notion, although “conventional wisdom” might be a good approximation. Since dialectical reasoning is basically a reasonable form of argumentation for Aristotle, and since arguing from an endoxon is not included in his list of fallacies in On Sophistical Refutations,31 one might conclude that appeal to popular opinion is not a fallacy for Aristotle. But there is a very significant passage in the Topics where Aristotle offers his readers clever strategic advice on how to get the best of a speech partner with whom you are arguing.32 He suggests that it is useful to add to your view the generally held and expressed view. The reason why this strategy should work, he adds, is that people are reluctant to go against customary opinions. This passage suggests that while Aristotle did not condemn appeal to popular opinion as a fallacious type of argumentation, he well understood how it could be used for purposes of strategic manipulation. It is fundamental to Aristotle’s view of rational thinking to be clear that practical reasoning in deliberation is quite different from scientific reasoning. The basic principle underlying the distinction is that to deliberate is to reason about things that are variable and change with circumstances.33 Aristotle called scientific reasoning “demonstration” (apodeixis), and he describes its properties in the Prior Analytics.34 Demonstration needs to proceed by deductive (syllogistic) reasoning from premises that are known to be true.35 The premises of a demonstration are fixed, once in place, and stable. For example, in geometry they are necessary truths or axioms. In goal-directed practical reasoning of the kind used to make choices in eth30. Jonathan Barnes, “Aristotle and the Methods of Ethics,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 133–34 (1980): 500. 31. Aristotle, On Sophistical Refutations, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). 32. Topics 156b20–156b24. 33. Nicomachean Ethics 1094b19. 34. Aristotle, Prior Analytics, in Analytica Priora et Posteriora, ed. David Ross and L. Minio-Paulello (Oxford: Oxford Classical Texts, 1981). 35. Brian McAdon, “Rhetoric Is a Counterpart of Dialectic,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 34 (2001): 113–49. McAdon notes that the starting point (premises) of an Aristotelian demonstration must be not only true, but also more familiar than, prior to, and explanatory of the conclusion. Burnyeat notes that Aristotelian demonstration proceeds from premises that are “true and primary and immediate and better known than, prior to, and explanatory of the conclusion demonstrated from them.” Myles F. Burnyeat, “Enthymeme: Aristotle on the Logic of Persuasion,” in Aristotle’s Rhetoric: Philosophical Essays, ed. David J. Furley and Alexander Nehemas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 13.

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ical deliberation, the premises are variable. In ethical reasoning that culminates in a choice on what to do, he wrote, “we must be content with premises to indicate the truth roughly and in outline.”36 Hence reasoning in deliberation is based on premises that are generalizations which are “only for the most part true.” But now an obvious question is raised. Where do such uncertain premises come from, and what makes them acceptable for rational thinking? The answer Aristotle gives to this dual question is that the premises of ethical reasoning are endoxa, or generally accepted opinions. As noted above, the endoxa are not merely popular opinions of any kind, but “reputable” opinions with some standing.37 They are opinions generally accepted, not just by the public, but also by the experts. The account of endoxa in the Topics defines them as follows: “Those opinions are reputable that are accepted by everyone or by the majority or by the wise.”38 But now another problem arises. If the endoxa are variable, can they even be inconsistent with each other in some cases? Could the public, for example, accept one proposition and yet, at the same time, also accept its opposite? There are actual cases, quite interesting ones, in which the public does seem to accept contradictory propositions. Aristotle’s account seems to permit this. Barnes and Robert Bolton take Aristotle’s notion of endoxon to allow, for example, that popular opinion can conflict with the opinion held by “ the wise” or “the most reputable of the wise” (the experts).39 Thus an endoxon is only something that is generally accepted and is therefore plausible. That does not mean that it is true, or even that everyone accepts it. What we need to note is that endoxa can function as premises in rational deliberation, for example in political decision making, even though they are fallible. In some cases, they may even lead to contradiction because they are inconsistent, or contain inconsistencies that can be derived from them by logical reasoning. But here is the problem. In deductive logic, anything 36. Nicomachean Ethics 1094b19–23. 37. Barnes, “Aristotle and the Methods of Ethics,” 500; McAdon (“Rhetoric,” 124) has observed that endoxon is often translated as “generally held belief,” but that the term refers only to certain accepted opinions “held in high esteem” or “of high repute.” 38. Topics 100b22–24. 39. For example, a passage in the Eudemian Ethics (1214b29–1215a15, in Barnes, Complete Works, vol. 2), indicates that the opinions of experts on ethics, say on happiness, could be different from popular opinion on the subject. Aristotle wrote that we do not have to “consider the views of the multitude” for they “talk without consideration about almost everything, and most about happiness.” Robert Bolton, “The Epistemological Basis of Aristotelian Dialectic,” Biologie, Logique et Metaphysique chez Aristote, ed. Daniel Devereux and Pierre Pellegrin (Paris: Editions du Centre de la Recherche Scientifique, 1990), 185–236.

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follows by valid reasoning from an inconsistent set of premises. Thus it is clear that argument from popular opinion must be based on some model of reasoning other than that of deductive logic. And it turns out that it is. It is based on a kind of fallible reasoning based on warrants that are subject to exceptions. To see what kind of reasoning this is, we need to rethink the concept of the enthymeme. Only then can we penetrate beneath the veil of our logical empiricist prejudices and begin to see how the argumentum ad populum can be formulated as an argumentation scheme. An argumentation scheme is a form of argument that can be reasonable, even if it is subject to critical questioning. It is a form of argument that can be fallacious in some cases, but can also be reasonable, under the right conditions. Aristotle claimed that dialectical reasoning, the most important kind of rational argumentation outside science, should be based on premises accepted by the majority and the wise. All this evidence would seem to show that somewhere in the philosophy of Aristotle, and especially in his theory of rhetorical argument, one should find support for the principle of reason-based deliberation. Why then is it that such support has never been found? The reason is that Aristotle’s view of rhetorical argument has been systematically misinterpreted in a way that makes it more supportive of logical empiricism by concealing the fundamental link between the speaker and the audience—their shared ways of thinking. The misinterpretation is that the enthymeme, literally meaning “in the mind,” is misleadingly taken to be a kind of deductive argument with a missing premise. Once it is shown what an enthymeme really is, or was for Aristotle, a very different view of his rhetorical theory emerges, one that can actually be shown to strongly support the principle of reason-based deliberation.

the enthymeme as the key component in aristotle’s RHETORIC

In his account of argumentation presented in the Rhetoric, Aristotle’s view was that rhetorical argumentation should properly be based on premises that express public opinion at a given time. It would be quite surprising if his view of rhetorical argumentation were to be otherwise. For surely a rhetorical speaker, in order to be successful in persuading an audience, must base his arguments on the commitments of the audience, on what they accept as their opinions. Of course, a public speaker will try to change

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some of these commitments and opinions, but it is surely illogical to think that he will, or should, try to change all of them. To successfully persuade his audience to come to accept a specific claim, he will generally have to base his arguments on their way of thinking, and on opinions and ways of thinking about things that they are inclined to accept and are accustomed to. In other words, the successful public speaker needs to recognize that the audience (including what the audience accepts, and the audience’s general way of thinking) has an important role in his argumentation. The use of this recognition could be called audience-centered rhetoric. In audience-centered rhetoric, argumentation needs to be seen as a dialogue between the speaker and the audience. The audience may appear to be passive in this dialogue, but this appearance is misleading. The reason is that the audience’s opinions and customary ways of thinking need to be vital in guiding the speaker’s argumentation. In modern terms, the speaker needs to use empathy to figure out what his audience is thinking about an issue, what they accept on the issue, or what they can be brought to accept, and how they are thinking about the issue. But what evidence is there that Aristotle’s view was compatible with, or supported audience-centered rhetoric? Actually, there is quite a bit of evidence, but it all depends on Aristotle’s concept of the enthymeme. Right at the beginning,40 he cites the enthymeme as centrally important for rhetorical argumentation, criticizing other theories of rhetoric because they say nothing about enthymemes. But what did Aristotle mean by the term? The conventional opinion throughout the history of logic has been that Aristotle meant by “enthymeme” a deductively valid argument (syllogism) that needs to be made explicit by adding in a premise that is tacitly understood. To cite the traditional example given in so many logic textbooks, consider the following argument: all men are mortal, therefore Socrates is mortal. This argument is invalid, as it stands. But if we supply the missing premise, “Socrates is a man,” the argument becomes valid. Since everyone knows that Socrates is a man, or at least an arguer could assume that a typical audience would be aware of this fact (and presumably would not dispute it), this missing premise can be added as part of the argument. There is some textual evidence for this traditional view of the Aristotelian enthymeme, mainly one sentence from the Prior Analytics (70a10): “An enthymeme is an incomplete argument ( syllogismos) from plausibility or sign.” But as M. F. Burnyeat has suggested, the key word “incomplete” 40. Rhetoric 1354a4.

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(ateles) may have simply been added in the eleventh century. Burnyeat argues 41 that this addition is wrong, and should be deleted. Many earlier Aristotle scholars had agreed with Burnyeat’s view that the traditional view of the enthymeme as an incomplete syllogism is an error. What then, it needs to be asked, did Aristotle really mean by “enthymeme”? The answer is breathtaking in that it opens up a different way of looking at the concept of argumentation in Aristotle’s Rhetoric that departs radically from long-standing traditions in both logic and rhetoric. What Aristotle really referred to, according to this view, is a kind of argumentation that can be called plausible reasoning. It was known to the Sophists. It is different from deductive and inductive (in the modern statistical sense) argumentation. It can be identified with what Peirce called abductive inference. It is a fallible form of argumentation. It requires input from the audience, or respondent, to whom the argument is supposedly directed. As Lloyd F. Bitzer notes, although there are many hints, there is no unambiguous statement defining the enthymeme in the Rhetoric.42 However, McBurney carefully examines the passages in the Rhetoric where Aristotle pays special attention to the enthymeme, and comes to the conclusion that it represents an argument based on sign and “probability.” But the term traditionally translated as “probability” (eikos) does not refer to the modern statistical meaning. McBurney writes that the greatest difficulty in grasping what is meant by the enthymeme arises from understanding what Aristotle means by eikos, for Aristotle’s discussion is “obscure” and “he does not give us a complete example.”43 But eikos was a familiar notion in Greek rhetoric. A better translation would be “plausibility” instead of “probability.” The most famous illustration of plausible reasoning in the ancient world was the example described by Aristotle in the Rhetoric where it was attributed to Corax.44 In a trial in a case of alleged assault, the one man was visibly bigger and stronger than the other. The weaker man appealed to the jury by arguing that it was implausible that he would have assaulted the visibly much bigger and stronger man. Turning the tables, the stronger man then put forward a reverse eikotic argument, opposed to the smaller man’s original eikotic argument. The stronger man 41. Burnyeat, “Enthymeme,” 6, 7. 42. Lloyd F. Bitzer, “Aristotle’s Enthymeme Revisited,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 45 (1959): 399. 43. James H. McBurney, “The Place of the Enthymeme in Rhetorical Theory,” Speech Monographs 3 (1936): 56. 44. Aristotle Rhetoric 1402a17–28.

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argued that it was implausible that he would attack a visibly smaller man, since it would look so bad for him if the case went to court. According to Michael Gagarin, the reverse eikotic argument was a typical “turning-of the-tables” argument favored by the Sophists of the second half of the fifth century b.c.45 McBurney argued that many examples of such plausibilistic or eikotic arguments can be found in the various Aristotelian topics, or common argument types. Christopher Tindale noted that many of the topics outlined by Aristotle in book 2, chapter 23, of the Rhetoric are common strategies or lines of argument that are familiar to modern argumentation theorists.46 Included are argument from precedent, argument from consequences, and argument from analogy. R. C. Seaton cites Antony’s public speech against the charge that Caesar was ambitious as a nice illustrative case of one of these common types of arguments.47 First, he states that Caesar brought many captives home, but put their ransoms in the general coffers. Second, he argues that when the poor cried, Caesar wept. Third, he argues that three times, when offered the dictatorship, Caesar refused. Seaton notes that all three arguments are based on “signs.”48 None of the arguments is deductively valid or inductively strong. None does more than offer a hypothesis or conjecture that would plausibly explain the data. In recent times another name has been given to this kind of argument— abduction.49 The American scientist and logician C. S. Peirce used examples both from science and everyday reasoning to argue that abduction, or inference to the best explanation, is an important category of argument in its own right. In “The Proper Treatment of a Hypothesis,”50 Peirce describes abduction as a kind of guessing, characteristic of scientific reasoning at the discovery stage, which can save experimental work by narrowing down the possible hypotheses to be tested to the most plausible candidates. But Peirce also gives examples of abduction from everyday reasoning. He cites 45. Michael Gagarin, “Probability and Persuasion: Plato in Early Greek Rhetoric,” in Persuasion: Greek Rhetoric in Action, ed. Ian Worthington (London: Routledge, 1994), 51. 46. Christopher Tindale, Acts of Arguing: A Rhetorical Model of Argument (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 11. 47. R. C. Seaton, “The Aristotelian Enthymeme,” Classical Review 28 (1914): 113–19, 114. 48. Ibid., 114. 49. Carolyn Eisele, Historical Perspectives on Peirce’s Logic of Science (Berlin: Mouton, 1985), 1:890–904. 50. Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Saunders Peirce, vol. 2, Elements of Logic, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 375.

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the case of his landing at a seaport in Turkey and meeting a man on horseback surrounded by four horsemen holding a canopy over his head.51 The conclusion he drew—this person must be the governor of the province. The reason—the governor was the only person he could think of that would be so greatly honored. This case of inference to the best explanation is a good example of abduction leading by plausible reasoning to a conclusion that is a guess or hypothesis. It could be wrong, but in context, it seems like a good guess. One can see the similarity here between abductive inference and the kind of plausibilistic reasoning characteristic of the kind of rhetorical argumentation described in the Rhetoric. Both are fallible, and both depend on commonly held assumptions about what is typical, or can normally be expected, in a kind of situation that is familiar to both a speaker and a hearer. A generalization like “Only a governor would be so greatly honored,” is not a universal generalization of the kind studied in deductive logic. It is a kind of commonsense generalization that fits a stereotypical kind of case, but is subject to refutation if more comes to be known about the particulars of the case. At any rate, the parallels between the Peircean notion of abductive inference and the Aristotelian notion of the enthymeme are thought-provoking. These matters of how to interpret Aristotle’s notion of the enthymeme are quite controversial. It seems incredible that the history of rhetorical argumentation since the time of Aristotle could be based on such a fundamental error. Although the error was recognized and pointed out by logicians from time to time, the logic textbooks in the twentieth century continue to use “enthymeme” in the way tradition dictates. Sir William Hamilton was clearly aware of this error. Hamilton called the defining of the enthymeme as a syllogism with one of it premises “not expressed, but understood” a “vulgar doctrine.”52 He saw this vulgar doctrine as a corruption of Aristotle’s meaning. According to Hamilton, “enthymeme is Aristotle’s term for a syllogism based on signs and likelihoods.” Hamilton argued that not all Aristotelian syllogisms are of the deductively valid kind. He argued, convincingly: “A syllogism from signs and likelihoods does not more naturally fall into an elliptical form than a syllogism of any other matter.”53 According to Aristotle’s view, Hamilton argued, there are syllogisms, like 51. Ru Micheal Sabre, “Peirce’s Abductive Argument and the Enthymeme,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 26 (1990): 363–72. 52. Sir William Hamilton, Discussions on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1861), 153. 53. Sir William Hamilton, Lectures on Logic (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1874), 389.

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those based on argument from sign, where the inference from the premises to the conclusion is not logically necessary, but only based on what generally appears to be true, subject to exceptions. H.W.B. Joseph distinguished between the common use of “enthymeme” in logic as a syllogism with a missing premise and the Aristotelian meaning of the term as an eikotic argument.54 According to Joseph, eikos is “a general proposition true only for the most part, such as that raw foods are unwholesome.” Such generalizations are subject to exceptions, as Joseph noted, and thus the inferences based on them, although they can be reasonable, are subject to refutation. Joseph cited examples of the medical diagnosis of a disease as an argument of this sort.55 The given symptoms may plausibly suggest a particular diagnosis, but new developments in the case may later point to a different conclusion. When did such a fundamental misinterpretation of one of the most central notions in Aristotle’s theory of rhetorical argumentation get started, and why has it persisted so long as such a dominant dogma in the history of logic? Hamilton noted the prevalence of this interpretation by commenting, “This absurdity has been and almost universally is believed by the acutest of human intellects, and on grounds which, when examined, afford not the slightest warrant for such a conclusion.”56 One might be tempted to blame it on the modern logicians, who have typically portrayed deductive logic as all-important, and have studiously ignored the defeasible nondeductive kinds of inference now regarded as so important in computer science. But apparently, this mistake did not originate in modern logic. It started a long time ago. Hamilton wrote that the “vulgar doctrine” of the enthymeme started from the earliest Greek commentators on Aristotle and can be traced through Sextus Empiricus.57 But what if the interpretation suggested above, defining enthymeme not as argument with missing premise, but as plausible argument to the best explanation, turns out to be right? The implications for rhetoric, and for the study of rhetorical argumentation in a context of deliberative democracy, are highly significant. It means not only that the traditional view of the enthymeme as a deductively valid argument with a missing premise is a misinterpretation of Aristotelian rhetoric. It opens up a new and radically different way of viewing the enthymeme as the key component in Aristotle’s technical art of rhetorical argumentation. It means that the cen54. 55. 56. 57.

H.W.B. Joseph, An Introduction to Logic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916), 350. Joseph, An Introduction to Logic, 350. Hamilton, Lectures on Logic, 389. Hamilton, Discussions, 155.

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tral form of argument in Aristotelian rhetoric is based on the notion of the speaker and the hearer sharing common assumptions about the way things can normally be expected to go in familiar situations—in situations that are familiar to both the speaker and the audience. It means that the speaker and the audience must share a bond that is the basis of the speaker’s successful argumentation. It means that the speaker must use empathy to grasp popular opinions, or assumptions about the way things can normally be expected to work in familiar situations. This aspect of rhetorical argumentation was well illustrated by Seaton’s case of the argument used in Mark Antony’s speech. If a politician is accused of being ambitious, then an audience will tend to see the fact that he rejected offers to take up high public office as relevant to that claim. The reason is that normally if a politician is ambitious, he will jump at the chance of taking up a high public office. Of course, this generalization is subject to exceptions. And it could be subject to refutation if more particulars of the case come to be known. Despite being guesses, these plausible kinds of arguments can be extremely powerful in making a case in political and legal argumentation, where the evidence tends to be based on a mass of weak and inconclusive arguments that are all factored in together. The public may not be in a position to know all the details of a complex political situation where the media tells only part of the story. But they can certainly draw plausible inferences from the information they are given.

the logical form of ARGUMENTUM AD POPULUM The initial obstacle to investigating the argumentum ad populum in a context of democratic rhetoric is one of nomenclature. To study something, you first of all have to define it, or at least mark out the subject for investigation by choosing a term to describe what you propose to investigate. To translate the Latin into some kind of workable English phrase that denotes the object of study, should we choose “popular opinion” or “public opinion”? The phrase “appeal to popular opinion” is the traditional translation used in logic, and is well entrenched in the logic textbooks. But this phrase has highly negative connotations, suggesting that argumentum ad populum is inherently fallacious.58 The phrase “public opinion” has much more positive connotations, suggesting that argumentum ad populum could be basically reasonable in many instances. On the other hand, while the 58. Hamblin, Fallacies; Douglas Walton, Appeal to Popular Opinion (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999).

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expression “public opinion” sounds clear on the surface, Susan Herbst has shown that it is highly ambiguous, having different meanings in different fields. As Herbst has shown, sometimes this term is used strictly to refer to the outcome of a poll, while other times it has strong ethical connotations.59 The ethical meaning includes more than just a numerical aggregate of public opinion, but also indicates a standard of “acceptable” right conduct. So a choice of terminology needs to be made at the outset. Should we label the form of argument “appeal to popular opinion” or “appeal to public opinion”? Below, the latter option is selected. The rationale is that we do not want to foreclose the option that this form of argument can sometimes be reasonable, under the right conditions. The next criticism often leveled against arguments based on public opinion is that they don’t fit the usual structures that have traditionally been put forward as models of rational argumentation in logic. Suppose that appeal to public opinion is portrayed as a deductively valid form of argument, “Everybody believes A is true; therefore A is true.” Seen in this light, the argument is fallacious. For even if everybody believes that A is true, it is logically possible that A is false. Thus portraying the appeal to public opinion as a deductive form of argument is setting the standard impossibly high. A more plausible approach would be to portray appeal to public opinion as an inductive form of argument that is statistical in its logic. Appeals to public opinion are typically based on public opinion polls. So it is evident that these arguments are often taken to be statistical, and that their support is based on the statistical methodology used by the pollsters. On the other hand, there have been many criticisms of public opinion polling in recent times, and many observers are becoming increasingly skeptical about how the polls are manipulated to disguise predetermined conclusions as public opinion. Many of the shortcomings of the polling methods are not statistical errors, however, but problems caused by the natural language wordings of the questions used in the poll. Polls are expressed in a way that makes them appear to be scientifically precise. And in some respects, for example, in how the sample of respondents is selected, they often are very precise. What is less often recognized is that they are based on selective choice of words and phrases that are generally not measured scientifically by the poll methodology but that can strongly influence the outcome of the poll.60 Words and phrases often have strong connotations 59. Susan Herbst, Numbered Voices: How Opinion Polling Has Shaped American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 60. Yankelovich, Coming to Public Judgement; Cynthia Crossen, Tainted Truth: The Manipulation of Fact in America (NewYork: Simon and Schuster), 1994.

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to poll respondents, eliciting a positive or negative emotive reaction that is not easy to define or anticipate. It has also been widely recognized that the outcome of a public opinion poll can be affected very significantly by the structure of the question. For example, it may make a big difference to the outcome whether the question is expressed in an open format or a closed format requiring a limited choice of responses.61 What has been especially revealing is the empirical measurement of how subtle variations in the wording of the question in a poll can have highly significant outcomes on the response.62 The technique used by Howard Schuman and Stanley Presser was to submit the same question to statistically comparable groups of respondents, but with the wording of the question subtly altered, for example, by using a synonym, or expressing the question in an equivalent negated form. The results of these experiments showed that the subtle wording differences had very significant effects on the outcomes of the poll in many cases. Thus even though the premise of the appeal to public opinion argument is often based on statistical polling, the link between the premise and the conclusion may not be itself purely inductive. It may be based on many assumptions about how the question was worded and structured, for example. For these reasons, in many instances where appeal to public opinion is used in public deliberation as a persuasive form of argument, it may be best to see the logical structure of the argument as abductive. In its abductive form, the appeal to public opinion points to the conclusion as a best explanation, but does not exclude other competing explanations categorically. The abductive form of the appeal to public opinion is therefore phrased in terms of tentative acceptance or nonacceptance rather than truth and falsity. Abductive Form of Appeal to Public Opinion People generally (but subject to exceptions) accept A. Tentatively accepting the hypothesis A is indicated (subject to default). What the conclusion states is that an investigation or action plan can move forward by tentative acceptance of the hypothesis indicated, even though 61. Stephen K. Campbell, Flaws and Fallacies in Statistical Thinking (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974); David W. Moore, The Superpollsters: How They Measure and Manipulate Public Opinion in America (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1992). 62. Howard Schuman and Stanley Presser, Questions and Answers in Attitude Surveys (New York: Academic Press, 1981).

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that hypothesis may be rejected in the future as more information and evidence comes in. The notion of rationality inherent in this form of argumentation is dynamic and tentative, rather than fixed and absolute. The appeal to public opinion, as portrayed in its abductive form, begins to seem like a much more reasonable argument than its deductive or inductive portrayals. Consider a simple example. I am leaving the train in a foreign country where I do not speak the language. I don’t know how to get from the train to the exit to the street. There are three such exits I can see. Everybody in the train is moving in a crowd toward the one exit. I have heavy bags. Should I simply follow the crowd, on the basis that since everyone is heading for that exit, it is a plausible hypothesis that that is the exit to the street. In this case, I am in a situation of lack of knowledge. I don’t have hard evidence. But the best available explanation of the given data seems like a good basis for taking action. If the hypothesis turns out to be wrong, I can always go back and start over, even though it means lugging the heavy bags farther. In a case, the appeal to public opinion seems like a reasonable, and not a fallacious form of argument, even though it is only a guess, based on best explanation of a kind that is subject to refutation. The example suggests that argumenta ad populum can sometimes be reasonable, and that when they are, they have an abductive form, rather than a deductive or inductive one. The problem with many actual examples of the use of the appeal to public opinion type of argument is that they tend to be quite weak, even when they are reasonable. They are in fact so weak, when used simply by themselves, that they are not very persuasive, except when combined with other arguments. In fact what one finds is that appeals to public opinion are typically reinforced with other forms of argument like position to know arguments and appeals to expert opinion. Case studies of the appeal to popular opinion type of argumentation have shown that in most cases where this argument is used, it is not in the simple form outlined above.63 In many cases, for example, the argument takes the following form. Group Scheme Version of Appeal to Public Opinion Everybody in group G accepts proposition A. Therefore A is tentatively acceptable as a hypothesis.

63. Walton, Appeal to Popular Opinion.

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In the group scheme variant, much depends on particulars of the group cited. In some cases the group cited may be experts in a domain of knowledge into which proposition A falls. This variant of the argument can be quite strong. In other cases, the group may be in a position to know, even though they are not scientific experts. For example, in the train station case, the mass of people heading for the exit may be assumed to be in a position to know that the exit they are moving toward is the best way to get out of the station to the street. Presumably, they are familiar with the station. The study of many such cases has led to a general hypothesis called the bolster thesis.64 According to the bolster thesis, appeals to public opinion are typically quite weak as arguments on their own, but are strengthened by combining them with other supportive forms of argument, like appeal to expert opinion. In some cases, the assumption that makes an appeal to public opinion stronger is that the public has presumably deliberated about the issue in question. Because they have presumably thought the issue through, and examined the arguments on both sides of it, the argument appears to have backing beyond just being an appeal to public opinion. Consider the following argument: “All democratic countries have adopted the policy that torture is an unacceptable method of interrogation; therefore torture is an unacceptable method of interrogation.” The premise might or might not be true. But on the assumption that the premise is true, the argument does seem to give some sort of rational basis for support of the conclusion (at least abductively). What gives it that support? Presumably the support derives from the assumption that people in democratic countries have long engaged in intelligent deliberations on the issue of torture as a method of interrogation. This assumption gives a backing to the appeal to public opinion that makes it more than an argument from a numerical aggregate of public opinion.

new foundations for deliberative democracy The framework of deliberation needed to validate the theory that argumentum ad populum can sometimes be a strong, rational argument in a democratic setting has now been provided. What has been shown is that the argumentum ad populum needs to be evaluated differently in different cases 64. Ibid.

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depending on two main factors. One is the argumentation scheme, or form of the argument. The other is the context of use of the argument. If the argument was used in a “mob appeal” form, in a mass rally, it can be fallacious. If it is used in negotiations by interest groups only to try to promote the interests of the group against the interests of the majority, it can also be of dubious worth as a rational argument. If it is used as a rhetorical tactic of persuasion by using the usual public opinion polls to try to get the public to follow what is taken to be the leading trend, again it is a weak form of argument that can contain many faults and fallacies. But if it is used at the right stage of a process of intelligent deliberation, it can be much stronger. Thus the principle of reason-based deliberation in democratic politics can be defended as resting on the most plausible and strongly supported type of ad populum argument. Even more generally, the appeal to popular opinion, and with it many other abductive arguments of the kind typically used in democratic political rhetoric, can be evaluated. The evaluation can now be based on the argumentation scheme and the context of use in a dialogue. Such practical arguments can be seen, in many cases, as reasonbased arguments that have some worth as reasons for accepting a conclusion or taking a course of action. Such arguments can be judged to be reasonable in the context of a deliberation, when they are used at a particular stage of the deliberation, insofar as they contribute to the goal of the deliberation by moving the argumentation forward. Of course, such arguments can also be used in other types of dialogue, like negotiation, eristic dialogue, or persuasion. In any given case, a particular argument should be judged on its merits, depending on what type of dialogue it is supposed to be part of. Such arguments are abductive and fallible. They are eikotic, in the sense that they are based on presumptions shared by speaker and hearer concerning the way things can normally be expected to go in a kind of situation that is familiar to them both. Aristotle’s rhetoric, once the errors concerning the interpretation of his notion of the enthymeme are cleared away, is all about these eikotic and abductive forms of argument. Once the long-standing misinterpretation of the enthymeme is sorted out, it can be seen how much of a basis there is in Aristotelian rhetoric that supports the principle of reason-based deliberation. There may be many reasons why Aristotle’s theory of rhetorical argumentation has been misunderstood and ignored for so long. One may argue that logical empiricism, a view that admits only of deductive and inductive arguments, and does not even admit the rationality of abductive arguments, has

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for such a long time had such a strong hold on Western culture. But once we concede that the abductive and eikotic types of argument are reasonbased, we gain a much more balanced perspective on how to evaluate the argumentum ad populum in political deliberation. This new way of analyzing and evaluating argumentation provides a new foundation for the theory of democracy, by showing how arriving at a decision based on the thinking of a majority in a democratic political system can be reason-based, under the right conditions. Arguments used in policy formation and competent decision making in democratic politics can be shown to have a practical worth as part of the mass of evidence that is processed as a public deliberation proceeds through its various stages. Coming to public judgment in a deliberation can result in a conclusion that supports the argument from public opinion as being based on rational thinking in some cases. Of course, the new theory also shows how the argumentum ad populum can go wrong, even though a fallacy in democratic political rhetoric in other cases. These negative aspects provide evidence that supports Tocqueville’s hypothesis about the danger of the tyranny of the majority in democratic politics. The new theory shows how the appeal to a popular opinion type of argument and other abductive arguments typically used in democratic rhetoric relate to the principle of reason-based deliberation. Such eikotic arguments, although they tend to be weak in themselves, can together tilt a deliberation one way or another. They must be seen as fallible and prone to manipulation by demagogues. One should always be a little skeptical about them, and not be afraid to ask critical questions about them. But they represent the best kind of argumentation we can hope for in democratic deliberations on matters of public policy where the future is uncertain. The best one can hope for is to map out a prudent course of action after discussing both sides of a controversial issue and weighing the arguments on both sides.

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contributors

RUSSELL BENTLEY lectures in the Department of Politics at Southampton University. He has published papers on ancient political theory in History of Political Thought and Political Studies. He holds a doctorate in government from the London School of Economics and Political Science. BENEDETTO FONTANA teaches political science at Baruch College of the City University of New York. He is the author of Hegemony and Power (Minnesota, 1993), as well as numerous articles on ancient and modern political thought. TSAE LAN LEE DOW is a doctoral student in Social and Political Inquiry at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Her dissertation focuses on ideas of the body politic from the ancients to today. THOMAS MURPHY has taught political science at Bentley College and Pima Community College. Currently working as an editor for ABC-CLIO, he completed his doctorate at the New School for Social Research and has published an article in New German Critique. CARY J. NEDERMAN is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Graduate Program at Texas A&M University, College Station. He has published many books and essays on the history of political ideas, including Political Thought in Early Fourteenth-Century England (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2003), Worlds of Difference (Penn State, 2000), and Three Tracts on Empire (Thoemmes, 2000). GARY REMER teaches political science at Tulane University. The author of Humanism and the Rhetoric of Toleration (Penn State, 1996), he has published widely on ancient, medieval, and early modern political thought in books and journals such as Political Theory and Journal of Political Philosophy. ARLENE W. SAXONHOUSE is James O. Murfin Professor and former Chair of Political Science and Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Among her numerous distinguished publications on the history of political philosophy are Athenian Democracy (Notre Dame, 1996) and Fear of Diversity (Chicago, 1992). GARY SHIFFMAN is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. JOHN UHR is a senior fellow in the Political Science Program at the Research School of the Social Science at the Australian National University. Among his many publications in political theory and public policy is Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge, 1998).

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NADIA URBINATI teaches in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University. She has published articles in Political Theory and Ethics as well as editing On Liberal Revolution by Pietro Gobetti (Yale, 2000). JOHN VON HEYKING is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Lethbridge. In addition to his book Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World (Missouri, 2001), he has published several articles on Aristotle’s social and political thought. DOUGLAS WALTON, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Winnipeg, is author or editor of more than thirty books and dozens of articles on a wide range of philosophical topics. His recent writings include Scare Tactics (Kluwer, 2000), One-Sided Arguments (SUNY, 1999), and Appeal to Popular Opinion (Penn State, 1999).

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index

Abram v. United States, 84 Ackerman, Bruce, 143 Aeneid (Virgil), 177 Alcibiades, 34, 64, 65, 66, 67, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 80, 84 Ambrose, 172 America, 3, 159, 297, 298, 299, 301, 303, 321 Antidosis, 154 Antony, Mark, 145, 146, 321, 324 Apology (Plato), 104, 105, 106 Arendt, Hannah, 1, 5, 7, 168 Aristogeiton, 58, 67, 71 Aristotle, 6, 7, 13, 14, 15, 20, 22, 25, 27, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36, 37, 41, 42, 54, 55, 59, 113, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 127, 131, 137, 164, 185, 248, 272, 273, 283, 284, 286, 289, 292, 294, 296, 303, 304, 305, 310, 311, 313, 314, 315, 316, 317, 318, 319, 320, 321, 322, 323, 324, 329 Aspasia, 105 Athenagorus, 67, 70, 75, 76, 77, 80, 81, 82 Athens, 1, 6, 7, 8, 9, 15, 21, 31, 33, 34, 40, 41, 43, 44, 49, 50, 58, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 99, 102, 103, 104, 138, 139, 140, 143, 157, 158, 213, 277 Augustine of Hippo, Aurelius, St., 23, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 211 Augustus, 40 Barber, Benjamin, 269 Barnes, Jonathan, 315, 317 Beitz, Charles, 117 Bentham, Jeremy, 258 Berlin, Isaiah, 278 Benhabib, Seyla, 8–9, 140, 217, 234, 235 Bentley, Russell, 22 Bickford, Susan, 188

Bitzer, Lloyd F., 320 Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Renate, 209 Bohman, James, 187, 220, 221, 266, 267, 312 Bolton, Robert, 317 Book of the Body Politic (Christine de Pizan), 204 Book of the City of Ladies (Christine de Pizan), 203, 207 Bosnia, 304 Britain, 224 Budge, Ian, 269 Burke, Edmund, 159, 216 Burnyeat, Myles F., 319, 320 Bush, George W., 211 Caesar, 321 Caesarea, 172 Callicles, 17, 36, 43, 44, 47, 99, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 140, 142, 143, 154, 155, 156, 158 Carneades, 143 Catilina, Lucius Sergius, 35, 178, 179 Cato, 178, 208 Cephalos, 107 Chambers, Simone, 141 Charlemagne, 229, 230 Charles V, King of France, 203 Charmides (Plato), 104 Christianity, 20, 283 Christine de Pizan, 23, 24, 191, 194, 200, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210 Cicero, 13, 14, 18, 20, 22, 23, 24, 27, 35, 36, 37, 41, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 135, 136, 137, 138, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 162, 169, 171, 177, 180, 185, 196, 197, 198, 248, 292 Cimon, 140 Civil War, U.S., 286 City of God (Augustine), 168, 169, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185 Cleon, 34, 49, 80

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334 Cluentius, 147 Cohen, G. A., 303 Cohen, Jean, 9 Cohen, Joshua, 21, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 107, 111, 218, 220 Colish, Marcia, 194 Columbia Broadcasting System, 303 Confessions (Augustine), 167, 168, 173 Conley, Thomas, 144, 145 Connor, Robert, 70 Corax, 30, 320 Corcyra, 67 Corinth, 63 Cornificius, 197, 198, 200 Craig, Christopher P., 149 Crantor, 150 Crassus, Lucius, 146 Creon, 68 Crito (Plato), 101 Dahl, Robert, 4 De Doctrina Christiana (Augustine), 167, 168, 170, 171, 174 De inventione (Cicero), 146, 147, 198 De lingua, 195 De officiis (Cicero), 22, 136, 144, 146, 147, 148, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 160 De oratore (Cicero), 135, 138, 144, 145, 146, 147, 149, 152, 153, 171 De partitione oratoria (Cicero), 138 De republica (Cicero), 144, 155, 178, 180, 183 Deane, Herbert, 181 Democracy and Disagreement (Gutmann and Thompson), 123, 125, 126, 132 Demosthenes, 41, 42 Dewey, John, 236, 270 Diodotus, 34 Diotima, 105 Doria, 50 Downs, Anthony, 4 Egesta, 67, 69, 71, 72 Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 232 Elshtain, Jean Bethke, 167, 175 Elster, John, 9 England, 3, 256, 259, 260, 262, 263, 316, 324 Enlightenment, 8, 301 Entheticus de Dogmate Philosophorum (John of Salisbury), 197, 199

index Etienne de Bourbon, 195 Euben, J. Peter, 21, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102, 111,139, 140, 142, 143, 160 Europe, 3 Euthydemus, 100 Euthyphro (Plato), 104 Federalist Papers, 34 Fishkin, James, 202, 298, 302 Flaccus, Lucius Valerius, 137 Florence, 6 Fontana, Benedetto, 20 Foucault, Michel, 241 France, 3, 224, 297 Gagarin, Michael, 321 Germany, 224, 297 Gilbert, Alan, 209 Gomme, A. W., 78 Goodwin, William, 287 Gorgias, 7, 13, 17, 20, 27, 30, 32, 36, 42, 47, 52, 99, 101, 103, 107, 117, 122, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 154, 156, 158, 160 Gorgias (Plato), 42, 44, 54, 92, 99, 100, 101, 102, 106, 107, 109, 110 Gracchi, 52 Gramsci, Antonio, 9 Gray, John, 279, 291 Greece, 1, 15, 20, 33, 34, 42, 50, 51, 52, 56, 57, 70, 77, 150, 172, 248, 320, 323 Grice, H. P., 311 Grootendorst, Rod, 315 Grotius, 10 Guicciardini, 54 Gutmann, Amy, 10, 22, 70, 116, 123, 125, 126, 127, 130, 132, 188, 189, 219, 220, 272 Gwyn, William B., 268 Habermas, Jürgen, 1, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 21, 23, 24, 60, 61, 70, 89, 90, 140, 143, 189, 214, 215, 216, 217, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 234, 235, 271, 272 Hamblin, Charles, 296 Hamilton, Alexander, 4, 34 Hamilton, Sir William, 322, 323 Harmodius, 58, 67, 71 Harrington, Sir James, 3, 6 Hegel, G.W.F., 9, 10, 276 Held, David, 213

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index Helen of Troy, 44, 52 Hellas, 40, 49, 50, 283 Herbst, Susan, 325 Hermocrates, 65, 67, 70, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82 Herodotus, 58, 62, 68, 71, 78, 79, 85, 286 Hindess, Barry, 25 Histories (Herodotus), 68, 85 History of the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides), 58, 64, 66, 68, 73, 75, 77, 82, 84 Hitchcock, David, 312, 313 Hobbes, Thomas, 3, 14, 24, 47, 57, 63, 79, 240, 242, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 252, 253, 254, 255, 258, 265, 267, 268 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 57, 61, 84 Holofernes, 202 Homer, 58 Horace, 35, 178 In Defence of Rhetoric (Vickers), 138 Institutio Oratoria (Quitillian), 147 Ionia, 50 Isocrates, 7, 28, 30, 32, 36, 50, 51, 154 Italy, 9 Jefferson, Thomas, 6 Jesuits, 268 John of Salisbury, 23, 24, 191, 193, 194, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 209, 210 Joseph, H.W.B., 323 Judith, 202 Juno, 177 Jupiter, 177 Kahn, Victoria, 190 Kant, Immanuel, 9, 10, 141, 218, 219, 280 Kaplan, Abraham, 4 Laches (Plato), 101,104 Lasswell, Harold, 3, 4 Latin, 324 Lavinus, 200 Lee Dow, Tsae Lan, 23, 24 Leviathan (Hobbes), 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 254 Levin, D. M., 246, 247 Locke, John, 3, 6, 10, 24, 90, 128, 140, 141, 240, 242, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 265, 267, 268, 287

335 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 3, 5, 19, 34, 43, 48, 53, 54, 190, 191, 192, 193, 203, 209, 211 MacPherson, C. B., 213 Madison, James, 4, 17, 34, 164 Magna Graecia, 50 Marius, 35 Markus, R. A., 181 Marsilius of Padua, 6 Marx, Karl, 9, 10, 288 Massachusetts, 159 Matheolus, 207 McBurney, Peter, 312, 313, 320, 321 Media, 77 Melos, 68, 77 Merovingian, 229 Metalogicon (John of Salisbury), 197, 198, 199, 201 Michels, Robert, 3 Mill, James, 287 Mill, John Stuart, 9, 24, 25, 271, 273, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294 Milbank, John, 165, 177 Miltiades, 140 Montaigne, Michel de, 292 Montesquieu, Baron de, 24, 240, 242, 250, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 289 Mosca, Gaetano, 3, 4 Murphy, Thomas, 23, 24 Mutacion de Fortune (Christine de Pizan), 209 Mytilene, 61, 63, 65 Nazi, 297 Nederman, Cary J., 6, 23, 24 Nero, 177 Neustadt, Richard E., 266 New England, 159 Nicholas of Cusa, 6 Nicias, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 79, 80 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 121, 304, 314 Nightengale, Andrea, 110 Nussbaum, Martha, 151 Oakeshott, Michael, 165, 183 Ober, Josiah, 14, 64, 65, 66, 70, 74, 83, 157, 158

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336 Oedipus, 68 On Human Conduct (Oakeshott), 165 Orator (Cicero), 146 Ovid, 35, 208 Panaetius, 151 Pareto, Vilfredo, 3 Parry, Adam, 62, 71, 85 Parsons, Simon, 312, 313 Pateman, Carole, 213 Paul, St., 171, 174 Peloponnese, 58, 81 Pericles, 34, 43, 49, 63, 71, 72, 73, 103, 140, 143, 293 Persia, 77, 78 Pettit, Philip, 6 Phaedrus (Plato), 29, 42, 44, 54, 94, 117, 118, 144, 151 Pickstock, Catherine, 165 Pierce, C. S., 320, 321, 322 Plancius, 149 Plata, 68, 77 Plato, 7, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 20, 21, 22, 27, 28, 33, 34, 35, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 54, 55, 56, 59, 76, 87, 88, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 101, 102, 107, 109, 110, 111, 112, 115, 117, 118, 120, 122, 123, 125, 135, 138, 139, 140, 142, 143, 144, 145, 148, 151, 154, 155, 160, 172, 175, 177, 273, 286, 310 Plutarch, 200 Pnyx, 71 Pocock, J.G.A., 6 Policraticus (John of Salisbury), 197, 199, 200, 201 Politics (Aristotle), 32 Polus, 99, 101, 139 Poulantzas, Nicos, 213 Presser, Stanley, 326 Prince, The (Machiavelli), 34, 190 Pro Flacco (Cicero), 137 Protagorus, 28, 54 Protagorus (Plato), 59, 101 Publius, 250, 257, 258, 265 Pufendorf, Samuel, 10 Pylos, 63 Quintilian, 135, 147, 171 Rawls, John, 10, 89, 90, 143, 217, 220, 269

index Remer, Gary, 22, 24 Regulus, 179 Rehg, William, 187 Republic (Plato), 34, 43, 45, 48, 141, 175 Rhetoric (Aristotle), 30, 31, 41, 42, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 131 Riker, William, 111 Rist, J. M., 196 Romance of the Rose, 203 Rome, 6, 7, 8, 9, 20, 22, 34, 35, 38, 40, 41, 48, 51, 52, 55, 137, 146, 155, 156, 157, 158, 163, 168, 171, 172, 177, 178, 179, 180, 182, 183, 184, 185, 192, 248 Rose, Nikolas, 241 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 3, 5, 163, 217, 273, 287 Sallust, 35, 177, 178, 179 Samuelson, Robert J., 303 Saxonhouse, Arlene, 21 Schattschneider, E. E., 187 Schuman, Howard, 326 Schumpeter, Joseph, 3, 4, 187 Scipio, 180, 183 Seaton, R. C., 321, 324 Selinuntia, 67, 69 Sextus Empiricus, 323 Shiffman, Gary, 21, 22 Sicily, 61, 63, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77, 78 Sidney, Algernon, 6 Skinner, Quentin, 5, 6, 14, 41 Sloane, Thomas, 144, 145 Socrates, 21, 22, 44, 45, 54, 59, 88, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 113, 118, 119, 122, 125, 135, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 151, 319 Sophists, 49, 310, 320, 321 Sparta (Lacedaemonia), 58, 63, 67, 68, 71, 72, 77, 80 “Speech to the Electors of Bristol” (Burke), 159 Statesman (Plato), 42, 45 Sterling, 293 Stock, Brian, 173 Stoicism, 49.150, 151 Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Habermas), 23, 214, 222, 225, 234 Subjection of Women (Mill), 24, 25

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index Sullus, 35 Syracuse, 15, 21, 50, 63, 67, 68, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82 Tacitus, 20, 27, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 48, 52 Tarenteum, 78, 79 Taylor, Harriet, 282 Thebes, 68 Themistocles, 140 Thompson, Dennis, 10, 22, 70, 116, 123, 125, 126, 127, 130, 132, 188, 189, 219, 220, 272 Thompson, William, 287, 288 Thrasymachus, 17 Thucydides, 15, 21, 33, 34, 35, 43, 49, 57, 58, 59, 60, 616, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85 Tindale, Christopher, 321 Tisias, 30 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 25, 297, 298, 299, 300, 301, 304, 330 Topics (Cicero), 119 Trajan, Emperor, 200 Treasury of the City of Ladies (Christine de Pizan), 203, 205 Tusculan Disputations (Cicero), 150

337 Uhr, John, 24 United States, 84, 111, 257, 258, 265, 266, 306 Urbinati, Nadia, 24, 25 Van Eemeren, Frans H., 315 Venice, 6 Vickers, Brian, 110, 138 Vico, Giambattista, 42, 48 Victoria, Queen, 284, 285 Vile, M.J.C., 265 Vincent of Beauvais, 195 Virgil, 35 Viroli, Maurizio, 6, 210 Von Heyking, John, 23 Walton, Douglas, 25 Walzer, Michael, 188 Wilks, Michael, 197 Wolin, Sheldon, 13 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 287, 292 World War I, 84 Yankelovich, Daniel, 25, 298, 306, 307, 308 Young, Iris, 164 Yunis, Harvey, 14, 63