Page 124 - Šolsko polje, XXX, 2019, št. 5-6: Civic, citizenship and rhetorical education in a rapidly changing world, eds. Janja Žmavc and Plamen Mirazchiyski
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šolsko polje, letnik xxx, številka 5–6
consider, act, especially when it comes to social and public life. Practical-
ly, the intellectual goal is to set it aside, or go beyond all that is rheto-
ric. There are several reasons offered for this decline by George Kennedy
(1980) or Bender and Wellbery (1990). Explanations blame either the lack
or – surprisingly – the expansion of democracy and the ways modern sci-
entific thought and methods have over dominated human and political
life (Crosswhite, 2013).
Interestingly, despite modern academic distaste in or ignorance to-
wards what rhetoric has to offer, the last century has not passed without
pivotal periods in its theorizing. We may arrange these changes under the
label of “rhetorical turn” (Simons, 1990), a movement in human scienc-
es motivated by the rediscovery of rhetorical argumentation and the reac-
tion against objectivist quests for certainty in the scientific method, that
is, academic positivism. ”Rhetoric” – James Boyd White assumed later, in
1985 – “in the highly expanded sense in which I speak of it, might indeed
become the central discipline for which we have been looking for so long
[…]” (White, 1985, p. 701). This turn offered a view to better see the over-
arching constitutive nature of rhetoric.
Marking this significant turn, two seminal works were published
in the same year of 1958. One was Traité de l’argumentation – la nouvel-
le rhétorique (The New Rhetoric) by Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbre-
chts-Tyteca, the other was Stephen E. Toulmin’s The Uses of Argument.
Both center around the rhetorical argument as a social, practical tool and
a meeting of minds, and they both contribute to the birth of the ‘new rhet-
oric project’ (Crosswhite, 2010). Nevertheless, it is Perelman and Olbre-
chts-Tyteca’s New Rhetoric that explicitly revives rhetoric via the discus-
sion of social argumentation. They did rediscover rhetoric’s millennia-long
history of concern with reasoning about practical matters in conditions of
uncertainty. Their radical rhetorical move with the valorization of the au-
dience proved to be a fundamental shift from pure logic to social-psycho-
logical settings. As they stated: all argumentation develops in relation to
an audience (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969, p. 5). These approach-
es were followed by the wave of „big rhetoric”1 that have opened up a new
horizon for rhetoric in the new millennium (Aczél, 2019a).
Michael Billig stated two decades ago that although the study of
rhetoric had always had to fight for its academic credibility, today it is
“creeping back into theoretical fashion” (Billig, 1987, pp. 33–34). At the
same time, in Central Europe, time seems to stand still as the study of
1 As Edward Schiappa (2001, p. 260) put it with big rhetoric “we refer to the theoretical posi-
tion that everything, or virtually everything, can be described as ‘rhetorical’.”
122
consider, act, especially when it comes to social and public life. Practical-
ly, the intellectual goal is to set it aside, or go beyond all that is rheto-
ric. There are several reasons offered for this decline by George Kennedy
(1980) or Bender and Wellbery (1990). Explanations blame either the lack
or – surprisingly – the expansion of democracy and the ways modern sci-
entific thought and methods have over dominated human and political
life (Crosswhite, 2013).
Interestingly, despite modern academic distaste in or ignorance to-
wards what rhetoric has to offer, the last century has not passed without
pivotal periods in its theorizing. We may arrange these changes under the
label of “rhetorical turn” (Simons, 1990), a movement in human scienc-
es motivated by the rediscovery of rhetorical argumentation and the reac-
tion against objectivist quests for certainty in the scientific method, that
is, academic positivism. ”Rhetoric” – James Boyd White assumed later, in
1985 – “in the highly expanded sense in which I speak of it, might indeed
become the central discipline for which we have been looking for so long
[…]” (White, 1985, p. 701). This turn offered a view to better see the over-
arching constitutive nature of rhetoric.
Marking this significant turn, two seminal works were published
in the same year of 1958. One was Traité de l’argumentation – la nouvel-
le rhétorique (The New Rhetoric) by Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbre-
chts-Tyteca, the other was Stephen E. Toulmin’s The Uses of Argument.
Both center around the rhetorical argument as a social, practical tool and
a meeting of minds, and they both contribute to the birth of the ‘new rhet-
oric project’ (Crosswhite, 2010). Nevertheless, it is Perelman and Olbre-
chts-Tyteca’s New Rhetoric that explicitly revives rhetoric via the discus-
sion of social argumentation. They did rediscover rhetoric’s millennia-long
history of concern with reasoning about practical matters in conditions of
uncertainty. Their radical rhetorical move with the valorization of the au-
dience proved to be a fundamental shift from pure logic to social-psycho-
logical settings. As they stated: all argumentation develops in relation to
an audience (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969, p. 5). These approach-
es were followed by the wave of „big rhetoric”1 that have opened up a new
horizon for rhetoric in the new millennium (Aczél, 2019a).
Michael Billig stated two decades ago that although the study of
rhetoric had always had to fight for its academic credibility, today it is
“creeping back into theoretical fashion” (Billig, 1987, pp. 33–34). At the
same time, in Central Europe, time seems to stand still as the study of
1 As Edward Schiappa (2001, p. 260) put it with big rhetoric “we refer to the theoretical posi-
tion that everything, or virtually everything, can be described as ‘rhetorical’.”
122
