Sovereignty, democracy, and the political economy of logos: A defense of antagonistic rhetoric

Abstract

I am interested in locating assumptions about democracy and logos in the Greek democratic city-state which have been carried over into the modern, democratic national-state. The assumptions, I argue, offer insights into the hegemonic view among rhetoricians that antagonistic rhetoric is inappropriate in our contemporary democracies. In Chapters One and Two, I analyze the development of democracy in Ancient Greece in order to uncover the assumptions upon which that system was based. I argue that these assumptions are dominated by what I call "the ideology of sovereign right." In Chapter Three, I illustrate how this ideology has been carried over into contemporary treatments of democratic argumentation that have had influence in the field of rhetoric and composition. I argue that the Western tradition has privileged and continues to privilege the Aristotelian logic of non-contradiction, and thus, has left no legitimate place for antagonistic rhetoric. In Chapter Four, I return to ancient Greece to investigate the struggle over the construction of the rational that took shape in pre-Socratic philosophy. I argue that prior to the Socratics, another treatment of rationality developed, one based on the logic of contradiction, which provides a place in rhetoric for antagonism. In Chapter Five, I argue that dialectical materialism, as opposed to Aristotelian dialectics and post-structuralist notions of rationality, challenges the ideology of sovereign right embedded in democratic systems. In the Epilogue, I comment on the significance of this argument for the field of Rhetoric and Composition.