Giuseppe Ballacci

Recent studies of technocracy and populism contend that, despite their apparent incompatibility, they share a common rejection of pluralism and mediation. This makes their articulation much easier than what is traditionally assumed. This new interpretation, however, exaggerates their compatibility, precisely since it neglects the sphere of appearances. Comparing technocracy and populism at this level—that of political style and representation—reveals key political differences in terms of responsiveness, politicization, and mobilization. They introduce an inherent element of instability into any potential alignment, doomed to escalate in moments of crisis, as evidenced by the Czech political movement ANO.

This chapter explores Cicero’s ideal of the union between philosophy and rhetoric, incarnated by the figure of the perfect orator, and the formative process associated with it: the rhetorical paideia of which Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria offers the most accomplished account. This ideal represents an alternative to the Platonic view that postulates an intrinsic tension between philosophy and politics, to the extent that makes of eloquence the crucial element in and through which these two elements can meet and complement each other. The process of self-cultivation and political commitment become two interdependent endeavours, being the practice of eloquence their point of encounter and culmination. This ambitious ideal, one of the founding elements of humanism, is thus an ideal that aspires to combine transcendence and contingency through eloquence.

This chapter reads Rorty through the lens of the rhetorical-humanistic tradition of Cicero, Quintilian, and Vico, focusing on the interrelation between language, politics, and humanism. In particular, it compares them on the theme of the relation between self-cultivation and political commitment. If many have emphasized the deep humanism of Rorty, still unnoticed is the fact that his version of humanism contradicts a basic tenet of that tradition: the idea that the mastery of communication skills is key to the development of the person, both as individual and citizen. The chapter argues that Rorty’s neat demarcation between self-cultivation and political commitment—consequence of his radical understanding of contingency—is in contradiction not only with that tradition but also with some basic aspects of his own project.

This chapter opens the second part of the book, which discusses three major contemporary theorists from the perspective of questions that emerged in the first part, above all Cicero’s union of rhetoric and philosophy. Strauss is the first thinker considered. In his political philosophy, transcendence and contingency are both present and rhetoric is what bridges them. Recovering a classical conception, he conceives this discipline as a process that, starting from the opinions of the citizens, strives to transcend them in search of the truth. The political tension generated by this process of continuous questioning creates the necessity for philosophy to employ rhetoric. Nevertheless, because according to Strauss the whole process is led by the pole of transcendence (philosophy), rhetoric can only acquire for him an instrumental role.

This chapter discusses Plato and Aristotle’s conceptions of rhetoric in the background of the quarrel between philosophy and rhetoric. The fundamental, or even ‘foundational’, significance of this quarrel lies in the fact that in there a set of dichotomies (truth/opinion, theory/practice, reason/emotions) related to the political tension between transcendence and contingency, the philosophical and the practical, emerges for the first time and with an unsurpassed clarity. In this respect, Plato represents the pole of transcendence. He sets philosophy and politics in an unresolvable conflict and thus relegates rhetoric to a subordinate position. Aristotle, instead, offers a revaluation of contingency as the specific realm of human affairs, and thus of rhetoric as a crucial manifestation of the form of reason proper for this realm.

This chapter presents Arendt as one of the contemporary theorists more akin to the Roman-Humanistic tradition of rhetoric. First, it argues that at the roots of Arendt’s critical posture towards western philosophy there are some basic motives that approximate her to the tradition of ancient rhetoric at large: starting from a similar premise—the indissoluble relation between plurality and contingency in politics—Arendt and that tradition reach the same conclusion: that persuasion and judgment are the two basic political capacities. Such proximity however reveals a deeper affinity between Arendt and the Roman-Humanistic version of rhetoric (in particular Cicero): the idea that politics is the main form humans have to endow the world with meaning and therefore to transcend what is given by nature.

The Introduction explains that the main contribution of this book consists in showing that the meaning of rhetoric for political theory goes beyond what post-modern theorists, on one hand, and neo-Aristotelian theorists of public deliberation, on the other, are currently defending. According to this book, the broader meaning of rhetoric emerges once rhetoric is seen from the perspective of its ancient quarrel with philosophy. The political value of this quarrel dwells in the way it reveals a key tension at the core of politics: that between transcendence and contingency. Such tension can be found at work in the theories of influential thinkers such as Strauss, Rorty, and Arendt; and in all of them rhetoric, as the link between transcendence and contingency, plays an important role.

After briefly summarizing the argument of the book, the Afterword offers some final considerations on the political significance of the ancient quarrel between rhetoric and philosophy and of Cicero’s ideal of their combination. In this respect, it reaffirms the idea that the lessons that political theorists can derive from ancient rhetoric go beyond the question of public deliberation. As the dialogue of such tradition with contemporary theorists such as Strauss, Rorty, and Arendt, shows this recovery impels us to reconsider the relation between transcendence and contingency in politics and how such a relation brings to the fore the intermingling of existential, ethical, and political motives in politics. At the same time such a conception raises some questions that have to be explored further: is such rhetorical conception possible in a post-metaphysical era? Is its implicit elitism compatible with democracy?

The ‘constructivist turn’ in political representation literature has clarified that representation is crucial in forging identities – through the creation of ideological and symbolic representations that mobilize and coalesce otherwise scattered and undefined social forces – and thus also why it is essentially an interpretative and performative activity. In this article I argue that, as a consequence of this emphasis on interpretation and performativity, this approach makes clear why the ethos of representatives is important in representation. To prove this, I employ some insights from rhetoric. Rhetorical persuasion and democratic representation, indeed, call for a similar kind of judgment, as they both need to mediate between opposing exigencies: rhetoric between attentiveness to the specificity of the audience and the creation of new beliefs, and representation between being responsive to specific interests and giving them a new articulation. Mediating this tension requires an exercise of judgment that, being directed toward the future, inevitably introduces uncertainty into the relation. This is why both in rhetoric and representation the ethos is an essential element. However, as I argue in the conclusion, the personal qualities that should be considered relevant here are above political qualities, rather than technical or moral ones.

This book explores the significance of rhetoric from the perspective of its complex relationship with philosophy. It demonstrates how this relationship gives expression to a basic tension at the core of politics: that between the contingency of its happening and the transcendence toward which it strives. The first part of the study proposes a reassessment of the ancient quarrel between philosophy and rhetoric, as it was discussed by Plato, Aristotle, and above all Cicero and Quintilian, who ambitiously attempted to bring them together creating an ideal that is at the roots of the humanist tradition. It then moves to twentieth-century political theory and shows how the questions that emerge from that quarrel still strongly resonate in the works of key thinkers such as H. Arendt, L. Strauss, and R. Rorty. The volume thus offers an original contribution that locates itself at the intersection of politics, rhetoric, and philosophy.

This article proposes an interpretation of the work of Giambattista Vico in order to show its relevance for the current debate between liberal universalism and its critics. After a critical reconstruction of its origin at the dawn of Modernity, and having iden- tified rationalism as one of its decisive features, we shall analyse some of the criticisms currently levelled against it by various postmodern authors. The work of Vico and of the traditions from which he drank are found to be a rich source of ideas that may lead us toward a way out of the dead-end that this debate is currently facing.

In the literature there are two well-established but opposite readings of Arendt: as an agonistic theorist and as a deliberative one. In between these two positions a smaller number of scholars have argued that in Arendt these two dimensions can to a large extent be reconciled. This paper follows this third path but tries to bring it one step further. In particular, it defends the idea that those scholars who have proposed this third reading of Arendt have fallen short of revealing the degree to which deliberation and agonism are, for her, interwoven. Through an original reading of Arendt’s views on judgment, persuasion, distinction and Eichmann’s banality, the paper clarifies why, for her, agonism and deliberation are not only compatible but actually mutually dependent. In other words, it clarifies why she believes that there can be no deliberation without agonism and no agonism without deliberation.

Populism is one of the most discussed topics in political theory. Nonetheless, much work remains to be done in order to understand populism in historical context. To what extent is contemporary populism a distinctively modern phenomenon? To what extent does it have roots and precedents in earlier periods of political history? And how can studying populism in the light of rhetoric and the history of ideas help us answer these questions? As this book demonstrates, contemporary populism, even if it is a relatively recent phenomenon, has evident links with a wide range of longstanding topics in the history of political thought and the tradition of rhetoric: for instance, disputes over populist and elitist approaches to rhetorical persuasion, conflicts between the technical expertise of "the few" and the lay opinions of "the many," and debates over models of political leadership and civic education. This volume also draws new connections between populism and demagoguery, a phenomenon that has been discussed by political theorists and philosophers since antiquity. Contributors to the volume explore the significant conceptual overlaps between populism and demagoguery (such as their relation to manipulative or flattering rhetoric, and their resistance to systematic analysis), as well as their important differences (such as populism's comparatively greater ideological content). With this wide range of connections in mind, the volume draws on diverse perspectives and methodologies in order to enrich the debate on populist politics by locating its theorization in an historical perspective.