Persuasion in the Rhetorical Tradition

T he study of persuasion can be traced back to ancient Greece, the birthplace of both rhetoric and democracy. As Dillard and Pfau (2002) noted in the first edition of The Persuasion Handbook, Aristotle “provided the first comprehensive theory of rhetorical discourse” (p. ix) in the fifth century BCE, and persuasion was central to that theory. Yet persuasion has not always been at the center of rhetorical theory. During the Enlightenment, the scope of rhetoric broadened to include aesthetic and psychological concerns, rendering persuasion secondary to considerations of “taste” and “sympathy.” More recently, narrative and dramatistic theories of rhetoric have emphasized identity or “identification” over persuasion, and some rhetorical scholars have even denounced persuasion as a mechanism of “control and domination” (Foss & Griffin, 1995, p. 2). Still, persuasion has remained a dominant theme in the rhetorical tradition, with two broad concerns distinguishing the rhetorical perspective from more scientific or empirical approaches to persuasion: a focus on the political or civic contexts of persuasion, and an overriding emphasis on ethical concerns. In this chapter, I survey the rhetorical tradition with a view toward illuminating some of the differing, even competing, perspectives on persuasion over the long history of rhetorical studies. In the process I highlight two cultural imperatives that help to account for the emphasis on politics and ethics in the Western rhetorical tradition: (1) the need to educate for citizenship, and (2) an ongoing debate over the rules or norms of democratic deliberation. In the rhetorical tradition, these two imperatives link the study of rhetoric to democratic theory, inspiring normative conceptions of persuasion that emphasize the responsibilities that go along with the right of free speech in a democracy. By surveying how rhetorical theorists historically have distinguished responsible or legitimate free speech from propaganda and demagoguery, I illuminate the intimate connections between rhetorical theories of persuasion and democracy itself. I begin by revisiting the classical/humanistic roots of the rhetorical tradition, from the sophists of ancient Greece to the Roman rhetoricians, Cicero and Quintilian. I then sketch the history of rhetorical theory through modern times, Persuasion in the Rhetorical Tradition