The Idea of Republic and Philosophy
Rhetoric, Persuasion and Political Deliberation: the Greco-Roman Roots of Republican Political Philosophy
Özgür Emrah GürelThis paper aims to discuss the Greco-Roman roots of republican politics by focusing on the role of rhetoric as reason and speech. Given the emphasis on the historical aspects of republicanism, it is highly controversial that scholars have almost failed to examine the potential contributions of the history of rhetorical practice to the understanding of republican politics. However, mastery of rhetorical techniques has been evaluated as one of the most important aspects of democratic politics, and particularly crucial for political actors in public sphere. Thus, historically rhetoric was often understood as unavoidably amenable to civic-republican values. Accordingly, this paper attempts to pinpoint the fact that the long-standing tradition of political rhetoric seems especially relevant to the study of the theories of republicanism. According to Greek and Roman sophists, philosophers and historians such as Isocrates, Gorgias, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Tacitus, rhetoric is a form of political praxis, which raises questions about reason and desire, truth and opinion, leaders and citizens and principles and power. Through the analysis of these thinkers, this paper claims that rhetoric is basically a civic-republican form of political discourse. As a result, the robust understanding of political discourse developed in the Greco-Roman tradition may supplement the overly constricted conceptualization of political communication and proceduralism found in the modern republicanism. In sum, this paper defends the thesis that a hermeneutical reading of logos, which conceives the plural nature of reason as argumentation and rhetoric might help us to re-contextualize the Greco-Roman roots of republican political philosophy.