Rhetoric and Its Masses: An Introduction

Abstract

In virtually every epoch of its history, the theory of rhetoric has been associated with large, anonymous groups of people. They appear sometimes as crowds and at other times as mobs. At still other times, these large, anonymous groups of people are figured as herds, (counter)publics, imagined communities, “the people,” the audience, or social imaginaries. In whatever guise they appear, these anonymous groups of people have played a major role in the development of the idea of rhetoric. A few examples will make my point. Plato (2001) defined rhetoric as discourse that would persuade an ignorant crowd (94). Augustine (2001) tailored rhetoric to the “multitude of the wise” (459). In the sixteenth century, Castiglione (2001) calibrated rhetoric to the tastes of “ladies or gentlemen” (663). In the eighteenth century, David Hume (2001) suggested that discourse must account for “man in general” (836). Thomas Sheridan (2001) developed his “Lectures on Elocution” from a consideration of “man in his animal state” (884). By 1828, Richard Whately (2001) could characterize the entire history of rhetoric as so many theories on how to persuade the “promiscuous multitude” (1007). In 1958, Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca made a large, anonymous group of people—the “universal audience”—famous as the enabling presupposition of all rational argument (Perelman and OlbrechtsTyteca 1991, 31–35). Finally, consider the vibrant subfield of public sphere theory. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, public sphere theory may be the most institutionally secured of rhetoric’s modalities. In this popular mode, rhetoric is understood as the democratic practice of engaging groups of people qua citizens. Administrators seem to love this vision of rhetoric. Basic courses in both writing and speech are often designed explicitly as training in civic engagement, and institutionalized centers for civic engagement are now a common feature of research universities. Rhetoric, we might say, has generated institutional security by tying its fate to (and betting its value on) a particularly resonant large group of anonymous people: the