ABSTRACT
One of the key tenets of Chaim Perelman’s prescription for conceptualizing rhetoric-both for the Wingspread Conference and in his other writings-was the crucial nature of audience and context. He wrote that “The new rhetoric owes its specifi c character to the relation between speaker and listener” and that “the principles of rhetoric get more accurately defi ned through the subject-matter and context.”1 Reading Perelman’s chapter in the Prospect of Rhetoric almost forty years distant from his immediate context underlines the potency of that emphasis on audience and context. Perelman’s writings and the Wingspread Conference were, on the one hand, not only germinal, but germinating. Perelman’s essay forecast much in the new disciplinary paradigm: he described the basis for the broadening of the reach of rhetorical studies, especially the rise of the “rhetoric of science,” he justifi ed the continued expansion of a distinctly rhetorical version of the history of ideas, and he provided a concise analysis of the communicative conditions that generate social protest-which were soon to take new importance in the fi eld’s discussions. His central contribution, according to most of those in the fi eld who have subsequently written about his work, was to loosen the shackles of modernism by expanding the notion of reason beyond mere logic-in the words of Gross and Dearin, to “enlarge the domain of reason to encompass a rhetorical rationalism.”2
