ABSTRACT
The primary difficulty in conceptualizing “rhetoric and politics” is the tendency of rhetoricians, especially, to collapse those two concepts into each other. Although the idea of politics, in 20th-century American political science, came to be associated with the rational-choice mechanisms whereby nation-states regulate and control the redistribution of resources via powerful institutions, its earliest meanings assumed operative principles of rhetorical practice. 1 To act politically in ancient Greece was to do the decision-making work needed in the polis. As the monarchical and tribal culture of eighth- and ninth-century BCE Greece gave way to the narrower and more formally organized city-state, and as the newer forms of government—oligarchy, aristocracy, and democracy—took root, the notion of the citizen rose to replace the concept of the subject.
