ABSTRACT
This chapter provides readers with a grounding in the history of rhetoric. The marketing scholarship on rhetoric, which will be examined in detail in Chapter 2, has generally not attempted to provide readers with an understanding of the historical development of rhetoric. It is, therefore, important in a book that intends to argue that marketing is fundamentally and completely rhetorical that a wider, more detailed overview of the long development of thinking around Western rhetoric is provided for the reader. The chapter starts with the Sophists and then proceeds roughly chronologically, examining Platonic reaction to the Sophists, the Aristotelian systematization of rhetoric and its legacy, the Roman flowering of political oratory, and Renaissance and Reformation developments, and finally ending with a discussion of the importance of the ‘rhetorical turn’ for contemporary social science.
