ABSTRACT
In this book I have offered a broad examination of the ways in which rhetoric is manifest in politics. In these final remarks I summarize some of the major claims I have made along the way, which might stimulate the reader's further reflection upon — and exploration of — practices of persuasion. Perhaps it will help to begin modestly, underlining what the book has and has not sought to do: it has offered an account of the historical background to rhetorical political enquiry, but not a detailed analysis of the development of rhetoric and its relevance to all political thinkers and rhetoricians; it has noted the key classifications and techniques of ancient rhetorical instruction, but not comprehensively surveyed all the devices that can be found; it has set out a way to apply these techniques to contemporary politics, but there are many variations and methods by which this application can be made and I have avoided an explicitly ‘normative’ approach; and it has looked at some key areas in which rhetorical enquiry can be illuminating, but a wide variety of relevant themes and issues could also have been included (such as the rhetoric of war, the rhetoric of dissent, policy rhetoric, right-wing rhetoric and so on). Rhetoric is not a narrowly circumscribed body of ideas to be summarized in one go or mobilized with one method alone. It is a prodigious and open-ended source for investigating practices of persuasion. Where this book undoubtedly falls short there are, thankfully, many others (as well as specialist journals) that can fill in the details, take alternative lines of enquiry and come to different conclusions. Such is the way with arguments.
