ABSTRACT
The connection between rhetoric, culture, and forms of government is a topic that, in spite of its apparent modernity, has been of interest to scholars in a variety of disciplines for centuries. Humans have been curious about why other humans communicate differently than they do. Plato, of course, condemned democracy because of its use of rhetoric, and rhetoric because of its use in democracies. In Rhetoric (1932), Aristotle made the point that the rhetoric of a democracy was not the same as the rhetoric in a monarchy or oligarchy. The interest in the relation between rhetoric, culture, and politics became particularly active during the time known as the Enlightenment.
