ABSTRACT
Planning and policy analysis are rhetorical practices (Majone 1989; Throgmorton 1991).1 At first glance, this notion might seem outlandish. Planners and analysts “know” that rhetoric is a matter of “mere words” that simply add gloss to the important stuff. In this view, planning and analysis are technical practices disciplined by objective methods: planners use survey research, computer modeling, forecasting, and other technical tools to discover the facts, then use language only to let those objective facts speak for themselves. Alternately, rhetoric might involve the use of seductive language to entice others into embracing a speaker’s preferred values, beliefs, and behaviors. In this case technical tools can be used as political instruments to achieve political ends, like missiles that hostile forces let loose on one another (Myers 1990).
