ABSTRACT

One of the commonplaces of the rhetorical tradition has been that democracy is dependent on rhetoric and vice versa. We see it in the great humanist myths of origins reproduced in Protagoras’s Great Speech (Plato 320c-328d), Isocrates’s Hymn to Logos (253-57), and Cicero’s De inventione (I.i.2-I.ii.3) in which human beings, through the power of rhetoric, go from being uncivilized brutes to becoming civilized members of a self-governing society.1 From the Roman republic and the Italian city-states to liberal democratic nation-states like the United States and now South Africa, the ability of rhetoric to democratize societies is an article of faith among scholars in rhetorical studies.2 For example, in “The Origins of Rhetoric: Literacy and Democracy in Ancient Greece,” Richard A. Katula argues,

With few exceptions, we in rhetorical studies have accepted the commonplace that rhetoric’s fortunes rise under democratic states and fall under nondemocratic states.3