ABSTRACT
In “The Habitation of Rhetoric,” Michael Leff argues that American rhetorical scholars began the twentieth century as neo-Aristotelian speech critics and have ended it as neo-sophistic, socio-political critics. More specifically, Leff characterizes this development as a shift, or split, in rhetorical scholarship from 1) criticism that studied speeches to understand their contexts or to locate processes assessed by their extrinsic effect, thereby aligning speech or rhetorical criticism with history, to 2) criticism that viewed rhetoric as “a power that ranges across the entire domain of human discourse,” reducing rhetorical criticism to social critique. What both views share, Leff posits, is a preoccupation with action as opposed to substance (53).
