ABSTRACT
Like several other essays that Richard McKeon wrote in the late 1960s and early 1970s, “The Uses of Rhetoric in a Technological Age: Architectonic Productive Arts” argues that the times call for rhetoric to become an architectonic productive art, as McKeon says it did on two earlier occasions: Rome as it morphed from republic to empire and the Renaissance as it tried to overcome the constraints of what it effectively and dismissively constructed as “the Middle Ages.” I will try to say what McKeon took an architectonic productive art to be, what these earlier eras had in common with his, and why McKeon thought that his time, unlike its previous analogues, called for an architectonic rhetoric that would take upon itself the offi ces of fi rst philosophy, replacing metaphysics.1 I say “his time” intentionally. A lot of water has fl owed under the bridge in the last four decades. So I will go on to refl ect on whether time has brought forth what McKeon called for and whether his call remains timely today.
