ABSTRACT
The conclusion discusses the main findings of the book in the context of early modern rhetoric and political thought. It outlines two competing interpretations of Vives’s rhetorical politics centred on decorum. First, in a somewhat traditional way, it argues that much of Vives’s work can be placed in the context of what has recently been called virtue politics. In this view, Vives thought that politics was the direct outcome of ethical virtue of those in power and that ethical dispositions to act correctly were constructed and evoked rhetorically. The second interpretation is more problematic. By the 1530s, Vives had understood that those in power often fell short of ethical standards. Consequently, moral actions could not result in any simple way from their ethical dispositions; instead, the orator sometimes had to appeal to their wrong emotional dispositions – such as ambition– in order to direct them to good. This was a built-in element of rhetoric rather than a full-fledged theory of politics. Nevertheless, it implied a more complex interpretation of politics as a world in which concord did not result transparently from virtue but was rather the outcome of crafty management of the emotions on the part of the orator.
