Rhetoric and public reasoning: An aristotelian understanding of political deliberation

Political Theory

Volumn 34, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 417-438

  Yack, Bernard ^a  

^a BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Aristotle; Deliberation; Deliberative democracy; Rhetoric

Indexed keywords

EID: 33745818946     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: 15527476     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591706288232     Document Type: Article

References (64)

1. The recent interest in democratic deliberation is largely inspired by Rawls's understanding of public reason and Habermas's understanding of communicative action. Its main arguments and problems are made clear in the following collections of articles: Seyla Benhabib, ed., Democracy and Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996);
2. James Bohman and William Rehg, eds., Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998);
3. M. P. d'Entrèves, ed., Democracy as Public Deliberation (Manchester:Manchester University Press, 2002);
4. Jon Elster, ed., Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
5. and Stephen Macedo, ed., Deliberative Politics: Essays on Democracy and Disagreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
6. Indeed, this capacity makes man "much more a political animal than any kind of bee or other gregarious animal" (Politics 1253a). In his History of Animals (188a), Aristotle describes a number of social species as "political" in nature, referring there to their capacity to subordinate the individual to the common good, a capacity that man, obviously, does not excel at compared to bees and ants.
7. Stephen Salkever, "The Deliberative Model of Politics and Aristotle's Ethic of Natural Questions," in Aristotle and Modern Politics, ed. A. Tessitore (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 342-74, 344.
8. Such constraints, inspired by Rawls's concept of public reason, are developed most systematically by Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
9. For critical assessments, see the essays collected in Macedo, Deliberative Politics.
10. See Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers: On Little Rock and Political Friendship, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), chaps. 9-10;
11. Bryan Garsten, Saving Persuasion: A Defence of Rhetoric and Judgments, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), introduction and chap. 5;
12. and Paul Nieuwenberg, "Learning to Deliberate: Aristotle on Truthfulness and Public Deliberation," Political Theory 32 (2004): 449-67.
13. Garsten's argument (Saving Persuasion, chapter 5)
14. that Aristotle is trying to improve public reasoning by drawing our attention away from the exaggerated claims of forensic rhetoric seems quite persuasive to me, as does Nieuwenberg's point ("Learning to Deliberate," 450-52) about the way in which Aristotle relies on shame to improve the quality of deliberative rhetoric.
15. Bernard Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 1-3.
16. Utilitarians, Williams suggests (Bernard Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument, Ibid., 1-2), apply their moral standards to all political decisions, rights theorists, like Rawls and Dworkin, to the basic structure of political institutions.
17. David Wiggins, "Deliberation and Practical Reason," in Essays on Aristotle's Ethics, ed. A. Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 221-41, 222.
18. See, for example, J. Cohen, "Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy," in Bohman and Rehg, Deliberative Democracy, 67-93;
19. and James Johnson, "Arguments for Deliberation: Some Skeptical Considerations," in Elster, Deliberative Democracy, 161-84.
20. See Julia Squires, "Deliberation and Decision-Making," in d'Entrèves, Democracy as Public Deliberation, 133-56;
21. and T. Christiano, "The Significance of Public Deliberation," in Bohman and Rehg, Deliberative Democracy, 243-77.
22. This mistake is made even by empirically focused supporters of deliberative democracy such as Jon Elster ("Introduction," Elster, Deliberative Democracy, 5-6.)
23. There is no need here to get into the controversy about exactly what Aristotle means when he suggests that deliberation focuses on the things that contribute toward our ends. For my own part, I agree with Wiggins's interpretation ("Deliberation and Practical Reason," 224-28) that Aristotle is talking about things that constitute as well as produce ends.
24. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 39-40.
25. As Allen notes (Talking to Strangers, chap. 10), Aristotle's Rhetoric provides the account of political judgment that is missing in the Politics and the Nicomachean Ethics.
26. No doubt, when we decide what to do about our assessments of the guilt or praise-worthiness of actions, that is, how to punish or reward individuals for what they have done, we do deliberate about the choice of future collective actions. Aristotle's point seems to be that we listen to forensic and epideictic rhetoric primarily to help us in our assessment of past behavior and character, while we listen to deliberative rhetoric primarily to help us determine the best course of action in the future.
27. P. Nieuwenberg makes an interesting argument (in "Learning to Deliberate") about how Aristotle counts on shame as the psychological mechanism that produces improvements in the moral character of public speakers. Nieuwenberg notes how the reliance on this kind of heteronomous motive conflicts with the Kantian inclinations of most current defenders of deliberative democracy.
28. The Melians' defiance of the Athenian demand that they join the Athenian empire or face certain death might seem an exception until one recalls that the Melians were unwilling to let the Athenians present this proposal for public debate in the assembly for fear that it would win majority approval. (See Thucydides, History, Book 5, para. 84-6.) Their defiance takes place, instead, in a parley of a few Melian representatives with the Athenians.
29. Robert Wardy, "Mighty Is the Truth and It Shall Prevail," in Essays on Aristotle's Rhetoric, ed. Ameilie Rorty (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 56.
30. 1 defend this reinterpretation of Aristotle's understanding of political teleology in Bernard Yack The Problems of a Political Animal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), chap. 3.
31. Bernard Yack The Problems of a Political Animal, Ibid., chaps. 2-4.
32. For a critique of this interpretation, see Barbara Koziak, Retrieving Political Emotion: Thumos, Aristotle, and Gender (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2000), 110-4.
33. For an alternative interpretation of political friendship as an advantage friendship, one that makes it less distant from Aristotle's understanding of virtue friendship than my own, see Jill Frank, A Democracy of Distinction: Aristotle and the Work of Politics, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), chap. 5.
34. As I think that we should. Treating democratic deliberation as the ground of political legitimacy - see, for an influential example, Cohen, "Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy" - is based on a confusion between moral justification, the subject of Habermas's communicative ethics and Rawls's contractarianism, and political legitimacy.
35. See Squires, "Deliberation and Decision-Making,"
36. Christiano, "The Significance of Public Deliberation," 243-77,
37. and Saward, "Less than Meets the Eye: Democratic Legitimacy and Deliberative Theory," in Democratic Innovation, ed. Michael Saward (London: Routledge, 2000), 66-77.
38. See Harvey Yunis, Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Classical Athens (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), fora general account of ancient Greek thinking about the limitations of political rhetoric.
39. See G. E. L. Owen, "Tithenai ta phainomena," in Owen, Logic, Science, and Dialectic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986);
40. and Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1986), chap. 8.
41. No doubt, this combination of condemnation and exploration of emotional appeals poses considerable problems to those who seek to interpret the Rhetoric as a whole. It therefore figures prominently in the commentary on Aristotle's rhetoric, as in the articles collected in David Furley and Alexander Nehamas, eds., Aristotle's Rhetoric: Philosophic Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994);
42. and Rorty, Essays on Aristotle's Rhetoric.
43. But Book 1 of the Rhetoric makes clear that Aristotle's discomfort with emotional appeals is focused on primarily legal judgment, where, as we shall see, he believes that appeals to character and emotion are far less relevant than in political deliberation. See Garsten, Saving Persuasion, 117-24.
44. As Gary Shiftman notes, our practice of public reasoning seems to rely on something like a norm of dissensus, the expectation that speeches will be opposed or challenged by other speeches. See Gary Shiffman, "Construing Disagreement: Consensus and Invective in "Constitutional Debate," Political Theory 30 (2002): 175-203. This norm is not explicit, as in the adversarial process that defines the practice of public reasoning in trials. But it implicitly governs the practice of public reasoning and supports the practice of forming parties. To make clear how much we rely on such a norm, imagine how suspicious we would become if political leaders with very different backgrounds and interests were always agreeing with each other publicly; their agreement would suggest that some conspiracy was afoot, that they were not doing the job we sent them there to do.
45. Susan Bickford, The Dissonance of Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 4-5. Bickford develops this important argument partly through an interpretation (in chapter 1) of Aristotle's understanding of political deliberation.
46. Susan Bickford, The Dissonance of Democracy, Ibid., 48.
47. Plato makes this case in his famous turn on the ship of state metaphor in the Republic, 4886-189d.
48. So while Yunis (Taming Democracy, 12-3) is right to describe Aristotelian orators as advisers, it is important to note they are advisers who share our interest in the outcome of the issue at hand; hired advisers, like lawyers and other consultants, do not share our interest in this way. The former, therefore, have an interest in persuading us that the latter do not.
49. See Stanley Fish, "Mutual Respect as a Device of Exclusion," in Macedo, Deliberative Politics, 88-102, 90-1.
50. As in Thomas M. Scanlon's influential reformulation of Rawlsian contractualism, "Contractualism and Utilitarianism," in Utilitarianism and Beyond, ed. Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
51. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 42-3.
52. John Rawls, "The Domain of the Political and the Overlapping Consensus," NYU Law Journal 64 (1989): 233-55, 238-9.
53. Thucydides, History, Book 3, para. 32-4.
54. Not that Rawls thinks the assumption true. He sees it instead as a regulative principle to guide our participation in public reasoning.
55. The Athenians' difficulty with getting sound advice from their leaders, given their well-justified suspicions of their leaders' motives, is an important theme in Thucydides's History.
56. On this point, see especially Melissa Williams, "The Uneasy Alliance of Group Representation and Deliberative Democracy," in Citizenship in Diverse Societies, eds. Will Kymlicka and Ralph Norman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 124-46, 128-9.
57. Melissa Williams, Citizenship in Diverse Societies, Ibid., 127.
58. Gutmann and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement, 52-3.
59. See Nussbaum, "The Discenment of Perception: An Aristotelian Conception of Private and Public Rationality," in Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 54-105;
60. and Gisela Striker, "Emotions in Context: Aristotle's Treatment of the Emotions in the Rhetoric and his Moral Psychology," in Rorty, Essays on Aristotle's Rhetoric, 286-302, 297-8.
61. Garsten presents an especially insightful discussion of this passage in Saving Persuasion (125-9), where he defends Aristotle's view of what he describes as "situated judgment."
62. See Michael Saward, "Rawls and Deliberative Democracy," in d'Entrèves, Democracy as Public Deliberation, 112-32, for a good discussion of how these impartiality-inducing devices of representation color contemporary visions of deliberative democracy.
63. Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed, 13.
64. As Saward suggests, were it not for the connection to these two highly influential philosophical theories, it is not at all clear that democratic deliberation would be on the agenda for contemporary moral and political philosophers. See Saward, "Rawls and Deliberative Democracy," 112.