The Sophists and the Birth of Rhetoric

It is in this environment that the thinkers we now know as the Sophists flourished (their name coming from the Greek for ‘wise’, sophos). Murphy et al. (2014) note that “while the term applied originally to any wise person, it soon came to denote those who engaged in the art of rhetoric in the courts, the legislature, and/or the public forum” (p. 28). Sophists might earn their living from the teaching of argumentation, the writing of speeches for others, or from the public display of their oratorical skills. Now, all three of these vocational directions will lead at some point to the Sophist having to construct an effective argument for a case that might be called (to use Aristotle’s terminology) the weaker. So, a speechwriter will compose a plea for a client whose case might be full of holes, a teacher might build an exemplary argument for a patently absurd case in order to teach the use of particular tropes and strategies, and an orator who lives on the generosity of the crowd will sometimes seek to display his admirable skills in ways that are greatly entertaining precisely because they clearly make the weaker case the stronger. Modern marketers are, of course, familiar with the pressures; sometimes the realities of the profession mean that marketing skills are used to valorise a shoddy product or weak brand. Your campaign can still win a Cleo even if it is for a nutritionally suspect soft drink that others are convinced contributes to teen obesity levels. Indeed, in the same way that modern marketing is routinely lambasted for being at the root of a host of social ills (Critser, 2003; Chomsky, 2012; Klein, 2009; Malkan, 2007; Moss, 2013; Schlosser, 2002), the Sophists attracted a reputation for a dangerous lack of consideration towards the truth and for being concerned with victory in argument at any cost (called eristic argument). The nature of Sophistic argument and how it relates to what will later flower into the discipline of rhetoric is important to my thesis linking rhetoric and marketing, so I will spend a little time delineating the principal perspectives that surround it and we will return to it in later sections.

Much of the way that Sophistic practice is now understood has come down to us from the discourse of those who have sought to attack it. In particular, the works of Plato and Aristotle have powerfully influenced later understanding of the Sophists, tainting them with the “stigma of deception” (Tindale, 2004, p. 40). Platonic dialogues such as Euthydemus, Gorgias, Hippias Major, and Protagoras characterise their eponymous Sophists as unconcerned with objective or ultimate truth (aletheia), instead focused upon the importance of opinion (doxa) and how it can be swayed by appeal to an audience’s sense of what is most likely or probable (eikos). For Plato, such an approach is diametrically opposed to his own project of finding the truth of the good life because it leads to a mercenary style of relativism. The root of Sophistic eikos can be found in Protagoras ‘measure maxim’. Protagoras (484–411 BCE), along with Gorgias, is the most famous of the Sophists and was the first to settle in Athens. His ‘measure maxim’ asserts that “man is the measure of all things, of things that are as to how they are, and of things that are not as to how they are not” (quoted in Murphy et al., 2014, p. 31). The meaning here is that man cannot perceive the truth behind appearances; all we can do is to pay attention to our own subjective experiences, to the way that things seem to us. Consequently, it follows that in deciding upon any issue we should ask ourselves ‘what is the more probable’? In doing so, each of us will look upon our own experience and make a judgement. Such a position was not just antithetical to Plato, of course. Many aspects of Athenian culture assumed the existence of absolute truths and the “rampant individualism” (ibid.) displayed in the teaching of the Sophists (almost every one of them metics, or foreign-born immigrants to Athens) generated much anxiety in the city-state while at the same time contributing “to a more pluralistic and tolerant society than would exist at any other time in Greece” (Smith, 2003, p. 47).

One of the most obvious methodological differences between the Sophists and Plato is the former’s focus on public argument, often instantiated in lengthy speeches, which contrasts with the latter’s belief in “interior reasoning” (Tindale, 2010, p. 33). Disputing in public meant that Sophists relied upon the audience. This meant, from Plato’s perspective, that they cared “not for truth but only for persuading their audience” (ibid.). The Socratic elenchus (the question and answer pattern Plato has Socrates use in the dialogues) is far better suited to intimate argumentation between a few friends. It is also more adapted to the hunting down of small detail around specialised aspects of topics. The long speeches that were the Sophists’ tool in trade were primarily concerned with portraying the bigger picture, the wide sweep of a topic, in order to win over a large audience. Perhaps the most famous example of the power of Sophistic speech-making is Gorgias’ Encomium to Helen. Gorgias represents the final important element in Sophistic style and that is the power of poetic oratory. The Encomium provides four reasons why Helen should be considered blameless in the events surrounding her kidnapping by Paris. By Gorgias’ time, Helen’s part in the horror of the Trojan War had been much mulled over by generations of poets, playwrights, and philosophers and one’s view of her guilt or innocence was a litmus test for where one stood “in the emerging Greek sense of morality” (Murphy et al., 2014, p. 233). The Encomium is famous for two reasons. Firstly, it is a clear application of Gorgias’ poetic style to argumentative purposes—Gorgias plays with patterns of length, rhyme, and sound throughout the piece to great effect. Secondly, it contains a description of how Gorgias saw the operation of persuasion through the power of words that has become canonical in regard to the practice of rhetoric. In the Encomium Gorgias considers four reasons as to why Helen voyaged to Troy (abandoning Sparta and her husband, Menelaus). The third possibility, and the one that he spends the most time considering, is that “speech persuaded her, and deceived her soul” (ibid., p. 234). For Gorgias, speech (logos) “is a powerful lord” that can alter the “opinion of the soul” as if by the arts of witchcraft or magic”. The persuader is therefore a “user of force” and can rely upon the power of speech as having “the same effect on the condition of the soul as the application of drugs to the state of bodies” (ibid.). As Conley (1990) remarks, this means that “the relationship between speaker and audience is, so to speak, ‘asymmetric’ as it is the speaker who casts a spell over the audience and not the other way around” (p. 6). In addition, we should note that Gorgias’ Encomium is itself an example of the power of logos to bewitch—it “both pays homage to the power of logos to create impressions and at the same time uses it to do so” (Tindale, 2004, p. 47). It advertises the power of which it speaks through its continuing power to enchant even in the twenty-first century.

I will be giving the Sophists significantly more attention in later stages of this study. Their legacy is, I will argue, central to a nuanced understanding of the rhetorical and magical nature of marketing. For now, though, we need to move on to consider the way in which competing and later Greek philosophers reacted to Sophistic rhetoric by constructing a systematised, bounded approach to persuasive argumentation that sought to cleanse public discourse of some of the more apparently irrational and dangerous aspects of Sophistic practice.

Plato and Anti-Rhetoric

It is no wonder that, despite their moral relativism and sceptical perspectives, Sophists such as Gorgias, Protagoras, Antiphon and Isocrates had such tremendous influence over the education of Athenian youth. Their emphasis on the cultivation of effective, persuasive speech had great practical value in the radical democracy of Athens. They were also very much part of the market—the sold their skills as teachers, speechwriters, speech-makers, and authors of teaching texts. Plato, who spent so much time across his dialogues attempting to ridicule and undermine the Sophist tradition, was certainly not a speech-maker. For him, the end of discourse was the philosophical discovery of absolute truth. The fact that we now use the word ‘sophistry’ in an entirely pejorative way to describe deceptive, fallacious arguments is in no little degree due to the influential early characterisations of Sophistic discourse provided by Plato. The speech-making of the Sophists was seen by Plato as trapped in the material world, the world of appearance and opinion, and as such was incapable of reaching the absolute truth that lies behind the senses. Plato “established dichotomies that the Sophists rejected: inquiry is preferred to persuasion; reason is preferred to emotion; one-on-one communication is preferred to mass persuasion” (Smith, 2003, p. 57). We shall see these tensions repeat themselves throughout the current study—they are not ancient matters far removed from our modern lives but instead sit at the heart of contemporary marketing thinking (as well as public reactions to it).

Plato was suspicious of rhetoric and poetry precisely because he was suspicious of the audience. Unlike the Sophists, who thrived upon the challenges of an audience-led civic life in democratic Athens, Plato was no supporter of the crowd. His conception of the ideal state as outlined in the Laws and the Republic has the public audience “slotted into well-defined positions and not allowed to defy the philosopher king” (Smith, 2003, p. 59). If rhetoric was to be used, then it was to be restricted to ensuring the “consent of the governed by the governors” (ibid.). For Plato, the fact that Sophists were willing to teach all citizens the means of securing adherence to their position was not only a reckless and irresponsible abandonment of intellectual duty but it was also based upon an incorrect understanding of what the duty of a citizen should be. Perhaps one of the most fundamental problems that Plato had with the Sophist approach to logos is that it fosters a power asymmetry in discourse. This might be ironic in a broader sense, when we consider that Plato envisaged a state where each citizen had an allotted place and was led to knowledge of absolute truth (and hence the good life) by the forces of the philosopher king. However, in regard to the methodology of argumentation, Plato’s position is quite clearly concerned with equality between disputants. In Gorgias, Plato argues that the rhetor is successful only because he is talking to those who are ignorant of the matters in hand. While it might be true, as his interlocutor Gorgias contends, that a good rhetor could persuade a patient to accept a course of treatment far more effectively than a doctor might, this is only because the patient is ignorant and therefore will be swayed by the language tricks of the rhetor. Conversely, the rhetor has no power to convince the doctor regarding medical topics. The Sophist takes advantage of the ignorance of his audience, while the philosopher (i.e. one schooled in the methodology of Socrates) seeks to lead his interlocutor through a dialectic that will uncover for both of them the real truth. Similarly, in the Phaedrus Plato describes the way in which Sophistic logos can seduce the young (represented by the titular character) by aping the tricks of the Sophistic rhetor Lysias and bewitching Phaedrus with his speech on love only to point out that he has been successful through a use of linguistic and argumentative manipulation. As an antidote to this, Plato has Socrates expound upon the real art of rhetoric—by which, of course, he means a philosophical rhetoric that is anchored in, and convinces because of, the true knowledge of that which the rhetor speaks.

Perhaps the biggest irony regarding Plato’s position on rhetoric is that, while ridiculing the Sophists’ reliance upon the persuasive power of logos, he is such a masterful user of these techniques himself. Indeed, while Plato clearly has many important issues with Sophism, there is one area in which their methodology remains fundamental to Plato’s project. As Corey (2015) notes, the Sophists are adept at producing wonder, “of awakening interlocutors from their dogmatic slumber” (p. 231). While he might disagree with the Sophist approach to truth, Plato recognises that words have to be used in order to bring an audience, even if it is an intimate audience, to a realization that their common-sense views of the world need to be questioned, that what they thought to be true might not really make any sense. And it is this realization that can be “the starting point for philosophy” (ibid.).

Aristotle and the Art of Rhetoric

Plato’s Academy continued to exist and be influential in Athens (and so in Greek scholarship) for hundreds of years after his death. The Sophists left no comparable institution behind and their works have been largely lost to history. Consequently, Plato’s handling of the Sophists has (until comparatively recently) tended to be the one that has formed the accepted interpretation of the Sophists and their early approaches to rhetoric. However, in regard to the broader subject of rhetoric itself it certainly cannot be said that Plato’s view carried the day. His pupil, Aristotle, had a much more enthusiastic and nuanced understanding of the importance of rhetoric recognising it as an art “crucial for human survival” (Smith, 2003, p. 71). His work, On Rhetoric, quietly restores much of the Sophist thinking on the use of arguments of probability in persuasive civic discourse as well as powerfully establishing the contingent nature of argumentation. It also does an awful lot more, acting as a nexus (and testing ground) for much of Aristotle’s previous thinking on logic, psychology, civic duty, and morality. As a consequence, the work is a considerably complex one and in its taxonomic structure it is less clear and all-encompassing than many of Aristotle’s other works. As Murphy et al. (2014) note, this suggests that “rhetoric deals with human inter-relationships involving so many variables that not even an Aristotle can devise a ‘system’ to describe it scientifically” (p. 62). Despite this complexity, On Rhetoric has served directly or indirectly as the model for mainstream Western rhetorical studies to this day. It contains a number of concepts and distinctions that will be essential to my later arguments and expositions, so I will introduce these now.

Isocrates and the Improving Power of Logos

Before moving on to discuss the rhetoric of the Roman era, we should briefly consider the figure of Isocrates, who ran his school at the same time as Aristotle set up his own Lyceum. Isocrates can best be seen as Aristotle’s main competitor in the provision of education in Athens. He believed in a balanced approach to education, the paideia, and his inclusion of gymnastics, science, philosophy, mathematics, and rhetoric in his curriculum has served as an influential model for general education ever since. For Isocrates, the act of rhetoric was “the final phase of a total process of personal growth and development” (Murphy et al., 2014, p. 52). Learning how to speak more effectively in public is something that for Isocrates will significantly aid in a man’s social standing and his own character, for “the stronger a person desires to persuade hearers, the more he will work to be honourable and good and to have a good reputation among the citizens” (quoted in Kennedy, 1994, p. 47). This improving power of rhetoric was encouraged by Isocrates through the study and copying of speeches that he had composed on virtuous subjects. He reasoned that the more one considered and argued for the virtues, the more one would become virtuous. Chief amongst the virtuous topics that Isocrates composed essays upon was the cause of Panhellenism, an idea which offered to bring together all of the Greek feuding city-states. Isocrates locates the practice of persuasive logos firmly within a frame of idealised civic duty. In this sense, Conley (1990) argues that he “tried to bridge the gap between morality and technical skill that had been created by his sophistic predecessors and Plato alike” (p. 18). Alongside his general impact upon the development of education, Isocrates’ teachings had a definite influence upon the early Roman conception of rhetoric, particularly through his focus on kairos, his ornate style, and impressive use of amplifications (or makrologia, where sentences are prolonged in various ways in order to underline the importance of particular words).

Stasis and the Orator-Leader

Roman rhetoric is characterised by the presentation of “highly specific, pragmatic systems” of oration (Murphy et al., 2014, p. 111). In this sense, it is influenced by the tradition of rhetorical handbooks that flourished throughout the times of Plato and Aristotle. Most of these handbooks have not survived, though a few of the more influential, such as the Rhetorica ad Alexandrum, have. However, their decidedly practical orientation formed the model for the works of Cicero and Quintilian as well as the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium, which became the first work to attempt to create an exhaustive listing of the rhetorical figures and which became the basis of rhetorical education well into the sixteenth century.

It is interesting to note that, as Athens turned from being a radical democracy towards more tyrannical forms of government, so the necessity for public displays of deliberative (political) rhetoric diminished. In the Hellenistic period, it was in the law courts that most rhetoric happened and, as was natural given the move away from democracy, the arbiter who was to be persuaded became not a large group of citizens but a very small number of judges. Not surprisingly, therefore, the next significant innovation in rhetoric comes from a re-consideration of the demands of forensic rhetoric. Hermagoras’ theory of stasis (c. 150 BCE) had a great effect upon the early Roman rhetoricians, particularly Cicero, with whom the term is most closely associated in modern times, and the author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium.

Stasis, meaning ‘stance’, refers in rhetorical theory to “the stand taken by a speaker toward an opponent” (Kennedy, 1994, p. 98) and concerns the ability to locate the “relevant points at issue in a dispute and to discover the applicable arguments drawn from the appropriate ‘places” (Conley, 1990, p. 32). Stasis theory essentially comes down to walking through a series of questions to determine what is the best defence in any particular case. These questions relate to issues of fact, definition, justification, quality (including mitigating circumstances), jurisdiction, and procedure (Smith, 2003; Murphy et al., 2014).

Any fan of modern police procedurals or court room dramas will be familiar with the arguments that result from a consideration of the stasis system; “as the records of his ankle tracker clearly show, my client was in Texas at the time of the murder in New York” (an issue of fact), “yes, my client stabbed the deceased but she did it in the heat of the moment and therefore this is not a malicious, premeditated murder” (and issue of definition), “while it is true that Dr. White administered the fatal dose of morphine to the President, he did this in order to save the whole country from entering an unjust and illegal war that would have claimed the lives of thousands of our armed forces personnel” (an issue of justification), “my client ran the red light, it is true, but having just failed his PhD viva he was in no fit mental state to consider the rules of the road and he throws himself upon your mercy” (an issue of quality), “my client is a sovereign citizen of the Oceanic state of Linux and does not recognise the authority of this court in matters relating to taxation” (an issue of jurisdiction), “my client was not read her Miranda rights at the time of arrest and so was held illegally” (an issue of procedure).

A subtle mastery of the stasis system provided a speaker with the reliable means to invent effective arguments in forensic environments but could also be used to effect in deliberative and epideictic situations. Cicero was known for his careful use of stasis both in his early career as a lawyer and in his later life in the Roman Senate. His De Inventione, an early and incomplete work, though one that was to have a great influence in the teaching of rhetoric, contains a thorough consideration of the system. The Rhetorica ad Herennium provides us with a more complete picture of early Roman approaches to rhetoric, however, providing a large amount of discussion and advice on style, delivery, memory, and arrangement as well as the topic of invention under which stasis falls. Certainly, in comparison to the texts that remain to us from the Greeks, the Rhetorica ad Herennium portrays a far more integrated and systematised approach to the subject. There is little sense that the text is constructed in opposition to any other prevailing opinion on the discipline; it is not an adversarial document. Style and delivery are given as much emphasis as the instruments of argument and the topoi. In many ways, we can see the Rhetorica as a pragmatic fusion of the best of Greek thinking on the subject—elements of Aristotle mix with elements of the Sophists and Isocrates. While this made of rhetoric something that was far easier to transmit—a comparatively unproblematic, self-contained system with clear applications and procedures—it did rather paper over some of the epistemological and ontological tensions that had been present in the art from its inception, tensions which would continue to appear down through the centuries.

Under the influence of Cicero and Quintilian, rhetoric became seen as the essential skill of the virtuous citizen. In a similar manner to Isocrates, Cicero held that an orator would become virtuous through the necessity of learning as much as there was to learn about the matters they would speak upon. As well as being knowledgeable about their subjects, of course, they need to be knowledgeable about those whose opinions they seek to lead—they “must have a scent for an audience, for what people are feeling, thinking, waiting for, wishing” (quoted in Smith, 2003, p. 129). Very importantly, the rhetor must seek to embody a moral authority (auctoritas) that would aid them in their persuasive endeavours. The notion of this authority was based upon Aristotle’s conception of ethos but became in Cicero’s work a far more substantial matter. In De Oratore, Cicero explained how auctoritas was generated through gravitas, a word we still use today, of course, to refer to someone’s impressive dignity but which for Cicero reflected a worthy public persona built up through one’s family connections, one’s educational history, one’s record of civic duty, and one’s reputation for wise advice. All of these elements contributed to who you were, or who you were perceived to be, and this could have a tremendous impact upon how your audience would judge you and your arguments. In this way, the serious study of rhetoric must inevitably touch almost every aspect of a person’s inner and outer life. Those who wished to lead in Roman life, to be able to navigate the vicissitudes of the law courts and political assemblies, must cultivate a virtuous persona with the gravitas, and hence the authority, to persuade. Placing rhetoric at the heart of such a general moral education was something that typified the general Roman approach to oratory and we see it forming the foundations of Quintilian’s later depiction of the rhetor as the “good man, skilled in speaking” (quoted in Smith, 2003, p. 130).

Another instance of peculiarly Roman elaboration upon a Greek rhetorical concept can be seen in the matter of decorum. As we have seen, kairos defined the idea of the right rhetorical moment, “adapting to rhetorical circumstances and exigencies, which include the orientations of both speaker and listeners, the moment, the place, and so forth” (Sipiora, 2002, p. 4). It was a central idea to Greek rhetoricians, no matter their other disagreements with each other. In Roman rhetoric, kairos developed into the ideas of propriety and decorum. Perhaps naturally, given the thinking that influenced the emphasis on auctoritas and gravitas, Roman understanding of oratorial propriety centred around fulfilling the expectations of the audience. Argument forms and figures should be chosen with respect to their suitability for a particular audience—they should attract attention and give pleasure but at the same time not overly stimulate or tax the hearer. In Cicero’s famous analogy, the forms and ornaments of a speech should all be necessary to its function, just as all the parts of a ship are necessary to its sailing—there should be no superfluous use of words, patterns, or imagery. Decorum represents the rationalisation, the systematisation, of style, then, and as part of this process the Romans began to catalogue as many rhetorical figures (ornatus) as could be found. Use of ornatus also tended to determine how far a speaker embodied either the Asiatic or the Attic styles. The Asiatic, or grand style, was “impetuous and ornate” (Kennedy, 1994, p. 96) and was often contrasted unfavourably by Roman writers such as Cicero and Quintilian with the plain, sober style of Atticism (which looked to early classical Greek oratory for its models). Indeed, Cicero at one point even calls Asiatic oratory “fat and greasy” (quoted in Kennedy, 1994, p. 96). However, what actually drew the ire of such Roman rhetorical theorists was the exclusive use of either style. Their advice was that a speaker should know when to adopt the grand style, when to speak plainly, and when to tread the middle ground, and it was the exercise of such judgement that typified the mastery of decorum.

The flowering of the Asiatic style (influenced by the practices of orators from Asia Minor) is generally located within what is called the ‘Second Sophistic’, a phase of Roman oratory that sits at the heart of the Imperial period (Smith, 2003). Imperial Rome saw the genre of epideictic rhetoric gain ascendance, perhaps because the arenas of the law courts and political assemblies had become less democratic and the opportunities for forensic and deliberative rhetoric less common. However, as Smith (2003) points out, the rhetoric of praise and blame can have significant deliberative aspects and it was often used in the Second Sophistic to praise behaviour or values that a speaker wished to bring to the attention of the Emperor in the hopes of influencing his policy and decisions. However, of particular interest for us is an anonymous work (previously attributed to Longinus) written at this time, On the Sublime, which raises the use of ornatus and the generation of decorum to an extreme level of importance. The author of this text is concerned with understanding the type of speech that transports the audience. This is something of a higher order than just the generation of appropriate emotion in an audience. When the sublime is achieved in a speech, its power is irresistible, bringing the audience almost to the point of madness (de Romilly, 1975). The author advises the rhetor who desires to attain such effects to portray noble ideals in their speech and to use careful and decorous word patternings. Words, when arranged appropriately, can have the same effect as a magic charm upon the audience. So, while we see here clear evidence of a move back towards the sort of emotive, inspiring power that an eloquent, Gorgian style might focus upon, it is reined tightly in by a Roman focus on decorum, balance, and noble intent. This is a dynamic which I will come to discuss in more depth when I consider marketing as a particularly Sophistic instantiation of rhetoric in later chapters.

Arrangement and the Faculties of Rhetoric

Before leaving our discussion of Roman rhetoric, it will be worthwhile to briefly outline the way in which the Latin authors approached the broad categorisation of the discipline. In particular, a consideration of the super-structure found in the Rhetorica ad Herennium allows us to appreciate the way in which this highly influential text understood the strategic planning behind the duties of the orator. A quick discussion will serve to highlight the range of skills that the successful orator was expected to master.

The Rhetorica ad Herennium starts by listing the faculties that the orator should possess (often referred to as the ‘canons’ of rhetoric)—invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery (Anonymous [trans. Caplan] 1954). Invention covers “the devising of matter, true or plausible that would make the case convincing” (ibid., p. 9) and therefore relates to the creative construction of proofs (of logos, ethos, and pathos). Arrangement is then concerned with how these proofs are organised to best effect, “making clear the place to which each thing is to be assigned” (ibid.) The Rhetorica promotes a six-part arrangement scheme consisting of introduction (designed to catch the attention and empathy of the audience), narration (or the statement of facts), division (which makes “clear what matters are agreed upon and what are contested”), proof (where the main arguments and their corroboration are presented), refutation (wherein we destroy our opponent’s arguments), and finally the conclusion (where the speaker summarises their case and makes a final appeal to the emotions of the audience). Style relates to the effective choice of words and sentences to clothe the proofs. The Rhetorica devotes its whole final book to a discussion of style, which the author explains is determined by the qualities of “taste, artistic composition, and distinction” (ibid., p. 269). Memory, of course, is an essential skill for the orator (made somewhat redundant in contemporary scenarios by the magic of the auto-prompt) and the Rhetorica provides instruction on how to train the imagination to construct images and “backgrounds” which can serve as mnemonics for all aspects of a speech. The final faculty, delivery, is accorded considerable significance by the author, who affirms that it has “exceptionally great usefulness” (p. 189) and that its mastery “is a very important requisite for speaking” (p. 191). Chiefly, delivery covers the study of voice quality and movement and how these elements are used in order to support the organisational stages of the speech and the strategies of invention that have been chosen.

Roman orators, then, had much to busy themselves with. Rigorous training across all five faculties was necessary for a student to master the discipline and both an opponent and the audience would pick upon weakness in any of them easily. Considered generally, however, the faculties of rhetoric provided the essential tools for successful public life. The cultivation of invention brought the early science of decision-making away from the rarefied field of philosophical dialectic and into ‘real life’, with all its messy concerns with reputation, opportunism, emotions, and what was probable (rather than true). The study of arrangement taught the rhetor how to take arguments and organise them clearly and effectively, mindfully leading the audience through a series of progressively convincing stages designed to secure their adherence to a way of thinking about something or someone. A knowledge of style led to a command of the power of language, a power that allowed a rhetor to buttress any argument they might make with word choices and patterns that would help put the audience in a receptive mood or frame of mind. The study of delivery educated the physical side of the student, providing them with conscious control over the associations that tone of voice and gestures (body language) could invoke in their audience. While it has become fashionable in modern education to avoid reliance upon memorisation and even to ridicule its cultivation, a cursory glance through the intellectual histories of any civilisation will make it plain just how important the training of the memory has been in establishing and transmitting intellectual culture (Carruthers, 2008; Yates, 2001; Olick and Robbins, 1998). Memory training of the form developed in the Western rhetorical tradition functions as a form of personal knowledge management, allowing the user to build and sort intellectual resources and form connections and categorisations amongst them all within the confines of their own mind.

So, the faculties covered everything that a citizen would need to function in the political and legal milieu. We must also not forget that at the root of faculties such as invention and style is the necessity of researching the appropriate information so that arguments can be chosen wisely and formed persuasively for particular audiences. The centrality of knowledge (of the audience, of the laws, of the political expediencies of the time) to the successful pursuit of the rhetorical faculties cannot be overstated and the way in which this closely mirrors the central place of market research in the market orientation demonstrates the fundamental similarity between the two enterprises.

Rhetoric and Religious Persuasion

The place of rhetoric in the Christian establishment of the Middle Ages is an important topic for us as it demonstrates the way in which the nature of the discipline shifts according to its political and cultural environment. Many figures in the early years of the church came from a background where the Greco-Roman educational system, which afforded such an important place to rhetoric, was still influential. As Conley (1990) remarks, “virtually all the early Fathers were converts who had studied and, in many cases, taught, rhetoric” (p. 63). Many of their audiences were also people who had been acculturated to Greco-Roman rhetorical practices and would thus respond well to this tradition of oratory and persuasion. In addition, it is worth remembering that Judaism, and the Christianity and Islam that sprang from it, “are speech-based religions to a much greater extent than Greco-Roman paganism” (Kennedy, 1994, p. 257). Early Judaism had its own system of rhetoric that relied strongly on “proclamation based upon the divine authority of the speaker” (ibid), but also contained structures of logical reasoning as well as a highly developed use of metaphor and allegory. Through its instantiation in the books of the Old Testament (as well as some of the New Testament such as the gospel of Mark) this tradition would influence the evolving rhetorical practice of Christianity alongside the conventions of Greco-Roman oratory.

At the same time, the political and social position of early Christianity had its own influence upon the formation of its rhetorical approach. The persecution that the Christians faced from pagan leaders and communities led to a significant emphasis upon the genre of the ‘apologetic’, in which Christians such as Justin Martyr, Tatian, and Tertullian would defend and explain their faith “against slanders heaped upon it by its opponents” (ibid. p. 259).

The Church Fathers were faced with a number of persuasive challenges; defending the reputation of their persecuted faith, converting pagans to the faith, establishing doctrinal unity within that faith, and, perhaps most importantly, establishing a discipline of interpretation which could help to explain the corpus of texts chosen as the Old and New Testament. However, classical rhetoric was ostensibly seen as corrupting because of its associations with pagan cultures and institutions and many early Christian writers ironically found themselves echoing Plato’s sentiments when they asserted that rhetoric could not help uncover the truth. Smith (2003) recounts the tale of Jerome, who converted to Christianity after an early life being trained in the Ciceronian tradition in Rome. One night Jerome dreamed that he had ascended to heaven and stood outside its gates awaiting entry. However, he is turned away because he is judged to have spent his life as an advocate of Cicero rather than Christ. After that day, the chastened Jerome “pledged never to read pagan works again” (p. 158) and argued vociferously for Christians to rely solely upon the truth of divine revelation in their lives. Yet such attitudes were largely short-lived and were entirely overturned in the work of Augustine, the most influential of the Christian writers on rhetoric.

Although Augustine was born to a Christian mother, he did not himself become a Christian until he was thirty. His early years were instead spent training to become a lawyer in the law courts of Carthage. As a part of this education he became intimately familiar with the works of Cicero and the larger Greco-Roman rhetorical tradition but, at the same time, he also began to explore the many religions that thrived in the environment around him. Giving up his attempts at a legal career, he began to teach rhetoric and finally moved to Rome in search of better students and better prospects. He thrived in this milieu and was awarded the chair of rhetoric at Milan (Kennedy, 1994). However, over time, Augustine found himself being drawn closer and closer to a consideration of Christianity, aided by his friendship with Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, and he resigned his teaching post and converted in 387 CE, eventually becoming the bishop of Hippo. Augustine’s work, De Doctrina Christiana, contains much instruction upon the place of rhetoric in Christian education and is heavily indebted to his Ciceronian background. From Augustine’s perspective, however, certain long-standing tenets of rhetorical theory were superfluous to what the discipline was to be used for by the church. Consequently, the division between the three genres was collapsed as there was only need for one—the genre of preaching (later to be called homiletics).

Eloquence of style was something Augustine connected with the status of the speaker—the writings of the church fathers and the scriptures were to be imitated because they embodied the form of eloquence that Christians should uphold. But, importantly, eloquence of style is something which allows the preacher to “sway the mind so as to subdue the will” (Book 4, ch. 13). This is in keeping with Cicero’s dictum that the purpose of rhetoric is to teach, to delight, and to move, though the end result for Augustine is always the hearer’s appreciation of the truth of God’s word. This brought out a strong distinction between the Christian rhetor and the pagan orator for while much Greco-Roman speech-making had been designed to aggrandise the speaker and win them applause, Augustine reminded his readers that the only motivation for effective, persuasive, speaking was the communication of “the truths which deliver us from eternal misery and bring us to eternal happiness” (Book 4, ch. 18).

Alongside the development of ecclesiastical rhetoric as a tool of persuasive preaching, Augustine also helped in the establishment of a Christian tradition of hermeneutics which sought to provide a system of Biblical interpretation which could help unlock a proper understanding of the sometimes contradictory or confusing, and often highly allegorical, scriptures. Preachers needed to be able to work out the meaning of scripture for themselves before they could use it to enlighten their audiences. They therefore needed to be skilled interpreters who would be able to light upon the truth of a passage perhaps entirely couched in figurative language and then invent the most effective way of explaining it to an audience lacking in their own educational background. Christian hermeneutics took advantage of the considerable amount of Greco-Roman studies on metaphor, allegory, and symbolism that came out of the rhetorical and poetic traditions.

The influence of Augustine saw to it that the study and practice of rhetoric had a place in the Christian educational system, and this position was to remain reasonably secure well into the late Renaissance. Rhetoric became a tool of religious persuasion, helping to convert, assuage, educate, and (to use Augustine’s own term) subdue a vast variety of audiences. However, Medieval scholars extended a facet of Augustine’s teaching on rhetoric in a way that had some powerful consequences.

As we have seen, attention to the peculiarity of any given audience was an important component in classical rhetoric. It influenced the concepts of kairos and decorum, was fundamental to the reasoning behind Aristotle’s discussion of ethos and pathos, and is ever-present in discussion of the effective choice of stylistic figures. Augustine developed this mindfulness of the audience in a direction that had not been previously considered, however. He wrote that the stylistic genres (sublime, temperate, and calm—corresponding with the grand, the middle and the plain of the Ciceronian tradition) were suited to particular audiences. The temperate style, where ornamentation produces a beauty of expression, is of use to cause adherence in an audience who are “vain of their eloquence” and who will therefore react well to the aesthetic nature of such a speech. The sublime, or grand, style is best suited to an audience of those who know the truth of a message already but resist it through the pressures of custom, society, or fear, whereas the calm style is to be used to instruct those who are ignorant of the truth. As Smith (2003) notes, later Medieval writers greatly amplified the letter and spirit of such distinctions and “argued that different types of discourse should be used with different types of audience: demonstration for scholars of the same faith, dialectic for the intelligent of other faiths, and rhetoric for the masses” (p. 187). This unwarranted compartmentalisation, such a characteristic of the Medieval scholastic mindset (Vickers, 1999), meant that rhetoric slowly began to lose its place at the centre of education, becoming instead a specialised tool not generally suited to application in intellectual discourse. Instead, the Scholastics moved logic to the fore, influenced by their study of Plato and Aristotelian texts such as the Organon. While humanists such as Roger Bacon wrote against the diminishing of rhetoric by those scholars unfamiliar with its full history and true worth, it was generally the case that the associations between ignorance and rhetoric meant that it became a somewhat moribund and fragmented area of study in the Medieval period (Smith, 2003; Vickers, 1999). An interest in stasis theory was maintained as teachers found it a useful introduction to the broader study of the (more worthy) dialectic (Kennedy, 1994), while hermeneutics, homiletics, and the study of effective letter writing meant that isolated strands of the Classical rhetorical tradition found niches in which to survive, if not significantly develop.

Renaissance Rhetoric

The re-discovery of many Classical texts that did so much to feed the flames of the humanist movement of the Renaissance had a tremendous impact on the resurgence of interest in rhetoric during this time. Renaissance humanism was largely a reaction to the extreme abstraction of Medieval Scholasticism, which became perceived as unaesthetic and disconnected from the realities of everyday life. Humanism looked back beyond the church fathers to a conception of civic life that was fundamentally Ciceronian, where eloquence of expression was a mark of virtue and an essential tool in making one’s way through an uncertain public life (Conley, 1990). As Mack (2013) puts it, “rhetoric and the renaissance are inextricably linked” (p. 2). Language (particularly Latin but increasingly also Greek) became something that should be studied deeply so that its total resources could be mastered. These resources would then be the key to both a more powerful and effective functioning within public life but also a fuller understanding of all the other Classical texts of science, history, and law which were also being discovered. Classical rhetoric, particularly as presented in the full versions of Quintilian’s Institutes, Cicero’s De Oratore, and Aristotle’s On Rhetoric that became available during the Renaissance, offered a complex, thorough, but eminently practical means of approaching the study of effective language use. Rhetoric gradually become an important complement to the study of dialectic instead of just a small backwater of the grand framework of Scholastic logic. As a result of this re-balancing between the two forms of argument there also emerged a willingness to think more critically about the supposed differences between the them, “prompting new thinking about both subjects” (Mack, 2013, p. 311).

Renaissance rhetoricians such as Agricola and Melanchthon also rehabilitated the place of emotion in rhetoric, returning to Aristotle’s treatment of it in On Rhetoric, particularly the way in which the rhetor needs to carefully consider the connections between the characteristics of a specific audience, the particular arguments that need to be conveyed, and the ways in which different emotion can influence different types of decisions.

The learning of rhetorical figures and tropes became a staple of the European school room. Pupils were expected to first memorise all of the considerable number of figures collected by such figures as Susenbrotus (who listed 132 of them), then be able to identify them in any piece of Classical writing that they were presented with, and then finally master the art of composing with the figures themselves (Vickers, 1999). The creation of a commonplace book was taught as an aid to this process of memorisation and identification, with pupils being directed to collect examples of figures and quotations from worthy sources which would provide them with a fecund storehouse to base their own compositions upon as well as providing useful authority for their arguments. The commonplace book was part of the more general programme of copia (or ‘abundance’) that was introduced in Erasmus’ eponymous work, a treatise that soon found its way to the heart of European rhetoric education. The idea of copia was to be able to construct impressive writing through the artful use of lexical, phrasal, and source variety. Rather than just sticking to the same old tired expressions, the mastery of copia allows a writer to use original turns of phrase, convey subtle meaning, and present themselves and their ideas within a vivid and powerful framework of reference. As an illustration of how the techniques can be applied, Erasmus provides 195 variations on the phrase “your letter pleased me greatly” (Mack, 2013)! Erasmus’ De Copia was an immensely rich textbook that embodied a fascination with, and joy of, the possibilities of impressive (and so persuasive) linguistic communication.

Perhaps inevitably, the sheer abundance of rhetorical material that found its way into the hands of scholars and teachers prompted many calls for the simplification and systematisation of the discipline. These calls finally found substance in the educational reforms of Peter Ramus in the middle of the sixteenth century (Conley, 1990). Ramus is often accused of radically diminishing the scope of rhetoric, particularly through his transfer of invention and arrangement away from rhetoric and into the realm of logic. This left only embellishment through figures and stylistics of voice and gesture (Smith, 2003). However, Ramus was clear that dialectic should be studied alongside rhetoric and, as Mack (2013) notes, this meant that although the technical provenance of invention and arrangement might have shifted in Ramist schooling, nevertheless students were effectively furnished with all of the traditional areas of rhetorical knowledge. As a result, although his approach is predominantly dialectical, Ramus “is strongly committed to the broad syllabus of rhetoric: invention, organization, style, and delivery” (ibid., p. 146).

The Protestant Sermon

The rise of Protestantism saw the practice of rhetoric drawn squarely into the realm of religious discourse once more. Both John Calvin and Martin Luther were talented rhetors in their own right and also were adamant regarding the importance of rhetorical training in the formation of new priests (Vickers, 1999). It was certainly the case, however, that their models were not the Classical texts beloved of the humanists. Instead, Protestant rhetors swung the pendulum back to a consideration of scripture and the church fathers as the source of rhetorical instruction. At the same time, the emphasis that Protestantism placed upon religious instruction in the vernacular, both directly in the pulpit and via the programmatic translation of the Bible, meant that the influence of vernacular style and language usage began to make its way into widespread rhetorical practice.¹ The Protestant sermon, delivered in the vernacular, could often became a rhetorical tour de force designed to seize the emotions of the congregation and make as vivid as possible the errors of their ways and the dire consequences of those errors.

Of course, such vituperative rhetoric was also directed at the opponents of the Protestant movement. The Catholic establishment, for its part, sought to define itself in a number of ways. Outside of the ‘inartistic proofs’ of warfare, torture, imprisonment, and battery, the battle between Protestant and Counter-reformation forces also took place within the realm of rhetoric. The Jesuits, and their mission to “teach the young and convert the heathens” (according to its original 1540 charter, quoted in Conley, 1990, p. 152), were the Catholic bulwark against the rising Protestant tide, sweeping “out across Europe to seek and destroy the arguments of [Luther’s] followers” (Smith, 2003, p. 220). The founder of the Society of Jesus, Ignatius Loyola, was just as adamant as the Protestant leaders in giving rhetorical training a central place in their educational endeavours. For the Jesuits, written and oral eloquence were vital tools in seeking and maintaining adherence to the Catholic worldview. The number of rhetorical textbooks written by Jesuits, and the number of editions they went through, was so large “that it is difficult to arrive at any precise estimate of the total number of such books and of the extent of Jesuit influence” other than to say that the numbers “were gigantic and the influence correspondingly great” (Conley, 1990, p. 153). Jesuit authors such as Cypriano Soares and Nicholas Caussin based their work upon a generally conservative use of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian. Of note, however, is the strong emphasis put upon emotion as a persuasive force across both Jesuit and Reformation rhetorical writings. This perhaps reflects the legacy of the Renaissance in general, where rhetoric was returned to a far more practical discipline (Vickers, 1999). The battle for the souls of Reformation and Counter-reformation Europe was a battle very much waged through the “arousal and orientation of emotion” (Conley, 1990, p. 155). Rhetoric became a vital tool in learning “anew how to make powerful speeches on behalf of new religions, in defense of old religions, and for political gain” (Smith, 2003, p. 233). It is perhaps understandable, then, that in the nascent science and political philosophy of the seventeenth century the power of rhetorical language began to be treated with caution. The Enlightenment was born amidst fervent religious and political discord that for many called into question established traditions and assumptions. Examining the place that language played in furthering such discord led many thinkers to attempt to place clear bounds upon its persuasive force, or at least to bring to public attention the dangers that rhetoric might hold for those involved in empirical, rational investigation into the natural and social worlds.

Science, the Plain Style, and the Enlightenment

Concerns regarding the way in which language can potentially obscure the truth are common in early scientific discourse as well as the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Some of these concerns might well originate in the growth of the alternative communicative and ratiocinative language of mathematics. So, for example, Galileo had already declared in 1623 that the “grand book” of the universe is “written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it” (quoted in Stark, 2009, p. 95, n. 18). Additionally, new approaches to the rational investigation of the world such as Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (published in 1620) and Descartes’ Discourse on the Method (printed in 1637) had begun to promote a clarity and simplicity of language, as well as a distrust of the ‘idols’ of tradition, which was often at distinct odds with contemporary rhetorical approaches to communication. The language of “enthusiasm”, namely the religious reliance on a torrent of stylistically powerful words to bully an audience into a passionate resonance with an orator’s vision of the truth, was seen by the protagonists of the Enlightenment as the enemy of rational enquiry and the cause of uncertainty and chaos in public and private life.

Perhaps the most concerted attack upon the deleterious effects of rhetoric was to be found in the movement for plain speech in the early years of the Royal Society. Directly influenced by Bacon’s writings, the Royal Society was established in 1660 as a meeting place for those thinkers interested in the new experimental, ‘scientific’ approaches to natural philosophy. Many of those associated with the founding of the Society were staunch in their mistrust of the stylistically complex and obscurantist writing of the old guard natural philosophers of the previous generations, particularly such occult writers as Agrippa and Paracelsus (Stark, 2009). Propagandists for the Society, such as Thomas Sprat, published tirades against the use of extravagantly figured, Latinate language in philosophical discourse, urging for the adoption of a “close, naked, natural way of speaking” which would bring to scientific discussion a “near Mathematical plainness” (quoted in Conley, 1990, p. 169). Rhetorical figures were seen by Spratt as dangerous, even evil, as they “give the mind a motion too changeable, and bewitching, to consist with right practice” (quoted in Stark, 2009, p. 49). The Royal Society attempted to promote a new form of rhetoric, then, one shorn of its “bewitching” potential. This attempt is born of the strong assumption that certain ways of using rhetoric can lead audiences to error and can be used by authors and orators to deceive—to “insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgement” as John Locke wrote in his own condemnation of the “artificial and figurative application of words” (quoted in Stark, 2009, p. 54). For many language reformers of the Enlightenment such as Locke, Spratt, John Dryden, and Joseph Glanvill, rhetoric was a tool that could be used by those inspired by the devil in order to befuddle, enchant, inflame, and lead astray. While these thinkers were great promoters of the new experimentalist perspective, which was based upon a rational, sceptical approach to the natural world, they were also still part of the religious world of their time; their desire for rational language was built upon a fear of the irrational, magical influence of “bewitching” rhetoric.

The strong tension between magic, rhetoric, and science is at the core of the current study’s perspective on marketing, and it is something that we will explore in more depth in Chapters 3 and 4. For now, however, it is sufficient to note the important part that the suspicion of rhetorical influence had in the early development of the scientific view of language and communication.

Rhetoric, Elocution, and Belles Lettres

The Enlightenment desire for a balanced language that communicated in a pleasing, but rational, manner was to have a definite influence upon the teaching of rhetoric in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At the same time, increasing opportunities and demand for social mobility in European society meant that the need to be able to impress with one’s spoken and written language was becoming of larger public interest. In particular, the issue of “taste” in expression became an important focal point for the theories of rhetoric that evolved out of (and, in some senses, as a reaction to) the plain language reforms as well as the wider culture of salon and club discourse that marked the Enlightenment. For example, Adam Smith, known to us now as the founder of free market economic theory, spent more than a decade lecturing on rhetoric in Edinburgh and his popularity as a source on the subject was greatly aided by the opinion that “his pronunciation and his style were much superior to what could, at that time, be acquired in Scotland only” (as his anonymous obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine states, quoted in Smith, 2001, p. 7). Social aspiration, making one’s way in the world, demanded effective and appropriate communication skills and it was to rhetoric, and its recent flourishing into the scene of belles lettres, that Europe looked to provide instruction and inspiration. It is no coincidence that much of the great work done on rhetoric in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sprang from the Celtic fringes and the North of England. As Conley (1990) notes, the curricula at Trinity Dublin, Edinburgh University, and Marischal College in Aberdeen were designed to help students overcome the “serious cultural handicaps” of being born and brought up outside the influence of London. The teaching of rhetoric in these places was therefore designed to provide students with the ability to generate persuasive ethos through eloquent speech and writing.

Allied to the rise of rhetoric as a tool of social power was the eighteenth-century British explosion in the art of elocution. While delivery, the performance aspect of oration, had usually been something that writers on rhetoric had paid at least some attention to, it had become somewhat sidelined in the Medieval and Renaissance period. However, the part played by gesture and voice in the successful delivery of affecting, persuasive speech began to occupy a number of educators and theorists in the latter years of the Enlightenment. Michel La Faucher’s 1657 study on the use of pronunciation and gesture in public speaking was translated into English in 1727 and is generally considered to have been the seed for the Elocutionary movement in Britain (Conley, 1990). Later English manuals, such as the Irish actor John Sheridan’s A Course of Lectures on Elocution (published in 1762) began to move on from such physical minutiae as instructing the reader upon the correct use of the eyebrows when marking their words as sarcastic, to include a broader cultural project of establishing a standardised ‘English’ speech for all to educate themselves in. Sheridan held that the correct model of English pronunciation was to be found at court, and that deviation from this model was bound to lead to the judgement that the speaker was not worthy of attention or elevation.

The principles behind the Elocutionary Movement became mainstays of the Victorian approach to the proper mastery of English and were also enthusiastically taken up in the United Sates. Yet, by the early twentieth century elocution had largely become an embarrassment, something to be suspicious of or ridiculed (Sloane, 2013). Indeed, most people’s exposure to the idea of elocution nowadays comes directly from Shaw’s mockery of it in his 1913 Pygmalion or that play’s vivid film adaptation as My Fair Lady. The value and ethos of regional and ‘class’ accents have become a lot more complex in contemporary English (across all its international manifestations), and though they still remain an object of strategic persona construction an English public figure eager to appear approachable and sympathetic might be more concerned with making their vowels a little more Estuary English rather than Received Pronunciation (which is not to downplay the continuing role that negative stereotyping plays in the reception of regional accents). Indeed, while the motivations of the Elocutionary Movement seem to be at clear odds with the cult of ‘authenticity’ that has apparently taken over Western popular culture (Barker and Taylor, 2007; Gilmore and Pine, 2007; Banet-Weiser, 2012), it is precisely because of the desire to be seen as authentic that a return to considerations of ‘proper’ delivery has occurred—even though the definition of ‘proper’ might have radically shifted.

Movements such as those promoting Elocution and belles lettres (in both its Continental and British manifestations) tended to be guided by concerns of aesthetics and taste. Hugh Blair, the preeminent British proponent of belles lettres, saw taste as “ultimately founded on a certain natural and instinctive sensibility to beauty” (quoted in Smith, 2003, p. 257) and as such must reflect the universal components of beauty, namely order, proportion, and harmony. The influence of the sublime was quite apparent in Blair’s approach, and a tasteful piece of writing should activate an appreciation of the sublime in its audience, moving it “to new levels of conviction born of appeals to the imagination and the affections”. Logos becomes dominated by appeals to pathos and, to a lesser extent ethos, here. This unbalancing of the traditional rhetorical faculties and proofs in some sense reflects the gradual fragmentation of rhetoric as a discipline over the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. We can see this also, at the other extreme, with the attempts by Richard Whately to centre the study of rhetoric around logos and a far deeper and nuanced consideration of logical proof than had been popular for many centuries. For Whately, the Elocutionary Movement was far too concerned with the speaker when what should be given the weight of attention was the argument and its presentation. Though Whately did write on delivery (it constitutes Part Four of his popular Elements of Rhetoric, first published in 1828), he believed that rather than concentrating on imitating all the gestural and tonal minutiae beloved of the Elocutionary Movement, which would only lead to a stilted, mechanical performance, a speaker should instead let the argument that they are making move them naturally. Whately’s Elements of Rhetoric had an important influence on the way that the teaching of rhetoric was transformed into the teaching of composition, and it is to this that we will now turn.

Rhetoric and Composition

Today, in Britain, rhetoric is rarely to be found on the school curriculum or in the university lecture theatre. Students of Latin or Greek might come across it tangentially and those studying for a degree in English Literature might be introduced to it as an arcane precursor to literary criticism or as a means of further understanding some of the Renaissance texts they are reading but the concerted study of rhetoric and its history has largely disappeared from formal education. In the US, things are rather different, and this is primarily due to the importance of forensics and debate teams in high school and freshman composition classes at universities. As Conley (1990) points out, rhetoric appears to have become transformed into the study of composition in the US largely through the tremendous influence of one book, John Mitchell Bonnell’s Manual of the Art of Composition, published in 1867. Bonnell argued that the proper province of rhetoric was composition, not delivery or elocution. This approach resonated with developments in US higher education after the Civil War, which saw the establishment of state universities and a far less elitist conception of the purpose of university education. Students needed to be prepared for “a fruitful occupation and individual self-realization” (Conley, 1990, p. 248). One of the most essential tools on the road to professional and individual success in the world was universally considered to be the ability to write clearly and correctly and so to communicate effectively. Consequently, no matter their major of choice, university students began to be drilled in the rhetoric of composition. The effects of this change in emphasis continue to this day, with rhetoric scholars in US universities afforded their position due to the continued place in the curriculum of composition courses that service the broad student population. While for many years this might have meant that the teaching of rhetoric in the US was hampered by unrealistic expectations and function-alist orientations, it nevertheless has assured a continuing presence for the discipline (or a subset of it) in the everyday life of higher education in the US. It is not surprising, also, to find that so much of the work advancing and evolving the study and application of rhetoric in the twentieth century came from US-based academics. The composition focus in US rhetorical studies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was greatly indebted to the work of Alexander Bain, a Scottish scholar who applied Continental empirical psychology to rhetorical theory, bringing a scientific basis to the pursuit of effective communication. As Smith (2003) notes, Bain’s introduction of the vocabulary of psychology into rhetorical studies is a line that leads quite directly to the rhetorical conception of Kenneth Burke, the doyen of twentieth-century US rhetoric.

Contemporary Rhetoric and the ‘Rhetorical Turn’

The significance of language in constructing the way we view and understand the world is one of the major scholarly obsessions of the twentieth century, running throughout modernism, structuralism, postmodernism, deconstruction, and constructivism, as well as being fundamental to debates in the philosophies of mind and language, socio- and psycholinguistics, sociology, and anthropology. It is not my intention, and I certainly do not have the ability, to review the extremely fecund and variegated literature generated in the twentieth century on the power of language. Instead, in the final part of this historical review of the discipline of rhetoric, I will remain focused upon those ideas and authors that have most influenced the understanding of rhetoric in the last 100 years. Principal among those authors who have advanced rhetorical theory in the twentieth century are I. A. Richards and Kenneth Burke, and I will endeavour to summarise the nature of their contributions. Additionally, I will review the broad rhetorical turn (Simons, 1990a) that has placed scientific discourse under the lens of rhetorical interpretation. I would direct the reader eager for further detail and explication regarding the major figures of twentieth-century rhetorical theory to Foss et al.’s (2002) classic overview in Contemporary Perspectives on Rhetoric.