Author's Keywords: rhetoric, speech, language, reason, appetite, general will. liberty, legislator, founder, logos	Convention All Academic Convention can solve the abstract management needs for any association's annual meeting. Submission - Custom fields, multiple submission types, tracks, audio visual, multiple upload formats, automatic conversion to pdf. Review - Peer Review, Bulk reviewer assignment, bulk emails, ranking, z-score statistics, and multiple worksheets! Reports - Many standard and custom reports generated while you wait. Print programs with participant indexes, event grids, and more! Scheduling - Flexible and convenient grid scheduling within rooms and buildings. Conflict checking and advanced filtering. Communication - Bulk email tools to help your administrators send reminders and responses. Use form letters, a message center, and much more! Management - Search tools, duplicate people management, editing tools, submission transfers, many tools to manage a variety of conference management headaches! Click here for more information.
Association: Name: American Political Science Association URL: http://www.apsanet.org
Citation: URL: http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p63645_index.html Direct Link: HTML Code:

Fontana, Benedetto. "Rousseau and the Ancients on Rhetoric" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia Marriott Hotel, Philadelphia, PA, Aug 27, 2003 <Not Available>. 2009-05-26 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p63645_index.html>

Fontana, B. , 2003-08-27 "Rousseau and the Ancients on Rhetoric" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia Marriott Hotel, Philadelphia, PA Online <.PDF>. 2009-05-26 from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p63645_index.html

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript Review Method: Peer Reviewed Abstract: To Rousseau rhetoric is an instrument that presupposes, and generates, division, disunity, and conflict. This is similar to what Plato and Tacitus say. Yet, in Rousseau’s time, as he himself says, there is no public space, there is no people (the people are “kept scattered”), and there is no public/political speech as that in use in the ancient assemblies of the polis. Thus, the issue is to create and to found a people and a public/political space, within which and through which public speech becomes again possible. Rousseau’s critique of rhetoric, especially in The Social Contract and in the First Discourse, represents an attempt to discover or to rediscover a language appropriate to his political and theoretical project: to uncover the means by which a people and a polis come into being. In effect, the critique of rhetoric is also an attempt to redirect it toward the reform of political thought and political practice. And like Plato’s use of rhetoric in the Republic and in the Phaedrus this redirection is also an attempt to reform and to reformulate contemporary forms of speech and language. Rousseau recognizes rhetoric, in the proper hands and properly used, as a vehicle to reform society by teaching and educating the masses. Education, of course, is crucial to Rousseau, as it is to the ancients. The educator, whether it be Plato’s philosopher-king, the legislator, or the teacher of Emile, must devise ways and means by which the subject--the people or the pupil--is to be led to acquire a given character or a given habit or code of behavior. This requires some form of persuasion. But persuasion of a kind quite unlike that of the orators and rhetoricians, a persuasion sensitive and attuned to the subject it is addressing. At the same time, reason, philosophy and dialectic are not by themselves adequate to the task at hand. For without the means of public speech they are, in Tacitus’ evocative words, “mute and speechless.” Yet the hegemony of philosophy and rational will, represented by the wise founder/orator, and institutionalized in the general will, demands that the citizen body become mute and speechless. In the same way that Plato’s true rhetoric, by giving voice to philosophy, renders politics voiceless, Rousseau’s legislator/orator, by using a reformed speech to found a sovereign people, renders rhetoric not only useless but pernicious to the determination of the public good. In addition, Rousseau is well aware of the contradiction between his notion of liberty (not subject to external forces, obeying laws of one own’s making) and his notion of political education. Yet he believed that the polity devised by a wise legislator, originally established by rhetorical manipulation and simulation, would eventually come to express and to represent the true desires of the people. His hope was that the legislator/educator would eventually become superfluous, and that citizen body would come to such an understanding that it would be able to say what Emile came to say to his teacher: “I have decided to be what you have made me.”

People Who Need People: The Impact of Social Capital on HIV-related Actions as Mediated by Self and Proxy Efficacies in Namibia

Like Parents, like Citizens: The Role of Television News, Family Discussion and Parents’ political participation on Mexican Children’s Political Socialization

Political Rhetoric in Ancient Greece and Beyond: An Application of Aristotle?s Proofs of Persuasion to Political Speech