Rhetoric or Deliberation? The Case for Rhetorical Political Analysis
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321716651898 |
| Author | Ryan Walter |
| Date | 01 June 2017 |
| Published date | 01 June 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321716651898
Political Studies
2017, Vol. 65(2) 300 –315
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321716651898
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Rhetoric or Deliberation?
The Case for Rhetorical
Political Analysis
Ryan Walter
Abstract
This article joins together recent work in rhetorical political analysis with methodological
advances made in intellectual history to prospect a historical and linguistic approach to public
reason and deliberation. It is offered as an alternative to currently dominant approaches that
emphasise philosophical and normative understanding, especially those associated with the
‘deliberative turn’ in democratic theory. This alternative approach is developed by identifying
two points of methodological divergence between a rhetorical and philosophical orientation to
deliberation. First, a rhetorical approach will study standards of deliberation that are endogenous
to a society instead of imposing them on the basis of one form of philosophical reason or another.
Second, rhetorical analysis does not conceive of deliberation as consensus reached through non-
coerced reflection but as the strategic deployment of shared linguistic resources in a context of
contingently unfolding non-linguistic events.
Keywords
rhetoric, rhetorical political analysis, language, deliberation, deliberative democracy
Accepted: 21 April 2016
Habermasian assessments of political speech and argument […] are unable fully to recognize
the legitimacy of rhetorical force in political argument.
Finlayson (2004: 538)
Recent research on rhetoric within political science has attempted to recall the discipline
to the study of persuasive language. The key premise is that such language is not the
antithesis to reason but a core instrument of political power and an object of political
contest in consequence.1 A distinguishing feature of this research is conveyed in the epi-
graph quoted above – that a rhetorical perspective on politics diverges from philosophical
School of Politics and International Studies, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
Corresponding author:
Ryan Walter, School of Politics and International Studies, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Brisbane,
QLD 4072, Australia.
Email: r.walter1@uq.edu.au
651898PSX0010.1177/0032321716651898Political StudiesWalter
research-article2016
Article
Walter 301
approaches because the latter exclude a host of rhetorical practices from legitimate debate.
An instructive case is Robert Goodin’s treatment of dog whistling as pernicious rhetoric
that harms democracy. Goodin’s argument is straightforward: ostensibly saying one thing
while simultaneously sending a different and coded message to another group – ‘dog
whistling’ – makes open deliberation impossible (Goodin, 2008: 7, 224). A divergent
conclusion is reached in the rhetorical account of Barry Hindess, who instead concludes
that sending coded messages is a pervasive and sophisticated form of rhetoric, from Jesus’
counsel to ‘render therefore unto Caesar’ through to contemporary diplomacy (Hindess,
2014: 147–150).
Yet there is more at stake than divergent analyses; above all, there is the question of
whether standards of deliberation should be prescribed by one version or another of nor-
mative theory or whether they should be empirically studied as rooted in the history,
institutions and language practices of a society, and governed by legal and non-legal
norms. To see this point more clearly, consider the account of public reason developed by
John Rawls, which he used to reframe the arguments he made in A Theory of Justice
(Rawls, [1971] 1999). For Rawls, the citizen-legislator must understand that they hold a
‘comprehensive doctrine’ comprising ideas and beliefs regarding what is valuable in
political life and that this comprehensive doctrine is an obstacle to reaching agreement
with citizens possessed of divergent doctrines (Rawls, 1997: 807; 2005: 11–14). In con-
sequence, the citizen-legislator must generate a ‘political conception of justice’, one
which they ‘think is at least reasonable’ for others to endorse, for this stricture blocks
importing non-public and divisive aspects of a comprehensive doctrine into a conception
of justice, such as conceptions of God (Rawls, 1997: 770, 773–774).
The value of secularity thus emerges in Rawls’ account not as the result of legal and
ideological processes of deconfessionalisation2 – such that it would remain dependent on
continuing legal and political support – but as the outcome of applying an internal, philo-
sophical discipline to one’s beliefs and public speech. The limitation of this approach is
that we do not have a basis for comprehending secularity in historical and institutional
terms or for understanding different degrees of secular politics as the outcome of a given
institutional arrangement and national history. Furthermore, we are left without the tools
for studying how the value of secularity is actually mobilised in rhetorical contest in a
given society and the degree to which it does in fact govern deliberation or permits reli-
gious argumentation in a nominally secular public sphere.
On the surface, it might seem that these failings are mitigated by the fact that recent
work in deliberative democracy has been concerned to reconcile in theoretical terms the
requirements of normative theory with the empirical fact of political rhetoric. An influen-
tial example is John Dryzek’s ‘systemic appreciation’ of rhetoric, in which rhetoric is to
be judged according to its effects on the deliberative system first, and only secondarily
according to categorical criteria, such as whether or not rhetoric is non-coercive (Dryzek,
2010).3 Yet the enduring weakness is that standards of deliberation are formed theoreti-
cally, a priori, without reference to the standards that are already empirically present and
active in a given society.
A similar point holds for the ‘systemic turn’ within deliberative democracy more gen-
erally, a shift to studying multiple sites of deliberation that possess varying degrees of
deliberation (see, for example, Hendriks, 2006; Parkinson, 2006; Parkinson and
Mansbridge, 2012).4 While this dilutes the normative purity required of deliberation, it is
nevertheless still the case that theorists presume ‘to judge the deliberative system […] to
apply criteria drawn from the theory of deliberative democracy’ (Owen and Smith, 2015:
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