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Advances in the History of Rhetoric

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Troubled Freedom, Rhetorical Personhood, andDemocracy’s Ongoing Constitution

Ira J. Allen

To cite this article: Ira J. Allen (2015) Troubled Freedom, Rhetorical Personhood, andDemocracy’s Ongoing Constitution, Advances in the History of Rhetoric, 18:2, 195-215, DOI:10.1080/15362426.2015.1081529

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Advances in the History of Rhetoric, 18:195–215, 2015Copyright © American Society for the History of RhetoricISSN: 1536-2426 print/1936-0835 onlineDOI: 10.1080/15362426.2015.1081529

Troubled Freedom, Rhetorical Personhood, andDemocracy’s Ongoing Constitution

IRA J. ALLENAmerican University of Beirut

Freedom is a contested concept, at once bound up with andpromising transcendence of social bonds. This article examinesthe understanding of freedom particular to rhetorical theory, atroubled freedom that is the negotiation of constraint. Articulatingthis concept in negotiation of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s“universal audience,” the article explores a key implication oftroubled freedom for the governance of human persons. Giventhat human personhood is a rhetorical phenomenon, that personsemerge in flows of tendentious discourse, the article urges a rhetor-ical approach to democratic constitution writing. Constitutionshould be composed to foster the rhetorical capabilities of demoi.

Rhetorical theory is at once drawn to and suspicious of social power’s flame.The discourse of rhetoricians promises insights into rhetorical gradients,the discursive inequalities that structure every emergence of sociality. Suchinsights, rhetorical theory suggests, make for more effective, socially power-ful rhetors. At the same time, rhetoricians are skeptical of wealthy cousins inmarketing, public relations, and so forth—especially as these pivot on andintensify rhetorical gradients, inequalities in the public realm. Rhetorical the-ory, in short, is deeply ambivalent about power. This ambivalence springsfrom an understanding of the freedom of symbolic animals, particular ifnot necessarily unique to rhetorical theory, as constitutively troubled. Weapprehend freedom as the negotiation of constraint. Here, I adumbraterhetorical theory’s understanding of troubled freedom and look to wherethat leads us in thinking about social power. Put simply, rhetorical theoryneeds freedom and, for rhetorical theory, there is no freedom that is nottroubled. Moreover, our troubled freedom has consequences for processes

Address correspondence to Ira J. Allen, American University of Beirut, P.O. Box 11-0236,Department of English, Riad El-Solh, Beirut 1107 2020, Lebanon. E-mail: ia55@aub.edu.lb

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of democratic institution-building.1 This article thus lays out three points:(1) that something called “troubled freedom” is a central and ever-reneweddiscovery, so to speak, of rhetorical theory—discovered here in Perelmanand Olbrechts-Tyteca’s The New Rhetoric; (2) that troubled freedom is keyto understanding “rhetorical personhood,” our ongoing coming into beingtogether as individual nodes in collective and dispersed rhetorical networks;and (3) that democratic constitutionalism, comprising theoretical and practi-cal efforts to compose and implement democratic constitutions, should focuson enhancing the troubled freedom of the rhetorically emergent persons andpeoples that we are.

The basic idea is that, rhetorically speaking, “freedom” cannot be eithera simple absence of constraint or a positive capacity, but must rather beuneasy—much like a conscience. If my conscience has never been uneasy,I have no conscience at all. Likewise, any thinking of freedom as absence ofconstraint describes for rhetoricians a nothingness, an aporia at the edge ofthought. And yet a notion of freedom as a positive capacity to overstates thecase; rhetoric does not act but influences. Rhetoric’s freedom is uneasy evenabout being “freedom,” is a restless possibility arising in the negotiation ofconstraints on shared being. So it seems, at least, when we recall that rhetoricdeals with beings at once capable of being persuaded and of changing ourminds. We are subject to rhetorical power that transcends our consciouslydecisional adherence and, at the same time, are agents in and of our ownpersuasion. As representative anecdote for the dynamics of this freedom, Iconsider the troubled relations Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca discern at thenexus of persuading and convincing. Thinking about these relations throughthe prism of troubled freedom also helps address a persistent mistaking ofThe New Rhetoric’s idea of a “universal audience.” Subsequently, I considerwhat troubled freedom suggests about how we should conceive of politicalsubjectivity and thus about how we ought to write democratic constitutions.2

The ultimate charge of this piece, dramatized in a brief consideration ofIceland’s crowd-driven constitutional composing, is that good constitutionwriting is constitution writing that fosters rhetorical capabilities, that improvesour collective capacities to exercise a troubled freedom. Such composingmust be formative, providing for our ongoing emergence as who we are inrhetorical negotiation with one another.

TROUBLED FREEDOM AND UNIVERSAL AUDIENCES

One is persuaded, say Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, despite oneself, whileone is convinced only by those arguments to which one assents. The differ-ence between the two, which raises questions of power and freedom, hasstruck many readers of The New Rhetoric as hinging on l’auditoire universel,“the universal audience.” A common reading sees The New Rhetoric as urging

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the notion of a universal audience that would ethically anchor rhetoric; suchan audience, posited as regulative ideal, implicitly smooths out power gradi-ents and allows rhetors to address actually existing audiences by approachingthem in the fullness of their freedom.3 But this reading of The New Rhetoricis inapt. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca do, it is true, distinguish betweenpersuading and convincing. And they do posit that individual rhetors have inmind a universal audience. But their distinction is analytical, not ontological;they are not suggesting that persuading and convincing are two differentthings in the world but rather that these are two different dimensions of onething—different dimensions of rhetorical interaction. Likewise, they neitherposit nor urge others to posit an actually existing or regulative universalaudience; rather, they note that we are all helpless to avoid having in mindsome sense of universality. In short, these apparently opposing dimensionsof rhetorical being are in fact co-constitutive, two complementary ways ofbeing-for-audiences.

Persuasion and conviction, turning helplessly together toward imagi-narily universal audiences, are the entangled constituents of our troubledfreedom. In one dimension of our being-for-one-another, we are billiardballs, subject to forces that exceed our grasping and to which, for the mostpart, we would not particularly like to assent even as they move us. We arepersuaded, constrained by symbols. The market testing that prompts adver-tisers to display impossibly satisfying hamburgers on billboards alongside theroad belongs to a broad array of efforts to understand and exploit that firstdimension of our rhetorical being. And rhetoricians’ interest in—we mightwant to say, “willingness to accept the unavoidable reality of”—this dimen-sion is certainly part of what so got under Plato’s (1987) skin, provoking hisfamously unflattering commentary in the Gorgias. We are persuaded in ourunfreedom. By contrast, “True rhetoric,” per Plato (517a), is the convincingcommunication of experts, those who rationally knew better and with whomwe must naturally come to agree; this is the second dimension of our rhetor-ical being. We are convinced where we negotiate squarely with the facts ofthe matter, where, unconstrained, we face up to the realities of a situation.We are convinced in our freedom.

For Plato (1987), something like persuasion and something like convic-tion seem truly to have been opposed; true rhetoric is not pastry making.And yet pastries appeal over and against our better judgment; freedomis troubled. For The New Rhetoric, persuading and convincing are onlyheuristically—not substantively—distinct. Unfortunately, in provisionally iso-lating a dimension of being-subjected-to-mechanically-rhetorical-forces froma dimension of rational, agential assent to arguments, and in identifying thatagential dimension with a “universal audience,” Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca lent themselves to misreading. For a while at least, The New Rhetoricstruck readers both condemnatory and celebratory as pursuing a rationalis-tic project predicated on just the sort of absolute internal freedom in which

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rhetoric cannot believe. Many readers of The New Rhetoric supposed theanalytic distinction between persuading and convincing to be a substantiveone, often taking the universal audience associated with convincing to be anormative ideal. Lisa Ede (1981), for instance, objected that Perelman hadbeen “unable entirely to free himself from the conventional rationalist modelof argumentation” because of his commitment, aspirationally if not actually,to a universal audience (118). Meanwhile, some philosophers have arguedapprovingly that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s universal audience savestheir rhetoric from becoming a pernicious relativism. Christopher Tindale(1999), acknowledging in Acts of Arguing that “recourse to audiences and totheir own standards of acceptance raises not only the specter of relativism. . . but the more serious problem of allowing what intuitively seems imper-missible” (114), argues that “the universal audience gives a fixedness to thestructure of an argumentation that reclaims the core of the product previ-ously offered by logicians” (87). The universal audience, on this reading, isa rational, extrarhetorical safeguard against the specter of relativism (a ghostthat has been haunting—or inspiring—rhetoric for millennia). For worse andfor better, readers like Ede (some time ago) and Tindale (more recently)have seen The New Rhetoric’s universal audience as a normative anchor forrationality. But if The New Rhetoric is really rhetorical, it must aim somewhatto the side of the philosopher’s rationality.

And yet there remain positive (and still rhetorical) accounts of The NewRhetoric’s supposed rationalism.4 Among these perhaps strongest is the viewrefined by James Crosswhite in a series of articles and books, and mostneatly in the essay “Universalities.” Crosswhite’s (2010) nuanced but opti-mistic view sees the universal audience as both normative and descriptive,an appeal to freedom that names a real dimension of human rationality: therhetorical production of universalities. Crosswhite suggests that the “universalaudience” comprises an always vanishing horizon for discourse, a regulativeideal that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca both urge and see us as helplesslystipulating for ourselves. Crosswhite (2010) sees universalities as phenom-enally real, “generated in specifically rhetorical events” (431), nexuses ofpersuading and convincing where we project out before us—and ought toproject out before us—new horizons for rationality. Universal audiences, inCrosswhite’s view, come normatively into being in argumentation orientedtoward ideal horizons. They loom before us and fade into the distance whenapproached, securing at every moment the very possibility of convincing,of rationality. So, Crosswhite acknowledges that “there is no self-grounding,autonomous rationality in The New Rhetoric” (438) but avers that the effortto move toward universality, rationality, is both necessary and unavoidable.The point is not to achieve final, unarguable positions but rather that “insetting out from a particular audience toward a universal audience, oneestablishes a direction” for argumentation (441). We both do and ought toseek universalities, according to Crosswhite. By privileging convincing over

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persuading outright, however, Crosswhite ascribes more hortatory intent toThe New Rhetoric than the text will bear. In outlining the rhetorical emer-gence of universalities, Crosswhite is, ultimately, presenting less Perelmanand Olbrechts-Tyteca’s and more his own, admittedly compelling, view.

The New Rhetoric is not a directly prescriptive project, though it is oftentaken as such. Rationality and freedom, in any specific version, are moretroubled than championed in this text. As Perelman and Olbrechts-Tytecaput the matter, rhetoric’s arguments address and are conducted by personswho would manage to be both “durable beings” and “free subjects,” with the“possibility of being persuaded and of resisting persuasion” (397; 295).5 Thepossibility of assenting to one’s persuasion, they do indeed argue, is centralto the human experience and thus makes “the human sciences disciplinesthat cannot content themselves with copying faithfully the methodology ofthe natural sciences” (397–398; 295). And the human sciences, rhetorical the-ory assuredly among them, study a being whose behavior is not as lawlikeand regular as planetary motion. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca empha-size this, however, midway through a text that devotes hundreds of pages tocataloging modes of argument by which people do, in fact, happen quite reg-ularly, in nearly lawlike fashion, to be persuaded! There is, then, some deepregularity, a radical constrainedness within which the freedom articulated byrhetorical theory emerges.

Rhetoric’s troubled freedom has much to do with the founding ambi-guity of something like a universal audience. The universal audienceprovisionally licenses the notion that convincing and persuading might sim-ply be different beasts, but it does not press us into the service of one orthe other. This audience, which they indicate each of us has somewhere inthe back of his or her mind, is a kind of internal representation of othersthat secures the possibility of truth, of fact, of convincing: “Every personbelieves in a collection of facts, of truths, which every ‘normal’ person, sohe feels, must admit because they are valid for every rational being” (36–37;28). The New Rhetoric’s universal audience, as amply discussed in the liter-ature, is indeed the very figure of normality and rationality. This is not afigure Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca urge upon us, however. Rather, theynote, each rhetor and each member of an audience helplessly projects outbefore her a particular, always temporary version of a “universal audience.”We take ourselves to be convinced by assertions to which we imagine thisimaginary audience would also assent. And, in so taking ourselves, we areconvinced. But we are also only ever persuaded. Our universal audience ofone moment fades away, as Crosswhite (2010) astutely argues, only to bereplaced by a new sense of universality. In so saying, The New Rhetoric doesnot prevail upon us to adopt “the universal audience” as a direction-settingideal—although Crosswhite might well be correct that we should. To the con-trary, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca are only observing that we all already

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stipulate for ourselves some such (contingently emergent, ever-changing,socially networked) ideal.

In a pluralistic universe, the “facts” and “truths” to which each of ourvarying, fantasized universal audiences would subscribe are not stable overtime, but negotiable (and contingent on the wildly different subject posi-tions and levels of access to privilege we occupy). Any given person’ssense of a universal audience is not, like the mind of god, selfsame andall-encompassing; it changes and in changing judges previous versions ofitself over time (in a person’s imagined identification of and with it). Thereis then no actual or even universally ideal or regulative universal audiencethat could anchor convincing, allowing us to separate processes of rationalassent in some full way from processes of being acted upon. Ultimately,what Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s “point of view allows us to under-stand [is] that the distinction between the terms convincing and persuadingis always imprecise and must, in practice, be allowed to remain so” (38;29). The point of these concepts—convincing versus persuading, a universalaudience, and so on—is not primarily to offer moral guidance to rationallyassenting readers but to develop and share heuristics for negotiating broadlyshared constraints. One of those constraints, and this is evident in my ownsense of having a more faithful reading of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tytecathan does Crosswhite (2010), is precisely that we are helpless to avoid pro-jecting out before us something like a universal audience. We do assent topropositions for what we take to be the right reasons, sometimes. We believe,then, in some sort of freedom (even and especially if we suspect we arewrong to do so).

Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s persuading/convincing ambiguationhighlights that rhetorical theory’s freedom is neither absence of constraintnor precisely capacity to do. Persuading and convincing, so say rhetoricaltheorists, are analytic-perceptual categories to which human animals willtend to hold, even as we cannot justify keeping them separate in any finalway. The distinction between them is imprecise and must be allowed toremain so—attending self-consciously to that imprecise distinction gives usmore freedom, which is to say, helps us better negotiate constraints on ourown being.6 Rhetorical theory’s troubled freedom, emerging in the both-andspace between persuading and convincing, can usefully be understood asthe negotiation of constraint. Rhetorical animals emerge as capable withinand by virtue of constraints, and are persuaded or convinced to be who theyare in ongoing negotiation of those founding (and ever renewed) constraints.Indeed, the concepts of persuasion and conviction themselves, as Perelmanand Olbrechts-Tyteca elaborate these, are offered precisely for use in help-ing us to better negotiate constraint. A great virtue of the rhetorical tradition,from Gorgias or Aspasia to Susan Miller or Jim Berlin, has been the insightthat, of necessity, all freedom is in some sense the negotiation of constraint.

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RHETORICAL PERSONHOOD AND THE FORMATION OF THE POLIS

Our freedom is rhetorically troubled, and to be a symbolic animal is toemerge complexly as the subject of this troubled freedom. As suggested inthe preceding discussion of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, the negotiationswhereby we emerge as who we are cannot be conceived along fundamen-tally rational lines. “Negotiation” is a figure for the interested and bilateral(or multilateral) matrix of persuading and convincing. For rhetorical the-ory, a field that studies the negotiation of constraint, human personhoodis emergent in complementary processes of persuading and convincing.But today rhetorical theory is not alone in seeing matters this way. Onecould read the history of twentieth-century considerations of “the human”—in fields as diverse as psychoanalysis and political theory, neurobiology, andsociology—as a process of coming to terms with the notion that humanpersonhood, human freedom, is rhetorically emergent, which is to say, con-stitutively troubled.7 To be someone in particular is to be not a static entitymoving through time, integrally comprised of so-and-so many traits and sta-ble personality features, but rather a node of ongoing emergence withindense networks of rhetorical effects. At the same time, however, rhetoricalpersonhood does not mean that we are mechanically determined, simpleeffects of discursive regimes where no one in particular has had any realsay-so. One becomes who one is in exercises of troubled freedom to whichall symbolic animals are compelled; one is a negotiation of constraint, anegotiation of flows of rhetorical power. We are the emergent subjects of atendentious sociability.

So how are such emergent rhetorical negotiations/negotiators to be gov-erned? In a certain sense, “governance” is the defining problem of our age,a time when the idea of rhetorical personhood has reached its maturity(though going under many different names—and thus suggesting disparatetrajectories). How can good rhetorical decisions be reached, when neitherthe “we” who would reach them nor the “good” of those decisions canbe independently grounded? These are political questions, questions of thepolitical. As Chantal Mouffe has argued, attending democratically to thesequestions requires attunement to “relations of power and [to] antagonisms,”requires that we eschew “the typical liberal illusion of a pluralism withoutantagonism” (20). Democratic negotiations of rhetorical personhood mustaccount for the interested, not only agonistic but at times actively antagonis-tic character of the selves that emerge, for the fact that the developmentof both persons and polei involves “acts of power” (21). In so saying,Mouffe highlights a central dilemma for democratic theory: “When we envis-age democratic politics from such an anti-essentialist perspective, we canbegin to understand that, for democracy to exist, no social agent should beable to claim any mastery of the foundation of society” (21; emphasis inoriginal). Within rhetorical studies, one response to this dilemma has been

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a turn away from institution-oriented, foundation-mastery projects and alltheir universalist desire. In the justly acclaimed Deliberative Acts: Democracy,Rhetoric, and Rights, for instance, Arabella Lyon (2013) eschews deliberativedemocracy’s focus on institution-building, looking instead to deliberation’s“initiating moment of recognition, a moment in which interlocutors areconstituted in relationship or position to each other and so may begin con-structing a new lifeworld” (7). Her aim in so doing is to understand how wemight better emerge rhetorically together.

Of course, Lyon’s (2013) project does have a universalistic cast to it.Focusing especially on human rights discourse, as she readily acknowledges,means emphasizing a variety of conversation that, by definition, involvesuniversal and foundational claims. Lyon’s aim, however, in harmony withCrosswhite’s (2010) presentation of universalities, is to understand the con-tingent rhetorical emergence of what appear—and must appear, for theirmoment—as universal norms. This contingent rhetorical emergence at itsbest is what Lyon terms performative deliberation, and with this term shedraws our attention to the way in which our emerging in conversation hap-pens, even with regard to foundational or constitutive elements of politicalculture like “human rights,” for the most part outside the halls of power.Suspicious of rights-discourse from above, she affirms that “human rights arenot universal, nor are they simply a matter of writing laws; they need localtranslation and cultural imprint to be enacted by citizens who are agents,capable of navigating as well as resisting norms” (179). Lyon’s vision isimpressively attuned to the possibilities of our troubled freedom, the oftensurprising capacity of regular citizens to negotiate large-scale, systemic con-straints in the process of becoming-together. It is on behalf of this vision thatshe “consider[s] rights as performative deliberative practices leading to theconstitution of a new form of life” (5). Hoping to “avoid a dogmatic under-standing of human rights as law, a textual truth, or a universal standard ofwhat it means to be human,” Lyon stresses that ultimately “rights are com-munity decisions developed through a wide range of deliberative practices”(5). I think this is correct. And yet we live—and will continue to live in anyfuture contiguous with the present—in a world where the material possibil-ities of social power, the extent of our troubled freedom, and the rhetoricalgradients at play in our emerging, are still shaped by founding documentsof positive law. We live in a world of states and constitutions, and we willcontinue to do so for at least a while.

This is not to say that Lyon’s (2013) focus is misguided. To the con-trary, I think her project crucial. But it is not enough. In tandem with effortsto understand positive practices of rhetorical emergence, rhetorical theoristsmust ask about the composition of the large-scale, material power struc-tures within and in ongoing negotiation of which we emerge. One of thosestructures—perhaps not the most important but certainly central—is the con-stituted, aspirationally democratic state. How, then, should we go about

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constituting democratic states for the subjects that rhetorical theory says weare, for the subjects of a deeply troubled freedom? How can we intentionallystructure states so as to maximize the democratic possibilities of citizens—nolonger understood as rational, autonomous individuals but rather as rhetori-cal persons? Now that the rational individual of classical liberalism has givenup the ghost, how do we do constitutional justice to its inheritor? I addressthese questions by focusing on what an antiessentialist, rhetorically attunedconstitution ought to do. At the last, I examine one contemporary effort atdemocratic constitution writing that negotiates our rhetorical personhood.

Democratic constitutions should aim at enhancing troubled freedom byproviding iteratively emergent frameworks for the negotiation of rhetori-cal power. To enhance troubled freedom is to foster ever-greater rhetoricalcapabilities among members and potential members of a polis. Rhetoricalcapabilities are abilities to consciously negotiate the persuasion/convictionof others and to consciously negotiate our own persuasion/conviction byothers (and by the very frameworks within which our negotiative capac-ities take shape)—in ever-increasing recognition of the collective nature ofthese abilities.8 These are the capabilities Lyon (2013) describes as “the manybecoming action” (18) through “recognizing difference” and “seeing the otheras an agent capable of negotiating norms” (27). Rhetorical capabilities namesour collective capacity for enacting troubled freedom in discourse together.And fostering these capabilities requires living constitutions, foundationallyopen documents that constitute and are reconstituted by ever more capa-ble persons and peoples. To see matters in this way is to see that it is notenough for a constitution to lay out the rules of an electoral game,9 and noris it enough to work, however tirelessly, for better modes of public delibera-tion. Rhetoricians also need to pay close attention to institutional structures.After all, a constitution that fosters troubled freedom cannot be a largelystatic framework, a conservator of the power dynamics that made possibleits initial composition. At the same time, like Lyon (2013) and by contrastwith deliberative democrats from Jürgen Habermas (1996) to Amy Gutmannand Dennis Thompson (2004), I am suggesting that democratic-rhetoricalinterventions into the political should not look, first and foremost, towardthe reforming of public discourse in local institutions. It is not enough tobuild a better town hall meeting.

If we want to foster shared capacities to negotiate the founding sit-uations that structure our possibilities of discourse (and hence also ofemergence as persons), constitutions themselves must be conceived inrhetorically formative fashion. We need to compose constitutions that are for-mative of democratic citizens. Political theorist Jason Frank (2005) offers anexcellent gloss on what it means to think of political institutions as formative:

A formative conception of politics assumes that political institutionsinevitably shape and pattern the practices and beliefs of those they

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govern. Political institutions not only establish a framework of rules andcodes that regulates the actions of an otherwise autonomous citizenry,they also constitute both the very conditions favoring certain forms ofpolitics over others and the everyday practices of the citizenry on amicropolitical as well as a macropolitical level. (374–375)

Who we are, it should not be surprising to say, is in substantive measure afunction of the structures in and by virtue of which we emerge. To composedemocratic constitutions with due regard for their formative dimension, then,is to compose constitutions that foster rhetorical capabilities. Such constitu-tions would help us become better citizens, more capable of renegotiatingas demoi the very frameworks that form us. The properly rhetorical consti-tution does not hope vainly that, during periods of so-called normal politics,citizens will deliberate rationally, casting off the shackles of self-imposedminority and taking their place as autonomous adults at the political bar-gaining table (through representatives, of course). The properly rhetoricalconstitution recognizes that we are all emerging, across the life span, in ten-dentious and contingent flows of discourse. At the nexus of persuasion andconviction, it fosters democratically capable persons and peoples, who canreform the constitution that forms them.

To recap briefly, the motion of this article has been from (a) elaborationof “troubled freedom” as a key rhetorical concept through (b) presentationof human personhood as rhetorically emergent and (c) argument for writ-ing constitutions that address audiences of rhetorically emergent (rather thanrationally autonomous) persons and help to form them as free peoples (trou-bledly free, of course). Democratic legitimacy, I now suggest, can only obtainfor such strongly formative constitutions. So, very well: Human personhoodis not, at base, a matter of substantive autonomy and individuation. To bea person seems, unavoidably, to mean being a rhetorical being: emergentin and as flows of persuasion. We are at once composed by the voicesof others and also ever in the midst of composing our selves and others.Accordingly, our opinions are also not, in any strong sense of the word, everquite “our own.” Politically speaking, this means that the autonomous selfof liberalism, whose opinion was long the conceptual anchor of democraticlegitimacy, is moribund.10 Fine, one might retort, but are we not swimmingalong democratically enough? We are not. To the contrary, democracy is ingrave difficulty even in states traditionally regarded as its bastions.11 Andthere is another problem. Ours is an era of renewed constitutional enthusi-asm, renewed interest in the founding of popular, democratic states.12 But forwhom, exactly, are constitutions to be composed? What will it take to writeconstitutions that foster democracy, that form publics capable of and com-mitted to exercising troubled freedom together in the service of increasedfreedom for all? To foster democratic politics and polei, constitutions mustbe written for persons and peoples conceived of as rhetorically emergent.

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We must learn, in short, to compose rhetorical constitutions, frameworksfor the negotiation of rhetorical power that go beyond the conceptual con-straints of deliberative democracy. Whether this will work or not is an openquestion—like any other movement in the direction of actual democracy,what I propose is a wager. It is, however, a wager would-be democratscannot afford not to make.

CONSTITUTING DEMOCRACY AFTER DELIBERATION

The historical addressee of modern constitutions, the autonomous, ratio-nal individual of classical liberalism, still serves many as a regulative ideal,despite being empirically nowhere in evidence. Both in content and compo-sitional processes, modern constitutions tend still to be written with subjectsin mind who would be substantively autonomous, sole owners and propri-etors of their own opinions. Elite political actors gather together to writeconstitutions meant to represent the interests of their various constituencies.Democratic legitimacy is supposed to ensue. Taken in this way, constitutionsare frameworks—produced during periods of extraordinary politics—for thenegotiation of power (access to coercive force) during periods of normal pol-itics. Democratic consolidation and long-term legitimacy, for such politicalframeworks, are persuaded into existence via the quasi-magical operation ofthe ballot box, which receives and aggregates citizens’ opinions. Possessorsof opinions that are in a strong sense their own deliver these opinions freelyand without trouble at a time and in a manner stipulated by a constitu-tion, and the governing bodies chosen by tallying up those opinions are,by definition, “democratically elected.” Here, democracy appears as a mat-ter of opinion-based consent to the establishment of governments. DavidBeetham (2013) provides the classical formulation when he describes demo-cratic legitimacy in terms of “the demonstrable expression of consent” (18),and Grégoire Webber (2009) notes a key corollary: generally speaking, a“constitution will set out the basic democratic structures of the State, includ-ing procedures for electing representatives to the legislature” (24). The pointis that, for the classical view of democracy and constitutions, political legit-imacy proceeds from the almost sacred autonomy of individual consent,expressed in electoral procedures through the delivery of opinion by secretballot. Most contemporary constitutions have been composed with this viewof human subjectivity in mind. “Opinion” appears as the private propertyof substantively separate individual actors—with the selection and creationof governing bodies understood as the aggregate of free expressions ofindividual opinion and will.

The trouble, as suggested already, is with the idea that “opinion” and“will” are the private property of individuals. Individual human persons sim-ply no longer look like possessors inviolate of their own opinions, like

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private, autonomous willers. Accepting the implausibility of the notion thathuman persons are fully autonomous and volitional, political and rhetori-cal theorists alike have increasingly taken up the standard of deliberativedemocracy when thinking about how best to intervene in the political. Butespecially when leading the charge toward rational discourse, that standardremains haunted by the same rhetorical specters that haunted classical liber-alism. What is needed, as Bryan Garsten (2006) puts it in Saving Persuasion,is an “ideal of rhetorical deliberation” that jettisons the fantasy that “betterreasons” have their own “unforced force”—an ideal that would push us to“engage citizens’ judgments by trying to persuade them” (175) instead ofmerely coming up with new rules for discursive rationality. Such an ideal,Garsten follows Bernard Manin in arguing, accepts that “individuals sim-ply do not have a set of preexisting preferences or interests” (188) butrather form their opinions together, in political processes. Garsten use-fully underscores that individual persons are rhetorically emergent, and thata democratic politics must therefore foster not only good discussion anddeliberation but good formation or emergence as well.

Unfortunately, however, Garsten (2006) glosses over what is best inManin’s formulation. In quoting Manin’s excellent redefinition of democraticlegitimacy’s source—“not the predetermined will of individuals, but ratherthe process of its formation” (351; in Garsten 2006, 188)—Garsten highlightsthat what he wants is simply attunement to the rhetorical forces at play withinall deliberating. In other words, Garsten takes a useful step beyond manydeliberative democrats in emphasizing the unavoidability of tendentiousnessand the positive value of persuasion and judgment.13 But he at once sticks tothe personal demand and leaves (Manin’s) questions of institution buildingto the side. “What does that project [of rhetorical deliberation] require of us?”he asks, answering, “Not that we become brothers or comrades, nor thatwe befriend those with whom we disagree . . . Trying to persuade othersrequires us to step outside our particular perspectives without asking usto leave our particular commitments behind” (Garsten 2006, 210). Well andgood, but where is the polis in this injunction, which sounds distinctly ethical(and in that, good) and not terribly political at all (and in that, limited)? Thedifficulty with Garsten’s approach, like Lyon’s, (2013) is not that it cannotgive good direction but rather that the direction it gives is, on the whole,distinctly personal.

Not wholly unlike Garsten (2006) and Lyon (2013), though with a focuson institution building, deliberative democrats assert that reforms shouldfocus on promoting good discussion among citizens. At its best, the aimof this focus is to ensure that our shared opinions will emerge in and asthe result of procedures fostering good interlocutorship. The basic insightof deliberative democrats is that opinions are formed in discussion; soconsent, too, as the basis of political legitimacy, must also be forged in

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discussion. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson (2004) describe this posi-tion as undergirded by the “fundamental principle” that “citizens owe oneanother justifications for the laws they collectively impose on one another”(126). From their standpoint, the value of “the deliberative conception” isthat it “considers the reasons that citizens and their representatives givefor their expressed preferences. It asks for justifications” (13). Accordingly,they and other advocates of deliberative democracy urge, our legal frame-works ought to focus less single-mindedly on securing appropriate politicalparticipation—in other words, less on electoral procedures—and more onfostering good discussion. Most versions of deliberative democracy, in so say-ing, stipulate notions of “good discussion” that privilege rationality and theproduction of consensus, and Gutmann and Thompson (2004) are no excep-tion: “A well-constituted deliberative forum,” as they have noted, “providesan opportunity for advancing both individual and collective understanding”(12). Such a forum would be above rhetoric’s tendentiousness in some way.By contrast with “bargain[ing] and negotiat[ing],” where citizens “may learnhow better to get what they want,” properly rational deliberation sees citi-zens “expand[ing] their knowledge, including both their self-understandingand their collective understanding of what will best serve their fellow citi-zens” (12). On the face of it, this is laudably reasonable. Working to buildinstitutions that foster better conversations is surely a good thing to do.The problem is that deliberative democracy’s reason-giving citizens are notnecessarily free for discussion.

Gerard Hauser (2004) describes the dilemma nicely at the outset ofRhetorical Democracy. Contemporary political thought, as he sees it, hasresponded to the crisis of the autonomous subject by forwarding “a utopianideal of a state governed by deliberation in which citizens are guided byreason and the better angels of the human spirit” (1). Deliberation, how-ever, is part and parcel of rhetorical becoming, and “rhetoric is not entirelyrational and humans do not always heed their better angels” (1). Indeed,not only do we not always heed our better angels; our worse angels areusually loudly involved in creating the very conditions of discourse. And so,deliberative democracy risks conserving the particular conditions of inequal-ity or gradients of power—expressed as though not limited to inequalityof rhetorical capabilities—that have made possible the effective, but alsoalways unjust and in crucial respects antidemocratic, founding or constitut-ing of any given state. Patricia Roberts-Miller (2005) approaches this problemthrough the figure of demagoguery, which she sees “not simply as somethingdone by individual demagogues, but as an ideological and discursive practicethat may dominate a culture” (472). Demagoguery is the figure for a certainrhetorical incapacity on the part of the demos. To become more democrati-cally capable, persons and peoples must iteratively emerge with ever-greatertroubled freedom, ever greater capacities for persuading/convincing andassenting to persuasion/conviction.14 We must be more than mechanically

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subject to demagoguery. Accordingly, Roberts-Miller’s aim in working tounderstand this figure is to “develop a critical rhetoric that articulates stan-dards for good public discourse that does not exclude the already excluded”(460). We can transpose this aim, like those of Garsten (2006) and Lyon(2013), to the level of constitution-making. The question is how to composeconstitutions that simultaneously allow for their own rhetorical re-formationand that form us all as better, more collectively free, more rhetorically anddemocratically capable citizens—form us as persons and peoples with evergreater capacities for the negotiation of constraint.

Garsten’s (2006) contribution, expanding beyond the canonical literatureon deliberative democracy, has been to emphasize that our very prefer-ences and desires and, yes, our reasons emerge in flows of persuasion thatapproximate neither mathematical demonstration nor simple justification.Who we are emerges at the nexus of persuasion and conviction. We areall instances of troubled freedom, and no town hall meeting in the worldcan alter that. And yet the deliberative democrats’ attention to institutionbuilding seems useful in ways that Garsten’s ethical injunction (which eas-ily enough devolves to mere hand-wringing) is not. We ought indeed tobuild better political institutions. But we ought to build them at a more for-mative, (a)foundational level than urged by most theorists of deliberativedemocracy. Carole Pateman (2012) aptly critiques deliberative democrats forfailing to think at the most useful levels of structure, noting that “‘democ-racy’ in the wider social and political system is outside their purview . . .

deliberative democracy still leaves intact the conventional institutional struc-tures and political meaning of ‘democracy’” (10). In urging the compositionof constitutions for rhetorically emergent persons and peoples, I am say-ing that constitution writing needs to do more than merely incorporatestructures for deliberative reason giving. Negotiating for democracy meanscomposing political frameworks that enhance our troubled freedom in anongoing fashion. For the rhetorical constitution, endlessly susceptible ofrewriting, “democracy” itself must remain an open question, an aspirationalcommitment to the emergence of demoi that will deserve the name.15

Again, then, we need new constitutional frameworks for the negotiationof rhetorical power: the power that shapes both us and our opinions in ourcoming into being or emergence. And we need new mechanisms for howwe go about composing law in the first place, especially the basic law orlegal framework of constitutions. In other words, attunement to the rhetori-cally emergent character of human persons and peoples requires would-bedemocrats to push both for new kinds of constitutions and new ways of com-posing constitutions. Our political focus must shift: away from the expressionof opinions, as these collide in producing and orienting political decisions,and toward the formation of opinions, to be accomplished in rhetoricallyresponsible fashion. The rhetorical constitution will help form ever more

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rhetorically capable demoi, persons and peoples ever better able to negoti-ate the formation of their (thus more fully own) opinions. For the formationof opinion is the formation of person and polis alike.

TOWARD ICELAND AND BEYOND

So, how do you compose a constitution if you can’t rely on individualhuman persons to serve as freely differentiated bearers of political opin-ion, autonomous rational deciders—even in the constitution-writing processitself? If “I” can’t be said to possess my “own” opinions in a strong sense,what principles of legitimacy for constitution writing can present themselves?Well, certainly, you write it together. Beyond that, more or less by defi-nition, the concrete working out of constitution-writing processes requiresnegotiation among the real persons emerging in those processes. It wouldbe irresponsible to follow a radically social view of personhood with theconcrete recommendations of a lone writer speaking from a position of rel-ative rhetorical privilege. In other words, given that persons and peoplesare rhetorically emergent, the procedures to be used in composing rhetoricalconstitutions must themselves also emerge in real-time negotiation of actualpolitical situations. Still, discussion of one recent situation should help tomake the thoughts offered here more fully present and perhaps also moreuseful for future conversations. I turn to a constitutional moment remarkableboth for its attunement to rhetorical emergence and its emphasis on makingthe constitution-writing process itself democratically formative.

By all accounts, Iceland’s 2009–2013 constitutional moment was extraor-dinary. When the global economy plummeted in 2008–2009, governmentsworldwide responded with a combination of austerity measures for ordi-nary citizens and bailouts for the financial sectors that had caused the crash.Icelanders, by contrast, jailed criminal bankers and set about drafting anew social contract. In other words, they (collectively) negotiated the con-straints of a globally salient situation in ways that fostered their own people’sincreased capacity for negotiating constraint. They enacted a politics of (trou-bled) freedom The process by which the new constitution was composed,which political scientists Susan Burgess and Christine Keating (2013), amongothers, characterize as “crowd-sourcing,” was an effort to make the found-ing wrangle itself responsive to a broader swath of the democratic people itwas meant both to instantiate and to foster. In the end, despite avid popularparticipation, Iceland’s new constitution was not formally adopted—thoughthat too may yet change. The reasons for that failure cannot be addressed inbrief, and I consider here only the democratic success of the process itself.

In short, Iceland’s procedure for composing a constitution enhancedIcelanders’ troubled freedom. It fostered the people’s rhetorical and demo-cratic capabilities, even though the new constitution was never instantiated

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as such and the state thus never refounded.16 For starters, the publiclyparticipatory constitution-writing process—as a process—addressed citizensas rhetor-founders, capable of contributing to their own conditions of forma-tion. As Icelandic legal scholar (and longtime bureaucrat) Björg Thorarensen(2014) put this point, in a piece otherwise eager to downgrade the demo-cratic significance of the process, “It is at least safe to assert that the newpaths chosen to revise the Icelandic Constitution had a powerful impact onpublic awareness in Iceland regarding the significance of the Constitutionand its core principles” (para. 8). Burgess and Keating (2013) go further,seeing in Iceland’s constitution-writing process an instance of a new form ofparticipatory democracy, “participatory contract building.” As they have it,what was at stake in Iceland was “a means by which we can shape the termsand conditions of the power relations to which we are subject” (419). Icelanddemonstrated the actuality of a new set of rhetorical possibilities for democ-racy. A short step beyond Burgess and Keating, I am suggesting that—failureof ratification notwithstanding—Iceland’s constitution rewriting was not onlya demonstrative means but also an end in itself. It was a process that helpedcitizens emerge as more complexly and capably democratic, better able tonegotiate constraints at the nexus of persuading and convincing.

So what did Iceland’s process involve? After massive protests against thefinance sector–led devastation of Iceland’s economy and the legal implica-tions for ordinary citizens of Iceland’s sovereign debt, Icelanders formedan extragovernmental National Assembly in 2009, sending to the capital1,200 randomly selected citizens and 300 representatives of companies, insti-tutions, and other groups. The goal was to begin working out the coordinatesof a new constitution. Mounting political pressure forced the governmentto cooperate with this popularly instituted constitution-writing delegation,and multiple stages of randomly selected and popularly elected participantassemblies followed, each honing the provisions and concerns suggested byits predecessor. At the last, a Constituent Assembly of twenty-five electedrepresentatives drafted a constitution, relying heavily on suggestions offeredvia Twitter, Facebook, and other social media. Meetings of the Assemblywere streamed live over the Internet, and Icelanders weighed in repeatedlynot only with suggestions for the constitution but also with comments on thedeliberative process itself. In 2012, the draft constitution was approved in anonbinding popular referendum—but by late 2013 had stalled out withinIceland’s normal channels for constitutional revision. The background forcesof oligarchy are not readily overcome.

Still, this process itself suggests a new possibility. Typically, constitutionsare composed by elite actors, with democratic legitimacy supposed to arisefrom these elites’ character as representative of masses that are, through theprocess of founding, thus a people. When this works at all, and it often doesnot, it constrains the vast majority of a population to positions of diminished

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rhetorical capability. Most citizens are not negotiators of the propositionsand meanings of the legal frameworks in which they live. And most citizens’positions as nonnegotiators incline to persist, through the principle of theconservation of privilege, over time—if not for every person, family, or com-munity, then broadly and on the whole. The oligarchic social structures thathave made it possible to successfully found many states perpetuate them-selves within those states over time, ensuring differential access to rhetoricalcapabilities. The rhetorical gradients that enable founding moments will notdisappear of themselves. This is why, even as the deliberative democrats’approach to human sociality is noble, even praiseworthy, it is deeply flawed.As Burgess and Keating (2013) put the matter, the presence of multiple con-straints on who one is “deeply inhibits one’s ability to have a say in the termsand conditions of contractually legitimated power relations” (421). What isneeded in their view, accordingly, is not just better deliberative conversationbut “models of democracy in which people have a say in shaping the powerrelations to which they are subject” (421). What is needed, though Burgessand Keating do not put it in quite these terms, is (1) a process for composingconstitutions that does justice to the collective rhetorical emergence of per-sons, peoples, and polei and (2) a constitutional framework that will providefor the active and ongoing negotiation of rhetorical power at multiple levelsof society.

Democracy’s ongoing constitution must orient toward the increasedactualization of our troubled freedom. If a democratic politics is the pol-itics of and for a demos, a people, the constitutional formation of thatpeople itself ought to be written—to the fullest extent possible—not bysmall groups of elite actors but in broadly participatory processes designedto foster the rhetorical emergence of a people that is oriented and sensi-tized to democratic norms and values. Burgess and Keating (2013) see theIceland case, I think rightly, as “beginning to constitute a collective politicalsubjectivity that fundamentally reshapes the social contract in a meaningfuland ongoing manner” (418). Though the precise mechanisms most appro-priate for such an effort certainly remain debatable, Iceland offers a goodearly example of a shift in how constitutions are written, a shift we shouldhope to see more often. That shift is toward the composing of rhetoricalconstitutions. On top of this, we should hope to see more constitutionalprovisions written to foster ongoing negotiation of the rhetorical gradientsthat made their composition and force possible in the first place. It may bethat working out, in collaboration with others, methods for composing suchconstitutions is the manner in which scholars of rhetoric can best partici-pate in democratizing our democracies. Certainly, rhetoricians’ insights intotroubled freedom have a key role to play in imagining new possibilities ofpolitics.

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NOTES

1. I have elsewhere considered some ethical implications of rhetorical theory’s commitment totroubled freedom—among these being, as I see it, an attitude of rhetorical humanism (Allen 2014). Theaim here is to trace out political implications.

2. Democratic constitutions in particular because, as Barbara Biesecker and William Trapani(2014) put it, “an abiding and impassioned desire to render actually existing democracies ever moredemocratic animates” much rhetorical scholarship—though they are skeptical that existing public spherescholarship can satisfy this desire (25).

3. Seen in this light, the universal audience would be the guarantor, internal to each ethicallymotivated rhetor, of something like Habermasian communicative power. Space constraints prevent furtherdetailing of it, but there is a great deal of untroubled freedom presupposed by the Habermasian view,which I take to be inconsonant with Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s actual characterization of theuniversal audience.

4. Both celebratory and critical accounts of a normative auditoire universel remain common inthe Francophone world. In La fonction persuasive, for instance, Emmanuelle Danblon (2005) approvinglysuggests that the universal audience is proffered in hopes of “provid[ing] a guarantee for a sentiment ofjustice [justice] that one wishes were universal and that seems to find its place within the confines of theidea of law or right [droit]” (91). See, by contrast, Michel Meyer’s (2004) skepticism toward a Perelmanianrhetoric that he regards as “too rational, limiting itself to arguments, while the audience is often blindedby passions” (11); translations mine.

5. Page numbers for Traité de l’argumentation: La nouvelle rhétorique (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 2008) precede those for Wilkinson and Weaver’s (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1971) translation,which I have occasionally modified.

6. Note the resonance with Burke’s (1969) familiar characterization of rhetorical theorists in theGrammar: we “study and clarify the resources of ambiguity” (xix; emphasis in original).

7. In “Fearing the Masses,” Jay Childers (2014) argues compellingly that rhetorical studies had asignificant hand in this process, via Gustave Le Bon especially. But consider Simone de Beauvoir’s (1976)powerful formulation of the point, from quite outside the field, in The Ethics of Ambiguity: “The individualis defined only by his relationship to the world and to other individuals; he exists only by transcendinghimself, and his freedom can be achieved only through the freedom of others” (156).

8. I am indebted to James Crosswhite, from whom I take the term, for extensive discussionof rhetorical capabilities, which he follows Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen in conceiving as basicpolitical goods. See also Rereading the Sophists, where Susan Jarratt (1991) articulates a Protagoreanpedagogy that names well what I mean by rhetorical capabilities: “a composition course in which studentsargue about the ethical implications of discourse on a wide range of subjects and, in so doing, come toidentify their personal interests with others, understand those interests as implicated in a larger socialsetting, and advance them in a public voice” (116). We should look to our best approaches to educationfor inspiration on how to frame the state itself.

9. For the canonical procedural/electoral definition of constitutional democracy, see SamuelHuntington (1991): “Following in the Schumpeterian tradition, this study defines a twentieth-centurypolitical system as democratic to the extent that its most powerful collective decision makers are selectedthrough fair, honest, and periodic elections in which candidates freely compete for votes and in whichvirtually all the adult population is eligible to vote” (7). It would be humorous, if its real-world conse-quences had not been so grim, that Huntington presents this definition, drawn from Joseph Schumpeter’s(1975) classic Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, without noting Schumpeter’s profound pessimismabout the value of elections—a pessimism due to Schumpeter’s sense of the infinite and indiscriminatesuasibility of electoral publics (esp. 253–265).

10. For smart discussion of how “the realities of citizen political behavior do not accord withan idealized participatory democracy” because “the social structure within which individuals interactpredicts their political behavior and choices” in ways that go well beyond social network–specific flowsof information, see Betsy Sinclair (2012, xiii).

11. See, for instance, Larry Bartels (2008) or Sheldon Wolin (2008); “traditionally democratic” con-stitutions such as that of the United States can enjoy widespread and enduring support without actuallyfostering democracy, can enjoy a popular legitimacy that is not meaningfully democratic.

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12. In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, where I reside, the years since 2011 havewitnessed an almost unprecedented rash of constitutions. This phenomenon is hardly restricted to MENA.On the plausibility of substantive constitutional change in the United States (and its states) particularly,see Sanford Levinson’s (2012) often fascinating Framed.

13. Lyon (2013) also savages deliberative democracy’s fantastical attachment to consensus, to uni-versal audiences as strongly regulative; she follows Iris Marion Young in noting that “consensus explicitlydevalues diversity, resistance, and marginality, and thereby fails to perceive them as valuable or usefulends in themselves. Furthermore, the value of consensus, by its definitional force, fails to sponsor insti-tutions that respect and preserve difference” (19). While I agree wholeheartedly with this critique, whichis also Mouffe’s, my point is that the very idea of opinion back behind deliberative democracy is flawed.Inasmuch as deliberative democracy seeks to build institutions (typically, though not exclusively local) forthe formation of unitary collective will, it misses the way in which opinion formation always, helplesslyand necessarily, involves rhetorical gradients. The goal is not to eliminate these somehow but rather tonegotiate them better over time.

14. For a series of thought-provoking considerations of just what this means and how it might beaccomplished, see the essays collected in Brian Jackson and Gregory Clark’s (2014) Trained Capacities.My focus in this article is only a little on rhetorical education, but I want to highlight again that the richwork accomplished in that area should serve as inspiration for questions of institution building.

15. In Talking with Strangers, Danielle Allen (2004) observes, “‘The people’ exists finally only in theimaginations of democratic citizens who must think themselves into this body in order to believe they actthrough it. Democratic politics cannot take shape until ‘the people’ is imaginable” (69). See Jason Frank’s(2010) Constituent Moments for discussion of the ongoing formation of the people in what he calls“constituent moments, when the underauthorized—imposters, radicals, self-created entities—seize themantle of authorization, changing the inherited rules of authorization in the process” (8). My contentionis that the rhetorical constitution will provide already for such moments, moments in which the rhetoricalcapabilities of the people can allow for refounding, reconstituting, generally increasing democracy withoutdramatic ruptures in the basic form of the state.

16. A similar argument also holds for the Occupy movement in North America, pace widespreadperceptions of its democratic failure.

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Allen, Danielle S. 2004. Talking with Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brownv. Board of Education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Allen, Ira. 2014. “Rhetorical Humanism vs. Object-Oriented Ontology: The Ethics ofArchimedean Points and Levers.” SubStance 43.3: 67–87.

Bartels, Larry M. 2008. Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New GildedAge. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Beetham, David. 2013. The Legitimation of Power, 2nd ed. New York: PalgraveMacmillan.

Biesecker, Barbara, and William Trapani. 2014. “Escaping the Voice of the Mass/ter:Late Neoliberalism, Object-Voice, and the Prospects for a Radical DemocraticFuture.” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 17.1: 25–33.

Burgess, Susan, and Christine Keating. 2013. “Occupy the Social Contract!Participatory Democracy and Iceland’s Crowd-Sourced Constitution.” NewPolitical Science 35.3: 417–431.

Burke, Kenneth. 1969. A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress.

Childers, Jay P. 2014. “Fearing the Masses: Gustave Le Bon and Some UndemocraticRoots of Modern Rhetorical Studies.” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 17.1:76–87.

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Hauser, Gerard A. 2004. “Rhetorical Democracy and Civic Engagement.” InRhetorical Democracy: Discursive Practices of Civic Engagement, ed. Gerard A.Hauser and Amy Grim, 1–14. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

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Jarratt, Susan. 1991. Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured. Carbondale:Southern Illinois University Press.

Levinson, Sanford. 2012. Framed: America’s 51 Constitutions and the Crisis ofGovernance. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Meyer, Michel, ed. 2004. Perelman: Le renouveau de la rhétorique. Paris: Pressesuniversitaires de France.

Mouffe, Chantal. 2000. The Democratic Paradox. New York/London: Verso.Pateman, Carole. 2012. “Participatory Democracy Revisited.” Perspectives on Politics

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———. 2008. Traité de l’argumentation: La nouvelle rhétorique. Bruxelles: Éditionsde l’Université de Bruxelles.

Plato. 1987. Gorgias. Trans. Donald J. Zeyl. Indianapolis: Hackett.Roberts-Miller, Patricia. 2005. “Democracy, Demagoguery, and Critical Rhetoric.”

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