Rhetoric and Public Reasoning: An Aristotelian Understanding of Political Deliberation

This essay asks why Aristotle, certainly no friend to unlimited democracy, seems so much more comfortable with unconstrained rhetoric in political deliberation than current defenders of deliberative democracy. It answers this question by reconstructing and defending a distinctly Aristotelian underst...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Political theory 2006-08, Vol.34 (4), p.417-438
Main Author: Yack, Bernard
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Ancient Greek Philosophy
Aristotelianism
Aristotle
Aristotle (384-322 BC)
Common good
Communities
Deliberative democracy
Deliberative rhetoric
Democracy
Ethics
Forensic rhetoric
Greco-Roman antiquity
Historical studies (History of philosophy. History of ideas)
Philosophy
Political ideas
Political philosophy
Political rhetoric
Political theory
Reason
Reasoning
Rhetoric
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Summary:This essay asks why Aristotle, certainly no friend to unlimited democracy, seems so much more comfortable with unconstrained rhetoric in political deliberation than current defenders of deliberative democracy. It answers this question by reconstructing and defending a distinctly Aristotelian understanding of political deliberation, one that can be pieced together out of a series of separate arguments made in the Rhetoric, the Politics, and the Nicomachean Ethics.
ISSN:0090-5917
1552-7476
DOI:10.1177/0090591706288232