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"Rhetoric is among the most important and least understood elements of presidential leadership. Presidents have always wielded rhetoric as one tool of governance--and that rhetoric was always intended to facilitate political ends, such as image building, persuasion of the mass public, and inter-branch government persuasion. But as mass media has grown and then fragmented, as the federal bureaucracy has continued to both expand and calcify, and as partisanship has heightened tensions both within Congress and between Congress and the Executive, rhetoric is an increasingly important element of presidential governance.Scholars have derived ways to explain how these developments and the presidents' use of rhetoric have contributed to and detracted from the health of American democracy. This briefing book offers a succinct reflection on the ways in which historical developments have encouraged the use of political rhetoric. It explores strategies of "going public" to provide some leverage over the political system and the lessons one might derive from these choices.This essential analysis, written for lay readers, scholars, students, and future presidents, is the first in Transaction's innovative Presidential Briefings series. Mary E. Stuckey covers the scholarly literature with authority and offers examples of rhetoric that have lasting influence."--Provided by publisher.

This volume examines and applies classical and contemporary concepts of rhetorical theory and criticism to the context of late capitalism. Each contributor shows how discourse, its subjects, and power relations are irrevocably transformed by neoliberalism. The collection analyzes a range of discourses and phenomena in neoliberalism including: higher education reforms, computational culture, Occupy Wall Street protests, the activism of Warren Buffett, and the 9-11 Truth Movement. Together, these chapters explore the contemporary rhetorical production of homo economicus and the various ways in which neoliberalism has become a way of thinking, orienting, and organizing all aspects of life around economized metrics of individualized and individuated success. This book will be of use to students and scholars crossing the fields of media and communication, political science, and sociology.

Disability Rhetoric is the first book to view rhetorical theory and history through the lens of disability studies. Traditionally, the body has been seen as, at best, a rhetorical distraction; at worst, those whose bodies do not conform to a narrow range of norms are disqualified from speaking. Yet, Dolmage argues that communication has always been obsessed with the meaning of the body and that bodily difference is always highly rhetorical. Following from this rewriting of rhetorical history, he outlines the development of a new theory, affirming the ideas that all communication is embodied, that the body plays a central role in all expression, and that greater attention to a range of bodies is therefore essential to a better understanding of rhetorical histories, theories, and possibilities.--Publisher description.

The rhetoric of economics has long claimed scientific objectivity, however the late, great economist Joan Robinson argued that 'the purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.' This unique book examines the use of rhetoric in economics, focusing on the work of Deirdre McCloskey and other major economic philosophers. McCloskey is one of the most recognizable names in economics, yet this is the first real attempt to analyze her work in book form. She views economics as a language that uses all the rhetorical devices of everyday conversation, and her controversial standpoint on judging economics by aesthetic and literary standards has been hugely influential. Utilizing the views of Derrida and Foucualt amongst others, Benjamin Balak analyzes McCloskey's major texts and critically evaluates the linguistic, literary and philosophical approaches they introduce. This long overdue examination of the methodological and philosophical consequences of McCloskey's work will be of interest to philosophers and economists alike.

Although there has been a renewed interest in Aristotle's Rhetoric during the last decade or so, very few scholars have directly addressed what might be described as the most basic or obvious question concerning the work: what sort of rhetoric does Aristotle himself employ? To rephrase this question in slightly different terms: to whom is the book addressed and what did he hope to convey or teach? This essay contends that Aristotle's rhetorical strategy is aimed at convincing two different audiences—both practicing statesmen and potential philosophers—of the inherent limits of rhetoric as a field of study and way of life. In the former case, Aristotle wishes to set forth all of the clever rhetorical ruses aspiring statesmen may have to employ against sophistical demagogues in order to promote and sustain a decent political order as well as to remind them that they must eventually turn to the architectonic study of political science if they wish to comprehend most fully the nature of politics. In the latter case, Aristotle wants to demonstrate that although rhetoric and dialectic share striking similarities, rhetoric contains a necessarily sophistical—and therefore unsatisfying—character because of its focus on persuasion rather than instruction. In sum, the rhetoric of Aristotle's Rhetoric is intended to make rhetoric, properly understood, a prolegomena to both political science and philosophy.

The volume deals with the relationship between dialogue and rhetoric. The actual state of the art in dialogue analysis is characterized by a tendency to overcome the distinction between competence and performance and to combine components from both sides of the dichotomy, in a way which includes rules as well as inferences. The same is true of rhetoric: the guidelines proposed here no longer state that rationality and persuasion are mutually exclusive but suggest that they interact in what might be called the 'mixed game'. The concept of a dialogic rhetoric thus poses the question of how to in.