Introduction: Rhetoric and Public Policy

Some readers of this journal may wonder why a special issue, which ostensibly assembles a critical mass of articles focused on an unusual or underappreciated topic, has been devoted to rhetoric and public policy. After all, one may ask, haven't scholars understood for over two millennia that rhetoric and public policy are intertwined? Classical figures like Aristotle recognized this connection and wrote about it extensively. His discussion of deliberative rhetoric, for example, offered advice for advocates debating such issues as war, and he instructed citizens that "the security of the state" depended on their being "knowledgeable about legislation."¹ In our own time, on the pages of this journal, studies regularly appear exploring intersections of rhetoric and public policy across a wide range of historical and contemporary topics. A special issue on rhetoric and public policy, then, cannot blithely announce that a heretofore unseen connection has been discovered and that the articles shall inaugurate a promising line of inquiry. Rather, this special issue joins a longstanding scholarly conversation while articulating a different emphasis. In this spirit, the contributors consider questions that often recede into the background in our scholarship: What is the role of rhetoric in policymaking? How should rhetorical scholars approach public policy?

These questions address two aspects of the relationship between rhetoric and public policy: the place of rhetoric in the policy domain, and the rhetorical study of policy, respectively. Although clearly related, these questions invite independent answers, eliciting potential agreements and disagreements among rhetorical scholars and researchers in other disciplines. For example, extending debates over the material status of rhetoric, scholars may ascribe varying degrees of scope, centrality, and function to rhetoric in the policymaking process. Some may argue for a "sovereign" rhetoric that organizes other factors like money and power, whereas others may envision a more circumspect rhetoric constrained by material forces. Even as rhetorical scholars may disagree about rhetoric's place in policy, they may agree that the rhetorical study of policy demands a qualitative, critical perspective. Alternatively, a participant in the rhetoric-as-materiality debate may find him- or herself in agreement with a political scientist over rhetoric's place, but these two scholars may disagree about how rhetoric and public policy should be studied. The rhetorical scholar may prefer a hermeneutic or critical approach, whereas the political scientist may measure the frequency of key words and phrases.

By suggesting that questions of place and approach tend to appear as secondary considerations, I am calling attention to the case-based character of our scholarship on rhetoric and public policy. In article- and book-length treatments, rhetorical scholars have studied debates ranging from the war on poverty to the war on terrorism. Scholars have explicated the history and context of these debates, mapped their trajectories, and assessed their implications. To be clear, our attention to particular cases has proven to be irreplaceable, providing a strong foundation for future scholarship and pedagogy, and producing sophisticated and trenchant analyses of important moments in U.S. and world history, culture, and politics. However, by focusing primarily on the case and not pursuing fully "meta" questions of place and approach, we may have understated the important contributions of our scholarship not only for practice, but for theory and criticism, too.² Understating the significance of our scholarship across all three areas needlessly limits its value for at least two important audiences: aspiring rhetorical scholars and scholars in other disciplines who encounter our work.

In my own mentoring of graduate students, I have encountered their strong desire for metacritical and conceptual work to accompany our extensive case-based scholarship. Often, this appears as requests for advice—in the form of both interpersonal conversation and scholarly citations—for how someone interested in studying an extensive body of political rhetoric may conduct an analysis. In response, I often recount my own analytic process as I have combed through thousands of pages of committee hearing transcripts in writing books on welfare and Social Security. However, when faced with a request for a citation to a book or article that extensively addresses methodological or conceptual issues, I find myself...