Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation

SECTION I: Tracing Rhetorical Citizenship as Concept and Practice

section i tracing rhetorical citizenship as concept and practice The chapters in this section are united by attempts to trace the ancestry, the emergence, and the growth of ideas of rhetorical citizenship and deliberative democracy, in theory and in practice. Kasper Møller Hansen, a political scientist, views deliberative democracy as a model that values deliberation rather than participation as the key element in democracy; it seeks its justification in the quality of the deliberation , not the number of speakers involved. Hansen reminds us that academic interest in issues of deliberative democracy is not just a current fad but builds on a strong tradition. In fact, several political thinkers throughout history have addressed the concept of deliberation under a variety of names. Emphasizing its strong historical roots in the republican tradition, Hansen discusses its role in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, and John Dewey. In addition, Hansen introduces the thinking on democracy of the Danish theologian Hal Koch and goes on to trace the revitalization of the deliberative understanding of democracy in modern scholarship, emphasizing its wide distribution over many academic fields. Manfred Kraus, a classical scholar, goes even further back and discusses the ancient Sophists’ views about truth and human logos to make a case for their relevance to a concept of rhetorical citizenship. Their key contribution is the idea of establishing socially relevant truth in open public debate. Without their analysis of the functions of logos, rhetoric would not exist; and without rhetoric, the very idea of a responsible and self-determined citizen would not be possible. In Kraus’s analysis, the sophistic treatment of operational truth regarding the contingencies of human life, and the Sophists’ belief in the necessity of constant negotiation between contradictory points of view, as in the political assemblies and law courts of Athens, have laid the groundwork for the concept of citizenship. Our participatory democracy is in dire need of self-responsible, assertive, and independently thinking citizens—just the kind of citizens whom the Sophists’ teachings aimed to educate. William Keith and Paula Cossart, representing communication studies and sociology, respectively, also take a historical approach. Their aim is to understand the function and eventual lack of appeal of public forums where citizens might exercise their rhetorical citizenship. Their chapter thus presents the volume’s first case study. Comparing France in the late nineteenth century and the United States in the early twentieth, they find that in both cases, as people attempted to enact their role as citizen deliberators, the norms and practices they developed embodied a vision of rational citizenship, showing surprising parallels, whether successes or failures. The authors see rhetorical citizenship as the set of deliberative practices through which citizens enact their citizenship. They argue that, historically, the emergence of public deliberative events (citizen juries, town halls, and the like) was driven by a “crisis of republicanism”: a widespread doubt that democratic institutions and government policies reflect the will of the public. The chapter seeks to draw lessons for contemporary deliberative projects, in particular on inherent tensions in rhetorical citizenship. The three chapters in this section work together to outline key conceptual precursors of rhetorical citizenship by tracing the emergence of the notion of deliberative democracy and showing how, in the rhetorical tradition, ideas about free and critical discursive interaction were central to the idea of a civic community. While the remainder of the volume deals primarily with contemporary examples and issues of rhetorical citizenship, Keith and Cossart’s case study shows how—including at the level of practice—rhetorical citizenship has a rich history, important in itself and an important source for understanding current challenges that beset attempts to organize public discussion forums. 12 rhetorical citizenship and public deliberation ...