This section consists of four selections from Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian that serve as an introduction to the classical understanding of rhetoric. What is rhetoric? Is it an art or a mode of knowledge? What is its value? What are its elements or parts?

The issue of the civil rights of women and more generally of the role of women in public life is another great issue where the importance of rhetoric has been felt by both the advocates of the womens movement and its critics. This section consists of a selection of speeches that mimics the contentious character of this question. The speakers include Sojourner Truth, Susan Anthony, Joseph Jewell Dodge, Lucy Parkman Scott, Gloria Steinem, Phyllis Schlafly, Samantha Powers, and Christina Hoff Sommers.

This volume is intended to introduce students and general readers to the theory and practice of rhetoric. Part I offers classic statements of rhetoric in Plato (in the Gorgias), Aristotle (in the Art of Rhetoric) and other seminal thinkers—both what rhetoric is and what its potential virtues and vices, strengths and weaknesses, are. The rest of Part I is devoted to explaining Aristotle’s classic and influential account of rhetoric: its three main kinds (deliberative, epideictic, and judicial) and the three “modes of persuasion” or proofs characteristic of it (those that appeal to the speaker’s ethos or character, to the pathos or emotion of the audience, and to logos or the logic of the speech itself). Part II offers a broad range of exemplary speeches, ancient and modern, grouped thematically. There is a preference throughout for political speeches, as distinguished from essays, letters, and other forms of communication; and our collection boasts a diversity of speakers.

Since modern tyrannies tend to be ideological in character, they rely heavily on rhetoric or propaganda. This chapter consists of eight speeches that illustrate different ways that rhetoric has been used to foster tyrannical or immoral and violent policies in modern politics. The speakers include Maximilien Robespierre, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Goebbels, Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, and Deng Xiaoping.

This section consists of excerpts from Aristotles Rhetoric in which Aristotle discusses the three modes of persuasion (ethos, pathos, and logos) and of speeches illustrating each mode. There are three speeches that illustrate how one may be persuasive by appealing to passions (pathos), three that appeal to the good character of the speaker (ethos), and two that appeal to rational arguments (logos). The speeches range from the fifth century BC to the twenty-first century of our era.

Aristotle here considers the effect of diction, or word choice, on rhetorical argument. Metaphors, epithets, special dialects, the use of the voice to convey passion or emotion, and the necessary parts of any speech are all considered here.

This section consists of excerpts from Aristotles Rhetoric in which he discusses his division of rhetoric into deliberative, epideictic, and judicial or forensic rhetoric and a selection of speeches that illustrate each of these modes of rhetoric. There are two examples of deliberative rhetoric, eight of epideictic rhetoric, and seven of judicial rhetoric. The speeches range from the fifth century BC to the late twentieth century of our era.

Times of crisis call for powerful rhetoric. This section consists of seven speeches that address political, moral, or educational crises of their time. They range from high points of rhetoric to dishonest or ineffective displays of rhetoric. The speakers include Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Allan Bloom.

Rhetoric is of paramount importance when facing an issue that requires a reformation of public sentiment. Such an issue is the struggle for the protection of the civil rights of black Americans. This section consists of six speeches that address this issue. The speakers include Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, and Malcom X.

Wartime leaders need to carry their armies and sometimes their nations through trying ordeals. Accordingly, there are occasions that call for effective rhetoric. This section consists of fourteen speeches during wartime or in the face of impending war. The speakers include Shakespeares Henry V, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Neville Chamberlain, Duff Cooper, Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and George W. Bush.

As early as 1932, long before he joined any department of political science, Strauss wrote of the necessity of a radical criticism of the work of Max Weber; three years later, he wrote to his friend, Jacob Klein, that he has been reading a lot of Weber. His famous criticism of Weber in Natural Right and History was then the result of a twenty-year long reflection on that thinker. Indeed, he incorporated a criticism of present-day social science in a number of essays, and in small ways in every book he wrote in the United States other than his later Socratic books. He even organized a reading group with some of his students on the works of the leading scholars (Harold Lasswell, Arthur Bentley, Herbert Simon, and so on) around what he called the new science of politics, or what others have called the behavioral revolution in political science. This effort culminates in the publication of the Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics, the epilogue to which is written by Strauss himself. Why did this single-minded student of political philosophy devote so much of his time and energy to a critique of contemporary social science? This question assumes that political philosophy and social science are fundamentally different activities. However, Strauss questioned this assumption because he denied its underlying premise, namely, that modern natural science is the model for all scientific work. Accordingly, he can distinguish “present day social science” (social science positivism in its final form) from “classical social science” (the political science of Plato, Aristotle, and Xenophon) and “modern social science” (the political science of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu), categories that do not exist for adherents of present-day social science.