Drawing on the classical rhetorical tradition, I argue that we can normatively evaluate political communication by attending to the structure of rhetorical relationships. They are necessarily asymmetrical, but they can become more equitable when they involve both speaker and audience in vulnerability to risk: the audience assumes the risk of having its convictions transformed, while the speaker assumes the risk of public rejection or humiliation. This burden-sharing turns speech from a potential activity of domination into action in a common civic space. Today, this burden-sharing is threatened by routinized and data-driven practices that aim to shield elites from rhetorical risk, and by the demagogic rhetoric of “unfiltered” spontaneity that represents a backlash to these practices. I discuss these rhetorical pathologies in a survey of contemporary US rhetoric. We can recover an alternative in the rhetorical thought of antiquity: eloquence as “spontaneous decorum.” This notion of eloquence welcomes uncertainty as part of public deliberation. But it also has qualities associated with decorum, because it is avowedly artificial; it is conceived as inherently stylized and as set apart from ordinary speech. Eloquence, I argue, is an emergent property of sound rhetorical relationships – the audible sign, as it were, of the relationship’s health.

The Conclusion demonstrates how the tradition of thinking in terms of rhetorical relationships can illuminate a new problem – in this case, partisan polarization in the United States. The contemporary discourse around polarization casts it as a breakdown in the possibilities of persuasion. For the dominant accounts, the root causes of our polarized politics lie in human psychology and our evolutionary legacy, and to the extent that a solution is possible, it must involve a sweeping program of moral reform. By contrast, an approach grounded in rhetorical relationships would see the polarized citizen as engaged in a deficient, but self-protective, form of listening. Crucially, this listening is the counterpart of the algorithmic and demagogic rhetoric I discussed in the Introduction – deficient, but self-protective, forms of speaking. Just as speakers engaged in those rhetorical pathologies withdraw from the vulnerabilities attendant on speech, polarized citizens withdraw from the vulnerabilities attendant on listening. Just as those pathologies result from an excess of elite risk-aversion, polarized listening is self-defense against the risks and rigors of persuadability. Political “tribalism” is a justifiable response to a broken rhetorical bargain, a refusal to bear the burdens of persuadability under conditions of unmitigated political inequality.

In the rhetorically circumscribed world that Cicero feared and that Caesar did so much to bring about, Quintilian operated a successful school of rhetoric, tutored the sons of the emperor Domitian, and composed the twelve-volume Institutio oratoria. The Institutio, published circa 95 ce, not only compiled and transmitted much of the Greek and Roman rhetorical tradition; it also raised troubling questions about that tradition’s viability – questions of the kind that will motivate the second part of this book. We might call these problems of decorum on the largest scale: issues not of fit between specific words and a particular rhetorical situation, but between broad norms of speech and large-scale political, institutional, and cultural conditions.

Chapter 5 reads Carl Schmitt’s Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy as an account of a rhetorical crisis. Schmitt characterizes twentieth-century parliamentary speech as an empty ritual and proposes a turn toward effective rituals of speech that might supplant it. Schmitt’s assimilation of rhetoric and ritual is an important insight. But his rhetorical theory takes a troubling, authoritarian turn in its understanding of the conditions under which ritual becomes meaningful. For Schmitt, “eloquence is only possible against the background of an imposing authority,” and ritual must actively shape the political world. But with a richer understanding of ritual, we can retain what is of value in Schmitt’s account without following him to his authoritarian conclusions. Just such a richer understanding of ritual is available in the work of Adam Seligman et al. For them, ritual is action in the “subjunctive” mood, “the creation of an order as if it were truly the case.” Ritual is not an effort to shape the world, but a response to the world’s perceived brokenness. In this light, what the rhetorical tradition has to offer us is not a way of resolving the tension between speech and action, but a way of living in that tension.

Chapter 3 addresses Edmund Burke’s role in the eighteenth-century reception of classical eloquence, investigating his provocative claim that disruptive, injudicious speech can act as a spur to sound political judgment and institutional health. While Cicero’s rhetoric and his model of public life celebrated risky spontaneity and was only loosely rule-governed, a range of Burke’s contemporaries argued that the rule-bound governance of the modern era demanded a complementary style of rule-bound speech: a discourse that was factual, restrained, dispassionate, and even happily mediocre. Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful made an important break with this line of thought, celebrating the sublime’s power to disrupt custom and ordinary time. His speeches and political writings built on this conceptual foundation, developing an account of the pain of judging and the allegedly defective deliberation that often serves to evade that pain, substituting rules and maxims for engagement with circumstantial complexities. Burke consistently argued that such deliberation is ultimately self-defeating and marked by a fatal lack of what I call “imaginative judgment.” Yet he also suggested that the rhetorical sublime – which might be excessive and even uncanny – was necessary to provoke the exercise of such judgment.

Chapter 4 turns to the historiography of Thomas Babington Macaulay to investigate tensions between classical eloquence and the emergence of mass politics. Macaulay’s influential History of England revived the classical notion of history as a branch of rhetoric, as well as the classical practice of narrating political change through simulated speech. For Macaulay, writing history as rhetoric had a clear normative value: it was an effort to glamorize practices of political judgment that he saw as increasingly endangered by mass politics. While Macaulay contributed to the growth of political participation through his advocacy of the Reform Act, he also feared the ways in which mass politics might render political life less susceptible to classical norms of eloquence. His History is a response to this fear: an attempt to educate a judging public. The chapter concludes by contrasting his attempt with Tocqueville’s Ancien Régime. In comparison to his contemporary Macaulay, Tocqueville fixed his attention on secrecy rather than publicity, long-term processes rather than charged moments of persuasion, and tragic necessity rather than deliberative contingency. Nevertheless, Macaulay’s historiography offers something that Tocqueville’s lacks: a temporally sophisticated account of rhetoric, in which the orator’s responsibilities include cultivating practices of judgment over time.

Chapter 1 engages in a close reading of the most important Roman work on eloquence, Cicero’s De oratore. In the face of the late-stage crisis of the Roman Republic, Cicero reconceives oratorical virtus as a capacity to endure risk in confrontation with an unruly public. From this reconception flows a rejection of systematized rhetoric, in which Cicero valorizes the uncertainties of language: the absence of predictable, manipulable links between speech and audience response. This model of eloquence stresses the unreliability of the orator’s persuasive tools and claims that it is the very possibility of failure that makes oratory worthwhile, virtuous, and even interesting. The pursuit of eloquence pushes Cicero toward a surprising stress on the autonomy of the audience. It is just because Cicero stresses the difficulty of eloquence that he finds himself invested in constructing an unpredictable and unconstrained public. Though he was no democrat, his treatment of eloquence is relevant to democratic theory because of the unexpected pressures it places on his elitism. Cicero’s critique of technical rhetoric also anticipates dissatisfaction with the contemporary routinization of rhetoric. The chapter contrasts this view with the more rationalized model of speech developed in De analogia, Julius Caesar’s work on style.

Chapter 2 focuses on Cicero’s last work of rhetorical theory, the Orator, and its defense of decorum. Cicero positions the pursuit of decorous, adaptable, polyvocal speech as a political commitment: the orator ought to cultivate speech across the recognized range of styles. Cicero claims that the speech of contemporaries who refuse the challenges of decorum is not just stylistically inert but politically deficient. He advances these claims by constructing a useable stylistic past centered on the Athenian orator Demosthenes. In stressing Demosthenes’s stylistic range, Cicero draws a polemical contrast between his own brand of highly stylized speech and his contemporaries who confine themselves to plain speech. Cicero’s discussion of style also constitutes a critique of the rhetorically circumscribed world that Caesar’s preeminence promised. In such a world, the speaker-audience responsiveness that accounts for much of rhetoric’s normative value would be significantly curtailed – a loss in epistemic, political, and moral terms. In the final section, I consider more general questions about stylized speech. How could Demosthenes’s range of voices be consistent with his reputation for parrhesia, or frankness? As I argue, an embrace of stylized speech can open the way for less intuitive, but more challenging and more rewarding, forms of frankness.