Rhetoric as Jurisprudence

Abstract

It is altogether appropriate that the term rhetoric, which in one of its aspects refers to the study of grammatical ambiguities,’ should itself bear a diversity of meanings. In its most ancient definition it was quite simply and diffusely the study of all forms of public speech. The subsequent history of rhetoric, however, to which I will return below, was one of reduction, restriction and quite frequently disparagement. The most common modern acceptations of the term are pejorative or poetic and bear little trace of the discipline which was originally to have charted the interrelations of language and power. Ordinary usage now defines rhetoric as the specious, bombastic or deceitful use of language; rhetoric, in other words, is the abuse of language; while within the scholarly division of disciplines it generally fares little better as the study of linguistic forms or devices, located at the level of the word and divorced from any serious consideration of their content or use. At the risk of oversimplifying, rhetoric may plausibly be referred either to a pre-scientific theory of ideology or to a formalistic aesthetics.