Democratic dialogue

Beskrivning

Lennart Hellspong, Södertörn University

On the relationship between democracy and the art of public speaking. Through its rich contextualization, rhetoric rests on a reasoned approach to man, knowledge, society and language. This long series of associations to other branches of learning connects rhetoric with broad fields of humanist thinking. It might even be seen as the hub of a wheel of ideas about our ways of living and forms of action. In this article, Lennart Hellspong develops this insight into the significance of rhetoric by exploring its relationship to society, to our way of dealing with common issues by acting politically.

Lennart Hellspong (2011) remarks

My own background is in linguistics, a modern discipline with an elaborate and precise terminology. What attracted me to rhetoric as a distinct alternative (and also troubled me a little) is that its core concepts are few in number but deeply rooted in a long tradition and that they serve as topoi by not being closed terms but ever open to exploration. For this reason, they can be approached from different angles. This porosity is something that I wanted to take advantage of in examining the relationship between rhetoric and politics. What interested me was to engage in a dialogue between the two disciplines in order to review another dialogue: that which is central to our understanding of democracy as a pluralistic universe of voices.
I later came to take an interest in negotiation as an underdeveloped part of rhetorical investigation. I now think that a dialogical rhetoric can be con­ceived as a rhetoric of negotiation – a concept that does justice to both the deliberative and the persuasive aspect of exchanging views. Similarly, I think that a dialogical or deliberative democracy can be seen as a negotiative democracy, where both sober consultation and heated confrontation make up the democratic process.

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About this article

Annons

Shadows in the Cave. Revisiting Mats Rosengren’s Doxology

Shadows in the Cave. Revisiting Mats Rosengren’s Doxology

Caves, images, and symbols are recurring topics in the work of Mats Rosengren, from his reading of Plato in his dissertation Psychagōgia – Konsten att leda själar, to his investigation of the world of paleolithic cave art in Cave Art, Perception and Knowledge. While other philosophers might have descended into the cave with the aim of guiding visitors back up into the blinding light of eternal truths, Rosengren seems to be at home in the underworld. Instead of dismissing the paintings that adorn its walls as merely shadowy copies or distorted images, or claiming that the truth of these pictures is readily available to us, Mats Rosengren invites any traveler joining him to understand them as different forms of sensemaking, forms which at first might appear foreign, but that, upon closer inspection, reveal themselves in all their complexity. In this volume, the contributors take on some of the key themes found in Rosengren’s work, mirroring the stylistic, generic, and topical range that characterizes it. The volume is titled “Shadows in the Cave”, signaling a focus not on eternal truth, but – alluding to Plato – on the shadowplay of our human caves. Läs mer...

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• Part of: Scandinavian Studies in Rhetoric. Rhetorica Scandinavica 1997-2010, Kjeldsen & Grue (eds.), Retorikförlaget Publishers 2011.
• Article pp 126–155
• Original Swedish: “Den demokratiska dialogen“, Rhetorica Scandinavica 12 (1999).

About Lennart Hellspong

Lennart Hellspong is Professor Emeritus of Rhetoric at Södertörn University.