Politics and Rhetorics

Political theorists have long been ambivalent about rhetoric. On the one hand, rhetoric was often viewed with suspicion, akin to manipulation and demagoguery, leading to the corruption of public reason. From Plato’s critique of sophistry to Habermasian–Rawlsian paradigms of deliberative democracy or contemporary concerns about populism, propaganda, conspiracy theories and disinformation, rhetoric has frequently been portrayed as a threat to truth, judgment and democratic legitimacy. On the other hand, from Aristotle’s Rhetoric to republican, humanist, agonistic or constructivist approaches, rhetoric has also been understood as an indispensable dimension of politics: a practice through which collective identities are formed, citizens deliberate, leaders persuade and the common world of politics is made intelligible.

Recent developments (not only in communication technology) urge us to rethink this relationship. The rise of populist and anti-pluralist movements has drawn attention to the rhetorical construction of “the people,” “the elite” and “the enemy”. The crisis of liberal democracy has renewed interest in the affective and symbolic dimensions of political speech, including the mobilisation of fear, resentment, hope, anger and nostalgia. At the same time, political theorists and intellectual historians have challenged the opposition between reason and rhetoric, showing that persuasion, judgment, style, metaphor and other tropes, as well as the use of different forms of political language, are not external to democratic politics but constitutive of it.

These debates raise urgent questions. Can democratic politics do without rhetoric or is rhetoric one of its basic conditions? How can we distinguish democratic persuasion from manipulation, demagoguery or propaganda? What role do emotions, images, metaphors, narratives and performances play in shaping political judgment? How do rhetorical practices construct political subjects, crises, enemies and claims to representation? What happens to political rhetoric in the age of digital platforms, fragmented publics and AI-generated communication?

The conference Politics and Rhetorics invites researchers to discuss these questions from the perspectives of political theory, political philosophy, history of political thought, rhetoric, discourse analysis, media studies, sociology, communication studies, and related fields.

The conference will be jointly hosted by the Institute of Political Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, the Department of Political Science at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, and the Department of Political Philosophy and Globalization Research at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences.