Ira J. Allen

Rhetoric has been concerned with truth from the beginning. Beginning at least with Plato, rhetoric often has been blamed for the death of truth. And the field of contemporary rhetorical studies has been skeptical of easy understandings of truth. Meanwhile, hostility to truth seems to be doing a lot of damage, even if truth itself may never have been as reliable as hoped. The idea of post-truth poses systemic problems for rhetoric’s traditional concerns. Active obfuscation, negation of truth, and even truth-indifference are certainly not new. But the past couple of decades have seen a proliferation and pervasiveness of falsities, rendering the term “post-truth” an identifiable marker of the contemporary moment. Everyday public life regularly throws up examples of both post-truth in action and efforts to combat it by invoking truth. This edited volume draws on the resources of rhetoric to understand what here is new, what is old, and what may be done about the problem.

Despite its centrality to its field, there is no consensus regarding what rhetorical theory is and why it matters. The Ethical Fantasy of Rhetorical Theory presents a critical examination of rhetorical theory throughout history, in order to develop a unifying vision for the field. Demonstrating that theorists have always been skeptical of, yet committed to “truth” (however fantastic), Ira Allen develops rigorous notions of truth and of a “troubled freedom” that spring from rhetoric’s depths. In a sweeping analysis from the sophists Aristotle, and Cicero through Kenneth Burke, Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyceta, and contemporary scholars in English, communication, and rhetoric’s other disciplinary homes, Allen offers a novel definition of rhetorical theory: as the self-consciously ethical study of how humans and other symbolic animals negotiate constraints.