Book Reviews: After the New Rhetoric

TLDR: Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca as mentioned in this paper created the new rhetoric project, which is perhaps the most influential system of rhetoric of the twentieth century. But it has not yet been translated into French.

Abstract: In search of justice, Chaı̈m Perelman alone and in collaboration with Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca created the “new rhetoric” project, which is perhaps the most influential system of rhetoric of the twentieth century. Some of the project’s articles and books have been translated into English, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Dutch. I do not question the brilliance and importance of Kenneth Burke’s rhetoric, but his writings have yet to be translated into French. The rhetoric entry in the 2003 online version of the Encyclopædia Britannica features the new rhetoric, including a condensed version of the longer 1970 chapter by Perelman in Britannica’s Great Ideas Today series. Oxford’s 2001 Encyclopedia of Rhetoric has a host of entries documenting the influence of the new rhetoric. In his entry on “Philosophy and Rhetoric,” Brian Vickers writes that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s work is “one of the most influential modern formulations of rhetorical theory”; Dilip Gaonkar on “Contingency and Probability” observes that Perelman made a “founding distinction between demonstration and argumentation”; J. Robert Cox’s entry on the “Irreparable” reports that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s rhetoric is “groundbreaking”; Thomas Jesse Roach notes that “Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca are the first to offer a prominent position to expository discourse as genre of rhetoric”; Barbara Warnick devotes her entire entry on conviction to Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s theories of rhetoric and argumentation. Contributors making entries on argumentation, arrangement, exemplum, the forensic genre, inference, law and rhetoric, logos, pathos, practical reason, and rhetoric and religion also cite the influence of Perelman or his collaboration with Olbrechts-Tyteca. Many contemporary book-length studies of justice, argument, and rhetoric are influenced by and reference Perelman’s writings and those of the new rhetoric project. Among the more conspicuous of these recent works are David Raphael’s Concepts of Justice (Oxford University Press), Thomas Farrell’s The Norms of Rhetorical Culture (Yale University Press), and James Crosswhite’s The Rhetoric of Reason (University of Wisconsin University Press). There are, of course, excellent chapters on Perelman and his collaborations with Olbrechts-Tyteca in: Foss, Foss, and Trapp; Conley; Bizzell and Herzberg; and Kennedy. The works of Perelman and the new rhetoric project are found in a diverse array of articles in the scholarly literature. In the last three years, the new rhetoric project has been cited in Welt Der Slaven-Halbjahresschrift Fur Slavistik, Arbor-Ciencia Pensamiento, Zeitschrift Fur Die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft Und Die Kunde Der Alteren Kirche, Etudes Francaises, Journal of Language and Social Psychology, Political Geography, and a number of other journals. In comparison, Kenneth Burke is often cited in English language journals, but one finds Perelman rather than Burke in the footnotes of German and French publications on rhetorical themes. The 1958 publication of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s magnus opus, Traité de l’Argumentation: La Nouvelle Rhétorique, changed rhetorical studies. James Crosswhite declares the Traité “the single most important event in contemporary rhetorical theory.” Michael Leff writes that the 1970 English translation of Traité was a “bombshell” in U.S. studies of argumentation and rhetoric. Henry W. Johnstone reviewed the Traité twice, the original French rendition in 1958 and the English translation in 1970. In the latter review, Johnstone concluded that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s survey of argumentative techniques “may not be surpassed for another hundred years.” Perelman’s aspiration was to unveil an expression of reason that would navigate between the “cold logic” Hannah Arendt detected in totalitarianism and the nihilism of radical skepticism. The realm of rhetoric, Perelman argued, is that space between apodictic logic and aporia, the sphere of experience and action. Demonstration and formal logic, Perelman argued, are limited to the abstract and the vita contemplativa. Perelman sought to liberate reason from the constrictions of formal logic and to recover the role rhetoric played in the vita activa during the Renaissance, which, according to Dominic A. LaRusso, was “marked by its concern for humanitas, that unique blend of conception, passion, and expression.”