This chapter discusses the importance of the audience in research on forensic performance. “Forensic performance” is taken here to include the dramaturgical techniques that inform Erving Goffman’s account of “the presentation of self in everyday life,” extending not only to ways of affirming one’s own position but also to ways of portraying the various figures or propositions in a legal dispute. These practices include the use of speech, gesture, and ritual to convey arguments, embody or criticize legal authority, and impersonate a party, witness, or any other participant in an actual or imagined scenario. The audience includes those in the courtroom and imagined observers in the larger public. The chapter begins by examining criticisms of forensic performance in the early modern period and then turns to the use of cross-examination in the nineteenth century. Finally, the discussion considers judges’ behavior, particularly when they encourage the audience to laugh in response to their questions. By doing so, judges merge the role of an impartial interlocutor attending to policy questions and the role of an individual to whom the law might apply.

Many of the challenges facing social democrats today have deep historical roots. Labour politics were never simply encoded in the daily experience of the industrial working class; they had to be made. Labour had to adapt to an already acculturated working class, but over time, through a combination of rhetoric and public policy, it not only did so but it also changed the culture of that class. This chapter analyses both the practical strategies developed to build Labour’s base a century ago, and the parameters (and limits) of the vernacular social democratic politics that emerged from its eventual success. Vernacular politics are not ideological or partisan because politics is marginal to most people’s lives. Practically minded social democrats therefore need to identify where their goals chime most naturally with vernacular politics. This means recognising the predominantly contractual conception of social entitlement, but also where universalism has put down deepest roots: not just in health and education, but also in housing and in the care of the elderly and infirm. Above all, Labour needs to rediscover the ethical and emotional appeal at the heart of its historic claim to represent all working people: championing the dignity of labour and of place.

Since 1945, the practical solution to the Swedish Social Democratic Party’s ideological goals of ‘solidarity, equality and planning’ always tended to be yet another sweeping welfare state reform. Delivery was in keeping with the ideological rhetoric. However, increasingly the high taxes to support the reforms met with strong criticism from the party’s core blue-collar voters, disgruntled about marginal taxation and VAT. Yet, when in 1981 the party totally reformed its taxation policies by reducing marginal taxation, it infuriated key members and voters who felt that high-end earners benefitted unfairly. Moreover, the U-turn had knock-on practical effects on welfare state expansion. In 1982, Prime Minister Olof Palme stated that the welfare state could expand, ‘but not as a share of the total economy’. Suddenly, tax and welfare state ceilings had been put in place, with efficiency drives becoming increasingly necessary, leading to further U-turns when the party dropped most of its resistance to privatisations and to the marketisation of the welfare state. Yet the party’s rhetoric about the need for welfare state expansion and criticism of lower taxes remained intact. No longer does the delivery square with the rhetoric. Gradually, practical decisions have placed the party in an ideological dilemma.

The chapter motivates the topic of moral rhetoric by highlighting its relevance for how voters experience politics in everyday life. This leads to the question explored in the book: What role does moral rhetoric play in party politics? The chapter defines moral rhetoric as argumentation that frames political positions into moral views about right and wrong. Moral rhetoric can be used to frame views about specific policy issues (e.g., the economy, immigration) and more general political matters (e.g., the immorality of rival parties). Moral rhetoric contrasts with pragmatic, consequentialist rhetoric. To further illustrate, I present a series of examples of moral rhetoric used by parties and politicians in advanced democracies. Then I explain the research approaches of the book, such as use of the Moral Foundations Theory and geographic focus on Western democracies. The chapter ends with an outline of the rest of the book. The book examines the role of moral rhetoric in party politics in three parts: (1) whether and how moral rhetoric is a distinct aspect of political communication, (2) what effects it has on voters, and (3) its significance for democratic representation.

Various critics have labeled Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah as a dictator novel, a dictator-novel, or a novel about dictatorship, forcing the questions that inform this chapter: isn’t there a well-defined genre where Anthills fits unproblematically? Is the African novel that thematizes dictatorship a sub-genre, or the unwieldy name for the genre from which the African dictator novel emerges? Or are they co-existent genres? If genres “change when new topics are added to their repertoires” (Fowler 233), I explore the germinal novels of disillusionment in the 1960s, the imprecise “dictatorial literature” and “dictator” novel descriptors used in the early 1990s for clues that illuminate the difference between the dictator novel and novels about dictatorship. Playing off Derrida’s argument that the word “genre” establishes a “limit,” a line of demarcation (57) that simultaneously creates “an edgeless boundary of itself” (81), I argue that this indeterminacy fits the African novel variously labeled as the dictator novel or the novel about dictatorship, and the delimitation should be flexibly located in the “edgeless boundary” defined by the themes and function the novels serve. Further, the rise of increasingly authoritarian rulers globally lends currency to the African dictator novel in unmasking their rhetoric of dictatorship.

Chapter 1 opens with a discussion of the foundational importance of classical education in Roman society and politics, and how it served as a basis for both office-holding and elite Roman identity and self-fashioning. The chapter also provides a prosopographical sketch of the teachers and students that are visible in the historical record from the fourth to early sixth centuries in Gaul, showing that identifiable teachers and students begin to fade from the sources from the later-fifth and early-sixth centuries. It discusses the marked shift in the visibility of these individuals, the changing nature of our sources for education throughout the period, the limitations of our sources, and what we can learn from those limitations. The chapter argues that, while classical education largely disappears from the historical record by the early sixth century, this by no means indicates that classical education ceased to exist entirely. Rather, it shows that classical education was no longer a ‘public’ institution as it had been under the Roman empire, and that it did not occupy that specific place within politics, society, and culture that allowed it to be visible and take a prominent place in the technical and literary texts of the period.

This chapter emphasizes narrative as a vehicle for psychological analysis. It begins by noting the prominence of emotion in the Confessions; Augustine himself tells us in the Reconsiderations that the work is meant to arouse not just the mind but also the heart toward God. It argues that the Confessions contributes to ancient philosophical debates about the character of the emotions and how they should be controlled and moderated. The work presents a “therapy of the emotions” that is sometimes aligned with, and sometimes in critical tension with, the philosophical spiritual exercises proposed by earlier writers. Augustine is, in certain respects, more hopeful about progress in virtue than his philosophical predecessors; he presents his therapy of the soul for everyone, not just those with fortunate natural proclivities. Yet he insists that such progress can be made only by God’s grace. The techniques of ancient philosophy are, in themselves, unavailing for moral transformation.

The introduction sets out the approaches, sources, and scope of the book. It acquaints the reader with the main features of classical education and places the book within the modern historiography.

This chapter analyses the literary, textual, and propaganda work of the two main British fascist organisations in the interwar period: the British Fascisti (1923–1935), founded by Rotha Lintorn-Orman, and Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF, 1932–1940). The evolving styles, structures, and aesthetics in fascist publications reflect shifts in policy and strategy, often influenced by opposing political movements. Fascist literature was a strategic tool in a war of words and ideas, and as such was crucial for promoting fascist ideology. The chapter highlights the dissemination of fascist materials, including newspapers sold at events, manifestos for recruitment, and pamphlets on diverse topics. Songs, short stories, and poems aimed to mobilise and instruct, while public speeches were central to fascist rallies and demonstrations. The BUF trained its members, the Blackshirts, in public speaking, making speeches integral to their propaganda efforts; these speeches were later published, recorded, or filmed. This ‘gestural politics’ is exemplified by the BUF’s newspaper Action!, a title that symbolised the movement’s focus on public performance and outreach. Through these varied forms, the chapter shows how fascist propaganda intertwined literary efforts with political activism to influence British society.

This chapter traces the history of Renaissance Italy’s long and passionate love affair with the textual and material remnants of classical antiquity, exploring classical influences within literary and intellectual history, art history, and material culture. The classicizing movement known as humanism is charted here from its origins in the early 1300s to the moment sometimes called the High Renaissance in early sixteenth-century Rome. The chapter argues that past paradigms have often over-emphasized the secular leaning of Renaissance humanism or posited a sharp transition from a medieval, other-worldly to an earthly, human-focused world-view. Countering this, the chapter examines the ways in which a society and culture still deeply invested in Christianity responded to the philosophical challenges posed by pagan antiquity and the strategies it developed to reconcile the two.

This chapter discusses the work of twelfth-century theologians in Paris who laid the foundations for the development of theology as a discipline in the university. These thinkers explored the characteristics and limits of the discourse on God in theological treatises and summae, which employed increasingly sophisticated technical terminology drawn in part from grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

In this chapter, I argue that Plato borrows from Euripides’ Antiope, in order to frame the terms of the debate between Socrates and Callicles in the last part of the Gorgias about whether the philosophical or the political life is best. I argue that Plato’s engagement with this tragedy is an instance of paratragedy, that is, the non-parodic adaptation of a work of tragedy in order to enrich the dramatic situation. What redeems the Antiope in Plato’s eyes is its endorsement of the superiority of the intellectual over the political life. In adapting the Antiope for his own purposes, Plato defends an account of good life as spent in the cooperative pursuit of wisdom and virtue. This life runs up against two limits that are thematized in the Gorgias: human obstinacy, the refusal to cooperate and recognize the force of argument; and endemic uncertainty due to our finite capacity for argument. Since Socrates is portrayed as both defending the life of philosophy in argument, and actively living it, then the Gorgias itself counts as an ideal tragedy. This reading of the dialogue sheds important light on the arguments concerning the nature and value of rhetoric. In the end, I assess the dialogue in light of the constraints on ideal tragedy articulated in Chapter 4.