Political discourse and the relevance of rhetoric

The preceding chapter has discussed the relationship between discourse and politics. It has outlined the crucial and original contribution of discourse analysis in linguistics and social psychology to the study of political language. In this chapter the discussion is broadened to how social and political psychologists have traditionally approached the issue of persuasive communications, and some examples are given of how they treat language and rhetoric. The remainder of the chapter includes a discursive analysis of two selected aspects of political rhetoric: the use of metaphors and identification with an audience. The chapter closes with a discussion of the crucial task of moving towards a genuine political psychology of political rhetoric by anchoring it in the detailed study of the public use of language.

It is perhaps a truism to affirm that in politics, as in other realms of social life, rhetorical commitment and debate are necessary ingredients. Arguably, the political importance of rhetoric and dialogue is a position that does not often require justification. What does require justification is the way in which one thinks about and approaches it empirically. The term ‘political rhetoric’ refers both to the ways in which politicians try to persuade various audiences and to the (academic) study of such oratory (see Billig, 2003; Condor et al., in press). This chapter approaches political rhetoric in the spirit that Aristotle (trans. 1909) first championed. This is an analytic spirit, where the focus is on discovering ‘the available means of persuasion in each case’ (p. 5). This chapter suggests that the phenomenon of political persuasion ‘calls for a psychological approach that is itself rooted within the study of rhetoric’ (Billig, 2003, p. 223).