Many governments and universities have pursued excellence by emulating world-class models and relying on international ranking schemes for validation and ideas for improvement. Others have relied on traditional notions of quality and research productivity. These approaches rely on the accumulation of wealth and talent – strategies that are “rivalrous” limiting the opportunities of others to be as effective. Focusing on portraits of eight different institutions reveals other approaches to excellence, all of which rely on defining and pursuing a purpose.

For maximum effect, stories should be deployed strategically. That requires understanding the art of persuasion, the stages of a successful story, scene setting, and how to use the stories of others to illustrate important points. But by far the most powerful of all is knowing and using the stories which only you can tell.

Civil society has been lauded for its ability to act as a social glue that is critical to healthy and functioning democracies. Despite their centrality to US society, nonprofits have lacked legitimacy commensurate with the criticality of their civic purposes. Drawing upon the publicness debate in which government functions under a political authority and business operates within a market authority, Robichau and Fernandez propose a normative “Nonprofitness Framework” that accounts for the moral authority by which nonprofits operate, which is necessary for contributing to a vibrant democracy. A Nonprofitness Framework considers charitable and voluntary organizations in terms of degrees of moral authority and their expression of nonprofit ethos and missions in which some organizations move closer to public or private orientations. Understanding how nonprofits and their agents are conditioned by history and values in turn preserves and cultivates a thriving sector, generating the flexibility to enhance society and provide balance among a dominant private sector and an influential public sector.

This volume is intended to introduce students and general readers to the theory and practice of rhetoric. Part I offers classic statements of rhetoric in Plato (in the Gorgias), Aristotle (in the Art of Rhetoric) and other seminal thinkers—both what rhetoric is and what its potential virtues and vices, strengths and weaknesses, are. The rest of Part I is devoted to explaining Aristotle’s classic and influential account of rhetoric: its three main kinds (deliberative, epideictic, and judicial) and the three “modes of persuasion” or proofs characteristic of it (those that appeal to the speaker’s ethos or character, to the pathos or emotion of the audience, and to logos or the logic of the speech itself). Part II offers a broad range of exemplary speeches, ancient and modern, grouped thematically. There is a preference throughout for political speeches, as distinguished from essays, letters, and other forms of communication; and our collection boasts a diversity of speakers.

This section consists of excerpts from Aristotles Rhetoric in which Aristotle discusses the three modes of persuasion (ethos, pathos, and logos) and of speeches illustrating each mode. There are three speeches that illustrate how one may be persuasive by appealing to passions (pathos), three that appeal to the good character of the speaker (ethos), and two that appeal to rational arguments (logos). The speeches range from the fifth century BC to the twenty-first century of our era.

Genuine, refined, and updated scholarship in recent decades has gradually refuted the view of nationalism as a strictly modern phenomenon. That view in general had tended to interconnect nationalism with the industrial revolution and capitalism. According to this approach, the objective emergence of national markets combined with subjective manipulations by interested capitalists served to mold, often invent, nationalism; the conspicuous political expressions of this modern process are – per the modernists – the national states of western Europe. By contrast, my approach criticizes this dogmatic, often Marxist and Eurocentric, view, and is closely related to the new keen scholarship, which explores nationalism and nationhood, also beyond Europe, deep into antiquity, and aspires to avoid dogmas which ignore the rich, variegated, and eventful history of ethnopolitical identities. The Jewish nationalist case, as we shall see, conspicuously fits into the meaningfully nuanced long history category.

This chapter argues that As You Like It draws from early modern and classical educational theory to stage the acquisition of virtues such as courage, justice, and sympathy, which are, in turn, central to the romance’s resolution. The play explores a classroom exercise known as ethopoeia (or “character-making”), which frequently asked students to inhabit, write from, and perform from the subject position of other genders. Inhabiting other genders can prime students’ capacities to sympathize across categories of difference, enlarging prosocial other-orientation by cultivating the sense of justice necessary to understand how hardship affects people differently and the courage to give voice to the feelings of others. The analysis closes by considering the value of ethopoeia in contemporary liberal education.

The violent disunion rhetorics that swelled in anticipation of Civil War crafted sectional identities for listeners, pitting the interests of opposing sides as irreconcilable. For some, embracing such sectional identities was a rhetorical process. The war-time diary of one Virginia plantation mistress, Ida Powell Dulany, serves as a case study to explore the process of sectional identification and to illustrate the role of proximity to war’s violence in ethos formation. The Dulany plantation, Oakley, sat on a major thoroughfare that both northern and southern troops sought to control, bringing war’s violence to its inhabitants. Oakley represents a site of competing and divergent rhetorical motives and a site of conflict over the meaning of the southern home. The concept of rhetorical becoming accounts for the circumstances, contexts, and locations that shape self-perception and rhetorical action, foregrounding the interplay of public discourses such as disunion rhetorics and individual experiences in shaping a sense of war-time ethos.

The ethics of compassion in early modern England was rife with conflict. This chapter reveals some of the fault lines within Protestant ethics. Ethos marks the spot where character meets culture, as ethics unites four distinct aspects: character, sets of protocols for behaving, particular sites for that behaviour and ways of representing these entities of character, behaviour and action. Bruce R. Smith takes up these aspects of ethics to consider how each contributes to understanding the workings of compassion in the culture of early modern England between 1560 and 1660. His chapter considers philosophical writings, legal documents, sermons, music and theatre plays from England in the century between 1560 and 1660, a crucial time in the religious and political history of the country. It pays particular attention to the reframings of the concept of compassion in Protestantism as well as the politics of compassions vis-à-vis people of other nations and other faiths. He concludes that the 'ethics' of compassion is, at bottom, a matter of virtue, but in more complicated ways than we might at first assume.

In early modern England the theory of the emotions set out in classical rhetoric provides a context for understanding how they work in Shakespeare which is at least as important as Galenic humoral theory. The key concepts that link oratory and drama are ethos and pathos, where ethos may be understood in terms of character delineation and pathos as the emotion which character representation is intended to arouse in the audience. The key term used to describe the way rhetoric works on an audience is movere, ‘moving’. Rhetoric provided Shakespeare with a model of how to move the affections of his audience, but there are many points in his plays that reveal an awareness of the dangers of rhetoric – that the obvious deployment of artifice risks sounding insincere – and it is this that lies behind his development of more naturalistic forms of expression in his drama. This is also what lies behind the construction of Shakespeare’s reputation as the supreme exponent of the passions in the 150 years after his death, as ‘nature’ became the third term in the relationship between rhetoric and the emotions and the essential principle on which ‘moving’ is based.

While Cicero’s self-fashioning has been a subject of great scholarly interest already, my approach is more granular, emphasizing variability and adaptation in Cicero’s use of eight distinct personae to generate political leverage through the shaping of persuasive political narratives. The speeches from his return from exile in 57 BCE to his death in 43 have received relatively little scholarly attention (some more than others), and this book offers a comprehensive and innovative account of that part of the corpus. Cicero’s time in exile and the rise of the “first triumvirate” combined to change the political landscape, not only for Cicero but in general, creating new challenges in the rebuilding and maintenance of his influence. Each of the eight personae gives readers a framework in which to understand Cicero’s rhetorical strategies, and to see how his arguments and accounts of the world around him are shaped to address his political goals. A persona consists not only of social role and status but also of character traits, affective responses, and relationships to others.

The European Union is sometimes described as a ‘community of values’. Is this adequate? Legally anchored civil and human rights and democratic guarantees were not the foundation upon which institutional cooperation was built. Instead they sneaked in by the back door. Especially in the early days the centrality of values was by no means obvious, and certainly contested. The search for a specific institutional ethos only became significant in the course of the 1970s. Today’s EU was not born as a community of values; instead it grew into one in a fascinating, decades-long process characterised by ambivalence and contradiction. That does not mean that values and norms played no role in earlier stages of the integration process. At the beginning of the 1950s these questions were already hotly debated, and the value-orientation is clearly reflected in the way European integration was very much understood as a contribution to securing peace. To that extent, the European project is actually inconceivable without the values that grounded and legitimised it; values and norms shaped the EC’s institutions and informal practices at very fundamental levels. But without a legally binding framework they initially remained fragile and vulnerable.