[Begin citation] I am compelled to ask the question. Why use propaganda, a distinctly modern category of persuasion, rather than rhetoric, the classical form of persuasion . ...
Rhetoric first appeared as an art of public speaking in the fifth century B.C.E., in the context of the expectation in the Greek city states that a free male citizen be able to speak in the public domain on his own behalf. Throughout antiquity rhetoric remained a civic tool, indivorcible from the vicissitudes of public life ... .
Plato attacked rhetoric in the Gorgias. This dialogue, together with the Phaedrus, gave canonical status in Western philosophy to the opposition between distracting and entertaining rhetoric (which Plato banned from his Republic, along with painting and poetry) and a logocentric philosophy that strives toward truth. ... For Plato, the Socratic dialogue -- spoken one-on-one -- was the only way to arrive at truth. ...
Aristotle (and later Cicero, Quintillian, and the Renaissance humanists) rescued the art of oratory from Plato's adjudication of sophistry as empty and misleading by emphasizing the ethical and logical bases of its practice. ...
[I]n the last three decades of the nineteenth century social scientists and psychologists turned their attention to the susceptibility of the audience in the new study of crowd psychology. This scientific turn to the audience displaced the old psychology of the passions, providing a new psychological foundation for the modern form of persuasion in the offing, propaganda. It also ... laid the ground for propaganda to replace rhetoric as the dominant theory of persuasion. ... For the era of the crowd a new category of persuasion had to be invented that was different from previous forms of persuasion because of the conditions of modernity. ...
There are two strains in the history of the rejection of rhetoric. First is the philosophical rejection of rhetoric that dates back to Plato's time and which resurfaced periodically up to and during the nineteenth century. In the face of all challenges, rhetoric remained firmly at the center of philosophical discourse. Second is the actual rejection of rhetoric, its elimination from school curricula in the late nineteeenth and early twentieth centuries. Here Plato's wish was granted. Or was it? ...
[R]hetoric played an indispensable role in the [ancient Greek] polis: as the supplement, rhetoric was critical to the definition of the polis itself. And thus we are left with two questions. At the end of the nineteenth century has the polis sufficiently redefined itself that rhetoric is no longer necessary? To this one could answer that it is striking that it was precisely the democratic societies of the nineteenth century, which for the first time most closely approximated the ideal of the Greek city-state, that saw rhetoric as a threat. It is equally striking that rhetoric's demise was immediately followed by the emergence of an alternative form of persuasion: namely, propaganda.
What to make of this emergence? With rhetoric now cast out of schools, where the formation of the nation was taking place, what message did this send to the educated classes about how to communicate in the public realm? Is it possible that this public, no longer trained in rhetoric, was left more vulnerable to a new form of communication that had persuasion as its principal role? ...
And here is where the crux of the matter lies: while all propaganda, as a particular strain of persuasion, can be said to be rhetorical ... the same cannot be said in reverse: not all rhetoric is propaganda. ...
While propaganda has taken over from rhetoric ..., it is not simply a modern form of rhetoric. For the rhetorical tradition was far more complex, aligned at times with logic and also encompassing a poetics. ... Propaganda keeps its eye on its primary role: efficacious persuasion. And it does so without recourse to a legitimating discourse of either logic or poetics. [End citation]
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See also, in connection with these citations, John Brown, "Two Ways of Looking at Propaganda," USC Center on Public Diplomacy (2006); "Public Diplomacy and Propaganda: Their Differences," American Diplomacy (2008); "Public Diplomacy: The World Should Be Teaching Us, Mr. Kristof," (Huffington Post, 2010)
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