Rhetoric and Advertising

One of the most striking things about these readings, for me, was to note that Buck’s insistence that the social nature of rhetoric be taken into account was the same point that Booth is making 100 years later. Over the course of a century, despite all the changes in society, that need seems to remain. Perhaps Booth was aligning his work to answer Buck’s call for a theory to “complete the social justification which rhetoric has so long been silently working out for itself” (217).

I tend to see the modern rhetoric as Buck describes it - with its Sophist, self-centered motives - as best evidenced in advertising and politics. As she writes, “every detail of the speech is to be sedulously ‘adapted’ to the hearer…in order simply that he may the more completely be subjugated to the speaker’s will” (212). As we discussed how rhetoric has gotten a bad name for itself among the general public (the cynical Bart Simpsons, as Sue describes them), I have to wonder whether the Sophist discourse of advertising and politics so dominates society that people have learned to recognize it quite easily. Maybe they even expect it from certain sources, like government officials, big business, etc. In the early 20th century, the citizens of Buck’s time likely were not as media-savvy as most 21st century consumers. (Not to say they couldn’t recognize insincerity when they saw it.) Many people today probably would find Buck’s support for more responsible and ethical rhetoric quite a refreshing change from the typical dialogue that assaults them. Although if she were still alive today, she’d probably be disappointed in our failure to have let rhetoric (and those Sophists!) run so far amuck…