The Ethics of Rhetoric

"The central idea is that all speech, which is the means the gods have given man to express his soul, is a form of eros, in the proper interpretation of the word."

Is rhetoric only the art of getting your way, or can speech itself be good? In The Ethics of Rhetoric, Richard M. Weaver argues that no use of language is neutral. Every speaker, whether he knows it or not, leads his hearers somewhere, upward toward the true or downward toward appetite and slogan. Beginning with Plato's Phaedrus and moving through the Scopes trial, Burke, Lincoln, Milton, and the prose of the social scientists, Weaver shows how the arguments a man prefers and the words he treats as sacred expose what he really believes. He closes with an anatomy of the "god terms" and "devil terms" that move modern crowds. Written in 1953, it reads as though written for our own age of slogans, and it is the most searching defense of rhetoric as a moral discipline in the English language.

LAUDS AND APPROBATIONS

"This is a book which every professor of rhetoric should read." 
Miguel A. Bernad, S.J., Philippine Studies, 1956