Rhetoric is the art of harnessing reason, emotions and authority, through language, with a view to persuade an audience and, by persuading, to convince this audience to act, to pass judgment or to identify with given values. According to Plato, rhetoric is the “art of enchanting the soul.”
In Greece, rhetoric originated in a school of pre-Socratic philosophers known as Sophists c.600 BC. It was later taught, in the Roman Empire, and during the Middle Ages, as one of the three original liberal arts or trivium (along with logic and grammar).
In Ancient and Medieval eras of European history, rhetoric concerned itself with persuasion in public and political settings such as assemblies and courts of law. As such, rhetoric is said to flourish in open and democratic societies with rights of free speech, free assembly, and political enfranchisement for some portion of the population. However, celebratory (or epideictic) rhetoric, alongside deliberative rhetoric, is just as important an element of tyrannical regimes or dogmatic (religious and otherwise) public entities that are not open to debate on an equal footing.
In contraposition to scientific debates , rhetorical arguments, as in politics or even justice, do not make use of demonstrable or tested truths, but resort to fallible opinions, popular perceptions, transient beliefs, chosen evidence or evidence at hand (like statistics), which are all properly called commonplaces as they help establish a commonality of understanding between the orator or rhetor and his/her audience.
Contemporary studies of rhetoric have a more diverse range of practices and meanings than was the case in ancient times. The concept of rhetoric has thus shifted widely during its 3300-year history. Rhetoricians have recently argued that the classical understanding of rhetoric is limited because persuasion depends on communication, which in turn depends on meaning. Thus the scope of rhetoric is understood to include much more than simply public--legal and political--discourse. This emphasis on meaning and how it is constructed and conveyed draws on a large body of critical and social theory (see literary theory and Critical Theory), philosophy (see Post-structuralism and Hermeneutics), and problems in social science methodology (see Reflexivity). So while rhetoric has traditionally been thought of as being involved in such arenas as politics, law, public relations, lobbying, marketing and advertising, the study of rhetoric has recently entered into diverse fields such as humanities, religion, social sciences, law,[1] science, journalism, history, literature and even cartography and architecture. Every aspect of human life and thought that depends on the articulation and communication of meaning can be said to involve elements of the rhetorical. "In the last ten years, many scholars have investigated exactly how rhetoric works within a particular field".[2][3][4][5]
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