Does Public Deliberation really Need Normative Constraints? Recovering the Aristotelian Rhetorical Theory

Abstract

There was recently an attempt to correlate some sectors of the studies on argumentation and the theory of democracy. The relationship between these two areas concerns the fact that in both cases there is a significant interest in normative models of good argumentation. In these models there is no place for rhetoric. Our work has a twofold aim: (1) to show that, starting from the Aristotelian rhetoric, it is possible to develop a more suitable model of argumentation in the public sphere and (2) to doubt the very need to identify normative constraints for this type of argument.