Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation

Talking is not the warm-up to civic life; it is civic life. That is the argument running through this collection, which treats citizenship as something done in words: in debate, persuasion and public deliberation. Where most writing on citizenship follows the liberal tradition of rights and freedoms, these essays take up the republican view, reaching back to the Greek city-states and republican Rome, in which taking part in argument is what makes someone a citizen at all.

Christian Kock brings together scholars from fields that rarely meet, including rhetoric, political theory, philosophy and communication studies, with contributors such as William Keith, Georgia Warnke and Italo Testa. The result is a genuinely cross-disciplinary book for students and researchers of rhetoric and democracy, and for anyone who suspects that how we argue in public matters as much as what we vote for.