Customer Reviews

The New Rhetoric

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This is an academic books that has some real-world lessons--how do you argue and make a point effectively? I first read this book in college and continue to reference it.

Perelman catalogs several hundred different types of arguments with tons of examples. In fact, the examples are staggering and worth the price of the book.

Traditionally, rhetoric has been maligned as something manipulative and dishonest. Perelman's work looks at argument objectively, asking "how does someone convince someone else?" The result is a catalog that is like a toolkit for anyone trying to make a pitch. For anyone in business, this is invaluable.

This book is a masterpiece in the subject of argumentation. Since Descartes the rethorical argumentation got a bad conotation, as a disguise to fold the truth. But, as Perelman brightly teachs, not all structures of the reality can be describe just by the formal (mathematical) logics. In fact, some "truths" can only be discovered by using argumentation, such as political or moral subjects. In a democratic scene, the awakening of a new logic is needed, because the mathematical method can not be aplied to all areas of thinking anymore.

It's not really about rhetoric; it's about dialectic. Perelman points out early on that he avoided the term dialectic, because of its Marxist and Hegelian overtones. But his source for the work is Aristotle's Topics, a work about dialectic. Because rhetoric and dialectic are companion (if competing) theories of discourse, Perelman felt comfortable updating the term rhetoric (by using the adjective "New").

This book is a compelling statement about dialectic for the modern world.

Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's book is long, dense, and filled with examples that would only really be familiar to French readers (lots and lots of Bossuet, for example). Furthermore, their taxonomy of different types of argument is a bit fuzzy. Most problematic, it is very difficult to take their framework for understanding persuasion and apply it straightforwardly, for example, in rhetorical criticism. In short, it is not very easy, nor is it very portable.

In spite of these problems, it is a MUST for anyone wanting to understand how persuasion and argument work. Their discussion of quasi-logical arguments alone, or the first 50 pages of the book, or worth the price of the entire thing. What they do very well is to upset commonsense assumptions about what persuasion is and about what makes an argument work.

I loved this book, and I urge you to read it. If the length, complexity, and French examples are offputting, you might instead look at Perelman's later, shorter book "Realm of Rhetoric." This book here, though, is the real deal.