Rhetorical Closure

Abstract

I call communication that attempts to stop further communication “rhetorical closure.” This essay focuses on a form of rhetorical closure that implies character judgments of the interlocutor or audience in order to force assent and delegitimize dissent. Using Ayn Rand’s rhetoric as an exemplar, the essay demonstrates what rhetorical closure by character judgment looks like in practice, examines its dynamics, and assesses its enduring appeal.

• Ayn Rand
• democratic deliberation
• openness
• rhetorical closure
• rhetorical ethics

Acknowledgments

I thank Laura Michael Brown, Jean Goodwin, the RSQ editor, and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback.

Notes

¹ Between 1957 and 2007, Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged sold more than six million copies. Aided by and aiding the Tea Party movement, annual sales of Atlas Shrugged spiked to 445,000 in 2011. Rand’s nonfiction books, although less popular, continue to sell tens of thousands of copies each year, more than 30 years after her death (“‘Atlas Shrugged’ Still Flying Off Shelves”). But the spread of Rand’s ideas cannot be traced by book sales alone because, among other reasons, the Ayn Rand Institute distributes approximately 350,000 free copies of Rand’s works to high schools and colleges each year, supports essay contests on those books, and offers courses on Rand’s philosophy (Weiss 57).

Rand’s ideas have had a significant influence on US politics. David Nolan, a founder of the Libertarian Party, claims that “without Ayn Rand, the Libertarian Party wouldn’t exist” (Merrill and Enright 4). Before becoming chairperson of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan regularly visited Rand’s New York apartment in the 1950s to discuss philosophy and to read chapter drafts of Atlas Shrugged. In 1974, when Greenspan was sworn in as a chairperson of President Ford’s Council of Economic Advisors, he invited Rand and her husband to attend the White House ceremony (Burns 245). More recently, several prominent politicians have professed Rand’s influence on their thought, including Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party’s 2012 and 2016 presidential candidate; Kentucky senator Rand Paul; and congressman Paul Ryan, the 2012 vice-presidential candidate for the Republican Party and current Speaker of the House of Representatives (Merrill and Enright 3). Rand’s influence on contemporary politics was perhaps most clearly on display in 2013 when Texas Senator Ted Cruz delivered a speech before the US Senate arguing for ending “Obamacare.” To support his case, Cruz read aloud passages from Rand’s work. The video is available from C-SPAN: http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4465993/sen-cruz-reads-atlas-shrugged

² While Nathaniel Branden technically delivered the lectures, Rand treated him as her spokesperson. Until their bitter split in 1968, she referred to Branden as her “intellectual heir” (Branden 197).

³ I cite the printed version of Rand’s speech. The audio recording—which does not substantively differ from the printed version—has recently been made available online: https://campus.aynrand.org/works/1974/03/01/philosophy-who-needs-it.

⁴ Rand and many of her followers caution that engaging with one’s adversaries merely gives life and legitimacy to evil and should therefore be avoided. By contrast, David M. Kelley, who was publicly expunged from the objectivist movement for speaking with libertarians, defended himself by claiming that there is “no conflict between tolerance and certainty” (70). Certainty, as Rand had explicitly claimed, is contextual not absolute. Thus, according to Kelly, tolerance is a virtue because it tests our certainty by exposing it to a wider context.

⁵ There are some exceptions to Rand’s thin conception of rhetoric. For instance, Rand was a highly skilled rhetor who used fiction to sell her philosophy and she once called herself “the chief living writer of propaganda fiction” (“Letter to Gerald Loeb” 157). And in “The Argument from Intimidation,” she warns against arguments that rely on the “fear, guilt or ignorance of the victim” (163). Her use of the word “victim,” in particular, seems to suggest that audiences are not all-powerful. Yet overall, Rand locates responsibility for judgment solely within her audience and her account of communication privileges logic: If audiences exhibit the kind of independent judgment that they ought to, then persuasion happens through recognizing true arguments, not through appealing to identity, character, emotion, and so on.

⁶ Introducing Rand’s essay collection Philosophy: Who Needs It, Leonard Peikoff claims that Rand was “a salesman of philosophy—the greatest salesman philosophy has ever had” (vii). Selling philosophy is something that philosophers, and humanists more generally, continue to struggle with today (see, e.g., Ferrall; Harpham; Nussbaum). Although Rand sells philosophy in a positive sense by making it accessible and lively she also sells philosophy in a negative sense by radically oversimplifying philosophy and transforming it into a story of clear-cut heroes and villains.