1958 and the Rhetorical Turn in 20th-Century Thought

Abstract

An astonishing number of books and articles were published in 1958, marking what Gaonkar has termed implicit and explicit rhetorical turns. While Brockriede suggests this is a coincidence I suggest the appearance in 1958 of important seminal books and articles by influential scholars taking a rhetorical turn is a result of the authors working through the question of reason and the Jewish question. The traumas of World War II, the Holocaust, the failure of reason to prevent war and genocide, the threat of thermonuclear war, the limitations of the Enlightenment, logical positivism, the analytic philosophical tradition, and the reduction of rhetoric to the elements of style as envisioned by Ramus, moved Hannah Arendt, Michael Polyani, Kenneth Burke, Stephen Toulmin, Chaïm Perelman, and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, and others, to recover and renew rhetoric.

Keywords:

• 1958
• Rhetorical Turn
• Jewish Question
• Reason
• Hannah Arendt
• Chaïm Perelman
• Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David A. Frank

David A. Frank (Ph.D., University of Oregon, 1983) is Dean and Professor of Rhetoric at the Robert D. Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon