What Language Should Republicans Speak? On the Relationship between Freedom and Rhetoric in Quentin Skinner’s Thought

The 12th session of the EPLab Permanent Seminar will be led by Giuseppe Ballacci (U. Minho), with a presentation titled “What Language Should Republicans Speak? On the Relationship between Freedom and Rhetoric in Quentin Skinner’s Thought”. The session will take place on 16 October, at 10:30 (UTC+1), in room SD at Colégio Almada Negreiros (Campolide Campus), with online transmission, and will be held in English.

Anyone interested in attending, either in person or online, should contact the organisers: Inês Pinheiro (ines.pinheiro@campus.fcsh.unl.pt) and Devon Cass (devoncass@fcsh.unl.pt).

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between two of Quentin Skinner’s major contributions: his recovery of the neo-Roman conception of liberty and his rediscovery of the rhetorical tradition. While rhetoric plays a constitutive role in Skinner’s republican political theory, I argue that his own conception of rhetoric is structurally closer to a sophistic model of logos than to the classical traditions he studies, and that this sophistic model in fact undermines his republicanism. Combining some key insights from rhetoric with Austin’s speech- act theory and an anti-foundationalist, Nietzschean perspectivism, Skinner seems to reduce political life to a clash of competing logoi, framed wholly as contestation, with little room for deliberation. This underplays two features central to the classical rhetorical tradition Skinner has himself recovered, above all in its Ciceronian form: Cicero’s combination of philosophy and rhetoric, whereby eloquence is yoked to reasoned judgment and the pursuit of truth-like justice, and Aristotle’s conception of rhetoric as an argumentative art grounded in reasoning from the probable. Restoring these features clarifies why a Ciceronian and Aristotelian conception of rhetoric is better suited to both the deliberative and contestatory requirements of republican freedom.

Bio

Giuseppe Ballacci is Research Fellow and Director of the Centre for Ethics, Politics and Society at the University of Minho. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Theory from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and has been a visiting scholar at the Humboldt University of Berlin, the University of Chicago, KU Leuven, and the Université Libre de Bruxelles. His research focuses on democracy, political representation, populism, rhetoric, and the history of political thought. His work has appeared in journals including Critical Review, Contemporary Political Theory, The Review of Politics, and Philosophy & Rhetoric. He is the author of Political Theory between Philosophy and Rhetoric (2018) and co-editor of Populism, Demagoguery and Rhetoric in Historical Perspective (2024). He is currently working on a monograph on demagoguery in the history of political thought.

More information on the EPLab Permanent Seminar here.