Mere Rhetoric

  Weclome to mere rhetoric, a podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, terms and movement who have shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren and today we’re talking about two influencial chapters from one book: Richard Weavers’ “The Ethics of Rhetoric”   The Ethics of rhetoric was written in 1953, and it definitely feels like it and Weaver was Southern and definitely feels like it. Even though he spent most of his career at the University of Chicago, with Wayne Booth, he kept his summers free to go down to a farm that he kept where he lived an agrarian dream of plowing the family vegetable garden with a mule. He definitely believed in the Jeffersonian ideal of the gentleman farmer, connected to the earth. Somehow in the middle of all that plowing, Weaver was able to be one of the most important of the “new conservative” branch of thinkers and the leading neo-platonist rhetorician of the 20th century. Weaver believed also somewhat idealistically about rhetoric. He said, “Rhetoric “instills belie