The New Rhetoric

By the mid-20th century, the classical rhetorical tradition had been marginalized in academic culture. The Enlightenment's privileging of formal logic and scientific method had pushed rhetoric to the periphery; Ramus's 16th-century reduction had already stripped it of its argumentative core; and positivist philosophy's sharp distinction between the formally valid and the merely persuasive had effectively declared rhetoric intellectually illegitimate.

The mid-20th century's recovery of rhetoric as a serious intellectual discipline is associated primarily with two projects: Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's La Nouvelle Rhétorique (The New Rhetoric, 1958) and Stephen Toulmin's The Uses of Argument (also 1958). Both challenged the philosophical establishment's dismissal of practical argument; both sought to understand how people actually reason and argue in the fields of law, ethics, politics, and public affairs; and both produced frameworks of enduring influence.

Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca: The New Rhetoric

Chaïm Perelman (1912-1984) was a Belgian legal philosopher whose original project; developing a rigorous logical analysis of justice; led him to conclude that justice and value judgments could not be analyzed through formal logic alone. Working with his colleague Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, he spent years cataloguing the argumentative techniques used in actual reasoning about values and practical matters, and the result was the Traité de l'argumentation: La nouvelle rhétorique; a 700-page work that is one of the most ambitious rhetorical treatises of the modern era.

The New Rhetoric begins with a fundamental premise: that argument is always addressed to an audience, and that its effectiveness is always relative to the audience that receives it. This apparently simple claim has profound implications, because it means that argumentation cannot be evaluated in the abstract; apart from its audience; but only in terms of whether it would be persuasive to a particular kind of listener.

The concept of the universal audience is Perelman's most original contribution. It provides a standard for assessing the genuine reasonableness of arguments; as opposed to their mere effectiveness with a particular group; without requiring the impossible standard of formal logical validity. An argument is genuinely reasonable if a rational, informed person would find it persuasive; it is merely effective if it works only by exploiting the particular biases or emotional dispositions of a specific audience.

The New Rhetoric also develops an elaborate taxonomy of argument schemes; patterns of reasoning that recur across different domains of practical argument, including quasi-logical arguments (arguments that resemble formal logic without being strictly valid), arguments based on the structure of reality (causal argument, pragmatic argument, argument from precedent), and arguments that establish the structure of reality (illustration, example, analogy, metaphor). This taxonomy remains the most comprehensive account of practical argumentation in the rhetorical tradition.

The Toulmin Model

Stephen Toulmin's The Uses of Argument (1958) attacked formal logic from a different angle. Toulmin argued that the syllogism; the gold standard of valid argument since Aristotle; was practically useless as a model for how people actually argue in law, science, ethics, and everyday life. Real argument, Toulmin observed, does not match the syllogistic form; it has a different, more complex structure that formal logic does not capture.

Toulmin proposed a six-element model of argument that has become one of the most widely taught frameworks in composition, communication, and critical thinking education:

• Claim; the conclusion being argued for
• Data (Grounds); the evidence or facts that support the claim
• Warrant; the general principle that licenses the move from data to claim
• Backing; support for the warrant itself, when it is not self-evident
• Qualifier; a modal qualifier indicating the strength of the claim (probably, necessarily, presumably)
• Rebuttal; conditions under which the claim would not hold

The Toulmin model's great virtue is that it makes visible the warrant; the often implicit general principle that licenses an inferential move; and requires that it be examined and, if necessary, defended. Much weak argument involves warrants that are unstated precisely because they would not survive scrutiny if made explicit. Making the warrant visible is one of the most productive moves in argument analysis.

The New Rhetoric's Legacy

Together, Perelman's audience-centered framework and Toulmin's structural model of argument reinvigorated rhetorical and argumentation theory. They demonstrated that practical argument; the kind that actually governs decisions in law, politics, ethics, and public affairs; was a legitimate subject of serious intellectual study; that it followed patterns that could be described and evaluated; and that the standards for good argument in these domains were different from but not inferior to those of formal logic.

Their influence is visible across composition and rhetoric studies, informal logic and critical thinking education, legal theory, political science, and communication studies. The Toulmin model in particular has become nearly universal in composition pedagogy, and Perelman's concept of the universal audience remains a touchstone for anyone thinking seriously about the relationship between persuasion and rationality.