Loving the World Appropriately: Persuasion and the Transformation of Subjectivity - Hardcover

by James L. Kastely (Author)

A revolutionary approach to rhetoric that asks why audiences need persuading.

What is persuasion? For some, it is the ideal alternative to violence. For others, persuasion is simply a neutral instrumentality--a valued source of soft power. Both positions rest on a fundamental belief: persuasion is a power that resides in a speaker acting on an audience. Loving the World Appropriately asks a different, more fundamental, question: why does an audience need persuasion? In shifting our focus, James Kastely delivers a provocative new history of rhetoric and philosophy, one that describes rhetoric as more than a matter of effective communication and recasts persuasion as a philosophical concern central to notions of human subjectivity. Ultimately, Kastely insists, persuasion enables us to love the world appropriately.

Author Biography

James L. Kastely is professor of English at the University of Houston. He is the author of Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodernism and The Rhetoric of Plato's Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion.