Abstract

Although thinkers before Aristotle saw rhetoric as a form of speech that helps to activate only emotions of audience, Aristotle mentions three different types of rhetoric as political, legal, and ceremonial, and structures the political rhetoric we examine in this research as an art consisting of three elements as subject, speaker, and audience, and three persuasion styles as reasoning, character of speaker, and emotional state of audience. As he structured it, political rhetoric is a reasoning-centered process. This reasoning centeredness makes political rhetoric an art sensitive to public interest and virtue rather than individual interest. We claim that from this structuring it is possible to obtain important clues not only about what a reasonable political persuasion attempt should be like, but also about how to protect oneself from the manipulations of malicious politicians who try to manipulate the audience only with character impressions and emotional provocations in cases where reasoning and giving evidence are possible.