Daniel DiLeo identifies Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric as a means of preserving the lawful systems of rule that make the inculcation of human excellence possible. This entails resistance to what he perceived as the lawlessness of regime-destabilizing extreme democracy and of what we experience today as populism. Since they both arise through the effectiveness of demagogic rhetoric, Aristotle arms those opposed to it with their own effective, but potentially benign art of rhetoric.
DiLeo demonstrates that Aristotle’s assessment of the wisdom of actual multitudes was quite negative. He challenges recent scholarship attributing inherent tendencies to yield politically prudent outcomes to the practice of Aristotle’s rhetorical art, absent any guidance by speakers of superior political prudence. He then shows how Aristotle’s principal rhetorical tactics, maxims, metaphors, and topics are instruments of manipulation.
Daniel DiLeo then notes how Aristotle shifted longings of elites away from honors allocated by the many to a concern for the human good and argues that even if Martin Luther King, Jr. privately and plausibly believed the heroes of the Bible were in fact “otherworldly,” and doubted that America’s founders strove for what is just by nature, his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” was nevertheless supremely benign.