Parliamentary Rhetoric Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

For the famous English journalist Walter Bagehot, parliamentary government was a ”government by discussion.” The rhetorical procedure of comparing alternative policies, or speaking pro et contra, is the key activity of the parliamentary deliberative assembly. The parliamentary procedure offers regular chances to persuade the adversaries or become persuaded by them, as argued by the Austrian scholar Josef Redlich in 1905. Free elections, the free mandate, and the free speech of parliamentarians form rhetorical conditions for the working of a parliament.

Classical rhetoric served as a model for parliamentary speaking. According to William Gerard Hamilton’s maxims in Parliamentary Logick (1808), which was derived from the practices of the eighteenth-century English parliament, speakers employ “words [which] often bear more than one sense, and are true or false according to the sense which they are taken.” A main persuasive strategy is the rhetorical redescription that revalues or devaluates a concept: ”Run a vice into a virtue; and vice versa,” as noted by Quentin Skinner when discussing paradiastole in 1996.

The eighteenth-century Westminster master speakers— such as William Pitt the Younger, Edmund Burke, and Charles James Fox—carefully prepared their speeches in advance. Later, the parliamentarization of government altered the style of parliamentary speaking in the nineteenth century. Speeches became largely spontaneous and improvised interventions in the debate, mixed with replies to opponents and interruptions from the floor. In the course of the parliamentarization of government and the democratization of elections, the rhetorical competence of parliamentarians has advanced the professionalization of the occupation, as argued by Max Weber in Politik als Beruf in 1919.

Parliamentary eloquence forms both a rhetorical genre and an inherent part of parliamentary politics, especially in Britain and France, as discussed by Louis-Marie Cormenin (pseudonym Timon) in Le livre des orateurs (1844) and Earl Curzon in Modern parliamentary eloquence (1913). The National Assembly of the French Third Republic was the purest example of a parlement de l’éloquence, with some scholars, including Nicolas Roussellier in 1997, arguing that persuasive speaking in the plenum regularly altered majorities and dissolved governments. Still, as illustrated by Thomas Mergel in 2002, the regimes were not necessarily unstable, but followed different political principles than purely electoral regimes, such as Weimar Germany.

In the postwar parliaments, governmental stability was more highly valued than lively debates. Parliaments were frequently seen as negotiating rather than deliberating assemblies. However, for example, due to the new interest in rhetoric and the increasing personalization of politics, the role of deliberation and debate has again grown in the practices of contemporary parliaments.

Bibliography:

Meisel, Joseph S. Public Speech and the Culture of Public Life in the Age of Gladstone. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.
Mergel,Thomas. Parlamentarische Kultur in der Weimarer Republik. Düsseldorf, Ger.: Droste, 2002.
Redlich, Josef. Recht und Technik des Englischen Parlamentarismus. Leipzig, Ger.: Duncker and Humblot, 1905.
Roussellier, Nicolas. Le parlement de’l’éloquence. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 1997.
Skinner, Quentin. Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

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