Classical Rhetoric and Modern Public Relations

An Isocratean Model

Charles Marsh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415626002
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136242632
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book expands the theoretical foundations of modern public relations, a growing young profession that lacked even a name until the twentieth century. As the discipline seeks guiding theories and paradigms, rhetorics both ancient and modern have proven to be fruitful fields of exploration. Charles Marsh presents Isocratean rhetoric as an instructive antecedent. Isocrates was praised by Cicero and Quintilian as "the master of all rhetoricians," favored over Plato and Aristotle.

By delineating the strategic value of Isocratean rhetoric to modern public relations, Marsh addresses the call for research into the philosophical, theoretical, and ethical origins of the field. He also addresses the call among scholars of classical rhetoric for modern relevance. Because Isocrates maintained that stable relationships must solicit and honor dissent, Marsh analyzes both historic and contemporary challenges to Isocratean rhetoric. He then moves forward to establish the modern applications of Isocrates in persuasion, education, strategic planning, new media, postmodern practices, and paradigms such as excellence theory, communitarianism, fully functioning society theory, and reflection.

1 Isocrates and Modern Public Relations

An Overview

“Contemporary philosophy, especially with respect to the theory of knowledge, exhibits a growing awareness of the importance of models and paradigms in the history of thought.”

–Michael Cahn(1989)

“If all writing about the past is partly an effort to understand the present, a confusing and contradictory present would seem to call more insistently for historical analysis and explanation. This is particularly true for the profession and academic discipline of public relations.”

–Ron Pearson (1992)

“[Y]ou are eager for education, and I profess to educate; you are ripe for philosophy, and I direct students of philosophy.”

–Isocrates (To Demonicus)

Aesthetics. Analysis. Apologia. Asymmetry. Autonomy. Axiology. Chaos. Crisis. Critical. Criticism. Cyber-. Democracy. Demographics. Deontology. Dialectic. Dialogue. Dilemma. Dogma. Dynamics. Economy. Epistemology. Ethics. Ethnicity. Geodemographics. Grammar. Graphics. Harmony. Hegemony. Hierarchy. History. Idea. Ideology. Logic. Logistics. Macro/meso/micro. Mentor. Methodology. Music. Normative. Ontology. Orthodoxy. Paradigm. Paragraph. Pathos. Phenomena. Philanthropy. Philosophy. Photography. Policy. Politics. Practice. Practitioner. Pragmatism. Problem. Program. Pseudo-. Psyche. Psychographics. Psychology. Rhetoric. Schema. Strategy. Symbol. Symmetry. Synergy. System. Tactic. Technician. Technology. Teleology. Telephone. Theory. Thesis. Topoi. Xenophobia….

The term public relations undeniably finds its etymological roots in Latin, but, as the catalog above indicates, the language and heritage of much of the profession's theory and practice is Greek—and not simply the Greek of the agora, the marketplace. The lexicon of public relations employs the Greek of the philosophers and rhetoricians; the Greek of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; the Greek of the greatest of the classical Athenian rhetoricians: Isocrates. In Cicero's De Oratore, as the assembled Roman rhetoricians assess their Greek forebears, they praise Isocrates as the “father of eloquence” (2:3) and “the Master of all rhetoricians” (2:22).

In one sense, however, Isocrates might consider these accolades a provocation. Locked in battle with Plato regarding weighty matters such as the possibility of true knowledge and the role of public opinion, Isocrates maintained that he taught and practiced not rhetoric—a term with a definition as contested as that of public relations—but, rather, philosophy. Iso-crates, in fact, avoided using the word rhetoric¹—and yet the gravitational pull of the seventy-plus Greek words that open this chapter still can lead us to a tantalizingly rich idea: A profession such as public relations, which has appropriated the language of a particular culture, might do well to consider the broader cultural offerings that infused those words with meaning.

Rhetoric is not the least of the language-related cultural offerings that we might ponder. Whatever rhetoric may be—we will discuss that debate in a moment—it was, in the words of historian George Kennedy, “[o]ne of the principal interests of the Greeks … [and] was basic to the educational system of Isocrates” (1963, pp. 3, 7). Cicero maintains that Aristotle, in a work now lost, traced the formal beginnings of rhetoric to Corax and Tisias of Syracuse, who in the fifth century BCE invented a method of putting forth logical probabilities—as opposed to certainties—to help settle land disputes (Brutus, 12). Though some scholars argue that Corax and Tisias were the same individual (Kennedy, 1994, p. 34), there survives a perhaps apocryphal anecdote of the master Corax suing the student Tisias for failure to pay for his instruction. Corax argued that if his case prevailed, he won—and that if Tisias’ case prevailed, he still should win, for in winning Tisias had proven himself to be a learned rhetorician who should pay for his knowledge. Tisias allegedly countered that if he won, he need not pay—and, if he lost, he proved that he hadn't learned enough of the art of presenting logical probabilities to merit payment. Public relations may be a modern Tisias in not acknowledging the influence of classical rhetoric—or, even while acknowledging, not embracing and appreciating the extent, value, and possibilities of the influence.

The twenty-first century is an ideal time for public relations to explore models of its past, present, and, possibly, future. Debates regarding its fundamental nature and practices continue to roil the profession. Even the prevailing definition—that public relations is the management of relationships between an entity and the publics essential to its success (Broom, 2009)—has not gone unchallenged (McKie & Munshi, 2007; Ihlen, van Ruler, & Fredriksson, 2009). Different models of the discipline compete for both normative and practical status. In one direction lies excellence theory, the product of a decades-long study sponsored by the International Association of Business Communicators, with its focus on two-way symmetry and an idealistic worldview:

Two-way symmetrical describes a model of public relations that is based on research and that uses communication to manage conflict and improve understanding with strategic publics…. With the symmetrical model, both the organization and publics can be persuaded; both also may change their behavior. (J. E. Grunig, 1992a, p. 18; J. E. Grunig and White, 1992, p. 39)

In another direction is contingency theory, which posits a spectrum of behavior ranging from, at one extreme, radical accommodation to publics’ demands to, at the other extreme, asymmetrical advocacy of a client/employer's viewpoint. Contingency theory holds that an entity's situational relationship-building strategies vary along the spectrum, driven by variables in the environment; in fact, scholars have identified more than eighty such variables:

[C]ontingency theory offers a perspective to examine how one party relates to another through the enactment of a given stance toward the other party at a given point in time; how those stances change, sometimes almost instantaneously; and what influences the change in stance…. This stance can be measured and placed along a continuum, with advocacy at one extreme and accommodation at the other…. Most organizations fall somewhere in between and, over time, their position usually moves along the continuum…. Put simply, the stance we take is influenced by the circumstances we face. (Cameron, Pang, & Jin, 2008, pp. 136–137)

A further enrichment of the ontological debate involves the importation of social theory, largely from European and Australasian sources, that generally approaches public relations not from a microlevel (individual) or mesolevel (organizational) but from a macrolevel (societal) viewpoint (Durham, 2005; McKie & Munshi, 2007; Ihlen, van Ruler, & Fredriksson, 2009). Marsh (2011) has proposed evolutionary biological theories as a foundation for what he terms the “social harmony frameworks” (p. 1) of public relations, including communitarianism (Kruckeberg & Starck, 1988), excellence theory (J. E. Grunig, 1992a), fully functioning society theory (R. L. Heath, 2006b), and aspects of the reflective paradigm (Holmström, 2004).²

Given this theoretical diversity, public relations may be anything from “the engineering of consent” (Bernays, 1947) to “building and maintaining relationships that benefit not only the organization but also public members” (Ledingham and Bruning, 2000, p. 65) to a broadly reflective process that helps maintain an organization's social legitimacy (van Ruler & Vercic, 2005). With their focus on organizations, however, such definitions create increasing controversy: Is public relations the exclusive domain of formal organizations? Do individuals or loosely organized activists not practice public relations (Duffy, 2000; Holtzhausen, 2007)? As early as 1976, Harlow had found and studied almost 500 definitions of public relations.

To the degree that public relations has sought antecedents in and guidance from rhetoric, the focus largely has been on modern theorists, primarily Kenneth Burke, rather than classical theorists such as Plato, Aristotle, and Isocrates. By way of example, the index of the first edition of Rhetorical and Critical Approaches to Public Relations (Toth & Heath, 1992) affords Aristotle and Isocrates together seven entries; Plato has none. Burke alone has 27.³ Rhetoric in general, and classical rhetoric in particular, fare little better in journals devoted to public relations scholarship. A search of articles in Public Relations Review and Journal of Public Relations Research from 2000 through 2010 reveals only nine articles with the word rhetoric or rhetorical in their titles. Of the nine, only three offer more than a cursory glance, if that, at classical rhetoric.⁴ And yet….

Motivated by public relations’ thirst for academic legitimacy and professional respect—and, no doubt, by true intellectual curiosity—scholars have included rhetoric in calls for a wide-ranging exploration of potential theoretical bases for the profession. In 1992, Elizabeth Toth wrote, “Rhetorical and critical scholars must at least define what they mean by rhetoric and public relations; and, at best argue how their findings contribute to our theoretical understanding of the domain” (p. 12). Eight years later, however, she lamented, “[R]hetorical studies of public relations may have reached their greatest concentration in the early 1990s” (2000, p. 141). Cheney and Christensen (2001) write, “We see public relations as a contested disciplinary and interdisciplinary terrain…. A vibrant discipline, we believe, needs to pursue a vision—or visions—of what it ought to be” they list “rhetorical studies” as one vision that merits additional research (pp. 167, 172). R. L. Heath (2009) includes rhetorical theory within the “call for pluralistic studies in public relations” (p. 14) and does trace origins to Plato, Aristotle, and Isocrates (2008, pp. 209, 210, 215–222). A continuing research project led by Lynne M. Sallot has identified twenty-seven “theory development” categories within current public relations research, including “Rhetorical Underpinnings” (Sallot et al., 2008, pp. 356–357).

Toth's request that scholars “define what they mean by rhetoric” provides a starting point for this book. As Lunsford and Ede (1994) have noted, to the degree that current scholars consider classical rhetoric at all, we tend to embrace the rhetoric of Aristotle's Rhetoric. This book, however, focuses on a different rhetoric, one that may offer a deeper and, in some ways, more suitable influence for public relations: the rhetoric of Isocrates. Isocrates was born in Athens in 436 BCE. His father was a financially successful flute maker, but the family fortune suffered during the Peloponnesian War. To regroup financially, Isocrates became a logographer—a writer of judicial speeches for Athenian litigants—and then opened a school that became, in the words of Corbett, “the true fountainhead of humanistic rhetoric” (1989, p. 275). He was the contemporary of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, having been born 37 years before Socrates’ death, 8 years before the birth of Plato and 52 years before the birth of Aristotle. He died in 338 BCE at the age of 98, shortly after writing a major discourse (Panathenaicus) and a letter to Philip of Macedonia. Some thirty of Isocrates’ discourses and letters survive.⁵

In the span of those 98 years, Isocrates first challenged Plato over the meaning of rhetoric and philosophy and then similarly challenged Plato's great student, Aristotle. To appreciate Isocratean rhetoric and the promise it holds for enriching modern public relations, we must contrast it with the rhetorics of those great rivals, Plato and Aristotle. And to do so, we must first—in true Socratic fashion—define the thing we wish to analyze. According to Corbett (1990a), rhetoric is “the art or the discipline that deals with the use of discourse, either spoken or written, to inform or persuade or motivate an audience, whether that audience is made up of one person or a group of persons” (p. 3). Continuing in the spirit of Socrates, we certainly could challenge that definition: Plato would dispute the notion that rhetoric is an art, whereas Isocrates and Aristotle would resist the emphasis on discourse rather than the critical thinking that precedes effective communication—but Corbett's definition provides a common ground from which we can begin.

Before examining the competing rhetorics of Plato and Aristotle, we should note that seeking origins of modern public relations in Isocratean rhetoric is hardly a revolutionary or heretical idea; it is simply an idea that has remained largely unexplored. Among public relations scholars, R. L. Heath (2000) and Marsh (2001) already have made such overtures. Among rhetoric scholars, Morgan (2004) has noted that Isocrates advised “the hapless Timotheus on public relations” (p. 134),⁶ and others have discussed various public relations functions within Isocrates’ works: Haskins (2004) holds that we could consider Isocrates “the first advocate of what we now call ‘liberal education’” (p. 4), and more than one scholar has referred to Isocrates as a “publicist” (Jebb, 1876; van Hook, 1919; Jaeger, 1944; Marrou, 1956/1982).⁷ Therefore, to Larissa Grunig's important assertion that Aristotle is “often considered the first public relations practitioner” (1992a, p. 68), we may add, “But first there was Isocrates.”

THE RHETORIC OF PLATO

As seen in Gorgias and Phaedrus, Plato (circa 428–347 BCE) rejected rhetoric unless it was in the service of absolute truth ( Phaedrus, 277b–c). Rhetoric, he believed, should be the exclusive province of philosophers who, through the thoughtful give and take of dialectic, had discovered divine, ultimate truths that predated creation (Republic, 484b). Popular rhetoric, such as that practiced by the sophist Gorgias, was not an art at all, Plato wrote; rather, it was a mere technique, like cookery, or, worse, just a form of flattery (Gorgias, 462d–463c). All too often, he maintained, rhetoric is “some device of persuasion which will make one appear to those who do not know to know better than those who know” (Gorgias, 459c). Plato thus relegates the art of persuasion to those who are certain they are right, who enter a relationship firmly believing that they must change others and remain unchanged themselves.

Possessing such moral certainty, the ideal rulers of Plato's Republic, the philosopher-kings, could use dubious rhetorical tactics to lead lesser beings to the light: “The rulers then of the city may, if anybody, fitly lie on account of enemies or citizens for the benefit of the state…. It seems likely that our rulers will have to make considerable use of falsehood and deception for the benefit of their subjects” (Republic, 389b, 459c). Such deception, of course, remained the exclusive privilege of the philosopher-king: “If then the ruler catches anybody else in the city lying … he will chastise him for introducing a practice as subversive and destructive of a state as it is of a ship” (Republic, 389d).

Plato's insistence on unshakable knowledge of absolute truth as a prerequisite to rhetoric is, in the words of Jaeger (1944), “repulsive to ordinary common sense” (p. 57). Even if such perfection in truth seeking were possible, the breathtaking asymmetry of Platonic rhetoric has prompted ringing condemnations. Platonic rhetoric, writes Kennedy (1994) , is “responsible for much of the dogmatism, intolerance, and ideological oppression that has characterized Western history” (p. 41). Jaeger (1944) calls Platonic rhetoric “uncompromising” (p. 70). Black (1994) notes that it deviates into “social control” (p. 98). Kauffman (1994) finds Platonic rhetoric “totalitarian and repressive” (p. 101). In brief, ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Research in Public Relations
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Quotes
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Isocrates and Modern Public Relations: An Overview
• 2 Sophrosyne and Dikaiosyne : Isocrates’ Concentric Ethics
• 3 Peitho: An Isocratean Model of Persuasion
• 4 Homonoia: Isocratean Rhetoric and Public Relations’ Social Harmony Frameworks
• 5 Koinos Bios: Isocratean Rhetoric and the Reflective Paradigm
• 6 Logos and Dunamis: Isocratean Rhetoric and Postmodern Public Relations
• 7 Syggrammata: Isocratean Planning and New Media
• 8 Paideia: Isocrates’ Rhetorical Education
• 9 Antilogia: Speaking against Isocrates
• 10 Mimesis: Rediscovering Isocrates
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index