The Rhetoric of Violence, the Public Sphere, and the Second Amendment

Abstract

Jürgen Habermas supports his transhistorical conception of violence as a form of instrumental reason to be rejected from the ideal polity with a historical narrative that recounts the rejection of Machiavellian and Hobbesian instrumental violence by the Enlightenment philosophes. This article provides a revised narrative, which emphasizes the persistence of a rhetorical conception of violence from Machiavelli's princely violence to a line of Anglo-American republican thinkers who shifted the locus of sovereign rhetorical violence to the people's armed militia. The narrative culminates with Madison's exegesis of the Second Amendment and sketches how this Madisonian conception harmonizes with Habermasian norms and law.

Honouring the artistry in qualitative social work research

“…In this piece, she examines her relationship with her father and the conversations that took place over more than a decade, as she situates queerness within the realm of potentially divisive, but also potentially transformative family relationships. Likewise, Nat Randall and Anna Breckton's 24-h endurance performance piece The Second Woman (Randall and Breckton, 2016) provokes cultural commentary on gender, privilege, and oppression through the repetition of a single scene on repeat. The depth to which Nat Randall deconstructed not just herself, but gender roles and identities through performing opposite 100 different men, for 100 of the same scenes, had overtones akin to a critical autoethnographic work.…”

The Rhetoric of Physical Violence

“…While there has long been a "philosophical critique of rhetoric [that] generally characterized it as a quasi-violent abuse of human judgment, " the turn to thinking about how rhetoric itself can be violence is relatively recent in the discipline as it has existed primarily in the United States since the early twentieth century. 22 To be sure, the 1980s saw a surge of interest in scholars thinking about the relationship between rhetoric and power, but there was little talk of violence. Rhetoric could be coercive, deceitful, and dangerous, but violence was not a descriptor that had much traction in the field during the last decades of the twentieth century.…”