Rhetorics of Moderation: politics and pragmatics
A day seminar to be held at IASH, as part of the ESRC Seminar Series.
General description:
Moderates often claim to speak with 'reason' and 'common sense' that invoke Enlightenment traditions of self-evidence in the humanities and social sciences. As a result, moderates perhaps constitute a unique analytical challenge for contemporary scholars of political and social change: subtle performers of the 'obvious,' they are often only visible by contrast with 'fundamentalists' or 'extremists' against whom they appear to achieve momentary definition. Their tactics and their effectiveness depend on verbal (self-) presentation and techniques of persuasion: Rhetoric. This seminar will consider a range of rhetorics - and disciplinary practices for their assessment - across domains from literature to philosophy, politics and religion.
We shall address historical and contemporary languages of moderation to ask what kinds of vocabulary, verbal structure and stance are deployed to promote the virtues of moderate thought? What are its philosophical antecedents? Does a rhetoric of moderation avoid, or depend on, potentially troublesome grand narratives of Enlightenment progress? What constitutes a 'moderate' intellectual? To what extent has the romantic idea(l) of the transgressive, unfettered thinker impeded the ways in which moderate, pragmatic thought is regarded? Such questions will contribute to the larger inquiry into how analysis of the rhetorics of moderatism help us better understand social, cultural and political developments historically and in our own time.
More details about the seminar to be announced soon.
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