The Weimar Origins of Rhetorical Inquiry

"As the Weimar Republic morphed into Nazi Germany, the emigrants who left became incredibly influential in a wide variety of fields of inquiry, perhaps nowhere more so than in the development of political theory. In his new book, The Weimar Origins of Rhetorical Inquiry, intellectual historian David L. Marshall focuses on figures such as Arendt, Benjamin, and Warburg, as well as Heidegger, arguing that they articulate a tradition of rhetorical inquiry that remains largely unacknowledged and underexplored. Marshall shows how they inflected and transformed problems originally set out by earlier figures such as Weber, Schmitt, Adorno, Baron, and Strauss, and contends that we miss major opportunities if we do not attend to the rhetorical aspects of their thought. His aim, in the end, is to lay out an intellectual history that can become a zone of theoretical experimentation in parademocratic times, taking inspiration from the conceptions of invention and creativity that reside at the very core of rhetoric. Redescribing the Weimar origins of political theory in terms of rhetorical inquiry, Marshall provides fresh readings of pivotal thinkers and argues that the vision of rhetorical inquiry that they open up allows for new ways of imagining political communities today"--

David L. Marshall is associate professor of communication at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of Vico and the Transformation of Rhetoric in Early Modern Europe.