Deliberative Democracy, Active Citizenship and Critical Culture: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Contemporary Political Philosophy

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to defend an adequate reading of Aristotle’s deliberative rhetoric that allows us to understand practical rationalization as a process of interpretation of human actions. After the consideration of rhetoric as a general human ability that is indispensable for political coexistence, the impact of the Aristotelian rhetorical proposal is pressed, not just as a defense of the importance of rhetoric in a democratic society, but also as a novel attempt to understand what it means to speak of practical rationality.