{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.016351558507920288, 'fraction_numerical': 0.008175779253960144, 'mean_word_length': 5.548494983277592, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Searching for the Rhetorical Public Sphere

Gerald Hauser’s Vernacular Voices is a further contribution to the effort by rhetorical theorists to bring their concepts to normative political theory. It is a rejoinder to the deliberative democracy project undertaken by such thinkers as Seyla Benhabib, who work in the wake of Jürgen Habermas’s reconstruction of post-conventional moral theory through the norms of conversational communication. Hauser contributes to the debate over the communicative norms best able to secure democratic life by broadening rhetoric’s function and scope. For Hauser, rhetoric is not restricted to the agon between citizens who vie to have their civic virtue recognized by a judging audience, but includes the discursive interactions between members of civil society as they voice opinions and come to terms with matters of common concern. As such, rhetoric can be expressive as well as strategic, and characterized by both symmetrical and hierarchical relations between communicants. Furthermore, Hauser breaks with the standard Athenian model when conceptualizing public address and the public sphere. Contemporary polities are not composed of public men seeking immortality through recognition of their embodiment of civic virtue, but of private persons who encounter others in sets of associative networks that Hauser terms civil society. Consequently, the rhetorical situation is not constituted exclusively by a speaker addressing an audience of individuals, for audiences may themselves be engaged in rhetorical interactions that constitute their criteria for judgment. The rhetorical audience is thus much more diffuse than we usually conceive it to be, being commensurate with civil society as constituted in voluntary association, that is to say in interactions that are not reducible to family, the economy, or the state. THE REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION 3.2 (April 2003): 105–109  2003 National Communication Association