A new rhetoric for a new justice and democratic order
| Autor | Marco Antônio Sousa Alves |
| Ocupação do Autor | Ph. D. Student in Philosophy at Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) |
| Páginas | 585-591 |
Special Workshop: Citizenship and access to justice in the democratic order • 585
A new rhetoric for a new justice
and democratic order1
Marco Antônio Sousa Alves2
Abstract: The democratic experience is closely related to the practice of argu-
mentation. There is no democracy without exchanging views and search by
persuasion or convincing. Democratic practice has, therefore, a clear rhetorical
dimension, understood as the pursuit of agreement or consent of a certain audi-
ence. In other words, we should not talk about democracy when decisions and
political choices necessarily emanate from an evident premise or simply reect
the will of an authority. A democratic order is quite dierent from an order of
reason, of God, or of Nature, on the one hand, and from mere imposition of the
will of the sovereign, on the other hand. The relationship between politics and
rhetoric is an old topic in political philosophy, as we see in the Platonic condem-
nation of democracy, seen as the realm of sophistical opinions. However, based
on the Aristotelian reection on practical reasoning, new studies have tried to
rehabilitate rhetoric and its importance for a new political and legal order, espe-
cially since the middle of the last century. It is in these terms that Chaïm Perel-
man’s new rhetoric must be understood. The new rhetorical perspective aims
at situating properly the very rationality of the democratic order. In this sense,
democracy can be approximated to the realm of reasonable argument that lies
between two opposite extremes: on one side, the realm of rationality and logical
necessity, on the other, the realm of irrationality and arbitrary will. I present
here the broad outline of Perelman’s new rhetoric (and its wide conception of
rationality) in order to sketch, in what follows, some ideas about a new justice
and democratic order. Among other things, I aim at highlighting Perelman’s
1
Paper presented at the special workshop (SWS) “Citizenship and access to justice in
the democratic order”, part of the 26th World Congress of Philosophy of Law and Social
Philosophy of the International Association for Philosophy of Law and Social Philoso-
phy (Internationale Vereinigung für Rechts-und Sozialphilosophie), held in Belo Hori-
zonte, Brazil, at the campus of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) from 21
to 26 july 2013.
2
Ph. D. Student in Philosophy at Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG). Professor
at Milton Campos Law School (Belo Horizonte – Brazil).
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