Talk:Historical Rhetorics/A Little Aristotle and the Other Socrates

Some notes to share before the reading on Isocrates. Underlying questions: 1) the "righteousness" of [rhetorical? sophist?] historiography. Why do rhetoricians do history? 2) Is Vitanza's Isocratean problematic fair? worthy of attention?

From Victor Vitanza, Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric:

Given my predispositions, I find Isocrates' notion of Panhellenism to be highly problematic. It becomes a forerunner of "manifest destiny" and of the Third Reich; it has within it the conditions of a philosophy/rhetoric of history and politics that is imperialistic. Panhellenism is a dangerous master trope. To be sure, there will be many readers who will argue that my comparison between Panhellenism and the Third Reich is too metaleptic, or too anachronistic. In a way they are correct; yet in other ways, deeply "mistaken" (Burke 1984, 41). (140) [...] ...Georges Mathieu, in Les Idee Politiques d'Isocrate(1925), points to an "analogy" between Isocrates's panhellenisme du ive siecle and pangermanisem of the twentieth century; Mathieu specifically says that many German historians begin to employ easily Isocrates' views to justify Third Reich ambition (destiny?, fascisms) to unite (by way of expulsion, purging) all of the Germanies and the rest of the continent beyond (218-222). The grand narrative goes: Today, Germany; tomorrow, the world! Greeks and Germans. Germans and Greeks! Such an ungrand narrative must be, cannot not be--I will incite right here and now and everywhere--responded to. (141)