Loving the World Appropriately : Persuasion and the Transformation of Subjectivity

A revolutionary approach to rhetoric that asks why audiences need persuading. What is persuasion? For some, it is the ideal alternative to violence. For others, persuasion is simply a neutral instrumentality—a valued source of soft power.Both positions rest on a fundamental belief: persuasion is a power that resides in a speaker acting on an audience.Loving the World Appropriately asks a different, more fundamental, question: why does an audience need persuasion?In shifting our focus, James Kastely delivers a provocative new history of rhetoric and philosophy, one that describes rhetoric as more than a matter of effective communication and recasts persuasion as a philosophical concern central to notions of human subjectivity.Ultimately, Kastely insists, persuasion enables us to love the world appropriately.