Episode 141: Rob Goodman discusses eloquence
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What is eloquence and how does Goodman define it?
Hello
and welcome to Elucidations, an unexpected philosophy podcast. I'm Matt Teichman, and with me today is Rob Goodman, assistant professor of politics and public administration at Ryerson University and former congressional speechwriter. Rob Goodman is the author of Words on Fire, Eloquence and Its Conditions, which is out now from Cambridge University Press. So if you like what we dish in this episode, go check it out. And Rob Goodman is here to discuss eloquence. Welcome. Thanks so much for having me on. It's great to be here. So I feel like on elucidations, we're always talking these like old timey language. Like we had one where we're talking about virtue and like who even ever used the term virtue anymore?
It sounds like we're in like the Victorian era. And it's a little bit like that with eloquence, too. I feel like, you know, it's like a word you'd read in an old book. Maybe just to start, what would you say eloquence is?
Yeah. I totally hear what you're saying about the kind of old-timey sound that the word has. Part of the thing that interested me in studying this topic is there's quite a bit of work on political rhetoric, on rhetoric and political theory, and on and on and on, but less than you'd think, I think, on questions of style, the way speech sounds, the way it kind of works holistically, the way that style and content or what the Romans called race and verba, the thing and the word, work together. I think this is all kind of part of eloquence and I think maybe part of the reason it sounds old fashioned is because there isn't a lot of conscious thought about those qualities and how they fit together compared to what they used to be.
I guess for me eloquence is just a really simple minimalist definition. It's skilled speech. I borrowed that from Christopher Vandenberg, I think, who's a classicist who works on Tacitus. Skilled speech is speech that goes well. That's just sort of the very basic minimal definition. I think that the figures I write about in the book have come up with more complex ways to elaborate that and draw out that meaning, but I start from the basic there. What I try to write about in the book is the idea that it's difficult to think about eloquence as just skilled speech or speech that goes well if you just look at the person speaking because one thing I try to stress is the way that rhetoric is embedded in relationships and eloquence goes and grows out of relationships.
Rhetoric and eloquence come from the interplay between the speaker and the audience. So another way I try to look at eloquence in this book is by saying that it's sort of an emergent property. It doesn't come from the speaker or from the audience but from the interplay of the speaker and the audience when there's sort of a healthy rhetorical relationship going on. And that the sign of this, the sign of that sort of underlying health is the aesthetic qualities that we perceive in the speech. So when we hear a particular instance of rhetoric that strikes us as having these qualities of eloquence, that it just, it seems like it goes well or it seems like it demonstrates skill. Or it seems like it demonstrates some kind of formal aesthetic or stylistic quality that might even describe as beauty, depending.
I think these things are out of
relationships. Is skilled speech the same thing as beautiful speech, or are those different?
That's a good question. I think that beauty is kind of one aesthetic quality you could look for in speech. One person I read about in the book is Burke, and Burke has a famous distinction between beauty and sublimity. Beauty is sort of like it's comforting, it's less threatening, and sublimity has those other kind of qualities that are kind of threatening and a little bit scary. So I think there are lots of aesthetic qualities that speech can have that are the product of skill that might not be beautiful. Just as if you go to an art museum, some paintings might strike you as beautiful, some might be equally skilled and not strike you as beautiful, but still seem like good art for some other reason.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is eloquence and how does Goodman define it?
0:09–4:28
2
How does Goodman explain eloquence as an emergent property of speaker‑audience interaction?
4:28–9:13
3
What role do risk and vulnerability play in successful political speeches?
9:13–13:26
4
How does the Parkland shooting speech illustrate the dynamics of risk and audience response?
13:26–18:30
5
Why does Goodman argue that political rhetoric often avoids genuine risk?
18:30–21:58
6
How do modern political technologies (data mining, A/B testing) change the calculus of rhetorical risk?
21:58–25:37
7
What does Goodman say about the ethical tension between persuasive rhetoric and manipulation?
25:37–30:08
8
How can politicians cultivate true eloquence without relying on algorithmic safety nets?
30:08–35:04
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Elucidations
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Episode 154: Greg Salmieri discusses free speech, "cancel culture," and "academic freedom"
Episode 153: Sam Enright discusses lifelong learning
Epsiode 152: Luca Gattoni-Celli discusses the housing crisis