Chapter One
Rhetoric
Persuasion as the medium in which leadership becomes real
Overview
The chapter begins with a question that sounds trivial and is not: how does an auditorium of strangers know when to laugh together? The answer comes from conversation analysis, and it introduces the theme that recurs throughout the book — structure does work that content cannot.
From rhetorical formats it moves to aphorisms, then outward to Aristotle's account of rhetoric as a cultivated faculty rather than a natural gift, and to the enthymeme: the argument that persuades by leaving a premise unstated for the audience to supply. Ethos, pathos and logos are recovered from the checklist they have become; emotion in particular is treated as a form of practical reasoning rather than as interference.
Literary formalism is then brought in — defamiliarisation, Propp's morphology, Sterne's digression — and the whole apparatus is applied to two empirical cases and one integrative case study.
Key questions
- What premises is this argument relying on the audience to supply?
- Would the claim survive having every premise stated?
- What has become so familiar here that nobody can see it any more?
- Does our change story have a plot, or only characters and ambitions?
- Whose account of what counts as evidence is being treated as settled?
Central concepts
Cases in this chapter
Work with it
Related lens: Rhetoric
Related tools: Enthymeme Analyser
Status: paraphrased from the manuscript · author review required