Rhetoric and Reasoning: What can political theorists learn from the arguments of politicians?

One way of framing the relationship between political science and political theory is to think of it as a relationship between a subject focused on understanding the world and a subject focused on changing it, or, more generally, between one focused on ‘is’ and one focused on ‘ought’. That distinction, I think fits a range of projects connecting the two, including in particular those working on what might be called ‘bridging’ concepts, such as feasibility, norm, expressive behaviour, experiment, legitimation, context, and so on. And yet, there is perhaps at least one feature of both the real and theoretical political worlds that has been relatively neglected by those doing such bridging work so far, despite being central to both – the practice of argument. Do we, for example, really have a clear grasp of exactly how arguments in these two domains differ? Or, put differently, do we really know how a political scientist might look at public rhetoric, in terms of how it is done and when it is effective, as opposed to how a political theorist might look at our more philosophical reasoning? Is the former, perhaps, more emotive and personal, with the latter more logical and abstract? Or, if they both appeal to values or principles, is there a tendency for different values and principles to rise to the fore in each? Here, I want to suggest not just that there are things to be learnt from these differences, but also that, when properly understood, they might be used to expand the argumental repertoire of political theorists, including in particular those more ‘public’ theorists who really do want to ‘change’ the world.