Rhetoric and the Sciences of Democracy

Rhetoric’s mode of approaching reality—eschewing claims of perfect correspondence while remaining grounded in careful attention to language, an acknowledgment of situated knowledges, and a humble understanding of human capacities—offers a comprehensive framework for conceiving the study of democracy as a science (Alonso-Rocafort, 2025). Its commitment to an ars topica capable of exploring any subject from multiple perspectives resonates with what Gagnon et al. (2025) have recently described as an ethno-quantic frame. Giambattista Vico’s rhetorical project advocated a “conspiracy of the sciences” as a response to the growing disciplinary fragmentation that, in his own analogy, threatened the political community itself (Alonso-Rocafort, 2024a). As is well known, Vico’s proposal ultimately failed. A solipsistic form of specialization, reinforced by hierarchical distinctions among the sciences that relegated democratic inquiry to the margins of speculative thought, came to colonize modern academic institutions. Within this context, the political science that emerged in twentieth-century universities was conceived as a sovereign disciplinary project (Alonso-Rocafort, 2025). Recovering rhetoric’s democratic horizon—as articulated by authors such as Vico and by his direct antecedents, including Isocrates and Quintilian—is therefore especially urgent today. Its reconfiguration of communal bonds through political friendship offers an antidote to the social distance, resentment, and loneliness cultivated by neo-illiberalism (Brown, 2019). Against the specialization that has shaped modern academia, this horizon foregrounds forms of knowledge rooted in shared inquiry—within each discipline and across them—, a reciprocal care that also invites an openness to both human and more-than-human alterity, expanding the contours of politically relevant community and multiplying the forms of knowledge required to understand and sustain it (Alonso-Rocafort, 2024b; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). A coherent study of democracy could therefore take the form of a post-normal (Funtowicz & Ravetz, 1993) and expanded community science, operating simultaneously as a crisis-and-care interdiscipline (see Pietrucci & Ceccarelli, 2025). The Mediterranean rhetorical tradition thus offers not only deep theoretical resources and a wellspring for radical democracy, but also a striking affinity with the contemporary scientific paradigm, enabling it to contribute more decisively to the understanding of the sciences of democracy beyond diciplines. Bibliography Alonso-Rocafort, V. (2024a). Vico and the conspiracy of the sciences. History of the Human Sciences, 37 (1), 121–145. https://doi.org/10.1177/09526951231186314 Alonso-Rocafort, V. (2024b). Why is the sky blue? A new question for political science. Sustainability Science, 19(4), 1155–1167. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-024-01479-5 Alonso-Rocafort, V. (2025). Rhetoric for a Democracy in Crisis. A Study of Political Theory. Palgrave Macmillan. Brown, W. (2019) In the Ruins of Neoliberalism. The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West. Columbia University Press. Funtowicz, S. O. & J. R. Ravetz, (1993) Science for the post-normal age. Futures 25(7):739–755. https://doi.org/10.1016/0016-3287(93)90022-L Gagnon, J-P. (2025). The Sciences of Democracy. UCL Press. Pietrucci, P. & L. Ceccarelli (2025) “Introduction: Rhetoric of Science as a Crisis/Care Discipline”, In: Scientists, Politics, and the Rhetoric of Public Controversy (1-16). Palgrave Macmillan. Puig de la Bellacasa MP (2017) Matters of care: speculative ethics in more than human worlds. University of Minnesota Press.