ABSTRACT What is the problem of democratic persuasion today? Looking at the complex cases of what Robert Fogelin calls “deep disagreement,” this essay brings Hannah Arendt and Ludwig Wittgenstein into a critical dialogue about the possibilities for persuasive speech. Questioning the received reading of “form of life” and “worldview” as the hard limit on such speech, it argues for a world-opening approach to persuasion where shared premises are missing. By contrast with those who reduce persuading to convincing based on such premises, Wittgenstein and Arendt show how to create them. Persuasion involves not convincing an interlocutor to adopt one’s point of view but learning to see from different points of view: a practice that Arendt calls “seeing politically” and Wittgenstein calls “seeing an aspect.”

ABSTRACTContemporary debates over the future of critique, feminist or otherwise, tend to neglect if not perpetuate a reliance on the philosophical tradition, with its disdain for the contingent and indifference to local audiences. If critique is to be realistic, as distinguished from realist or antirealist as the philosophical tradition has defined those terms, it must begin by clarifying the nature and extent of this reliance and begin to develop alternatives. Such an idea of critique would begin by questioning received notions of the relationship between theory and practice, which I argue are unduly inflected by philosophical prejudices. Theory should not be understood as a primarily epistemological or methodological enterprise whose task is to justify the basis of critique. Instead, theory should be conceived, with the rhetorical tradition, as a world-creating, first-order practice that gives meaning and significance to the human commons.