Abstract “Rhetoric in Hegel” is meant as the treatment of rhetoric in theVorlesungen über die Ästhetik, one of the author's posthumous works. It is a short exposition whose content does not reoccur in Hegel's systematic works. These remarks on persuasive speech, focused on oratorical and historiographical prose, are not significant for the economy of Hegel's thought. Yet in his texts on aesthetics and in his systematic works, traditional elocutionary and argumentative rhetorical figures appear without theoretical or historical justification. Such figures raise questions about the relationships of logic, language, and politics in Hegel and draw attention to analogical semantic isotopes. This is what is meant by “Hegel's rhetoric”: a rhetoric that goes beyond the author's own definition, that deserves analysis from the perspective of Hegel's dialectics, and that reflects in important ways on contemporary topicality.

“Rhetoric in Hegel” is meant as the treatment of rhetoric in the Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, one of the author’s posthumous works. It is a short exposition whose content does not reoccur in Hegel’s systematic works. These remarks on persuasive speech, focused on oratorical and historiographical prose, are not significant for the economy of Hegel’s thought. Yet in his texts on aesthetics and in his systematic works, traditional elocutionary and argumentative rhetorical figures appear without theoretical or historical justification. Such figures raise questions about the relationships of logic, language, and politics in Hegel and draw attention to analogical semantic isotopes. This is what is meant by “Hegel’s rhetoric”: a rhetoric that goes beyond the author’s own definition, that deserves analysis from the perspective of Hegel’s dialectics, and that reflects in important ways on contemporary topicality.

In their Traité de l’argumentation Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca declare themselves to be inspired by Aristotle’s dialectics and, contextually, to exclude Hegel’s dialectics from the horizon of Nouvelle Rhétorique. Yet, while some passages in the Traité account for their choice of Aristotle, the same cannot be said for their attitude towards Hegel, whose dialectics our two authors reject without criticism. Such rejection is actually in contrast with Nouvelle Rhétorique’s methodology, which is open to the examination of new meanings and usages in the philosophical field. In fact, when applied consistently, this methodology can discover similarities between Hegel’s dialectics and New Rhetoric, and remodel Perelman’s questions concerning tautology, analogy, philosophical pluralism, and the sense of audience.