7. Afterword

After briefly summarizing the argument of the book, the Afterword offers some final considerations on the political significance of the ancient quarrel between rhetoric and philosophy and of Cicero’s ideal of their combination. In this respect, it reaffirms the idea that the lessons that political theorists can derive from ancient rhetoric go beyond the question of public deliberation. As the dialogue of such tradition with contemporary theorists such as Strauss, Rorty, and Arendt, shows this recovery impels us to reconsider the relation between transcendence and contingency in politics and how such a relation brings to the fore the intermingling of existential, ethical, and political motives in politics. At the same time such a conception raises some questions that have to be explored further: is such rhetorical conception possible in a post-metaphysical era? Is its implicit elitism compatible with democracy?