The Ladder

Two researchers read everything the American agitators printed, looking for the grievance. There wasn't one — and the eight rungs they found instead are what the listener actually climbs.

A course on the thought of Leo Löwenthal.

Rhetoric

What you will learn

• State the difference between a complaint that names a condition and one that names a person.
• Explain why a grievance you cannot locate is a finding rather than a gap in the research.
• Distinguish a humiliation that is offered as temporary from one offered as permanent.
• Explain why being told you have always been a dupe can be more welcome than being told you can learn.
• State the difference between an enemy who obstructs a goal and an enemy who replaces one.
• Apply the test of asking what the world looks like the morning after the enemy is gone.
• Recognise a programme whose content is entirely protective — a promise to preserve, with nothing named to build.
• Explain what it means for a group identity to be defined only by exclusions.

Course outline

1. You cannot find the grievance — Two researchers set out to do the ordinary first thing — locate the complaint a movement is built on. They could not, and reporting that failure is the book's first result rather than an admission of…
2. Recruitment by insult — Every persuader has to tell his audience it is wrong about something. Löwenthal finds that for the teacher and the reformer the humiliation is temporary, and that here it is permanent — and that this…
3. An enemy who is the point — Every movement has an opponent standing between it and something it wants. Löwenthal finds a case where nothing is on the other side of the opponent, and shows what that does to the argument.
4. A home with no address — A movement has to say what it is for. Löwenthal goes looking for the positive half of the agitator's message, finds it is the thinnest part of the material, and works out what the follower is…
5. One of you, and above you — The two self-portraits the agitator keeps in play at once, in Löwenthal's words a minor key and a major one — the man who is exactly like you, and the man the enemy has been trying to kill for twelve…
6. What the listener heard — The book's own ending, which refuses two comfortable ones. The machinery worked on almost nobody in America, and exposing it is not what stopped it — and the study never watched a single listener.

Works read in this course

• Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator — Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman's 1949 analysis of American agitation, built entirely from the agitators' own speeches and periodicals, and published as a volume of Studies in Prejudice.
• The Broom — Leon de Aryan's weekly newspaper, San Diego, one of the fourteen sources listed in Löwenthal's Appendix II; San Diego State University holds the run and it is public domain.

Terms introduced

malaise, the eternal dupes, the enemy as an end in itself, endogamic community, the great little man, the bullet-proof martyr, Studies in Prejudice

Part of the Simposeum course library.