{"agent_id":"adams-jq","agent_name":"John Quincy Adams","slug":"classical-eloquence-against-popular-speech","label":"Classical eloquence against popular speech: was the ancient system still the right one for a republic?","topic":"Classical eloquence against popular speech","question":"Was the ancient system still the right one for a republic?","position":"The art has a settled structure because the mind of an audience has one. Invention, disposition, elocution, memory and delivery are not a schoolroom antiquity; they are the parts of the thing itself, and Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian discovered them because they were there to be discovered. A republic that will not train its citizens in them has not become more democratic. It has only decided to be governed by whoever happens to speak best without instruction.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The art has a settled structure because the mind of an audience has one.","n":[]},{"t":"Invention, disposition, elocution, memory and delivery are not a schoolroom antiquity; they are the parts of the thing itself, and Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian discovered them because they were there to be discovered.","n":[]},{"t":"A republic that will not train its citizens in them has not become more democratic.","n":[]},{"t":"It has only decided to be governed by whoever happens to speak best without instruction.","n":[1,2,3,4]}]],"texts":"*Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory* (1810), vol. 1 on the dependence of eloquence upon liberty and on the ancient divisions of the art; vol. 2 on style and delivery. Reception: the democratising of American public speech across the nineteenth century, which is the subject of Kenneth Cmiel's *Democratic Eloquence* (1990) - a book about Blair, Campbell and Adam Smith rather than about me, but about the argument I lost.","works":["*Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory* (1810), vol. 1 on the dependence of eloquence upon liberty and on the ancient divisions of the art","vol. 2 on style and delivery"],"reception":"the democratising of American public speech across the nineteenth century, which is the subject of Kenneth Cmiel's *Democratic Eloquence* (1990) - a book about Blair, Campbell and Adam Smith rather than about me, but about the argument I lost.","status":"Contested by the whole subsequent course of American speech, which went plain, popular and vernacular, and by readers who hear in the classical system a preference for the educated over the many.","era":"1767-1848","discipline":"Rhetoric","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, Vol 1","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"VII. Such then iire the primary divisions, under which I am to treat of the science of rhetoric; and the order, in wliich I have mentioned them, is that, pointed out by the natural succession of things, in their appHcation to the art of oratory.","label":"Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, Vol 1"},{"n":2,"work":"Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, Vol 2","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Departing from this great original principle, my subject open- ed itself in two great divisions; under the first of which I have endeavoured to give you as correct a general idea of the ancient theories of public speaking, as I have been able to collect from their profoundest and most ingenious writers. But as knowledge is principally valuable for the uses, to which it can be applied, I have been anxious, in LSCT.","label":"Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, Vol 2"},{"n":3,"work":"Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, Vol 1","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"When called to write upon any topic, assigned you, I presume you have often been much more at a loss how to combine and arrange your thoughts, than for the thoughts themselves; and often wanted more the disposing hand of art, than the genial fertility of nature.","label":"Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, Vol 1"},{"n":4,"work":"Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, Vol 2","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"In like obedience to the same injunctions, we have treated, under the head of disposition, of the properties and uses of each part of a regular dis- course, moulded on the forms of antiquity.","label":"Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, Vol 2"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[]}