The European Family and Athenian Fatherland: Political Metaphors Ancient and Modern

Abstract

This article explores the role and modes of operation of metaphorical framing in ancient Greek and modern European and American political discourse. It looks at how concepts such as citizenship, ownership, family, morality, finance, sport, war, domination, human life, and animals are used to reframe political issues in ways promoted by the speaker, and how they may continue to be reshaped in the ongoing political discourse. The analysis of examples of ancient Athenian public rhetoric and of modern European and American political debates reveals the differences and some striking similarities in the ways political and civic values were expressed and reframed in antiquity and how they are used today. This essay also discusses the potential effects of such framing in antiquity and in more recent times.     

20世纪中后期国外学者对古希腊演说研究述评

20世纪后半期,西方古典学界,主要是欧美学者对古希腊演说的研究开始摆脱亚里斯多德的传统,将其作为一种社会政治文化现象,与雅典民主政治结合起来进行研究,重点分析和探讨了演说与雅典政治领袖、雅典法律诉讼和雅典城邦民主政治意识形态的建构等之间的关系,取得了丰硕的成果。不可否认,这些研究成果具有很大的启发性,为国内外同仁进行相关的研究提供了宝贵的借鉴和参考价值。     

“The true principles of government”: William Henry Harrison and the Whig counter-revolution

Beyond his military exploits on the frontier, William Henry Harrison is best remembered as the president who died a month after taking office. Discussions of his presidency frequently focus on the ephemeral, such as the fatal illness he contracted while delivering his inaugural address – the longest ever – in the bitter cold. The address itself, one of the most unusual state papers in U.S. history, has largely escaped the serious notice of historians, political scientists, and legal scholars. Harrison proposed nothing short of a constitutional revolution that would have reduced the chief executive to a mere figurehead. This paper explores the many peculiarities of Harrison's address, including the Whig theory of the presidency, a radical and overlooked innovation that aimed to fundamentally alter the role of the chief executive in the constitutional order. A close reading of Harrison's inaugural and brief tenure as president also reveals a number of factual errors and interpretative missteps made by leading scholars of the period.     

The Sound of Debate in Georgian England: Auralising the House of Commons

St Stephen's Chapel, Westminster became the first permanent home of the house of commons in 1548. The building had to be adapted to conform to its new use. Visual and architectural adaptations to the space have been discussed in detail, but the building's new role also required improvements to the working use of the space as a forum for public debate. In this essay, acoustic techniques are used to explore how speeches and debate would have sounded during the Georgian period and consider how St Stephen's was adapted for this new use. The results demonstrate that, despite these alterations, the 18th‐century house of commons was not ideally suited to speaking or listening to debate. The listening experience was not uniform across the chamber, and its former use as a medieval chapel may have influenced how well certain positions in the chamber would have experienced speech.     

The Rhetorical Premiership: A New Perspective on Prime Ministerial Power Since 1945

The long‐standing debate about the power of the British prime minister has focused excessively on formal instruments of control exercised within Whitehall. By contrast, not enough attention has been paid to the ways in which prime ministers use rhetoric, formally and informally, to maintain themselves in power and to achieve their policy aims. The term ‘rhetorical premiership’ is used here to denote the collection of methods by which prime ministers since 1945 have used public speech to augment their formal powers. Set‐piece oratory remained consistently important throughout the period, in spite of new technology and the rise of the sound‐bite. However, parliamentary rhetoric underwent some important changes, and prime ministers spoke outside the Commons with increased frequency. Historians of the premiership should draw instruction from those scholars who have studied the rhetoric of US presidents, although caution must be exercised when drawing comparisons. Future study of the rhetorical premiership should involve close textual analysis of prime ministerial speeches, but this should not be at the expense of archival sources, from which important insights into the speech‐making process can be gleaned.