As Election Day approaches, I’ve been listening, though as little as possible, to our candidates for public office giving their standard speeches on their standard issues. These, frankly, are boring. The crowds may respond with (apparently) spontaneous enthusiasm and even excitement, but the words being spoken are more or less boilerplate, what the French call langue de bois, or xyloglossie, wooden language.

　　There are different varieties of wooden speech. The official state language of North Korea is one; the dictator Kim Jong Il spoke like a native. It causes acute discomfort in anyone accustomed to thinking of speech as a vehicle of truth. There also is what the British call “bafflegab,” language designed not to be understood, like an insurance policy, or pretentious bureaucratic language designed to conceal vacuity of thought. This sort of verbiage can now be machine-generated to suit the needs of, for example, DEI bureaucracies, without passing through a human mind, like the computer in John Searles’ “Chinese room.” Then there is the language most of our politicians speak, the manufacture of focus groups and polls, designed to hit hot buttons and bring voters out on Election Day (or, these days, Election Season). I refer here to the language used by the minority of politicians who are capable of avoiding word salads and speaking in a disciplined way, which in America means speaking in complete sentences.

　　Contrast these forms of wooden language with genuine eloquence. Contemporary students of history are most likely to think of Edmund Burke, Winston Churchill, or Martin Luther King rather than the great ancient orators Demosthenes and Cicero (although, in my insufficiently humble opinion, the eloquence of the classical orators has never been fully equaled in later Western history). In the contemporary world, great heights of eloquence have been scaled by very few. Boris Johnson’s moving tribute in 2022 to the monarch he called Elizabeth the Great surely stands out. Douglas Murray in his Sunday column for The Free Press has made eloquence his theme for the year, providing many rich modern examples. Those who have viewed his recent interview with Bari Weiss about the war in Israel will have realized that he is among the most eloquent men of our time. I don’t think it’s merely the partiality of a close friend and fellow historian that sees in Allen Guelzo one of the few Americans who can equal the British in his capacity to mobilize the English language in the articulate defense of high ideals.

　　Our universities should not overlook this matter of eloquence. Since last month’s forum in Law and Liberty on the new generation of civics institutes being founded in state universities across America, I’ve had some further thoughts about subjects they might teach that would attract enrollments and also serve the country well. Many people believe that eloquence can only be the result of inborn gifts not given to the commonality of men. That belief, however, has never been shared by educators in the Western tradition since the time of the ancient Greeks. It was the firm conviction of the Greeks and Romans and, for that matter, of all Western educators from the Italian Renaissance to modern times, that eloquence could be learned. Even Plato, a rival and critic of Isocrates—the great founder of humanistic education—held that philosophy had its own form of eloquence, of which he gave a splendid example in his Apology of Socrates.

　　Improving the ability of students to express themselves in public is an ideal way for the new civics institutes to add value to a university education and to American civic life more generally.

　　In the humanistic educational tradition—which in the ancient world ran from Isocrates to the Romans Cicero and Quintilian and was revived in the humanist schools of the Renaissance—eloquence could be taught through formal study of the art of rhetoric. In the early American republic many of the finest orators, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Greeley, and Frederick Douglass, learned to speak in public by studying and memorizing gems from the anthology The Columbian Orator (1797 and many later editions). This was a collection of speeches ancient and modern, including texts of Socrates, Cato, and Cicero alongside more recent speeches by the Elder Pitt, Charles James Fox, George Washington, and Benjamin Franklin.

　　Here, I believe, is a great art that the new civics institutes could restore to our republic. Rhetoric and public speaking used to be taught, even required, in American universities. Harvard had a requirement in rhetoric (public speaking) until 1955, and there was an endowed chair, the Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory, founded in 1804 to teach the subject. Its first holder was John Quincy Adams; in recent times it has typically been occupied by a poet. But the old art of learning to speak persuasively in public has been abandoned by the modern university. If there are required courses in public speaking at any American university, I’m unaware of them. Anyone who has overheard American undergraduates attempting to communicate with each other will be aware of this gap in their education.

　　Improving the ability of students to express themselves in public is an ideal way for the new civics institutes to add value to a university education and to American civic life more generally. Everyone knows that American politicians (unlike British ones) are as a rule incompetent public speakers, unable to express their thoughts or persuade people to accept their policies. They have to rely on the dark arts of political consultants to move even the tiniest percentages of voters into their column. That is one reason why they are not effective leaders.

　　As the Western tradition understood eloquence—the word comes from the Latin, eloquentia or speaking out—speaking out meant speaking with courage and conviction. “Free speech” in the premodern tradition was not a right hedged about with legal protections, as it is for us, but the courage to speak truth to power or the integrity to reject bad counsel that might be in one’s personal interest. Free speech, in other words, was a form of moral courage. It was a skill vital to republican government. Without the eloquence to convince our fellow citizens of the right course of action, politicians have to rely on force or fraud to compel assent, as we see demonstrated daily in this election season. When republics cease to rely on rational persuasion, they cease to exist as true republics.

　　Laments are heard on all sides these days that our politicians lack courage. But as Cicero observed, a man is more likely to speak with courage when he knows how to speak and has confidence in his ability to persuade. In the eyes of humanist educators since Isocrates, the acquisition of eloquence was a moral discipline intended to persuade and forge consensus in states; the man who acquired eloquence had acquired an indispensable tool of political leadership. For traditional humanist educators, the ideal orator would, like Cicero, denounce tyranny and corruption and preserve the republic from its enemies. Moreover, being able to speak your mind with power and beauty makes you fully human and thus able to contribute more excellence (or virtue) to the human community.

　　As the greatest political philosopher of Renaissance humanism, Francesco Patrizi of Siena—himself a professor of rhetoric—wrote in his treatise on republican government, “Rightly considered, of all the disciplines, none is more appropriate to the state (respublica) than the oratorical discipline.” Now that is a worthy subject for an institute of civic thought and leadership to take under its wing.