Ethos and the politics of habit: Class, character, and coercion in Aristotelian rhetorics.

Abstract

Middle-class professional ethos has undergone significant shifts from the "personality market" described by Erich Fromm and C. Wright Mills to the postmodern knowledge worker or "symbolic analyst" described by Robert Reich. The composition classroom, long acknowledged as a training ground for the inculcation of middle-class ethos, has undergone an analogous shift as computer-mediated writing instruction encourages students to perform a postmodern ethos. In contemporary culture, ethos still functions to demarcate various classes of knowledge producers. Robert Merton's analysis of scientific ethos, while superseded by subsequent sociology, still offers insights into the rhetorical strategies of scientists and humanists in the Sokal- Social Text affair.

This dissertation argues that a sociological definition of ethos as a signifier of hierarchized differences among classes or groups offers a productive expansion of Aristotle's rhetorical teaching on ethos. Mass/elite tensions in democratic Athens forced a renegotiation of aristocratic ethos by elite orators and provided the context for Aristotle's Rhetoric. The inadequacy of agent-centered, intentional models of Aristotle's rhetoric for contemporary theory can be partially resolved through an awareness of the class-demarcating function of ethos in contemporary culture.