Political marketing and its relation to Rhetoric

Abstract

Rhetoric has deep roots in legal discourse, given the conditions of its origin and its practice, being it one of the genres that was exercised skillfully and with great success. The institution of democracy also required who would defend it so that the values proposed could overcome the ones that were into effect until then. Thus, legal and deliberative genders aligned with each other, proving to be of great public and social application. In that historical path, the concept of political has been shaped, oftentimes having its borders expanded, in considerable abstract motion, or restricting itself to the practical circumstances of the citizen’s daily life. That was what happened to the political marketing, a product of an industrial and consumer society, which leveled all assets, reducing them to goods, and which include the very same subjects of action and knowledge. The objective of this article is to indicate the basic points that are present in the political marketing in the contemporary society, that are either globally significant or more localized, suffering mutual influences, as it happens, for example, in Latin America. Would the assessor and marketers’ métier, created to suit that purpose, have anything to do with what challenged the sophists? A critical view leads us to disentangle questions on identity and image production, which bring with them a game of representations as well as fundamental problems in the realm of rhetoric, such as the one on rhetoricity itself and on difference. The cornerstones of this study are New Rhetoric –with its resumption from ancient rhetoric–, Information Sciences and Political Sciences, once this question demands interdisciplinary subsidies.