Rhetoric of reaction? Re-conceptualizing Hirschman's thesis base on the notions of topos, maxim and actants

Abstract

In The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991), Albert Hirschman defines three classes of reactionary theses: the “perversity thesis”, the “futility thesis” and the “risk thesis”. The author seeks to describe the argumentative compulsions found in reactionary discourse throughout modern Western political history. We will claim here that these thesis acquire greater explanatory capacity if they are dissociated from the contingent values ​​that fill them with local and historical meanings. To achieve such a conceptual operation, we propose to think of them as argumentative topoi, identifiable from the definitions provided by Ruth Amossy, or as maxims, following the Argumetum Model of Topics of the Lugano school, represented by Sara Greco Morasso and Eddo Rigotti. This conceptual operation leads us to discriminate between "actors" and "actants", as formal positions in a discussion and identified by Plantin as the "proposer", the "opponent" and the "third party" in his dialogic model. Standing on this theoretical framework, the objective of this article is to find a more precise conceptualization of the thesis described by Hirschman to understand the feature of universality that makes them capable of operating effectively and indistinctly at both ends of the political-ideological arc