Politics and Rhetorics | Ideas in Politics Conference on November 19-20, 2026 in Prague, Czechia

6th Ideas in Politics Conference 

Politics and Rhetorics  

Prague: November 19–20, 2026

Political theorists have long been ambivalent about rhetoric. On the one hand, rhetoric was often viewed with suspicion, akin to manipulation and demagoguery, leading to the corruption of public reason. On the other hand, from Aristotle’s Rhetoric, to republican, humanist, agonistic or constructivist approaches, rhetoric has also been understood as an indispensable dimension of politics: a practice through which collective identities are formed, citizens deliberate, leaders persuade and the common world of politics is made intelligible.

Recent developments urge us to rethink this relationship. The rise of populist and anti-pluralist movements has drawn attention to the rhetorical construction of “the people,” “the elite” and “the enemy”. The crisis of liberal democracy has renewed interest in the affective and symbolic dimensions of political speech, including the mobilisation of fear, resentment, hope, anger and nostalgia. At the same time, political theorists and intellectual historians have challenged the opposition between reason and rhetoric, showing that persuasion, judgment, style, metaphor and other tropes, as well as the use of different forms of political language, are not external to democratic politics but constitutive of it.

These debates raise urgent questions. Can democratic politics do without rhetoric or is rhetoric one of its basic conditions? How can we distinguish democratic persuasion from manipulation, demagoguery or propaganda? What role do emotions, images, metaphors, narratives and performances play in shaping political judgment? How do rhetorical practices construct political subjects, crises, enemies and claims to representation? What happens to political rhetoric in the age of digital platforms, fragmented publics and AI-generated communication?

The conference Politics and Rhetorics invites researchers to discuss these questions from the perspectives of political theory, political philosophy, history of political thought, rhetoric, discourse analysis, media studies, sociology, communication studies, and related fields.

Keynote speakers

Kari Palonen (Univeristy of Jyväskylä)

Rob Goodman (Toronto Metropolitan University)

Call for Papers

We invite proposals of individual papers as well as panels (comprising 3–4 papers) on the following broadly defined topics:

Rhetoric in the history of political thought

Democracy, persuasion and public judgment

Rhetoric, representation, and the construction of “the people”

Populism, demagoguery, and anti-pluralist rhetoric

Affects, emotions and political mobilisation

Truth, propaganda and disinformation

Metaphor, narrative, image, and political imagination

Rhetoric, digital technologies and fragmented publics

Paper abstracts and panel proposals should be submitted electronically by September 1, 2026. For more details and to submit a proposal, please visit our website: ideasinpolitics.fsv.cuni.cz.