Retoryka: między polityką a cywilizacją
Rhetoric: between politics and civilization

Summary/Abstract: Rhetoric is nowadays reduced either to sophistry or to stylistics, i.e. either to the ability to persuade even at the cost of using morally unacceptable means, such as lying or manipulation, or to exposing various “beautifying” procedures, which are supposed to cover up the lack of truth. What is forgotten is the main task of classical rhetoric, which was to raise the culture of speech in general. And raising such culture is important for general human reasons, because speech is the environment of human development and communication within a society. It turns out that the level and quality of the culture of speech is a determinant which makes it possible to recognize the real political system into which a society is organized. This is of particular importance when such systems hide behind a façade of democracy in order to follow the path of such systems as oligarchy or ochlocracy. It leads to a crisis of both democracy and the culture of speech. That is why the efforts to achieve a high culture of speech, and thus its renaissance, have value not only in a purely verbal sense, but also in a political and deeply cultural sense.

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