Rationality and Phronesis in Economics: A Rhetorical Moment

Korax was an expert in juridical rhetoric. One of his pupils, Tisias, had a key role in teaching the art of rhetoric to the people at the end of the tyranny of Hiero II of Syracuse to help them (i) avoid chaos after the end of Hiero’s regime and (ii) recover properties that had been confiscated. This was the beginning of political rhetoric in Greek culture as a basic skill for self-government, the democratic deliberative style of life, and rhetoric as a tool of economic and social transformation. Both deliberative democracy and socio-economic transformation became an axis in the Sophist movement that was a precursor to humanism in different eras. They were a departure from the concrete condition of human life towards how humans are determined by language with its capacity to generate meaning and understanding. Truth was approached as a result of a dialogue between humans, building the relations needed to maintain the species. For Sophists, deliberation was the basic element of society.