Techniques of Persuasion [antikvár]

EDITORIAL FOREWORD 'Man is a rational animal.' So, at least, does he like to believe himself to be. This book outlines and underlines some of the qualifications and reservations which this self-appraisal require. So numerous are these qualifications and reservations that they could almost support the coimter-thesis that man is the most irrational of all animals. The lower animals are generally non rational, but few of them are so positively irrational as man can be. It requires considerable sophistication to be irrational. No animal could develop the systematic delusions of the insane, nor are the 'lower' animals easy prey to advertisers or political propagandists. But we must not go too far in pressing this coimter-thesis. Man has the capacity to reason and to be influenced by reason in ways in which a hungry tiger, for example, has not. It is an interesting and significant fact that political and religious propagandists, and advertisers, go so far as they do in thinking up (specious) argument addressed to the reason. These arguments are an unwitting testimonial to the rationality of man. The belief that man is not only a rational but also a reasonable animal attained its greatest popularity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Its most charming, if rather pathetic, expression is to be found in William Godwin's Political Justice (1793). Godwin asserted that man is a being whose conduct is governed by his opinions. Vice is error, and errors can be corrected by instruction. 'Show me,' he wrote, 'in the clearest and most unambiguous manner that a certain mode of proceeding is most reasonable in itself, or most conducive to my interest, and I shall infallibly pursue that mode, so long as the views you suggested to me continue present to my mind.' Being a rational man he carried the inferences to their logical conclusions. 'Render the plain dictates of justice level to every capacity . . . and the whole species will become reasonable and virtuous. It will then be sufficient for juries to recommend a certain mode of adjusting controversies. It will then be sufficient for them to invite offenders to forsake their errors. . . . Where the empire of reason was so universally acknowledged the