At the end of Maurizio Manzin’s essay there is a small table. Its three columns name an author, an epochal transition, and a dominant form of reductionism, and five of its rows are filled with figures who span two and a half thousand years. The rhetoricians of ancient Greece stand against myth and superstition. Augustine stands against grammar, Petrarch against dialectics, Vico against analytics, Chaïm Perelman against formal logic. The sixth row has no name. Its first cell holds an ellipsis, its second reads “in progress,” and its third offers a single word followed by a question mark: AI?
A table like this is easy to pass over as a teaching aid. Yet it compresses the whole wager of the essay into a grid. Manzin, a philosopher of law at the University of Trento who directs the Interuniversity Center for Studies on Rhetoric, wrote it for a volume on rhetoric in the digital age. The question mark in the last row belongs to our own moment. The rows above it are his attempt to show that we have stood in such a moment before, and that each time the same old art came back to meet it.
A Turning on the Axis
Manzin’s question is not whether rhetoric survived. It did, often as a remnant of classical schooling. He asks instead how and why it returns with intellectual urgency whenever the reigning paradigms of knowledge and authority begin to crack. Could one speak, then, of a philosophy of history with regard to rhetoric? He does not mean a law of progress. Unlike Hegel or Voltaire, he assumes no final synthesis toward which history moves. What he proposes is a set of recurring constellations, moments when rhetoric reappears as a form of resistance against those who would hold truth as a monopoly.
The frame he borrows is Karl Jaspers’ Axial Age, the period in which human consciousness turned from mythic to reflective ways of understanding the world. Manzin takes the spirit of the idea rather than its dates. Rhetoric, on this view, flourishes in transitional epochs, when inherited certainties collapse and meaning has to be rebuilt from many sources at once. Such periods are seldom calm. Language itself becomes contested ground, consensus dissolves, and new vocabularies arise for experiences the old words can no longer hold. Here rhetoric does more than carry discourse from one party to another. It rebuilds the conditions under which dialogue can happen at all.
Jaspers’ German word is Achsenzeit, and the image buried in it repays a moment’s attention. An Achse is an axle or an axis, the pin on which a wheel turns and the line about which a body rotates. The Latin axis and the Greek axōn come from the same root, and in each of them the sense is mechanical before it is historical. A wheel does not advance by abandoning its axle. It advances because the axle holds while everything around it turns. Jaspers used the word for a pivot in world history, the centuries in which reflective thought took hold in several civilizations at once.
Manzin uses the word more freely. He calls Petrarch’s moment a second “axial” turning, and he closes by suggesting that we may now be entering a new axial moment. Read with the old mechanical sense in mind, the figure matches the shape of his argument. In each of his cases, what turns is the prevailing form of knowledge. What holds is the art of speaking with others about what is true.
Five Returns
The first return is also the birth. In fifth-century BCE Sicily, the expulsion of the tyrant Thrasybulus from Syracuse in 465 BCE opened a political order that required citizens to reason in public. Corax and Tisias, remembered as the founders of rhetorical theory, belong to this world. For Manzin, what emerged there was an epistemological and ethical revolution, not merely a technique. Speech became the medium of truth rather than its vehicle. Justifications of power anchored in divine will or lineage gave way to a legitimacy grounded in shared reasoning. Power became a potential distributed among speakers in a polis, and Manzin draws here on Hannah Arendt, for whom speech and action are the modes through which human plurality is realized. Even Plato’s attacks on pseudo-rhetoric in the Gorgias and Phaedrus testify to the art’s power. This first revolt was against the reduction of truth to mythic revelation. Manzin calls it the first humanistic revolution.
The second return comes in Late Antiquity with Augustine of Hippo, who taught rhetoric in Carthage and Milan before he became a bishop. His conversion, as Manzin reads it, was also an epistemic reorientation, from persuasion toward illumination. The monopoly this time belonged to grammar. Late Roman education had made linguistic correctness into a kind of wisdom, and Augustine saw in the grammarians’ devotion to form an idolatry of the sign cut loose from what it signifies. Against it he set a rhetoric remade through charity. It was no longer the ars vincendi, the art of winning, but the ars docendi in caritate, the art of teaching truth in love. Persuasion became a service rendered to others. Because the inner teacher speaks through the shared logos of a community, communication takes part in the unfolding of truth.
Nearly a thousand years later, Francesco Petrarca turned on the scholastic dialecticians, who in his account knew all about the heavens and nothing of their own souls. Medieval dialectic, on Manzin’s reading, had reduced truth to formal coherence. It could establish the veritas connexionum, the truth of logical connections, but not the veritas sententiarum, the truth of lived judgment. Petrarch did not reject reason. He rejected a reason grown sterile, and he restored eloquence as a way of knowing that includes affect, imagination, and moral feeling. Rhetoric was, for him, the counterpart of dialectic in the Aristotelian sense. He even accused the scholastic Aristotelians of misreading Aristotle. Against the universities’ claim to authority, the humanists asserted eloquentia humana, a wisdom that speaks from within the human condition rather than above it.
Giambattista Vico faced the method of Descartes, which held deduction and mathematical abstraction to be the only roads to knowledge. In the New Science he argued that such a method ignored the historicity of human understanding. Knowledge is bound up with the practices, myths, and languages that constitute human societies. Truth, in his formula verum ipsum factum, is made as well as found, and it shows itself in human arts and action. Rhetoric, attentive to metaphor, narrative, and persuasion, mediates between analytic abstraction and the mythopoetic texture of culture. Where analytic method claims exclusive authority, it restores plurality to knowing.
The fifth return belongs to the twentieth century. In 1958 Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca published their Traité de l’argumentation and gave the name “new rhetoric” to a recovery of reasonable persuasion. Formal logic, Perelman held, was invaluable within its own domain. Applied to law, morals, and politics, it privileged universality over context, audience, and judgment. His idea of the universal audience tied argument to reasonable assent rather than coercive victory. Manzin sees in the project a response to totalitarianism as well, whose oratory had stripped public speech of its dignity and split persuasion from reasonableness.
Across the five cases the structure holds. A single domain of knowledge claims the whole of truth. Rhetoric returns to restore plurality, dialogue, and ethical deliberation.
Where the Bridge Holds
Manzin gathers these returns under one image. Rhetoric is a bridge. It runs between domains of knowledge, between ethical perspectives, and between temporal horizons, letting different forms of understanding meet without forcing them into one. It allows disagreement without enmity and consensus without coercion. In this sense he calls it a kind of philosophy of uncertainty, an art that thrives when dominant paradigms can no longer account for the whole of human experience.
That is why the last row of his table stays open. Rapid technological change, political polarization, and challenges to epistemic authority suggest to him that a new axial moment may be under way. Artificial intelligence, ecological threat, and global interconnection pose ethical and hermeneutic problems as well as technical ones. Rhetoric is not offered against them as a technique. Manzin describes it as a philosophical orientation and a civic habit of mind, a form of truth-seeking grounded in ethical engagement and a plurality of ways of knowing.
The essay closes with an appeal to reclaim rhetoric as both an academic discipline and a civic virtue. It should be taught, practiced, and defended as one of the most humane ways of living through uncertainty. The future Manzin imagines is one in which truth is neither a dogmatic scarecrow nor a surrender to the opinions of the strongest. Between the scarecrow and the crowd lies the ground on which, in every one of his epochs, people have had to learn again to speak with one another.
Manzin, Maurizio. “Rhetoric in Times of Change: A Philosophical Defense against Epistemic Reductionisms.” In Rhetoric in the Digital Age, edited by Gabrijela Kišiček and Davor Nikolić, 63–71. Zagreb: FF Press, 2026. https://doi.org/10.17234/9789533793337.06.
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