Deliberating War is a thorough, insightful, and well-written discussion of how people in the Western tradition deliberate about war and treat deliberation as war. In discussing various kinds of war, and various kinds of deliberating about war, Roberts-Miller illuminates how and why some of these are more dangerous than others. This book is a must-read for scholars in history, political science, and communication who care about war, democracy, and the relationships between them.
- Mary E. Stuckey, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Communication Arts & Sciences at Penn State University
This book argues that treating politics as war derails essential democratic processes, including deliberation and policy argumentation, in complicated ways. "Politics is war" is not always just a figure of speech, but often a sincere expression of how people see disagreement-they mean it literally-and they use it to evade the responsibilities of rhetoric. This book takes the metaphor seriously. Using a series of case studies ranging from the 432 BCE "Debate at Sparta" to Bill O'Reilly's recent invention of a "War on Christmas," Deliberating War illustrates pathologies of deliberation that arise when a community understands itself to be at political war. This book identifies recurrent rhetorical strategies that constrain or even effectively prohibit deliberation, such as deflecting, reframing, threat inflation, appealing to paired terms, claiming moral license, radicalizing a base. Once communities become persuaded that they are in an apocalyptic battle between Good and Evil, politics as war can quickly become real war-often with far-reaching and catastrophic consequences.
Patricia Roberts-Miller is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of many books, including Speaking of Race: Constructive Conversations About an Explosive Topic (The Experiment, January 2021), and Rhetoric and Demagoguery, (Southern Illinois UP, 2019), which was a finalist for the Rhetoric Society of America book of the year).
