Overview

A provocative and timely look at how language is used to manipulate the truth, how our gullibility leaves us susceptible to manipulation, and what we can do to reverse these trends. The Rhetoric of Manipulation looks behind the curtain of political and social communications in the age of “fake news” and the “post-truth” to show how the perversely engineered semantics at work today shapes culture and undermines reality. While language has always been manipulated to direct or anesthetize thought, today’s semantic perversions orient opinion and subdue political action to an alarming degree. Under such conditions, we are particularly susceptible to demagoguery. Arguing that too many of us have let our critical faculties wither, Robert Harvey opens our ears and eyes to an insidious impediment to free thinking by unflinchingly examining five realms of semantic perversion: the contemporary vocabulary of war; the recently evolved language tool known as scare quotes; the terms used to peddle white supremacy; the phenomenon of so-called cancel culture; and the jargon deployed in the corporatization of higher education. The wager of The Rhetoric of Manipulation is that a frank exposé of bad faith discursive practices and our accompanying gullibility can contribute to reversing the trend, remedying the current situation in view of a far more ethical immediate future, and remediating some of the damage already done.

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Reviews

An impassioned investigation into the creeping co-option of language, Robert Harvey examines the militarization of terminology, the misuse of 'ironic' scare quotes, the demonization of Critical Race Theory, 'cancel culture' and 'wokeism,' and the suppression of critical positions so integral to the humanities. With Victor Klemperer’s detailed account of the Nazification of language as a key reference point and Jean-François Lyotard’s Critical Watch as our guide, the seemingly inconsequential transformation of everyday speech takes an Orwellian turn. The Rhetoric of Manipulation is an important, careful critique in the face of proliferating semantic perversions. * Kiff Bamford, Professor of Art and Philosophy, Leeds Beckett University, UK *

Author Information

Robert Harvey is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in Philosophy, Stony Brook University, USA. His publications include Sharing Common Ground: A Space for Ethics (Bloomsbury, 2017), Parmi les gisants: penser le cimetière (2024), and Witnessness: Beckett, Levi, Dante and the Foundations of Ethics (Continuum, 2010).

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