The Concept of Conversation: From Cicero’s Sermo to the Grand Siecle’s Conversation David Randall (2019)

In "The Concept of Conversation," David Randall argues conversation, often overlooked in history, profoundly shaped early modern Europe. He reveals how it transformed from elite philosophical discourse to encompass friendship, salons, the press, and even women's voices. Challenging Habermas's view, Randall sees conversation, not just rational public debate, as central to intellectual progress, with women playing a key role in its evolution.

In the classical period, conversation referred to real conversations conducted in the leisure time of noblemen and concerned with indefinite philosophical topics. Christianity inflected conversation with universal aspirations during the medieval centuries, and the ars dictaminis, the art of letter writing, increased the importance of this written analogue of conversation.

The Renaissance humanists from Petrarch onward further transformed conversation and its genre analogues of dialogue and letter by transforming it into a metaphor of increasing scope. This expanded realm of humanist conversation was bifurcated in Renaissance and early modern Europe.

The Concept of Conversation by David Randall traces the way the rise of conversation spread out from the history of rhetoric to include the histories of friendship, the court and the salon, the Republic of Letters, the periodical press, and women.

It revises Jürgen Habermas' history of the emergence of rational speech in the public sphere as the history of the emergence of rational conversation and puts the emergence of women's speech at the center of the intellectual history of early modern Europe.

Credit: Adapted from Amazon

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There is a sequel to this book The Conversational Enlightenment: the Reconception of Rhetoric in Eighteenth-century Thought

 
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