Legal Culture of Communication

Each of us has a remarkable individual power: the deliberative power to give our consent. In this era ofmodernity and technology, in which media tools are the ones that most immediately and most easilyreach a wider public, deliberative power seems to be exercised once more on the basis of magic rituals,or rituals of ‘enchantment’, rather than the application of a rational method of investigation based onwhat is true. Rhetoric, as a cognitive and rational path to truth, deserves to be revived as a model ofhuman reasonableness that can be used as an ‘antidote’ to force and whim. Consensus, as a powerfuldecision-making capacity every person possesses, cannot be an expression of any method other thanthat which persuades by applying the criteria of reasonableness. To go back to believing, to trusting,only when something has been logically and empirically demonstrated, is to restore to reason its lostcapacity to manifest itself and to be understood, hence to create a more civil ‘good life’ as an alternativeto populisms. Persuasive communication, as an inclusive form of the public use of reason, enables usto escape the negative logic of opposition and preserve the essence of democracy itself, which is thetruth.