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Rhetoric. Political Economy. Two terms with pretty much a single claim. Rhetoric’s claim is to be the art of persuasion, or the finding for any given case the available means of persuasion, to paraphrase Aristotle. With Kenneth Burke, anything that is symbolic (or a sign system, in more European continental terms) and not coercive falls under rhetoric—a symbolic means of inducing cooperation among symbol using, symbol misusing creatures (to blend two Burkean definitions). Those symbols are language—the language of the alphabetic sign system, the language of musical and visual arts, the language of mathematics. If we communicate it, it is rhetorical.
Political economy “is concerned with the relationships of the economic system and its institutions to the rest of society and social development. It is sensitive to the influence of non-economic factors such as political and social institutions, morality, and ideology in determining economic events” (Ridell, Schakford, and Stamos qtd in Sackrey and Scneider, vi). In other words, it is concerned with the whole configuration of power and the economy. When that power is not coercive, then political economy is concerned with the rhetorical and the economic. Both terms—rhetoric and political economy—are architechtonic, are overdetermined.
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