The Rhetorical Strategy of Moralisation: A Lesson from Greece

This chapter studies populist rhetoric by considering it within the context of the rhetorical strategy it identifies as moralisation. At the centre of the analysis is a specific political episode: the period of negotiation between the Syriza-led government and Greece’s creditors in the first half of 2015. To challenge the logic of austerity politics and advance an alternative doxa, Syriza employed a moralising strategy which presented a policy problem as a moral dispute. The chapter elucidates this strategy by discerning the three intertwined rhetorical notions that instantiate it, namely a populist argumentative frame, epideictic speech, and an ethos of good will. The chapter makes two contributions. First, it shows how as a rhetorical form that ‘frames’ and organises meaning, populism is informed by other rhetorical devices without which it cannot perform its functions. Second, the chapter proposes that populism as an analytical category of political life can be more fully appreciated when placed within a broader context of analysis. A rhetorical approach to populism, the chapter argues, reveals what populism does in a world riven by complexity and competition over the definition of common sense: although it offers opportunities for political identification, it also creates rigid lines of division that cannot be negotiated.