I shall begin by speaking of our ancestors … [who] by their courage and their virtues, have handed … on to us a free country.
—“Pericles’ Funeral Oration,” Thucydides, History of the
Peloponnesian War, 2.36
Persuasion involves choice, will; it is directed to a man only insofar as he is free.
—Kenneth Burke, Rhetoric of Motives
Come, taste freedom with us.
—Pussy Riot, “Death to the Jails, Freedom to the Protests”
Freedom is a big, broad word—a capacious concept. It seems open and welcoming, frank and approachable. Such a natural pairing: rhetoric and freedom. There is an invitational gesture of sorts in each of the three passages that begin this piece: the speakers/writers offer to give over a polis, a choice, a collective experience to savor.
For Pericles the gift of freedom is consolation and justification for the losses of war; for Burke (1950), freedom...