Persuasion and Rhetoric
| Author | Carlo Michelstaedter; translated by Russell Scott Valentino, Cinzia Sartini Blum and David J. Depew |
|---|---|
| Published | 1913 |
| Format | Book |
TL;DR — The Italian philosopher Michelstaedter’s 1910 thesis contrasting ‘persuasion’, a life fully possessed in the present, with ‘rhetoric’, the comforting social fictions people use to evade it.
Carlo Michelstaedter wrote La persuasione e la rettorica as his university thesis in 1910 and killed himself the day after finishing it, aged 23; it was published in 1913. This is the 2004 English translation in Yale University Press’s Italian Literature and Thought series, with an introduction and commentary.
Drawing on Parmenides, Heraclitus, the Greek tragedians, Ecclesiastes and Schopenhauer, it argues that most human life is spent in “rhetoric”: knowledge, society and institutions built to hide the lack of real self-possession, which he calls persuasion.
What it is: a cult classic of early twentieth-century Italian philosophy, in a scholarly university-press translation that is still in print.
Where this came from
- A copy saved in October 2026.
207 pages. A PDF copy is held in Kyle’s private archive; it is not linked or shared here.