Does Public Deliberation really Need Normative Constraints? Recovering the Aristotelian Rhetorical Theory

There was recently an attempt to correlate some sectors of thestudies on argumentation and the theory of democracy. Therelationship between these two areas concerns the fact that inboth cases there is a significant interest in normative modelsof good argumentation. In these models there is no place forrhetoric. Our work has a twofold aim: (1) to show that,starting from the Aristotelian rhetoric, it is possible to developa more suitable model of argumentation in the public sphereand (2) to doubt the very need to identify normativeconstraints for this type of argument.