By contrast to the common view that rhetoric died out after the 18 th century one can see everywhere signs of its continuous and varied transformation up to the present day. Accordingly, this article proposes a sketch of this modernization . There are several major threads of rhetorical traditions and the observations here pertain primarily to just one of them. Setting aside the blunt fact of persuasion and formalized techniques for the construction of speeches, the focus here is instead on rhetoric as a mode of inquiry into the circumstances that call for persuasion and the concomitant implication of rhetoric in civic life. This version of rhetoric has been advanced by diverse writers from Isocrates and Aristotle to Charles Sanders Peirce and Kenneth Burke. Contributions by Thomas Hobbes, Giambattista Vico, and Walter Benjamin are considered here. Each constitutes an exemplary moment in our understanding of what discourse does for the political; together they provide points in an outline for a generally ignored tradition that we propose to reconstruct.