SOURCE: Mader, Diane C. “What Are They Doing to Carl Rogers?” ETC: A Review of General Semantics 37, no. 4 (winter 1980): 314-20.

In the following essay, Mader argues against the trend in rhetoric study that positioned Rogers as an Aristotelian rhetorician while ignoring the real goals of his methodology.

Recent college composition texts seem to imply that there is a new rhetoric, or, at the least, an alternative to classical persuasion strategy. In Rhetoric: Discovery and Change the authors advocate Rogerian argument as an alternative to the traditional Aristotelian framework; similarly, the author of A Contemporary Rhetoric has a section that points to “A New Kind of Argument … the Rogerian Approach.”¹ Although it seems questionable whether the Rogerian approach can be viewed as a form of “argument” (if only because the rationale for the Rogerian method is to minimize both argument and strategy), the only serious challenge to this “new...