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"If democracy is a continuing discourse, as Dewey said, then one problem of modernity is to thwart attempts to bring the process to a halt.  In that spirit, even the reader who is ill-disposed to rhetorics of science can entertain a rhetoric for modern democracy.  And those who want to maintain some version of realism against the various rhetorics of science can nonetheless entertain the claim that the rhetoric-versus-reality trope nourishes despotic discourses.  Surely Mr. Goebbels has proved that rhetoric is as real as anything else.  Despotism and fanaticism always come wrapped as Truth, and they are most insidious when they ignore, conceal, or deny their own rhetorical character.  "Liberalism and the Problem of Knowledge: A New Rhetoric for Modern Democray,"  Charles Arthur Willard, University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 10.