The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself

rhetorical work can serve as equipment for living in avariety of ways. It can provide a vocabulary of thoughts, actions, emotions, andattitudes for understanding and interpreting a situation.

Well, a similar sort of visualization-technique is at the heart of Utopian rhetoric - the prophet visualizes an image of an ideal city, and then inspires people to build it. In this sense, rhetoric is a sort of mysticism turned outward. This is the Utopian Imaginary, the use of phantasia in politics.