Abstract

Richard McKeon was a towering intellectual figure whose vast corpus of work is, outside a handful of essays, little read today. In the context of this volume, McKeon is noteworthy as someone who developed theories of both rhetoric and communication—explicitly so named—within a framework that his student Douglas Mitchell describes as “Pragmatism in a new key.” My overall aim in the essay is to draw together and extend the small but important body of commentary on McKeon’s “new key” of pragmatism and his theories of both rhetoric and communication. I will show how they constitute a problem-oriented, pragmatist rhetorical philosophy for a historically evolving, pluralistic world marked by traditional and emergent communication practices and media technologies. In so doing, I intend to draw readers’ attention to the fuller range of McKeon’s writings on rhetoric and communication and offer overarching characterizations that make them more available than they have been to this point.