Maria Evropi Chatzitheodorou

The presentation of Russia as a ‘state-civilisation’: how does Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric, through enthymematic reasoning and history, attribute superiority to Russia over the West and legitimise confrontation between them?

This article examines how Vladimir Putin constructs Russia as a state-civilisation through strategic rhetoric that combines Aristotelian enthymematic reasoning with selective historical narratives. Drawing on Aristotle’s concept of the enthymeme as a persuasive argument completed by the audience through shared assumpti...