This article joins together recent work in rhetorical political analysis with methodological advances made in intellectual history to prospect a historical and linguistic approach to public reason and deliberation. It is offered as an alternative to currently dominant approaches that emphasise philosophical and normative understanding, especially those associated with the ‘deliberative turn’ in democratic theory. This alternative approach is developed by identifying two points of methodological divergence between a rhetorical and philosophical orientation to deliberation. First, a rhetorical approach will study standards of deliberation that are endogenous to a society instead of imposing them on the basis of one form of philosophical reason or another. Second, rhetorical analysis does not conceive of deliberation as consensus reached through non-coerced reflection but as the strategic deployment of shared linguistic resources in a context of contingently unfolding non-linguistic events.