The ambassador: Unreliable sophist or peacekeeping negotiator?

Abstract

The article asks whether the envoy, or ambassador, can be understood as a historically stable type through which the whole history of diplomacy might be told. It begins with two ancient cases. One is Gorgias’s celebrated embassy to Athens in 427 BCE. The other is Demosthenes’s prosecution of Aeschines in On the False Embassy. Together they reveal an enduring suspicion of the ambassador as an eloquent sophist. Since the word “diplomacy” was coined only during the French Revolution, the article challenges the dominant origin stories, which place diplomacy either in a mythical primordial moment or in the Renaissance state system. In Athens kinship diplomacy’s myths of common origin concealed division (stásis) both within and between cities. Blaming a seductive “type” served to disavow that conflict. Early modern handbooks by Gentili, Hotman, Wicquefort, Pecquet and others are read through Lacan as a tension between a scientific drive to codify the ambassador and a traditional, hidden knowledge serving the master. This tension is framed as a symptom of what Santner calls the crisis of investiture. With the Revolution, in Paine, Rousseau and Ducher, the type becomes the diplomat: a mediator between wills within a market logic. Post-war nostalgia for “old diplomacy” in Nicolson, and the Netflix series The Diplomat, show how this thoroughly modern figure is retroactively naturalised. The article concludes that the envoy’s history is one of ruptures rather than continuity. Each version of the type answers a historically specific problem of sovereignty.

Cite

APA

Stagnell, A. (2025). Ambassadören: Opålitlig sofist eller fredsbevarande förhandlare? [The ambassador: Unreliable sophist or peacekeeping negotiator?]. In K. Ekeman, M. Gorgis, T. Lalér, & P. Mehrens (Eds.), Retoriska typer [Rhetorical types] (pp. 211–253). Uppsala Rhetorical Studies.

@article{stagnell2025ambassador,
   author    = {Stagnell, Alexander},
  title     = {Ambassad{\"o}ren: Op{\aa}litlig sofist eller fredsbevarande f{\"o}rhandlare?},
  booktitle = {Retoriska typer},
  editor    = {Ekeman, Karl and Gorgis, Mirey and Lal{\'e}r, Theodor and Mehrens, Patrik},
  series    = {Studia Rhetorica Upsaliensia},
  number    = {9},
  pages     = {211--253},
  publisher = {Uppsala Rhetorical Studies},
  address   = {Uppsala},
  year      = {2025},
  isbn      = {978-91-988139-2-0},
  language  = {swedish}
}