A few months ago, I gave a version of this paper at a rhetoric conference in
Johannesburg. I said that one of the characteristics of any idea that becomes a
received idea is that it threatens, when used, to identify the speaker’s position in
advance, and so lead to neglect of the substance or content of what is actually said.
Received ideas are important because they signal the end of thinking; that is why they are
likely to be of some ideological significance; and that is also why, though in his own terms,
Flaubert was so fascinated and repelled by them, and hence the interest of his
extraordinary project for a Dictionary of Received Ideas for any rhetorician. What else was
Roland Barthes’ Mythologies (1957) if not a critically and politically conscious version of
Flaubert’s great Dictionary?