The category of the social increasingly informs the way people think about rhetoric. The foregrounding of the social has a two-fold origin in an uneasy relationship between poststructuralism and sociolinguistics. Poststructuralism has provided a strong version of the hypothesis that language is determinative. Sociolinguistics has established that variations in language not merely reflect but actively express, and are constituted by, structured social differences. Together the poststructuralist and the sociolinguistic arguments renew an older emphasis on the social identified with Marxism. There are four dominant forms of an emerging social rhetoric produced by this three-fold set of origins: (1) ethnography; (2) sociology of science; (3) cultural studies; and (4) collaborative learning. While all these forms of social rhetoric move away from the limiting individualism of objectivist and expressionist rhetorics, the essential question that any critical reading will want to pose about these rhetorics is whether, despite the criticism of individualism they provide, the alternative possibility designated as community really comes into view. Collaborative learning and ethnography have contributed the least to filling the empty space of community, whereas sociolinguistics and mass-culture criticism best explain and describe the concept of community. What is really lacking within the academic community, however, is the will to engage with the social world. (Six notes and 43 references are appended.) (MS)