Abstract

Reviews 85 Paddy Bullard, Edmund Burke nud the Art of Rhetoric, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 272 pp. ISBN 978-1-107-00657-7 In Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric Paddy Bullard "proposes a theory of Burke's rhetoric" (p. 3). Bullard approaches the question "of the artfulness with which Burke wrote and spoke" (p. 21) not by superimposing the \ ocabularv of classical rhetorical handbooks on Burke's performances; not by using Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful as a source of technical, critical vocabulary; but bv looking to Burke's oeuvre to identify the rhetorical questions that preoccupied Burke and how he addressed the questions throughout his career. Readers will witness enactment of Burkean rhetorical virtues as Bullard examines Burke from perspectives as broad as classical and early modern thinking about rhetoric, to the practical occasions and stakes of Burke's political writing and speaking, to the textual dynamics of his rhetoric. The result is a compelling analysis of Burke's rhetoric that deserves to be read by scholars of eighteenth-century rhetorical theories and practices, and by any scholar interested in generating theory based on practice—indeed anv scholar who wants to read exemplary rhetorical criticism. Broadly speaking, the central question or issue that preoccupies Burke is the nature of the speaker-audience relationship. Bullard describes Burke's rhetoric as a "rhetoric of character," concerned with "who is addressing whom, on behalf of whom" (p. 5; see also pp. 7, 11). Bullard captures the dynamic nature of the relationship when he describes Burke's art of rhetoric as "an art of moral equipoise" (p. 10; see also p. 22). Put differently, "A well-established ethos giv es a speaker licence to be urgent, to abjure false delicacy, and to resist neutrality, and it allows him to do all this without renouncing the claims of equity" (p. 9). The speaker earns the audience's trust by displaying knowledge of characters and his own political judgment, and the audience grants the speaker a license to advocate with zeal. Bullard develops his analysis and argument in an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion. In the introduction Bullard defends his objects of study and critical vocabulary. He chooses to focus on "the relatively small number of treatises and speeches that Burke authorized as his own (either through publication or private endorsement), while the texts of his publicly reported speeches are treated with caution" (p. 21). Readers will almost certainly find the arguments for the selection to be sound, the central one being that Burke calls for attention to, and Bullard attends to, stylistic detail because this is where the action is—where audiences experience rhetorical effects. In chapters 1 and 2, Bullard covers standard topics in writing the history of rhetoric, namely Burke's intellectual context for thinking about rhetoric and the place of rhetoric in Irish education. This is not a routine history of rhetoric that broadly covers the usual suspects but instead focuses on clas­ sical, seventeenth-century and contemporary writers who explored the idea that is at the heart of Burke's rhetoric of character: that orators are best able to 86 RHETORICA secure a good moral character in the minds of their audience by demonstrat­ ing their understanding of what moral character is" (p. 28). Bullard covers Aristotle's treatment of rhetorical ethos and its guises in Roman thinkers in­ cluding Cicero and Quintilian. He uses Locke as a critical prompt to discuss writings by Hobbes, Edward Reynolds, and La Bruyère and to trace "how the rhetorical category of ethos returned to relevance during the seventeenth century as part of a popularized prudential moralism" (p. 42) in history, psy­ chology, and character-writing. He traces the Aristotelian model's adaptions in writings about pulpit eloquence and their secular processes in Shaftesbury and Smith. Similarly, the history of eighteenth-century rhetoric education among English speakers is not commonplace but instead advances the claim that "there are several important respects in which the Irish, rather than the Scots, should be seen as the real pioneers of this new development ["the study of literature in modern vernacular languages"] in the art of rhetoric" (p...